Today, as I was walking into the post office, there was an old man on the sidewalk with a clipboard, I assume to sway peoples’ political beliefs. There’s always one there this time of year. As I opened the door, he asked me if I was a Linn County resident. Without looking at him I said “Nah” and continued inside. But before the door shut, I heard him say, “Oh, you’re fibbing!” So I walked back out the door, knocked the clipboard out of his hand and screamed, “FUCK YOU!” in his face. Wait no, that last part is a lie.

Actually, I continued inside to pick up my mail. I probably wouldn’t have said anything to him, but a lady who works in the post office (one of the higher ups, who gets called to the counter when a customer demands to talk to a supervisor) was at the door and telling him not to do something. She was saying something like he needs to approach people on the way out instead of the way in.

So I stopped and said, “You know, I wasn’t lying to you. I really don’t live in Linn County.”

He says nothing. So I continue, “So you don’t need to call me a liar.”

“Huh?” he replies.

“You said I was fibbing when I told you I don’t live in Linn County and I don’t appreciate it. I shouldn’t have to be called a liar whenever I come to pick up my mail.”

“Oh. Well I was just kidding, buddy!”

By the time he says this I’m getting into my car and the post office lady is giving him an evil look. As I pull away she’s talking to him again. I don’t know how much authority she has over those people who stand out there, but it would be great if she made him leave. I hate having to dodge them every single day.

Oh, and I really am a Linn County resident. Tee hee! I love being a jerk.

EDIT: Just to prove that I’m not a complete jerk all the time, I should point out that in December I give those Salvation Army bell ringers at the post office money almost every single day.

The New York Sun reports that the price of gasoline in the US will soon be in line with what Europeans pay. Translating this price into dollars and cents at the gas pump, one of our forecasters, the chairman of Houston-based Dune Energy, Alan Gaines, sees gas rising to $7-$8 a gallon. The other, a commodities tracker at Weiss Research in Jupiter, Fla., Sean Brodrick, projects a range of $8 to $10 a gallon. -from here

While it sucks that gas costs so much and this is seriously screwing up my recreational travel, I think this is exciting news. Insane gas prices like that sure would give the U.S. a much-needed shakeup. We’ll finally be forced to find alternatives to everything. As much as I love owning a car, I would love to have an excuse to get rid of it. Maybe some of the awesome stuff that I always read on ecogeek.org will actually start happening. Maybe middle class people will have to start riding the bus. It’ll be anarchy! The prices are going to suck but I’m positive that good things are going to come out of it.

In more important news…

• Payton finished Harry Potter #7 this morning.
  
• Emily turned 12 last week.
  
• My 2 week long prank to Renae finally paid off.
  
• The new Wordpress 2.5.1 control panel is confusing.
  
• I’ve upgraded to another new server.
  
• Chris Tomkinson.
  
• There are new hotel calls on phonelosers.org.
  
• My cat-proof desk is stylish, yet effective.

And it’s really freaking the cat out.

In my quest to rid myself of tangible items, I’ve come across a small problem. I want to be able to easily browse my digital collections. It’d be nice to be able to see the cover art of my movies. Especially when perusing movies from the couch, which is hard to do anyway since everything is in tiny text. I’ve done a little searching on the subject, but I can’t seem to find any software that will let you add cover art pictures and easy browsing to your collection of digital movies. I know Windows Media Player sort of does it, but most of my movies are in mp4 format, which can’t be played on WMP. Any suggestions?

Also, I’ve tried pretty hard to not collect tons of books since I moved here. I think I currently own less than 20 books, since I usually sell them back after I’ve read them. But I’d like to have some kind of catalog of books that I’ve enjoyed, so I don’t forget about the book. You know, if you have a giant book collection, sometimes you’ll come across an old book that you haven’t read in years and you’ll decide to read it again. I need a way to create lists of books, preferably with cover art, that I can browse. Amazon has wish lists, but I don’t want people buying me books on a wish list. They don’t have just a regular list of stuff you like.

I’m thinking I’ll just set up an Amazon Store of my media, even though I’m not too crazy with the way they lay everything out. I already have a store for phonelosers.org. I guess it would be cool to have the added bonus of receiving a commission if anyone decides to buy anything in my personal store.

About the movies, I’m sure Netflix will come out with a way to make lists of favorites eventually. They already have Top 10 lists that users can make and share. I don’t think it goes much further than that, though. But if anyone has any other suggestions for doing what I think I want to do, other than making an Amazon Store, I’m open to them.

EDIT: I just set up a quick list on Amazon. Click here to see my Amazon store. Right after I made that, though, I discovered that Amazon actually does have a thing called Your Media Library which might do everything I was looking for. I’ve only spent a minute or two looking at it now, and I’m not sure if I like it. I’m going to look it over now, though. I’m still open to any alternative suggestions.

ANOTHER EDIT: I just remembered that after RijilV moved out of my spare apartment in Illinois, I had this insane idea of converting his old apartment into a library. As if I didn’t have enough useless space in my house as it was, I thought that turning every wall of his old living area into a bookshelf was an awesome idea. I came really close to actually beginning this project too, but luckily someone I knew needed a place to live so I rented it out again.

I didn’t even own enough books at the time to fill more than 1/4th of one of the smaller walls. So besides the lost rental income, I would have spent all this money on wood for bookshelves, lowered the value of the house, and then probably spent thousands of dollars after that just buying books to fill up the shelves so it would look cooler. Sure, it would have been a fun project, but I’m so glad I got sidetracked on that idea.

I bought some fabric today and made a green screen. Payton and I did a test video and it worked really well, even without any lighting. The kids have been making nonstop videos the past week. Mostly puppets and stuff. But we got on the subject of green screens and I told them how easy it is to do, one thing leads to another, and I’m buying fabric. It’s a lot cooler than the green screen out of posterboard that Herman and I made a few years ago. Who knows what we’ll do with this though.

Here’s our test video with the green screen. It’s very spotty since the lighting in the garage is dim:

And here’s my favorite video of theirs so far (not green screened):

In either first or second grade, I met the guy that would be my best friend for the next 6 or 7 years. His name was John and he lived on the same block as me, just at the opposite side. I don’t remember exactly how we met, but I think I kept seeing him on my way to and from the corner store (right next to his house) that my parents used to send me to for groceries all the time. I’m pretty sure we declared ourselves enemies at first, but upgraded to friends soon after that. Details are sketchy.

Eventually I began spending a huge part of my free time at John’s house. I guess I wouldn’t say that we got into a lot of trouble together, but we sure caused a lot of trouble. John is mentioned several times on my pranks page for things like tying strings across the road (or sometimes just pretending to) to annoy drivers and causing merchandise in the grocery store to talk to customers via walkie talkies. Not since John have I ever had a friend where it seemed like every single day for us was just another insane mission to accomplish. We didn’t just “hang out” when we were together. We plotted and schemed and accomplished things.

He had the kind of parents that were more likely to encourage our craziness, than to punish us for it. Whereas my dad might whip me with a belt and ground me for a week for tying strings across the road, John’s dad would suggest hanging newspapers along the length of the string to create a giant wall for cars to crash into. (He actually did suggest this to us, though I doubt he was entirely serious about it.) This is the main reason 99% of our time was spent on John’s side of the block and not mine. I only remember John being at my house once, and it ended with my dad yelling at me for whatever we were doing and sending John home.

I lost touch with John after 8th grade, when their family moved into a different school district. I did visit his new house once or twice, after he moved but once I was 16 or so, I completely lost contact with him. In the late 90’s, maybe a year or two after moving back to Illinois, I sent his parents a Christmas card and we ended up visiting a few more times, but I guess life kept us both too busy hang out much more than that. But just a few days ago, John tracked me down! I was surprised to find that he has a blog and that I was even mentioned in it once or twice. Since he’s contacted me, we’ve been catching up via this post and email which has been a lot of fun.

So in honor of John’s sudden return, I’m going to list a few of the things we used to do to keep ourselves busy in the 80’s.

• First of all, apparently we attempted to make a bomb threat to our grade school from the playground in the 1980’s. John just reminded me of this incident yesterday. I don’t remember any of it happening, but I’m sure I’d do anything to get out of school. John’s account of the story is hilarious.
  
• Since we lived right next door to a busy grocery store, we got to screw with customers as often as we liked. Sometimes we’d yell at them from his porch, other times we would go into the store and do things like putting hidden radios inside boxes of merchandise so we could talk to customers. Once we had a robot campaign and election and made a few of the customers vote for us.
  
• We used to dumpster dive in the store’s dumpster, which seems kind of gross now that I look back on it since it was a grocery store that cut up their own meat products. We mostly took cardboard boxes from it for projects, but what we really liked to find were Procut stickers. They were these sheets of 6 stickers that I assume the meat guy in the store was supposed to stick on the products. But instead he seemed to throw them all in the trash. We stuck these all over our block, mostly in the alley. We would ride our bikes up and down the alley, slapping them on everything we passed, such as houses, garages, fences, the ground, telephone poles, the church, etc. You couldn’t walk down our alley without seeing at least a few Procut stickers.
  
• I know this is written somewhere else on my page, but during one of our years in grade school, our MO was to blow up the school (and later the world). We drew up blueprints involving bombs in the boiler room and talked about it often. The teachers seemed to have no problem with this, though John tells me I did get in trouble for writing a paper about wanting to be a terrorist when I grew up.
  
• John came up with the idea of prank calling talk radio stations. I think we only did KMOX and I later branched out to WBGZ (What’s Your Bid?) on my own a few years later. But John would wait on the phone for nearly an hour sometimes, just to try and say something silly on the air. The only one I can remember was when he called about his son being on drugs and he was able to talk to the host for quite awhile before the host finally said, “This is a child, isn’t it?” and John responded with, “Right! I’m a prankster!”
  
• He also came up with the idea of calling up a pay phone, just to see if anyone would answer. So we got the number to a phone booth at the Wilshire shopping center and began talking to people there. This began our obsessive collecting of area pay phone numbers. We didn’t even call the numbers that much, we just wanted to build up our list of pay phone numbers. We both kept separate lists, organized in our own ways, and routinely swapped numbers with each other. I started keeping a small notebook on me every time I went out with my parents so that I could write down new numbers. When they would ask if I wanted to go to the store with them, my answer usually revolved around whether or not I had the pay phone numbers at that particular store. By the time grade school ended, we both had over 100 pay phone numbers.
  
• We used to draw arrows on the sidewalks everywhere, hoping that people would follow them. As if someone leaving the store would think, “Oh, an arrow on the sidewalk. I better spend an hour following these all over the block to see where they lead!” We sure put a lot of effort into it, though. I always had to make everything official with a business name too. This one was Arrows Incorporated.
  
• We also left treasure maps lying around, hoping people would find them. The maps were usually a series of steps, with things like “Walk 72 paces straight ahead. Turn left at the pole and walk another 40 paces.” Once I taped one underneath a pay phone, then called the phone and told the guy who answered to look under the phone for the secret map. Nobody would ever do it, though. You’d think a random person would want a little adventure in his life. Why else would they pick up the phone?? I signed a lot of these DOT Inc, which stood for Don’t Open This, which is what I wrote on the outside of a lot of them, hoping to entice people into opening them.
  
• One birthday, I received some CB walkie talkies. This is another thing that’s mentioned on my pranks page. Within a year, John and his sister also received walkie talkies and we all drove the local CB community nuts with our antics. Leadfoot was the man who was ready to kill all of us. I still don’t understand how he never found us. We sure gave him plenty of incentive to.
  
• We wrote a paper together called The Weirdo Weekly. I don’t think we ever got a full issue out. We also wrote magic spells and John started his own language. (Not sure how far he got with that.)
  
• Speaking of newspapers, we would deface their newspaper before his dad could read it by using a pencil to erase and change certain letters in the headlines. Simple things, like maybe changing the word Loose to Noose or something. I’m sure it made interesting/irritating reading for his dad.
  
• Out of nowhere, my dad once grounded me from hanging out with John any more, his reason simply being that he was a bad influence. I can’t remember how long this ban on John lasted, but I do remember getting in trouble one evening because my dad drove by the playground during recess and saw us playing together.
  

At this point I’m tired of writing so I’m going to stop. But it’s great that John has gotten back in touch. I count him as a major influence in my life, and he made my grade school years approximately a billion times more interesting than they would have been without him.

I just now finished the last episode of season 3 of Weeds. A few days ago I was browsing around Netflix and clicked on it, remembering seeing previews about it on Showtime back when I was watching Dead Like Me. I was immediately hooked on Weeds and have watched them nonstop for the past 4 days. There hasn’t been a show that’s made me LOL this much in a long time. I loved every episode. What a great show. It’s almost enough to make me want to sign up for cable this fall so I can catch the new episodes as they air. Almost, but not quite.

Also, Netflix’s Instant Play is awesome. This is my first time using it. The picture quality is a lot better than the movies I rip myself. Once they build their catalog up, there will be no reason for me to own movies and TV shows anymore. They didn’t have Season 3, so I had to spend a day downloading those from bittorrent. I was downloading them one at a time so I could watch them as they came in. But Netflix is great and I hope they work on making a lot more available soon.

Last night I had a dream that I was working on the PHP code on phonelosers.org to fix the problem with the “Comments” text being in Times New Roman font instead of Arial font.

A couple weeks ago I had a dream that I went to a bar with some lady who was a lesbian, she sat down and I went to the counter to get drinks. The bartender ignored me forever, and most of the dream was spent being pissed about the horrible service I was getting. I woke up before I got served.

You know you’re boring when your dreams suck this bad.

This week has been fun. The Spessas were here all week and just left yesterday. I drove with them to Portland to hang out for awhile before they continued back home. Today I’ve got nothing to do, which means I’ll probably be on the internet all day. So far this is what I’ve done today.