Soda machine hacking

Today I hacked my first soda machines! Emily and I tried to do one at the laundry mat over the weekend but it wouldn’t work. Today we were walking along the street and spotted a couple soda machines inside some office building. So we went inside and managed to get into the menus on both of them. We didn’t know what half the stuff meant since I hadn’t completely read through the instructions the other day, but it was fun.

Stopped by Pizza King, hoping to win a Crash Bandicoot plush thing that was in the claw machine over the weekend, but it was gone. I spent $2 on the claw and won nothing. And I did so good over the weekend, winning 2 things, each on the first tries. Stopped for ice cream, went by the park, then home to watch some Dead Like Me season 2.

Sinkhole

On the way to the park yesterday, the kids and I notice water running alongside the curb and into a drain. Quite a bit of it too. Figured it was just somebody watering their lawn too much or washing their car or whatever. A couple hours later, on the way back home, we notice it’s still pouring in there pretty strongly. Looking up the street, it appears to be coming from nowhere. So we walk up the block to investigate.

Apparently an underground pipe burst and the water was seeping through tiny cracks all over a large part of the street. You couldn’t actually see the water coming out, but it was. Walking across the wet spot on the road was like walking on thin ice. The road visibly cracked more as I went across and made neat crunching noises. You could see the water coming out of all the cracks on the parts that you stepped on. Luckily it didn’t all collapse and kill us.

This morning we were walking in that area again and decided to see if it had been fixed yet. It hadn’t. Some old lady and her cat was sitting by her back door so I went over to talk to her while the kids continued to watch water leak from the street. Eventually the kids came over too. The old lady seemed extremely happy that anyone bothered to come over and say hello to her. I think I made her week. She thanked us for coming by and said to stop by again.

Today we did laundry. And I made my best batch of waffles ever. Yesterday we ate at Pizza King while listening to bad karaoke. We walked there and back which was about 20 minutes each way. At lunch we had BTH and we walked through a giant antiques market thing they had going on in the streets. I think other stuff happened this weekend but I can’t remember any of it. I bought a TV this evening. $119 for 23″ is just too good to pass up. So far I’ve used it to listen to about 2 hours of podcasts. Money well spent.

Dad?

Was standing in line at BTH today. Suddenly someone is holding my hand. I look down and it’s a 5-year-old girl. Right behind me is her dad, kind of laughing. I poke her in the shoulder and say, “Hey, uh, you got the wrong dad.” See looks up at me and looks pretty terrified. She runs over to her dad and hides herself as me and the other dad laugh. Scaring little kids is fun!

George Harrison

Brad Carter: i downloaded the entire george harrison discography last night. and it’s 99.9% completed. and the ONE track that isn’t complete is from the one album that i really wanted.
Brad Carter: dammit
Brad Carter: 1.27 gigs of george harrison and it’s gotta be the song i want that’s not completed
Spessa: Which song?
Brad Carter: fish on the sand. from his Cloud 9 album
Brad Carter: not the best song on the album, but still…
Brad Carter: i viewed all the peers sharing it with me and they’re all 99.9% complete. so it’s unlikely it will complete
Spessa: I liked that when i was in 7thgrade
Spessa: I listened to it on my walkman at the dentist
Brad Carter: yeah i loved that album. i asked for it for my birthday but i couldn’t wait for it so i shoplifted it.
Brad Carter: then i had 2 copies
Spessa: Hah!
Spessa: This is payback
Brad Carter: hehe. must be
Brad Carter: stupid God
Brad Carter: or maybe george harrison’s ghost fucking with me
Spessa: George is waggling his finger from the grave
Brad Carter: what a jerk

Beatles vs. Eminem

I have the entire Beatles discography. In my Beatles directory there are 227 files, taking up 858 megs on my hard drive. Their music, as a group, spanned most of the 1960’s.

I also have everything Moby has ever done, from 1994 to his current stuff. 265 files by Moby consume 859 megs of my hard drive.

Then there’s Eminem. He’s a newb, compared to those guys. He didn’t become big until 1999. Guess how much of his stuff I have. 1.58 GIGS. 318 files sorted into 20 folders. To my knowledge I’ve got everything he’s ever released. Almost twice as much as either of those other guys and still going. He’s probably got enough “unreleased” stuff out there to put out another dozen albums after he dies.

Kids, vacuuming, Ipod, Luvox

Kids and I walked to Henderson Park again today. I read Blacklisted 411 while they played. Afterwards we walked to Hasty Freeze for ice cream. Stopped by a fountain to hang out for awhile and learned we could really screw up the fountain by stopping the flow of water to the drain. Colleen drove by, noticed us and stopped by to hang out for awhile. She left and we went to get our ice cream, then walked home.

Vacuumed the hell out of the house today. I just bought a vaccum cleaner last week after living here for 10 months. 10 months of hair, dirt and whatever else in the carpets.

My Ipod rules. Having my entire music collection in one tiny device is still amazing to me. I’m sure it’ll wear off soon. Especially if I don’t get to keep it. I’ve been updating my ID3 tags all day so that the music is organized better in the Ipod. I’d be nice if it would just organize it all into folders, like I have on my hard drive. But it won’t do that. Organizing by ID3 tags will be nice, though, once I get them all updated. Itunes makes that fairly easy.

Yesterday I put the 12 CDs I own on Ebay. So far they’re up to $3.05 total. Those have been sitting in my car, unused, for over a year now.

Luvox Phreak might be visiting me this weekend. She’ll know for sure tomorrow, so I get a day’s notice if she’s gonna show or not. If not, I’ve got a lot of shit I need to get done around here. And work is suddenly really busy.

Credit cards

Tell me if you think this reasoning is dumb. I’m not going to pay my credit card bills anymore. I lost my house to the bank so my credit is already fux0red so that part doesn’t even matter. I owe between $3,000 and $4,000 in credit cards right now and I’ve been diligently paying them each month. I usually pay just slightly over the minimum. Sometimes I pay twice the minimum. And occasionally I’ll drop $100 on one. This year I’ve ridded myself of 2 or 3 credit cards forever by finally getting them paid.

Occasionally I’m so broke that I don’t make the payments on time. This results in insane late fees. Like $30 or $35 per card. Plus, on the two cards that have high balances, the interest rates end up being $15 – $20 per month. So when I make the minimum payments, I’m actually only putting a few dollars towards paying them off. Only when I occasionally drop $100 on them am I really making a dent in them. And the occasional late fees screw that up. Seems like an endless battle.

Anyway, back to my point. I quit paying them and after 3 or 4 months, they’ll send me to collection agencies. When the collection agencies start begging me for payments, that’s when I’ll resume paying the cards. Because collection agencies aren’t going to charge me $35 for being late and there won’t be any more interest rates. Right? Or am I missing something?

None of the cards even have my phone number anymore. They all have my old Illinois number so I won’t have to deal with daily phone calls from them. Just letters. Maybe I’ll just stick it to The Man and never pay them! But nah, I’m sure I’ll pay them eventually. Besides losing the high interest rates and late fees, it sure would be nice to have a 3 or 4 month break in paying my credit cards.

I came very close to dropping a bunch of credit card payments in the mail today but stopped myself in the nick of time.

Anyone have any input/thoughts?

Jack

This cracks me up. It’s from Jack, who is currently homeless somewhere in England…

We opted to live, instead, a little closer in to town and chose a fine, four story privately-owned mansion which had been vacant for two years on Keats Grove in tony Hampstead Heath, located right across the road from Romantic poet John Keats old house.

Though in a state of disrepair, the mansion suited our purposes and had electricity and water and we stayed there for about three weeks until a neighbour noticed two of our number leaving the house one day and phoned the building’s owners, a wealthy American couple.

I was awoken that morning by shouts of “hullo, hullo” coming from the first floor kitchen and when I went downstairs to investigate, found two women and a man intruding in our squat!

The man and I both shouted simultaneously, “Who the hell are you?!”

“I’m the owner,” he replied, absolutely livid. “Well, I’m the squatter,” I countered, cool and level. “Get the hell out of my house,” he ordered. I asked if he’d seen the section six paperwork posted in the front window, a legal requirement for squatting, and told him to get the hell out of our squat!

There’s a legal process, I informed him, to have squatters evicted and suggested that if he wanted us removed from the premises, he’d better begin that process.

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