Year: 2005

Picking up the kids

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Satuday, June 18th, 2005: Picking up my kids today! My brother drove me to the airport and we hung out there for awhile eating overpriced roast beef at an airport restaurant with terrible service. My plane left around 11amish. I had a 1 hour layover in San Francisco and then ended up in Portland around 7:15pm. Had some airport Wendy’s with Colleen and the kids, then took the kids to a hotel for the night. Did some swimming at the hotel pool until 10pm, then went to sleep so we could wake up at 4am. Our flight leaves early.

A bunch of June 2005 entries

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Tuesday, June 07, 2005: Today and yesterday, I’ve written some perl scripts that automate my journaling. This new buggy script probably opens up all kinds of crazy security holes to my journal and my web host! The cool thing is that you can comment on my entries and make fun of me, etc. So try it out and hopefully it will work. I’m still working on the script and you may encounter problems.

  • Comment from theR0xy in TEXAS, silly! on Thursday, June 09, 2005: OMG BBRAAAD”S SILLY!!!!1
  • Comment from murd0c in five one six on Thursday, June 09, 2005: lame, Arbie. lamelamelamelamelame.
  • Comment from Roxy again in your moms hou$e on Friday, June 10, 2005: OMG where’s all my other posts at???!!!
  • Comment from theRoxy in Texas on Friday, June 10, 2005: that wasn’t me, stfu n00b
  • Comment from Hax0123 in Marriedville on Saturday, June 11, 2005: OMG YOU GOT HAXED!

    Friday, June 10th, 2005: In yet another attempt to make believe I have a Live Journal, I changed my journal’s color scheme to match theirs tonight. And I changed a few things on the layout to make it look a little nicer. It’s pretty bad that I have a journal and all I do anymore is talk about what kind of changes and updates I’m making to my journal.

    I expect this weekend to be boring, yet productive. No Galactic Picnics for me. I moved my office into the basement earlier this week. I’m trying to completely clear out the two upstairs bedrooms so that I can finish the renovations in preparation to sell my house, then close them off for the summer so I don’t have to cool them. I’m most likely moving to Oregon soon. Maybe this year, maybe next. Maybe never. Anyway, my weekend will probably be spent moving the rest of everything to the lower levels of the house. Here’s my new, cold, damp office:


  • Comment from D31337 in your ass on Sunday, June 12, 2005: If you move, will you keep notla?
  • Comment from Brad in Alton on Sunday, June 12, 2005: Good question. I haven’t really thought about it. Maybe I’ll just turn that site into something different. I dunno…

    Sunday, June 12th, 2005: I swear, this is the last journal entry specifically regarding the modifications on my journal. As well as my own journal scripts worked, I decided to scrap it all and go with this somewhat cool PHP program. It’s called WordPress and it can’t be too bad since I found it on Rob T. Firefly’s site. This is my first attempt at working with PHP, which is something I’ve wanted to get into for quite some time now. I got a new PHP book for Christmas last year so maybe I can finally put that to good use. I’ve also transferred my entire homepage over to phonelosers.com, if you didn’t notice. I can’t have bradcarter.com but I can at least have my own domain, dammit.

    This hasn’t been the wildly productive weekend that I was hoping for. I’ve sat in front of the computer for most of it. The last 2 days I’ve been woken up by people on Freecycle coming to pick things up. Fucking early birds.

  • Comment from primrozie (Lynn): Lol, we really enjoyed reading about your babysitting exploits. Poor guy, corrupted by a 9 year old ??! Stranger things have happened ~ I’m sure. Thanks for stopping by. Oh ~ this is like our 3rd litter from Pinkie. Twice now we had a vet appointment made and she got pregnant again. Such a little tramp. This time she won’t get away with it.
  • Comment from roxy: maybe you should stop freecycling. Then you won’t have people wake you up in the morning like that. Being nice is cool, but the reward is that you get woken up?! wtf is up with that?! (you know I’m not being totally serious, right?)

    Monday, June 13th, 2005: Went to McDonald’s for breakfast, the post office and then to work. Stopped by my parents at 1pm to let Sandy out. Hung out there for a little over an hour, working from their deck. Went to Target this evening to pick up some plastic boxes for packing.

    Tuesday, June 14th, 2005: I was driving around today, saw this sign in East Alton and took a picture of it. Strikes me as kind of funny, a proof reading business who apparently hired Jed Clampett to design their sign. I posted the picture on notla.com.

    There was another picture I tried to get while driving through this one neighborhood of a really old man wearing nothing but some crazy tie-dye rainbow shorts while mowing his lawn but it came out horrible since I didn’t stop the car to take it. It would have been a great picture too.

    I tried to drive into the neighborhood where all the mansions are but was turned away at the guard house. This is the first time I’ve ever actually seen a guard in there. Then I went to Steak N Shake to get a milkshake before I went home. I’ve been addicted to their shakes for about a week now, stopping in there every day for a shake.

    The weird part is that today as I was walking from the car into the building, I thought to myself, “Maybe I’ll see my old pastor in here today, from the church I grew up in. Just a weird, random thought. I sat down at the counter and IMed Linear on my phone as I waited for my order to be taken. Someone says to me, “Hey, I know you.” I look up and there’s Pastor Daughterty, who I haven’t seen in several years now. I’m so psychic. I caught up with him and his wife for a minute or two and then went home.

  • Comment from primrozie (Lynn): Oh my

    • Galactic Picnic

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    Sunday, June 5th, 2005: All morning I’ve been struggling with this huge dilemma. Which is, should I travel 2 hours to Carbondale, Illinois to meet this man for a Galactic Picnic?? I’ve called everyone I know, and nobody can go with me. I have to do it alone. I think I’m going. But maybe not. If I do, I need to leave within 30 minutes. I wish I had a backup plan of something else to in Carbondale.

    Later that evening… Okay, so I went to it. About a month ago, this guy orders some Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy buttons from me on Ebay. They were basic HHGTTG book/movie-related buttons. Along with his payment for the buttons, he sent me a flyer for a “Galactic Picnic” along with a full page hand written letter telling me about himself, the picnic and other random things. I’m surprised to see that this Galactic Picnic is located in Carbondale, Illinois which is just a couple hours south of me. Just to be a hoopy frood, I whipped up a design for the Carbondale picnic (pictured to the left), pressed about 20 buttons and included those with his order, free of charge. I also gave him an extra 20 or so HHGTTG buttons that he ordered. I figured it was for a nice, nonprofit cause so why not.

    I finally decided to go this morning, so I left around 11:45am and I arrived in Carbondale at 1:15pm. I stopped by Hucks and bought a 12 pack of Pepsi, some Tostitos and salsa to contribute to the picnic. It was supposed to be a potluck thing but I don’t know how to cook anything. I got there and it was the organizer and then 3 other people. Two of the people were there specifically for the HHGTTG thing and the other man had just wandered by and sat down with them all. As I expected before I even came, no females were in attendence. The 2 who were there for the meeting were father and son and I would guess their ages to be 40ish and 60ish. You know Harvey’s nerd friend in the movie American Splendor? The 40ish man looked just like him and seemed to have similar social skills. He even dressed like him and had the same glasses. He was nice, though, and we talked for the first 10 or 15 minutes that I was there. Then his dad said they needed to get going to catch their bus on time. He still lived with his dad.

    The other guy left soon after that and it was just me and the organizer for the next couple hours. I’m not a hard-core fan of the Hitchhikers books but I have read them all many times and I’ve seen the movie a couple of times. He was playing the original Hitchhiker radio broadcasts on a boom box in the picnic area. The tables where the food was were covered with various towels. (Towels are so useful!) I forgot to bring a towel with me and I almost stopped at a Wal-Mart on the way up to buy one. But nobody said anything about me not having a towel so I guess they assumed it was in my backpack. Anyway, me and the organizer discussed the movie, the books, the Hitchhiker’s pubcrawling game and various other things.

    He said he does this picnic thing every month during the Spring and Summer months. He spends over $100/year to rent the picnic area in the park and he spends money and lots of time to try and promote it through all kinds of media and by hanging up flyers around town. He said that last month about 18 people showed up because he handed out a bunch of flyers at the movie theater when the Hitchhiker’s movie came out. He says people tell him it’s such a waste of time and money to bother with it but he loves doing it because he gets to meet interesting people every month and he loves cooking things for picnics and his passion is the Hitchhiker’s story. Which I thought was kind of cool, just doing something weird like that because you love doing it. Especially in a small town like Carbondale where I’m sure interest in HHGTTG has to be fairly limited. This guy was in his 50’s and he’d been doing the picnic thing since 1999. He had a really cool way of inserting random HHGTTG philosophy and quotations into normal conversation.

    Terribly blurry and candid camera phone picture.Every time a random person would walk by, he would invite them to our picnic but nobody accepted the offer while I was there. He had several backpacks full of books and papers with him and he would occasionally dig through one of them to show me things. I noticed that most of his printouts were done on a dot matrix printer. He showed me a Douglas Adams eulogy and I started reading it. Then he grabbed it from me before I got very far and said he’d read it for me. So he gets up and puts on a BATHROBE, stands in front of me and reads the entire thing with all kinds of enthusiasm and hand gestures and stuff.

    So that’s about it. At 4:15 I decided to get going. And as I was leaving a guy showed up on a motorcycle and announced that he did bring a towel with him. He looked like your average Harley guy but he was there for the picnic. We shook hands all around and I left. It was all quite bizzare, but definitely worth the drive. I’m sure I’ll come back someday, dragging along some unwilling friends with me.

    Mowed the lawn

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    Saturday, June 4th, 2005: Mowed the lawn, then went to the farm to feed the animals. I think today might be my last day of being a pseudo farmer. Or maybe it’s tomorrow, I can’t remember. I rearranged the letters on their fridge today to spell:


    The 2nd one is just left over letters – there was nothing good to spell out of them. Visited my parents for awhile, then went back home to finish mowing the lawn. I hate mowing the lawn. It takes over an hour to finish it and it was in the 90’s today. I wish my kids would hurry and grow up so I could dump the lawn mowing duties on them. This evening my brother and I went to Dave & Busters to play video games. Got home around midnight.

    2600 & Hacking The Internet

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    Friday, June 3rd, 2005: Left work early to do the farm thing and then went to 2600, probably smelling like chicken poop. We managed to 0wn 2 different people at the meeting. The first was some guy that called Rivalz just to talk to people at the 2600 meeting since he’d never been to the meeting. Rivalz gave us the phone and a few people talked to him. Then we looked on the caller ID, got his number and somebody at the meeting talked his cell provider out of his full name, address and email address. We called him back and messed with him for awhile. He was pretty confused about us ending up with all his info.

    Then we hacked the internet! Apparently, these guys set up a line to call “the internet” and they just screw with whoever calls them. After listening to them yell at us for several minutes, we figured out that their number belonged to a university in Washington DC. By simply asking the lady who answered the college’s switchboard, we got the name of the building on campus and the room number that the phone is physically located at. Unfortunately they stopped answering their phone so that we couldn’t let them know we knew who they were.

    Steal This Book

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    Thursday, June 2nd, 2005: It really sucks that my kids don’t get to Illinois until the 19th. School lasts way too long in Oregon. I guess it starts later too, though, so it all works out. Today my brother picked me up and we went to Edwardsville to help somebody with something (how vague), then to the farm to feed everything, then to some pizza place in Troy to eat. Yesterday I had lunch with Tami, got a new tire for her car and hung out at the library for awhile. I got the Douglas Adams biography. On her card, since my card has some insane late fees on it. Oh yeah, funny story – the library shows that I checked out Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman in 1992 and never returned it. Isn’t that…ironic? I sure don’t remember keeping that book, though. I would still have it if I did. Maybe it’s at my parents house, hidden in the basement somewhere.

    Christy

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    Once, a long long time ago, in 1986, when I was 14, I got this job babysitting during the summer. For just a few dollars a day, I kept an eye on a 9-year-old girl named Christy. She was a bad influence on me. First of all, she was a chronic shoplifter. We went on walks all over town and every store we stopped in, she would walk out with all kinds of stuff and share it with me. At the time, I’d never even considered the possibility of shoplifting. It was just something you don’t do. But by the end of the summer, she’d turned me into quite the shoplifting addict. Yep, I learned how to shoplift from a little girl that I was getting paid to hang around with.

    One time, we were walking down an alley and a big chained-up dog jumps out at us and starts barking. So Christy takes out a can of red hairspray (that she’d just shoplifted) and sprays the dog in the face with it which shuts him up. The owner runs out of his house and yells, “Hey!” Me and Christy run away in different directions, losing each other. Probably 10 minutes later, I finally find her a couple blocks away. She says that she was so scared that she’d been crying, looking for me and thinking that guy would find her. It was hilarious.

    She also got me hooked on the soap opera The Young & The Restless. I don’t know why a 9-year-old would be watching that show, but we watched it all the time together. And after she left that summer, I kept watching it for about another 2 years. Hmm, what else. We made prank phone calls together with my TRS-80’s text-to-speech program. She shot me in the chest with a BB pistol which left a bruise on me for a week. Luckily we didn’t have any real guns in the house. There’s so much more to the Christy saga that I guess I just can’t remember after nearly 20 years. But after that summer I never saw her again. She was with me in spirit, though, each time I shoplifted for the next decade. And the moral of the story is, if you have kids don’t let me babysit for you.

    Farm, the other Brad, and Legend813

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    Today someone from the Tampa area was calling me and I correctly assumed that it was Legend813. He was calling from a mall kiosk phone that was selling VoIP long distance service. We talked for 10 or 15 minutes. The lady there started getting annoyed and told them there was a 3 minute time limit on that phone. He kind of gave her a hard time and she said something like, “We usually have this problem with kids but not with grown men like you.” So I say, “Let me talk to that lady.”

    In the most authoritative and scary voice I could muster, I gave this lady a piece of my mind. I told her I was with the district attorney and I was a VERY important man and it was not a good idea to mess with me and blah blah blah. I did a good job at rambling on about how important I was! Eventually she hung up on me.

    I immediately called back and said, “Oohhh, you’ve really made me mad now, lady! Do you want some trouble there??” She hung up again. I called back again and was hung up on again. I don’t think the number was even supposed to be taking calls since it was some kind of display phone. Apparently I made her mad enough to call the mall cops on Legend813 so he had to get out of there rather quickly to avoid getting into any trouble. But not before he snapped a picture of her.


    After work, went by the farm again and fed everything and took pictures. Chickens don’t appear to like having their pictures taken. It seems to freak them the hell out. I forget the puppies names except one of them is Dot. The rat’s name is Noskes. I forget the cat’s name but it doesn’t seem to care. And as you can see in the last picture, I made peace with Sasha, the dog that was ready to kill me when I arrived yesterday. And no, Amy, there were no eggs to be found in the chicken house.

    Earlier today this old couple that live across the street from me called me from their cell phone. They told me they were at some cafe in Edwardsville and in the parking lot was a truck that had a sign on the side of it that read www.bradcarter.com. Better yet, the license plate included the name ALEX on it, which is my middle name. I say, “I know that guy, he has my domain!” For years, I’ve waited and hoped that the guy with bradcarter.com would let his domain name go because I want it for my homepage. I don’t think it’ll ever happen. While on the phone, I checked the contact info on the domain and it looks like Brad Carter lives in Mt. Zion, Illinois which is sort of closeby. My neighbor said this Brad Carter was sitting in the cafe typing on his laptop and he was going to go talk to him. I told my neighbor to tell Brad I want my domain! I still haven’t heard how that conversation went. Maybe my neighbor roughed Brad up and got the domain name for me.

    HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CHRIS TOMKINSON! Outlook told me so – apparently it’s Colleen’s dad’s birthday too. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EX-FATHER-IN-LAW!

    The Farm & IM logs

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    Monday, May 30th, 2005: Today I began house sitting for some friends who are out of town. It’s a small farm house in Troy where I get to take care of dogs, a cat, a rat, chickens and plants. I have full written permission, in the form of Yahoo chat logs, to have wild parties there and to go through all their personal belongings, take pictures and post them in my journal. So that was the highlight of my Memorial Day – driving to Troy and feeding a bunch of animals. Their dog freaked out when I got there and kept bearing her teeth at me and barking while she ran circles around me. Luckily she was too wimpy to actually attack me. Once I fed the dogs, I was allowed to pet her. I think it took me about 30 minutes to finish everything. The chickens had large talons.

    Amy: what are you doing today
    Brad: just got back from doin’ my chores
    Brad: at the farm
    Amy: ahhh the chickens
    Brad: yep
    Amy: did they have eggs
    Brad: not that i noticed
    Brad: i just fed them and got outta there
    Amy: you should check tomorrow
    Amy: you can make eggs for breakfast
    Brad: eww
    Amy: you dont like eggs?
    Brad: not from chickens!
    Brad: i only like the ones from the grocery stores
    Amy: lol your tarded

    Brad: i think you’re just so socially active that you’re going to get a bunch of the bad stuff along with all the good stuff.
    Brad: I sit in my room all day so I rarely get either.
    Jammie: yeh, i guess it comes with having a lot of friends
    Brad: I came up with this neat theory once. For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. Seems pretty true in most cases.
    Brad: I ought to publish that.
    Jammie: well explain it a little more
    Jammie: your theory
    Brad: you know i’m kidding about that, right?
    Brad: the theory, i mean
    Jammie: no sorry im slow today
    Brad: hehe
    Brad: it’s okay. i think that’s Newton’s theory of relativity, isn’t it?
    Jammie: I THOUGHT THAT SOUNDED FAMILIAR
    Brad: haha
    Brad: i fooled you
    Brad: you thought i was really smart for a second!

    Computer crash

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    I have spent much of my weekend getting my office computer back in working order. I lost no data in the crash, but it sure was a pain to get it moving again. The restore CD that came with the computer refused to work properly. It pretended to, but 45 minutes later it still didn’t work. I tried several hard drives. Finally I resorted to my pirated copy of Windows XP. Which means no service pack 2 updates. Goddammit. The good thing is that I now have approximately 450 gigs of storage on my computer between the 4 hard drives. It’ll be a little while before I run out of space again.

    Tonight I went to a bar-b-que with Tami & Bryan. Which is good since my original plan was to stare at the computer screen all day. I came home to a massive thunderstorm and rain pouring into my windows. Well okay, I’m exaggerating – the windowsills were damp. I decided to take a walk in it all, stripping myself of all electronic gadgets I happened to be carrying at the time and having only a flannel shirt to keep me warm. It was windy, thundering, cold and lightning all over the place. Got home 30 or 40 minutes later. That was fun. Sort of.

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