I tried to cause mass confusion on a Salem Facebook account today by posting something terrible, waiting for hateful replies, then deleting my post.

It didn’t evolve into a lot of confusion and finger pointing like I hoped, but it still kind of looks like the first few people are offended by the original question. I need to refine this technique.

Few weeks ago I drove to Little Caesars for pizza since I’m too cheap to pay 3x as much for delivery. I threw the two large pepperonis on the front seat and the 2 liter of Pepsi in the back seat. As I rounded the corner onto my street, I turned down the blaring MC Chris and stepped on the brake to bring me to a reasonable level of speed. This caused the Pepsi to shoot off the back seat, hitting the front seat, which was slid all the way to the front. Then it dropped and landed on the corner of the metal track that the seat slides on, puncturing the bottle.

Then the bottle rolled over, spraying Pepsi all over the seats, windows, and ceiling. Pepsi was raining from the ceiling in my car. After a few seconds of this, I held my hand over the spraying Pepsi as I pulled into the driveway until it finally stopped. When it did there was a miniature lake of Pepsi on floor. I went inside and told Payton he wouldn’t believe what just happened. He immediately ran outside to survey the damage and laugh at me. Surprisingly, barely a drop hit me or my phone or car stereo, aside from my hand being covered in it to stop it from spraying everywhere.

After dinner I spent about an hour wiping out the car and managed to get it cleaned up pretty good. In fact, I even Windexed all my windows which I’ve never done before in the 7 years that I’ve owned the car. I still find occasional drops of Pepsi in parts of the car. Too bad they don’t still make glass 2 liters. That probably would have been easier to clean.

REMEMBER GLASS PEPSI BOTTLES??? I remember the very first commercial I saw for one in the 80′s. Some person accidentally knocks a 2 liter bottle off of a counter or table. In slow motion it takes forever to fall to the floor. Just as your expecting the bottle to shatter, it bends like a plastic bottle does and bounces back up in slow motion. At the time it looked like the coolest special effect ever since nobody had ever seen a plastic 2 liter and it was completely unexpected. GOD I’M OLD!

I just searched YouTube, trying to find that commercial and didn’t have any luck. But this lady sure had better luck with 2 liters in her car than I did.

Since yesterday I’ve been cleaning up the hard drive on my laptop. When I switched to Mac, I directly copied everything over from my old drive and I probably haven’t cleaned it out in years. I’m finding lots of awesome old sound files, pictures and other things. I’m completely restructuring how my directories are organized too. I haven’t changed much in the past 10 years until today. I still have a directory called html_development that I created in 1996 that is full of really bad website clipart. Tons of animated GIFs, under construction signs, dividing lines, snippets of java, html, php and perl code that could someday be useful but never was. For some reason I’m having a hard time throwing this directory out, even though it’s completely useless.

I’m going to see MC Chris live in a few days. I haven’t liked an artist this much in a really long time. MC Lars will be there too, so it’s going to be so great. Last weekend I went on a pub crawl with Angela in Salem, then we went to Geeky Karaoke in Portland. Wait, that was 2 weeks ago. Last week we had a Lost party at my house for the final episode of Lost.

I purchased a $5/month subscription to so I can listen to music commercial-free all night on my iPhone while I’m sleeping. I’ve gotten bored with all the normal stations and have been picking things like disco and classic country and other random things. I woke up at 4am this morning, recognizing an old country song I once liked as a kid and favorited it. I’m posting this only to be laughed at.

CNN did a story on sign hacking this week and featured my signhacker.com site a lot. They even played part of a commercial I made for the site, music and all. http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/offbeat/2010/05/25/moos.no.tacos.hackers.cnn.html This motivated me to update signhacker.com with a new post.

I stopped at a light on Waverly recently and some guy in a truck next to me was waving like crazy, trying to get my attention. I finally looked over at him and he held up a GPS receiver for me to see and waved. Guess he saw one of my Geocaching stickers on my car and desperately needs a geocaching friend. Reminds me of when I had an ICP sticker on my car about 10 years ago and some guy behind me kept honking and waving like crazy. Looking in my mirror, I noticed he had a giant ICP decal on his hood. He was going nuts because I wouldn’t acknowledge him, throwing his hands up at me and stuff. I’m bad at socializing.

Oh yeah, about a month ago I was returning to my car when I was at a mall in Salem and some guys across the parking lot screamed “FREE GEEK!” at me. I have a Free Geek sticker on my car, courtesy of Evie and Joe. It was a friendly yell, but my social anxiety issues prevented me from looking up and waving. Don’t put stickers on your car, it’s nothing but trouble! I should put a sticker on there that reads “Abortion is Hilarious!” and see what kind of friends I make.

I think I got everything migrated over to the Mac this weekend. It’s awesome and I love it. So far there’s only one important program that I can’t use on the Mac, which might force me to do some Windows or Linux emulation. Either that or I should stop using my Pro CD 2004 phone directories and find an alternative to it. (Don’t make fun of me, it’s work-related!) Now I need to get some stickers to cover this thing with.

Man…last night after typing that, the mouse and keyboard on my Mac completely stopped responding. It had been doing that intermittently since I got the thing, but this time it was for good. I wasn’t happy. I ended up plugging in an old Mac keyboard/mouse this morning and it worked fine. I took the laptop apart twice, ensuring that all ribbon cables were in place, but the keyboard and mouse still didn’t work. Then I finally found a post on some Apple forums about billions of other people having this same problem and the solution was to stick some folded paper on top of a certain part of a ribbon cable underneath the battery. I did it with some black tape and the laptop is back to normal. What a bizarre defect. I’m just happy it’s working again and all these other people claim that will solve my problem forever.

So in other news…I spent a few days in Idaho last week and that was a lot of fun. Yesterday the kids and I went to OMSI and it was awesome. I haven’t been there since 1994 and my kids hadn’t been there in a few years. Tonight MC Frontalot is playing in Portland and I’d like to go, but I don’t know anyone else who likes his music and would want to go. I’ll probably just stay at home and cut myself instead.

I’ve been shopping around for a Mac lately and I finally found a good deal on Craigslist for a 15″ MacBook Pro laptop, which I picked up today. So far I’m pretty happy with it, even though everything is completely foreign to me on it. The only time I’ve ever used a Mac is when I play with the display models in stores. This mouse is going to take some getting used to – it keeps confusing me with its single button. Garage Band rules so far and will probably be the thing I love most about the Mac.

The people I bought it from didn’t seem to put much thought into clearing their data. The amount of stuff they left in here is insane. Aside from just their entire personal photo album and music collection and a few home videos, they’ve given me the password to everything they’ve ever logged into. Five different Facebook accounts, Myspace, Wal-Mart, Walgreens, an LDS dating site, Gmail, Yahoo, everything. There’s gotta be at least 100 passwords saved in their Firefox browser. They probably didn’t realize that all their passwords are viewable from within Firefox.

The first thing I did on this laptop was attempt to check my email on gmail.com, only to find out that I was already logged into this guy’s account. Hundreds of emails, available for me to peruse. I clicked on a gmail chat log between the two of them and skimmed over their lovey conversations before logging out. I later noticed that he had AIM actually running and it was still logged in. He didn’t even bother to close it. He also had some member site open in Chrome that he was logged into. Assuming there’s a way to list all the passwords saved in Chrome, I’ve probably get even more things I could log into. Not that I’m going to. No really, for realz!

I was happy to see that they left their entire music collection to me, some of which I’ll enjoy. There’s tons of church music, church sermons, 80′s music and more original motion picture soundtracks than I’ve ever seen a person own. But there’s quite a bit of good stuff in there too, which looks like it’s all non-DRM. Kind of ironic that they’re pirating church music. While in iTunes, I decided to click on the iTunes store, just to see if they were logged in to that. And they were. I could have purchased billions of dollars in music and movie rentals if I wanted to. I immediately logged them out, just to avoid the temptation.

I have access to all their online bill payment accounts and their bank. Who knows what that Wal-Mart and Walgreens stuff is, but it could be to refill prescriptions. It’s probably just photo development though.

Oh man, I’m digging deeper now and I just found 707 video files, most of them taken with a cheap digital camera. A few are pirated TV shows, but most of these are just church events and birthday parties and stuff. I bet if I kept looking, I’d find their personal nude photos and videos. Looks like there are over 4,000 JPG files in here. Most likely their entire lifetime of photos.

I’m completely blown away by the amount of havoc I could cause with all of this. This just makes no sense at all. They were nice people and didn’t seem like complete morons. Even a person who’s not technically savvy would know not to leave massive amounts of personal data sitting on a computer that you’re selling to a stranger. And this guy seemed like he was into computers. He had several sitting around the house and had a 1TB external drive and his wife was typing away on a Mac. A quick look through his Gmail shows me that he’s taking physics, chemistry and statistics at OSU. So he’s not retarded. But he’s retarded! This whole thing is nuts.

As I’m writing this I keep looking around and finding MORE stuff that I have access to. I can log into about 5 different accounts on Gmail and they use Google Voice for their voicemails that I could listen to. I bet they use Google Docs too. You people reading this know the kind of stuff I’m likely to do, just because it’d be hilarious. I could cause such a ruckus and I’m so tempted to. I really won’t though. I’m going to wipe all of this stuff out of here and just concentrate on migrating all my own stuff to my new Mac.

I’ve bought plenty of used computers from people in the past and there’s always a few things that they’ll forget about and leave behind. That’s expected. But this is just unbelievable. He didn’t even shut down AIM. The joke’s probably on me – they’re probably remotely monitoring me while I type all this since I’m a newb and wouldn’t know how to spot anything like that running. I’m expecting a phone call from them any minute now, saying, “OMG, we gave you the wrong computer!” That’s the only logical explanation for all of this stuff in here, that they gave me the wrong Mac.

Anyway, Spessa says I owe it to him to send him an email telling him how incredibly stupid he is. I hope he doesn’t get mad at me. It should be interesting to see how he responds. Here’s what I just sent to him:

Hey Chris. I’m the guy that purchased the laptop from you today. I’ve been on it for a few hours now and everything is working great.

Thanks again for the awesome deal on this Mac!
Brad

I’m way too nice and concerned. Spessa suggested some awesomely terrible things to write to him, such as, “Had I been a more malicious person, I could have impersonated you on your LDS forums and told all the members that Brigham Young was a fraud.”

I’ll append his reply to this post as soon as I get it.

EDIT: His reply the next morning:

Thanks for the email. I was stuck with a dilemma of reformatting which would kind of render the computer unusable more or less in case you had any questions about the operation, since for someone to use it would require me registering and putting in some kind of user info over again. I finally came to the conclusion I would just reformat when someone decided to get it, it sounded like you were in a hurry so I just made a decision to trust that you’d reformat it. My wife deleted the documents a few days ago however so I figured the worst that could happen was you’d read some of my boring email.

The whole thing still seems crazy to me. It was hours between the time I talked to him on the phone and the time I picked it up. It would have taken just a few seconds to highlight all their videos/pictures and tap the delete button. And not much longer to wipe out Firefox’s stored password file. His logic of trusting the random guy from Craigslist is stupid. I’m crazy! I’ve screwed with peoples identities before. I’ve hacked accounts and caused online turmoil and devastation! This guy has no idea what kind of person he just handed all his passwords to. It’s a good thing Mr. Spessa isn’t visiting me this week, because he wouldn’t let me just delete all this stuff. He would insist that we do terrible things to everyone, just for the lulz. We would probably lock them out of every account they own, just to be jerks.

Whatever, though, I’m happy I got a laptop full of expensive Mac software, including iLife and the latest version of Photoshop!