shout out

must... train... harder

scheduled to run this half marathon in April.

you think this is the kind of guy that would complain about a "bad day?"

oh yeah

Rob wants everyone to watch the internet video about 9/11 called 911-Loose Change. I agree. Just be ready to be very freaked out. In fact, i think notoreous could maybe offer some input about the feasibilities discussed with the aircraft?

update

I've been busy as hell. Fortunately, other than work, i've managed to pack my life full of things i WANT to be doing rather than those we're more ofthen than not forced to do. Mondays and Wednesday I put my time in at college, where i often see you mother... see... because she goes to college. Thursday has become weekly Risk night. However last night we also played this absolutley incredibe game Zombies! Finally, Friday is indoor unltimate night. Last week i managed to experienced the two greatest feelings in an ultimate game:

Picture this: You're on offense, and you cut deep and hard. I mean real deep, like a 75% length of the field cut and your defender is left picking up his socks. You look over your shoulder and see the disc coming in fast and high; If it's a bullet to the end zone, you're going to have to swing your head around, get your bearings and look straight up... and thats when you're in that moment, when you can't see the disc and you're running staright up and staring at the sky (or ceiling). But if you read it well before, you know it'll be coming into view over head. And then it does. and you catch it. and you are the champion of the world.

Now you're back on defense trying to stop the score in the end zone. The force is home side but the mark is weak and the the handler owns your teammate. The long, hooking throw is comming in from the away side, high, about to land right in your man's hands... your only option is to throw yoursef mercellesly into the air (you've only got one chance on the timing) and smack at the air with a long, outstretched finger. You half expect to cut throigh the air unchalleneged but then you feel the tell tale resistance of the plastic disc being angrilly re-directed off you finger tips, thus ensuring that you've prevented the score... and you're now free to fall uncontroled and broken to the floor, several feet below. Cheers ensue.

I love this game.

In fact, my job even managed to entertain me this week. I spent some tim ein the cold room, which is basically a big ass garage that's climate controled to the extreme. On this particular day, they had it dialed in at -40 degree farenheit... that's -40. To demonstrate the extreme of this temperature, someone took a cup of scalding water and thorugh it's contents into the air... it's instantly turned to white powder and came down as snow. Phase changes are awsome.

So, aside from these daily obligations, i'm still trying to put the Fiat in running order and keep the lady happy. Wink, Wink, Nudge, Nudge.

truth

thanks for the link, Rob

I need my pain; it's makes me who i am

there's been a lot of posting and replyin going on here, so i figured i'd keep the trend alive. I boughtthis computer from dell and am lying in bed typing on it right now. I'm sore as hell from ultimate last night: I owned a couple guys in the end zone with some mad catches and blocks... but they tend to end in spine jarring landings on one's side and/or head.

Side note: with this stupid laptop, i feel like tom hanks in "you've got mail."

I guess the event of note is, i didn't buy a mac this time. It's odd to have it worry about viruses again, not to mention the fact that i spent the first 8 hours of ownership re-installing windows to free myself of all the crap software they package on a new machine. (here's one for gnome: you gotta check out this program called acronis trueimage: it creates a partitioned image of your entire operating system and all drivers and applications so once you labor over getting your system set up perfectly, you always have a completely recoverable set-up from boot. There's other benfits, check it out.) living with a hacker is very nice.

Finally, i'd like to point more attention to "brokeback to the future." damn that was funny.

Oh yeah, this guy seems to have it all figured out. If you've ever heard his rant about how the purity of the Olympics has been lost and how every American thinkgs you're a failure if you don't bring home a gold, you'll more appreciate what happened last week.

the FUTURE Conan?

In honor of Notoreous' arrival on the interwebs, i would like to dedicate this link to him.

what is love?

I'm going to destroy you

"click"

today leaving work i saw a car try to ram another car off the road.

http://www.remtek.com/arms/glock/model/45/30/index.htm

smells like an old library...

Chestocrates got me thinking:

so i think i mentioned here the recent death of an aunt the the monumental amount of items she had in her house. Well, several months later, the greater share of these good have been sorted through, sold and distributed. As reward for my weekends spend cleaning and carrying, i acquired an old bookcase that once sat in my grandfather's office. He was a doctor in detroit and eventually gained a certain degree of notoriety as a public figure and sat on a few hospital boards. This particular oak case has twin glass doors and is about the most sexy piece of furniture i've ever seen, not to mention is hold twice as much as my home-made job. The man himself, i never did meet. They tell me he raised quite beautiful peacocks.

Along with the bookcase, i was free to have any book i could carry out of the place. There were, in my best guess, maybe 1000 or 2000 titles in all. Most of the paperback junk was sold for twenty five cents apiece, but it was the leagues of hardcovers and classics that caught my eyes. Almost ever book Vonnegut penned, some of them in first edition prints. Any "classic" author you could imagine was represented, such as Gore Vidal, Faulkner, Ryand, Fitzgerald... the list goes on. And it's not just one or two books, but every title that these authors had... not to mention the scores of books and people i'd never even heard of. Then there was the really obscure stuff; german texts from the turn of the century, an anti new-deal book called "the abundant life" (very intereting) and the book about the three guys who all think they're Jesus, to name a few. I ended up with maybe 50 books for myself, since i didn't want to be overly greedy. Some of these look to be worth some decent money and i'm sure there were a few gems that ended up being donated to various charities.

long coming

Now that i'm all back doing the college thing, i been busy.

First, i'm officially off my Mac high-horse; I ordered a PC-based Dell laptop. Sorry Mac, you would have made a nice laptop, but that would require the offset of a PC desktop.


Site attendance was up last month. I suspect is had something to do with Girls crushing cars. Also, for some probably ceepy reason, that picture of holly holding a bat with the "peed herself" caption has been highly searched and linked in UK search engines... They're probably using it in some weird scat site. awesome.

In case you didn't hear, there was a super bowl here last weekend. (how's this for a cellphone camera?? nice...)

Damn place was blowing up with people. We took these shuttles (buses) from the outer regions to get to the downtown area and it was just insane. These buses were surrounded by a sea of people and i couldn't help think in my mind, "this is what it will be like when the end comes and they're trying to evacuate an entire cities' population in a short time."




Text version of this website

mother?

Veronica Corningstone: Take me to Pleasure Town!
Ron Burgundy: Oh, we're going there!

There is a GOD! and he loves us... How else can i explain these girls crushing cars?

What the sweet hell is going on on this internet? Who are these people??? Heather, you sweet-vixen, car-crushing, self proclaimed revolutionary and seeker of enlightenment...

could it be? DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND? We find these freakish things on the interwebs and we crap ourselves a little then we take a shower and forget about the whole ordeal, but didn't you see? all those car-crushing bio's said they were from michigan. MICHIGAN, DAMMIT!

THIS JUNK YARD IS 15 MILES FROM MY HOUSE. (scroll down for map) Ypsilanti, WHY, Ypsilanti??

...so tired...
...so defeated...

super ball's in detroit this year. that's the home of robocop

--meatwad

I love it: such a simple idea and yet so important. After five days of labor we set two aside and redefine ourselves. Two days to remember that we are not merely corporate cogs, but instead are Fiat mechanics and marathon men, professional drinkers and amateur dancers (or could it be the other way around?), body builders, recreational readers, hackers, music aficionados and of course, sweet, sweet love makers.

Five plus two, repeat until desired results are reached.

(of course, I guess the theory is we’re always working towards a job that makes those five days feel like an extended weekend. But until I can find a job that changes every day, lets me use my hands and my mind, involves lots of sweet, sweet lovin and has greats benefits, I’ll be relying on the weekends for my satisfaction.)

this weekend is particularly crazy round these parts do to el supero bollo (thank you three years of spanish)

i can't help but quote this ESPN blog: If you love burned-out brick buildings, this is the city for you; I have to believe Detroit leads the nation in low-rent housing that's been devastated by combustion. And this raises a question I had never considered until today: What (or who) is causing all of these fires?

My initial assumption was that these places were torched on purpose, probably for slumlord insurance purposes. However, a friend who lives here claims this carnage is usually caused by squatters; a building gets abandoned, it becomes occupied by rap-battling hobos, the hobos start a fire inside a garbage can for warmth, and fiery chaos eventually ensues. This makes sense (sort of), but the sheer number of these burned-out houses makes me imagine an explanation that's far more sinister. Is some supercriminal traveling around the city, randomly burning everything he sees for pleasure? This town truly needs a RoboCop.

we've all got secrets

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10927526/ I however would like to take credit for the idea of using sept 11 to fake your own death

here we go again

a lot of automotive folk found out monday that they were getting canned in the short future; it was news that one couldn't escape for three days in these parts, and now has sipped into obscurity along with the fact that sweden has vowed to be completely fossil fuel free by 2020. (google it; i don't have the energy to link)

Well now i must break my short lived vow of not trying to figure things out in a public forum-type setting. As the voice of the masses carries so far, i couldn't block out the common themed cries about "fat cat auto execs" that take million dollar bonuses while the company is "selling out the working man."

[sigh]

no one ever mentions that the "working man" in this case can easily make upwards of 100K a year with OT. I think people are afraid to state the obvious, which is these jobs are based on a legacy of low-skilled people performing repetitive tasks for what probably amounts to some 5 hours a day. Do you understand what i'm saying? Sure, maybe half those workers are real "hands on type" people, but the other half aren't even familiar with basic hand tools, which wouldn't be so bad if they weren't so god damned cocky about their jobs and such.

Likewise, why should anybody, executive or otherwise, volunteer self inflicted pay cuts at company A, when company B, C and D are paying the going rate for the work they're qualified for? I think the red-states will agree with me when i say nothing's more american than leaving a perfectly good job for one that pays slightly more money.

I've decided that when i look out onto the city of detroit, it's not unlike staring at one of those 3D posters. If you focus too closely, you'll go insane trying to count the squiggles. If you let things get to hazy, you might as well be in a drunken stupor. You have to find just the right amount of focus. (of course, those 3D posters never worked for me and i suspect everyone who claims to see the sail boat is a lying fuck)

Being a battery engineer, today i stopped a finished car going out the plant door, so i could use it to test-run a battery charger. When i opened the hood, i noticed that the screws meant to hold in one of the head lights were sitting in the holes but completely unfastened. The freakin light could have fallen off the car at any time. I asked the repair guy if he was going to report it and he said "what's the point?"

What's the point indeed

worms in my brain get them out

As mentioned, i have very limited internet access at work; almost completely utilitarian in nature, we get sites like Map-quest, weather.com and one that was just recently added, MSNBC. At first i thought it would be nice to have a ready internet distraction during the all too frequent down times and when i can't stand another piece of alternative energy literature without incurring the onset of seizures. But like most grand ideas, (most notably, the idea of "a stripper wife") this was not as great as it would seem.

Look, the problem is i have too much time, enough to read every article MSNBC has published in a week. It's too much and at the same time not enough... first i start on a national level. these articles about the war, they just don't mean anything by themselves, like looking at a mural through a pin-hole. See, today, i read about John Walker Lindh. He was a freedom fighter, see and he was fighting against the northern alliance with a team the U.S. supported back when john first went into the bush. Then things changed and everyone switched sides. They say he thought he was being rescued by U.S. forces when they picked him up; boy was he wrong. But then again, did he start the prison riot that killed that CIA official? One story with so many perspectives. things aren't going as well as some would like you to believe. A lot of people die but a lot of people don't; they just get blown up and put back together.

There was another article; it was about famous football players who get killed in the war by friendly fire and normal people who get the same thing. It told us about letters home that say they were heros and how many unfriendlies were killed by that person and the way to keep up moral is to keep FF on the DL. It was here because i saved it and now it's gone forever even though MSNBC keeps articles online for months after they're published. And then i wonder if i ever even read that article and think quietly "is anyone keeping track of this?"

See, the average person would never have time to read all this crap everyday, but then when you do, it's like a curse. Right, here's the problem: we weren't there and we'll never really know what happened. In fact, even if we were there, we'd only know what happened from our side of the room and that doesn't tell you a damn thing about what the other guy saw let lone why those people where doing that thing they may or may not have done. Does it make any sense? It's like when you ask for someone's opinion and they try to see things from your perspective but they can't because your perspective is built off a lifetime of experience that can never be fully understood even by you, let alone the guy in the cube across from you who just disappeared one day because his "legal issues" caught up with him and his wife thought the judge was going to go in the guy's favor especially with the baby involved but it didn't work out that way and no-one every saw him after that. Too much but not enough. I think his name was Ron because that's the person people ask for now when they walk by his desk two or three times and say "didn't ron sit over here?" and i say who?

i think i'm going to take a little time off to work on my car.

once more for the crowd

In case you haven't figured it out, MSN is one of the few websites i have access to at work. I don't know why they choose this.

Anyway, turns out americans are the sober, photo snapping snitches of the space party: see for yourself

Also, keep your enemies closer, as they say.

hope for the future

my seven (is he seven?) maybe eight year old nephew just got a little pet rat and very little white pet mouse. he named the rat "lieutenant Magma" and the much smaller mouse "tiny."

genius, pure genius.

reality pulls us back in

sometimes i hate online news sources because they can amend articles and then you have no proof of the original content. for example, this article about Ray Nagen originally didn't elude to any controversy surrounding the New Orleans Mayor and simply quoted his racist comments as fact. Thinking it was pretty funny, i planned to post it here. Of course, now that one person somewhere had an original thought and realized this guy's a dick, MSN jumped on board for the big win.

Also, everyone should read this article about friendly fire. It should ellicite some kind of response, even if you are dead inside.

crazy old man

I miss the old guy at work. He was a retired employee of "company X" that came back as a contractor (basically like me) to fill some time, make some money and offer some expertise. I don't really know a lot of people where i work because i only actually do work with a few of them. Also, as we all know, engineers don't make very exciting friends, and i'm surrounded by hard-core desk-jocky engineer types. Frank, as he was appropriately named, was not only a constant presence, but also a good guy with which to discuss the nothings that you discuss to fill the day. Unfortunately, as of the first of this year, he is re-retired.

Since we were both contract workers for the worst engineering group in the company (leadership-wise) we had (or "have" in my case) a lot of empty time to fill. When we got bored, we'd wonder around our huge engineering complex, discussing for the most part, cars. I can say without a doubt that he had some degree of experience with every aspect of automotive design and manufacture. Also, he was a former supervisor, so it made me feel a little better when he agreed that our immediate higher-up was a useless mass and most of the industry is not as we live it. If it hadn't been for this old guy, i would have learned very little in the past 6 months. Worse, the bit that i picked up on my own was the real trivial stuff, like "how to fill out form Z" or "where to request access A." You know, the type of stuff that the losers above would ask me to do as my part in the cogs of the corporate gear system. Even still they pretty much leave me to fend for myself on that info. Frank, on the other-hand, was preaching the good stuff; how to get ahead in the business, how to interact with the factory workers, ways to subvert, side-step or weasel around the system. He could talk to angry plant/quality/whoever managers and tell them not what they wanted to hear, but what he need to say in a way they'd want to hear it.

we would often find ourselves working at one of the many local assembly plants and end up walking the lines. He had such a wealth of knowledge it's just spill out. Then, when the topic of work wore out, we'd turn to the topic of cars in general. He was working on an old MG... i can't remember the year. He'd offer advice for the Fiat and even go as far as offer up use of his son's car hoist, should the need arise. Sure, occasionally he'd forget what topic he was speaking on and would require a reminder and yes, it was pretty hard to interject my own thoughts once he got rolling, but what can you do?

My old guy emailed me the other from Florida. He said the weather was wonderful and he saw a bobcat from his patio. He asked for an update on my current job prospect, which he was advising me about (still outstanding) and mentioned that he hasn't had a chance to go fishing yet, but you better god damned believe he's gonna. (the last bit were my words, not his)