“I think Wallace and Gromit is playing at The Palm, but don’t quote me on that.”

-Byron C.

And remember, MC DP says Don’t Copy That Floppy.

This weekend has been full of some extreme ups and downs, which was perfectly mimicked by the many amazing roller-coasters at Magic Mountain, including Goliath and Scream.

Especially Scream.

This weekend at Magic Mountain was the most fun I’ve ever had at an amusement park. It was good to see Joel, even though it took him 2 attempts and 110 miles to finally get there.

While at Magic Mountain, we were recording the USCvNotre Dame football game. After making it 10 hours without hearing the score, the outcome was revealed right as we were about to watch the opening kickoff. No biggie, it was still amazing; Leinert called it “one of the greatest games ever played,” but then he did score the winning touchdown.

And now I come home to discover my Vespa stolen. If you see it around, let me know:

http://slo.craigslist.org/mcy/104614668.html

Did you know that until the Supreme Court struck it down in 1965, there was a law that stated married couples could not legally use contraceptives in Connecticut?

1965. That’s only 40 years ago folks.

Those crazy northerners and their backwords ways.

If you send Jacqueline Stallone a picture of your ass, she can predict your future.

You don’t even need to add an extra remark to make that funny.

From a guide on how to pack for long motorcycle trips:

With a little effort, you can get an adaptor for your cell phone and laptop so that you can connect to the internet while you’re in your tent. Don’t do it. It’s a couple hundred dollars, the connections are typically 4800 baud (very slow), and it’s wrong. When you’re travelling thousands of miles from home on your motorcycle, you must guard your karma.

Understood. When you’re cruising along the highway with a motor wedged up your ass, you need all the Karma you can steal.

Some riders have been known to carry portable TVs. This lets you watch the weather in the evening. If you watch anything else, you are going to spend a lot of extra time in purgatory. Bring a book. Only 7% of all Americans read a book last year; less than 40% of all Americans will ever read a book in their entire lives. Bill Gates read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica in High School, and he’s worth $100 billion now.

There’s quite a large jump between encyclopedia reading and being the richest man on earth, but I suppose it’s possible the secret to unimaginable wealth is hidden within the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I mean, really, raise your hand if you’ve read more than a paragraph from this traditional elementary school shelf-buster. I bet if you read Encyclopaedia Britannica cover to cover there’s a bunch of hints, for example:

“George Washington was born in START A SOFTWARE COMPANY a cherry tree that fought bravely along the Delaware.”

or

“But Rosa Parks feet hurt and so when asked to stand she STEAL APPLE’S INTERFACE AND CLAIM IT WAS YOUR OWN snapped the bus in half like a pencil between her fingers.”

Started noticing a little problem with my Vespa soon after I got it, and by looking at the symptoms I suspected that I had a worn shifting cross, which I viewed as an opportunity to tear into my engine and do a partial engine rebuild.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t think the engine needed to be rebuilt, but one of my goals with this vehicle was to bite the bullet and really get to know it in a mechanical sense. I wanted to experience this Vespa in a manner that was so thoroughly physical that I would require gloves and my Vespa would be left huddled in the corner calling the 2-stroke equivalent of a social worker.

I ordered a bunch of parts from Scomo and got ready to get down and dirty. I fully suspected it to take a full 3-day weekend, but from working with my dad on various projects throughout the years I knew that it would take at least four score and seven years. And so it was.

The shifting cross is also known as the cruciform, for a reason that was quickly made obvious to me: even Jesus would want to kill himself trying to get to this thing. The motor has to be removed from the frame, split in half and all the gears have to be removed. There were points where I had mini-panic attacks and what little sleep I had was plagued by nightmarish visions of my scooter spread out over my parents garage for all of eternity, like an even-poorer version of a 74 Chevy pickup on blocks.

Fortunately, the night before (or the morning of) I was to move back to San Luis, we had it completely together and started it at 1 am. I’m sure my neighbors are still pissed…

To be fair, if my neighbors weren’t mad at me, I would never see them.

Check it out:

Rachel not only has a blog, but she is the first non-techy friend of mine to install linux. booyah.

About a week and a half ago I became the proud owner of a 1978 Vespa P200. It’s a 2-stroke engine, meaning it is made to burn oil as well as gasoline, which I find to be immensely satisfying in California.

Unfortunately, the only pictures I have are ones taken in the previous owner’s garage. Looky see:

More fun….

…than a barrel of supermodels.

Also, Lauren bought a brand new 2005 Vespa ET4 to drive her to and from her new job at Web Associates in San Luis Obispo. Snazzy….

Not really, but somebody did spoil the ending for the most recent Harry Potter book for me in almost the exact same font.

Ok, life updates in shotgun format just for historical purposes. It is not my job to entertain you people, no matter how many fake degrees I put on my resume.

1) Joel’s getting married, you all know this. He asked someone we all know to be his best man. Somebody close to everyone who reads this website, someone whose last name ends with Agner . You didn’t know that, even I was surprised.

Be sure to come back for drafts of my Best Man toast, which will be epic in ways that only those who have been to Molten Core will understand.

2) I work at Lockheed. So Far: Great People, Good Pay, Good Hours, not terribly interesting work. Coding with .NET is meh. Imagine you’d spent your entire life studying to be an architect and your new boss hands you a lego set and tells you to go at it. It’s colorful, but not all that challenging.

3) I like my parents. Visiting Parents = Good. Living with parents = too much of a good thing. I’m ready to head back to San Luis Obispo to continue my eternal college experience.

Thought of the moment: Smack someone you love on the bum.

Paul Winchell died this past weekend, and with him goes the original voice of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh.

Initial autopsy results show his top was made of rubber and his bottom made of springs.

Last night, I had a dream that I went to an open mic night to do a stand-up routine…

…and only thought up a single joke ahead of time. It did not go as well as I might have hoped.

While walking into work I read the headline “Tsunami Warning Fizzles.”

For those who don’t know, there was a HUGE earthquake off the cost of Eureka California ( magnitude seven point OH ) on Tuesday evening that set off a Tsunami warning along the west coast. While those of us who found out were convinced of our imminent death, the news channels wouldn’t have been more excited if Michael Jackson was caught molesting Scott Peterson’s son at Robert Blake’s house.

They were salivating at the death and destruction the Tsunami would bring; there would be countless wrecked houses to stand in front of, cute orphaned children to exploit, and of course the freak house that had been moved 400,000 miles and remained completely intact.

Which brings us to the word “Fizzle.”

Dictionary.com defines Fizzle as “To fail or end weakly, especially after a hopeful beginning.”

The writers for the San Francisco Chronicle had already booked flights to Tahiti for lengthy vacations. With this kind of abundant material they could have brought Ann Killion ( sportswriter for the SJ Mercury ) on and had her write the entire newspaper. With a disaster of Tsunamic proportions, the news really writes itself. All you have to do is report the number of bodies found today, and the new inspiring story of the dog who carried an entire school bus full of unconscious nuns/orphans/puppies back to their church/happy family/pile of dog biscuits.

But then it all fell apart. It was a huge earthquake, but it was the wrong kind of huge earthquake. What all started out so swimmingly ended up fizzling like Woody Allen’s career.

Bonus: Where did the title of this entry come from?

Upon meeting my new boss:

BossMan: So, what time would you like to start working in the morning?

Me: It doesn’t really matter, I can come in any time you need me to be here.

BossMan: Well, me and Bob normally get here at six in the morning.

Me: I’ll see you at eight.

First day of a real job tomorrow.

Not a job that involves the transportation of individually packaged cheese packets or explaining that despite the persistent rumor to the contrary, buying a service plan for a laptop does not immediately qualify you as mentally deficient; instead, this job will be the culmination of my schooling up to this point, the ultimate pointer as to whether or not I’ve been wasting my life in front of a text editor when I should really be up to my knees in my own feces with the Peace Core or working at starting my own public access show in Aurora, Illinois with my best friend Garth.

I don’t know where to go from here, there are many directions and I’d like to go to sleep soon, so I’ll just do some bullet points:

• I can’t sleep. Ryan compared it to the night before Christmas, but I’m thinking it’s more like Judgment Day Eve.
• You wouldn’t believe the amount of documentation they sent me, I am convinced that the “new hire” packet this place hands out is solely responsible for the destruction of the rain forests.
• Some of the perks my new employer has border on obscenity. They have a service called dock3, where essentially they hired a group of people to be enlisted as indentured servants. The full list of services can be found here, but the one that sticks out for me is that they will take my car to get it’s oil changed while I am working. I thought that’s what interns were for.

Man, that’s a hard life.

The things that were done to myself and others in the Networking final that was administered yesterday surely violates several stipulations of the Geneva convention.

I’ve discussed the actions with my state senator and he has assured me that those responsible for this injustice will be prosecuted as nothing less than terrorists.

Dr. “Smith,” pack your bags, you’re off to sunny Guantanamo Bay.

Did You Know?: This same professor just offered me no less than two jobs in the fall, one of them as a grader for a class I’m not entirely sure I’ll pass.

Written in the grime on the back of a Semi:

“I wish my wife was this dirty.”

I only have one mind. It can only maintain momentum in one direction as it is one single thing. If my head contained multiple instances of intelligent entities I would be capable of doing much more, for example as I write this I could be studying for my biology quiz later today or even work on my programming project whose description is so vague it would have been better communicated through a series of shrugs and facial contortions.

But that is not the case. And so I’ve failed out of my first class ever. Two programming classes is too much for my feeble mind. I thought I might be able to pull off a C after not completing two programming assignments in a row, but one blank midterm later, I realized it’s not possible and endeavored to save my other classes from the same fate instead of continuing the futile grind which consisted mostly of a staring contest with my computer monitor punctuated by restroom breaks and spontaneous fits of cursing.

but all is not lost

I’ve been offered a summer job actually writing code with quite a respectable company. I’m still waiting on the background check to go through, but pending that speed bump, I shall be starting June 13th at a certain company whose name rhymes almost precisely with Lockheed Martin. I’m thoroughly excited, though intimidated by the task I’ve been assigned.

congratulations

Lauren graduated from USC, which is hard for me to comprehend. Right now, she’s just looking for a job, and once she has that I’ll still deal with it mentally by telling myself it’s an internship, but once she doesn’t go back to school in the fall and refuses to go to class despite my urgings, I’ll have to come to terms with the situation.

At least by then USC football will be back and I’ll be able to go to a game with the free ticket that Lauren gets….. Wait a minute! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

“I tend to become a bit condescending when people say stupid shit.”
-Anon

Did you know if you added Orange Juice to Champagne you can have it for breakfast?

Man, alcoholics are creative

“Remember that. If you start a startup, you’ll probably fail. Most startups fail. It’s the nature of the business. But it’s not necessarily a mistake to try something that has a 90% chance of failing, if you can afford the risk. Failing at 40, when you have a family to support, could be serious. But if you fail at 22, so what? If you try to start a startup right out of college and it tanks, you’ll end up at 23 broke and a lot smarter. Which, if you think about it, is roughly what you hope to get from a graduate program.”

-Paul Graham, from here.

I’ve heard this same argument more than once… except for the last three sentences, which puts it into a proper perspective.