random thought challenge game!

As a challenge for me, and entertainment (cough) for you, I’m trying to write a batch of random thoughts during my office hour period (now). No one comes, so I doubt that I’ll be interrupted. When I come up with a new thought, I’ll refresh the site to show the update. The game ends at 3:15 p.m. Let’s see what transpires:

  • Life’s Burning Questions #305: Concerning those “Do not remove under penalty of law” tags found on pillows: if you remove one, does store security stop you at the door, or do they rush and dogpile you immediately? These are the things I need to know.
  • A sad defining characteristic of the average male my age today: ask one to recite the “Konami code” and they’ll fire off “up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start”; ask them their the date of their anniversary with their girlfriend, and they’ll draw a blank, if only for a couple of seconds.
  • By the way: January 8th.
  • One of the more satisfying things about being a teacher of high-schoolers at youth group: a couple of them, when told that the entire youth group was just “hanging out” rather than having specific groups that night, asked the youth minister if we could meet anyway. That’s pretty special.
  • Free Fashion Advice: If you bring home an outfit that makes a color-blind person wince, you might want to rethink wearing it out in public.
  • The “grace period” is about over: I haven’t received my computer mail-in rebate yet, even though it’s been past the eight week waiting period. Is it wrong to get antsy about this? This is $100 I could use.
  • I am the Master: I recently had a 7-wood made for me. It has a new Synchron head, a slightly used Adams shaft, and a Grip One grip. I’m thinking of calling it Frankenclub.
  • Bargain of the Year: roommate got a PS2 for free at a garage sale because it didn’t work anymore. He opened it up and cleaned the laser lens off with a tissue. He has a working PS2 now.
  • Which means: in the past six months, the quality of game systems in our apartment has gone up from a Nintendo and a Sega Genesis to a Gamecube and a PS2. This is a little like being handed the keys to a Porsche after driving a Pinto for years.
  • And Cokes were $1: it pains me to realize that I will be able to tell my teenage children that I knew what it was like when gas was under $2 a gallon.
  • You only get the creme de la creme: I’ve already erased four or five thoughts that I didn’t think lived up to the high standards we have here at pressing on…
  • To which some immediately reply: What high standards?
  • You don’t have to like it to feel it: overtime of a game 7 NHL playoff series is just about as exciting as sports can get.
  • I’m sure this would work: A TV show with four guys who talk about current events or sports. The catch: the conversation has to consist entirely of movie quotes, Simpsons quotes, song lyrics, Sportscenter catchphrases, and MST3K riffs. The winner is the one who works in the most.
  • Come to think of it: that would work mighty well as a website, too…hmm…
  • I have to wonder as I type all of these out: is anyone actually constantly refreshing my home page right now, or is it just me?
  • Congratulations, you’ve found a way to be more annoying than spam: I’ve recently been getting incomplete e-mails that cause my connection to get interrupted. I have to go manually delete them from my webmail account before I can get all my normal spam (and maybe a good message or two) downloaded.
  • And finally, as the office hours end: five hours until I see you, sweetie! I can’t wait.

what to do if you’ve lost your wallet

  1. File a police report with the local PD. They probably won’t find your wallet, but it can’t hurt, and it’s good to do it for credit agency purposes.
  2. Call and cancel all of your credit/check/ATM cards.
  3. File a fraud security claim with the credit reporting agencies. Equifax, one of the big three, will forward your claim automatically to the other two and provide you with a free copy of your credit report as they have it.
  4. Procure your birth certificate, or a certified copy of it. If you don’t have one readily available to you via a family member, VitalChek is one company who is well-known for doing this.
  5. If you had a school ID, get it again. It should be one of the easiest ID cards to get back, as most universities now use an ID separate from your SSN, and so should have an easily-recognizable pictoral record of you on file for visual proof. It’s also much easier to complete the next step with one.
  6. If you lost your Social Security card, fill out an application for a replacement. Go to socialsecurity.gov for the application and more information. Your birth certificate won’t work here, but a school ID will. If you don’t have a school ID, your passport or life insurance policy, among other things, will work. The social security agency will give you a stamped note stating that your SSN belongs to you; this should work in lieu of the card, which won’t arrive for a week at least. By the way, social security’s fraud division will not file a fraud claim unless you show someone is actively trying to steal your identity, so be on the lookout for a while to come.
  7. Now that you have that back, get your driver’s license. The birth certificate / social security notification combination should be sufficient for just about every state and situation you could be in.
  8. Use the newly acquired license to invalidate and replace all of your other items: membership cards, library cards, voter registration cards, etc.
  9. If you lost any checks as well, call the bank and invalidate them all immediately, and place stops on anything purchased since the time that you lost your wallet. The quicker you do it, the less you’re liable for. If you’re really concerned, you can just close out the account and start over fresh, although that will take a little extra time and money.
  10. Oh, and buy a new wallet.

One guess as to why this journal entry came about. Another guess as to how my past week has been.

thoughts at 2:30

  • If Chris Berman’s taking fan-suggested “Bermanisms”, the one at the very top of my list has to be Hee Seop “Lovin’ Her Today” Choi.
  • Every now and then, it’s just good to do yard work, even if it does result in you getting sunburned.
  • I admit that my yellow driving clip-on glasses make me look like a dork, but it’s so much nicer to drive with them on.
  • Getting a birdie is very cool, but making a par “from the tips” is pretty good too, especially when one is not a very long hitter, or a very good golfer for that matter.
  • The only thing worse for me than a long drive home at night is getting disconnected from my girlfriend on three different occasions during the trip for lack of phone service. A note to Cingular – your promise that callers don’t go out of your “nationwide” range only has teeth if your coverage is truly across the entire span of the country.
  • Sometimes I have to remind myself that as bad as things seem to me, someone else always is feeling worse, and for much better reasons than I have.
  • A few days without my precious broadband…it’s like going to the desert after living in the Amazon for the past two years.
  • I think $ale of the Century is the most underrated game show of all time.
  • I currently posess more change than a Vegas slot machine. I’m pretty sure I could at least buy a couple of new CDs with all of it. But it’s pretty sad when your change makes up a noticeable percentage of your life savings.
  • Why am I still up again?

I thought only Reese Witherspoon movies did this

Packing up my car to come to Melbourne and see my family, I encountered a micro-sized Chihuahua. It couldn’t have been more than five inches in length.

Then I saw its owner, a blonde girl, calling after it, “Hercules! Hercules!”

The first thought that came to mind was if she had a boyfriend who was 6’5″, 250 pounds, and nicknamed “Tiny”.

reason #81 why I hate night driving

I have never liked to drive at night. There are several reasons why – harder to see, glaring headlights, more potential for animal-related wrecks…but one of the biggest is that if something bad happens to the car, it’s much more difficult to get it fixed at night than it is during the day. This is especially the case when it’s a weekend night.

So last night I’m coming home from Boca Raton after seeing Kelly for the weekend. I realized when I left that I’d be making about half of the trip at night. This didn’t thrill me, but I had wanted to stay as long as I could in Boca. So I prepared myself for night driving.

My car’s right rear tire did not.

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crazy joint pain!

Memo to self: if I want to develop chronic arthritis in my hands before the age of 27, the best way that I can come up with to do it is to play Crazy Taxi at least 10 minutes a day.

I fooled myself

Well, how about that for an unplanned April Fool’s Day joke?

If you tried to visit my web site (or for that matter, any 1122 Productions web site recently (yesterday, especially), you got a Network Solutions “under construction” page. This occurred thanks to yours truly, but not as a joke. In fact, the joke’s on me.

It started when I got an e-mail from our host saying that our DNS information was changing and that we needed to update the change if our domain name seller (Network Solutions) used IP addresses. For those of you doing the Charlie Brown “wa-wa-wa-wa” sound right now, don’t worry about what that means…just know that I thought I’d have to change some information about where our site was on the Internet.

So I logged into our account manager, and found that all was well in as much as I didn’t look like I had to change anything. Unfortunately, it appears that I set the site to point to Network Solutions’ temporary “under construction” page in the midst of all that. It was not intentional.

So now I have to wait for the DNS to propagate through the Internet, a process that takes about 36 hours or so. Which meant that, for most of April Fool’s Day, I couldn’t do anything to my own web site. And as of this writing, I still can’t get my e-mail. WWW 1, Brandon 0.

suit challenge

I’m currently in the Alachua Library, taking a study break, and I thought that I’d pose this question to my adoring fans (the three of you know who you are).

So I was eating lunch/dinner at Subway in Alachua this afternoon, and I made a peculiar discovery. I got a straw to go with the drink that I purchased, and as I opened it I noticed that one of the ends of the straw was sealed closed. Now, I’m not sure if this has happened to anyone else before, but it was a first-time experience for me. I started laughing at the thought of putting the sealed end in my drink, then inhaling until my face turned red, without any liquid refreshment for all my efforts.

Then, my mind really took a left turn. What if, I wondered (I always wonder in italics), someone got one of these straws and couldn’t drink their drink, and in sheer anger, sued Subway? They could claim undue shame and embarrassment over not being able to use a straw (maybe the employees laughed at them or something), though it was obviously the company’s fault for not checking their product to ensure that it met with proper drinking-straw standards. Who knows? In this lawsuit-crazy country, someone might try it.

Okay, so it was really a random thought. But I’m famous for random thoughts! Anyway, it brought to mind an idea for a little contest for all of you loyal pressing on… fans out there. What’s the craziest idea that you can come up with for a lawsuit that just might have a chance in court? Something that’s even worse than Ms. I-Don’t-Know-That-McDonald’s-Coffee-Is-Served-Hot, or my Subway example, etc. I know there’s some twisted minds out there in cyberspace who are reading this. Comment away!

adventures in bode-sitting

A couple of weekends ago, I had the opportunity to dog-sit for my sister and brother-in-law, who took a trip out of town. This served them well (they didn’t have to pay for a kennel) and was going to serve me well, as Kelly was supposed to come up and see me on the Saturday of that weekend. Always a good thing. (Exhibit A – Bode, significantly smaller than she is now, but I don’t have an updated pic.)

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