For some reason, this past April, I decided to sign up for a Twitter account. Probably because I’m addicted to social networking sites since I spend more time on the internet than I do in real life. The idea of micro-blogging seems lame to me, but I still do it anyway. Enough to have made 91 Tweets in 2008.

I like following other people on Twitter too, even though I prefer actual blogging more. I’m currently following 35 people and I have 68 people following me. I tried getting my updates via cell phone, but that just annoyed me nonstop all day. So now I use a plugin for Outlook called OutTwit, which delivers all my Twitter messages to a folder in Outlook. I use Outlook all day, so it’s really convenient for me.

Also, Twitter was really cool for Defcon. During that weekend I had tweets delivered to my cell phone and it made keeping up with everyone else at the convention really easy. I’ll probably use it the same way during Shmoocon next month. Anyway, the point of all this is so I can post all my Twitter messages from 2008. Here they all are:

Back in grade school, John and I used to tie strings across the road to annoy motorists and pedestrians. Then that evolved into pretending to have a string across the road by each of us standing on opposite sides of the street and pretending to hold strings. I detail some of our string adventures on my pranks page. What prompted me to write about our string adventures tonight, though, is this YouTube video I watched this evening about two guys who do the invisible rope thing for the purpose of making funny YouTube videos. They’re pretty amusing to watch!

They’ve even got a domain at theinvisiblehope.com and a YouTube page made just for their invisible rope videos. As much as I love these videos, I still want to grab these guys by their big fat heads and scream at them, “I WAS PRETENDING TO HOLD ROPES ACROSS THE ROAD BEFORE YOU WERE EVEN BORN, KID!” I’m such a grouchy old man. It makes me wish even more that we could have had a video camera when we were kids. John and I would have taped so many awesome things.

Speaking of prank videos, I set up a YouTube page just for PLA videos. Now I won’t have my personal videos all mixed in with PLA stuff, even if those two categories are more or less the same. The YouTube is located at www.youtube.com/user/phonelosersofamerica.

Christmas has been a lot of fun! The kids got cool stuff and so did I.

A disturbing trend I’m noticing in my dreams lately – when something unusual happens to me, as often happens in dreams, one of my common thoughts during the dream is starting to be, “This is going to make a great blog entry!” Just like that old xkcd comic, only in dreams. I’ve had this thought at least twice this week now, that I can remember. I need to stop spending so much time on the internet.

The ice last week caused 3 snow days for the kids. So they got 3 days off in addition to Christmas break, which begins today. Oh, I mean “winter break” as the school calls it to avoid offending anyone who doesn’t celebrate Christmas. We had a couple days of good snow where the kids could actually go out and play in it. On Friday we bought some sleds and went sledding at Bryant Park for about an hour in a mixture of melting snow and mud. We were a mess by the time we left. It’s the first time we’ve been sledding since we moved to this state since the snow here sucks.

Really I need to just start driving to the nearby cities with higher elevations so we can go sledding in real snow, instead of complaining about Albany’s lame snow. There are plenty of places I could go for that. Maybe we’ll do that this week.

Friday night I tried going to the gym and they were closed “due to the weather” even though there was was absolutely no snow on the ground or ice on the roads. Lazy jerks. On Saturday we went to see Yes Man and The Day The Earth Stood Still. (Why didn’t the aliens just turn off our power to begin with instead of trying to exterminate us?) Sunday was swimming. Yesterday I downloaded Spore and put it on the kids computer and they played it nonstop. It looks really neat. They attempted to stay up all night playing it, but Payton told me this morning they only made it until 1:30am.

Had quite a bit of snow and ice today and there might be some more tomorrow. I wish we’d get a foot of it. I found out today that Oregon doesn’t salt their roads when they’re icy because the salt is bad for the environment. That makes me like Oregon a little more. Humans are expendable but the environment is not. This evening I drove to Corvallis to see a friend and saw quite a few wrecked cars on the way there and on the way back. One lady was way down in a ditch, looked like it was probably a creek. I love driving in weather you’re not supposed to drive in.

This morning I biked to some nearby woods to fix some problems with a geocache that the kids and I found recently. I’ve been itching to try out my new gorilla tripod for something, so I wound it around my bike frame and videotaped my trip there and back.

I just watched What Would Jesus Buy on Netflix and it’s great. Here’s the plot summary for it: An examination of the commercialization of Christmas in America while following Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir on a cross-country mission to save Christmas from the Shopocalypse (the end of humankind from consumerism, over-consumption and the fires of eternal debt.) The film also delves into issues such as the role sweatshops play in America’s mass consumerism and Big-Box Culture.

You know, I could take the message from that movie and use it in a way to make what I did on Black Friday seem like a noble cause. My childishness could have meaning!

I met Karalee’s parents this week. In fact, I met most of her family because it was a family reunion, but I’d met her parents earlier in the week when we came over to dinner. Siblings, nieces, cousins, everyone. We all hung around the house all day, played a lot of Wii, and a group of us went wine tasting at 3 different vineyards in the afternoon. I ate a lot of food that I’m not used to this week. Seems like I’ve met everyone associated with her at this point. We’ve bumped into every one of her friends at some point in the past year and I’ve met most of her coworkers and boss. Clearly it’s getting way too serious and I should dump her ASAP. SORRY, KARALEE!

One of my all-time favorite movies is Terminator 2. In 1991, I was working at Union Station Cine in St. Louis, Missouri when the movie came out. I had no idea what Terminator was and didn’t care. I wasn’t a fan of action movies and didn’t care much for Arnold. I caught bits of it while doing my ushering thing at the theater, but I didn’t really pay much attention to it.

Finally though, after it had been in the theater for a few weeks, I caught the ending chase scenes and was intrigued enough to start sneaking in as often as I could while working to catch parts of it. Eventually I saw the whole thing and I was hooked. Soon after that I rented the first Terminator movie and I liked it as well. Not as much as T2, but it was still a good movie. I ended up staying after work several times just to watch T2 in the theater again.

The reason I was working in downtown St. Louis (a 30 minute drive from my home in Illinois) was because I was hoping to move there. I was looking at apartments and other job opportunities in the area, saving money, and happily planning my new life in the big city. My parents didn’t even know I was working there for the first couple months. They thought I was going to work in Alton each day. I finally mentioned that I was when some guy from their church was surprised to see me working there and I figured it’d be best for my parents to find out from me instead of some random person at their church.

Earlier in the year, my girlfriend and I had been apartment hunting in Illinois. We’d also been talking about moving to Galveston, Texas. At some point during all of this she decided that I sucked and broke up with me, which is when I decided to move to St. Louis. The only reason I picked a city so close is that I knew my move would upset my parents and figured they could cope better if I were a mere 30 minutes away. But then I liked the scenes of Los Angeles so much in T2 that I suddenly decided I would just move there instead. And I was tired of waiting, so I put in my 2 weeks notice.

Over the next 2 weeks, I made my final preparations to move which included looking in Los Angeles newspapers for rent prices. They were insane and I knew if I drove there, not only would I blow a lot more of my saved money on gas, I would probably be homeless too. So I settled on Galveston, which I really wanted to see anyway since I’d been reading all about it earlier in the year. I left and I made it there. Thanks for the inspiration, T2!

A few years ago Terminator 3 came out. I was excited to hear about that, but then I heard they weren’t using the original John Connor, there was no Sarah Connor and James Cameron had nothing to do with it. By the time it was released, I was expecting to be disappointed and the movie didn’t let down my expectations. It had neat effects, action and a cool ending, but it just sucked overall.

Now they’re preparing to release Terminator 4, with ANOTHER new John Connor, no Arnold and no James Cameron. It seems weird to use Batman as John Connor, though I’m sure he’ll be better than that guy from Terminator 3. I actually have higher hopes for this one than 3. I know there’s a pretty good chance of just being disappointed again, but I think it could be good.

For the past year I’ve been really enjoying The Sarah Connor Chronicles on TV. It’s the only show on that I never miss. I actually watch it on TV and not hulu.com because I don’t want to wait the extra day to see it. I like all the characters in it and it’s a fun plot with them going around battling random terminators and hoping to stop Judgment Day. And they keep throwing all these random filler episodes in, like the girl Terminator losing her memory and thinking she’s a real girl with amnesia or the Terminator who’s accidentally sent to the 1920’s and becomes a real estate mongol. Silly, pointless stuff, but it’s great.

Each week, after the episode ends, I spend sometimes more than an hour reading the Sarah Connor Chronicles message board. That’s how much I like this show. Today while on the message board, I found a link to The Secret Diary of Cameron Baum. It’s hilarious stuff, especially the first couple chapters. It’s a humorous take on Cameron’s (the girl Terminator) day-to-day life. Read about her adventures in making a miniature reptar terminator for her science fair project, her failed attempts at being on top of the cheerleading pyramid, her night of big winnings in Vegas and her Terminating ants and dogs that wander onto their property. This is why I wrote this giant entry, because this diary story is cracking me up. One chapter to go…

I’ll get this out of the way first…

Last weekend I created my own geocache called the Telephone Cache which contains a bunch of telephone-related items. 5 people have found it already. One guy went out at night and found it within an hour of it being posted on geocaching.com.

Tonight I’ve been cleaning up my computer’s hard drive. Deleted probably 50 gigs of old stuff that I didn’t need anymore, most of it video. Back in the days before YouTube, I used to find funny videos through file sharing sites like Morpheus and I would store them in directories so I’d never lose them. I had gigs of the stuff, ranging from about 1998 to 2005. Lots of stuff. All gone now. I checked a few things just to make sure they really were on YouTube and, of course, they were. I love the internet.

Found quite a bit of old stuff that I’d forgotten about and did some organizing. Put up a few new videos on YouTube. So I was sort of productive tonight, even if it was only in front of the computer.

Speaking of loving the internet, I think it’s so cool that I can check my daughter’s grades in real-time on all her classes. Every assignment in every class is logged on a website that I can log into and it’s updated every few days. When there’s an ‘F’ or a missing an assignment, I can yell at her immediately instead of waiting for progress reports. It makes being a nosy parent so much more easier. If they’d had something like this when I was in Jr. High, maybe it wouldn’t have been so easy for me to fail everything.

Earlier this week I took a screen shot of my desktop for this thread. I added a bunch of weird icons and titles. I’m only stating the obvious so nobody reports me for being suicidal or for having plans to become a mass murderer.

Skipped 2600 tonight.

Not sure what the kids and I will do this weekend. Put up the Christmas tree I’m sure.

I was doing random YouTubing today and I came across an old Disney cartoon which talks about how awesome smoking is. As much as I was ripping on Disney and Goofy a few entries back, this has gotta be the funniest cartoon ever. Just for the absurdity of the message. Better than the Flintstones smoking, even. Watch it.

It was made about 15 years before Walt Disney’s chain smoking killed him.

Two Sundays ago my back started aching. Right after seeing Bolt, for no reason at all, it was just killing me. By Monday it was even worse. Walking, sitting, sleeping and pretty much everything else was painful. Bending over was nearly impossible. I’ve never had back issues before and I’ve always been really thankful for that, especially since I’ve seen my dad and brother deal with all that forever. The pain was gone by Wednesday, but I can still feel a hint of it. I’m hoping it was just a pulled muscle or something and it’s not me getting old. It’d suck to have to deal with that all the time.