Dumpster Fire!

Today’s been pretty exciting, and I’ve only been up for 90 minutes now. I woke up at 7am because my brother, who doesn’t understand the concept of time zones, sent me a text and woke me up. So I went downstairs, watched the news, had some breakfast, then opened the living room blinds to see a giant raging inferno right outside my window! Well okay, it was just a dumpster fire. I happened to be holding my phone in my hand, so I called 911 and told them about it. Five minutes later the fire department arrives. I took a few pictures, which you can see on my Flickr page. Here’s a few of the better ones.

I guess it’s a good thing that whoever dumped their smoldering garbage in the dumpster did it before it caught their kitchen on fire. That would have been even more exciting! That’s the one thing that bugs me about apartment living – knowing that a neighbor’s stupid mistake could burn my apartment down.

In other exciting news, I bought a DVR last weekend and I’ve converted almost all of my old VHS tapes to mpeg-4. I plan to return it for a refund this weekend because I’m unethical like that. (Colleen – be sure to call up Circuit City and tattle on me ASAP!) The DVR has a built in VHS player in it, so it automatically converts VHS to DVD, then I just put the DVDs in my laptop and rip them to mpeg-4. It’s a lot less hassle than dealing with software and video capturing hardware. Approximately 20 hours of home video will be added to the Xbox hard drive. Plus a few movies that I recorded to tape 10 – 15 years ago and aren’t available on DVD yet. I’m gaining a ton of shelf space by getting rid of all the VHS tapes. And I only own 3 DVDs now. I need to find out how to rip Xbox games, so I can get rid of those too. Be damned, physical media!

Cute tiny dogs

You know what I’m seeing a lot of these days? Cute girls walking around in stores carrying teeny dogs in their arms or in carriers. Like they’re all inspired by Paris Hilton to get tiny dogs and take them everywhere. I saw one in Home Depot today and one in Target a week or two ago and at the post office numerous times. Are non-service animals even allowed in places like this? Why don’t the rules apply to these girls? I want to trip them.

Worked with Payton on riding his bike today. He doesn’t know how to ride yet, but he’s inspired by the awesome bike he got for Christmas. He’s getting really good at it now. A couple more days and he’ll be on his own. But since it rains just about every day here, a couple days will probably take a few more weeks. I got quite a workout, running next to his bike for 30 minutes.

Violent Acres

Hey, MatthewT, thanks a lot for telling me about the Violent Acres blog. After reading a couple dozen posts from the RSS feed, I loved them so much that I went to the beginning of her entries (October 2006) and started reading them all. So far I’m up to April 1st, 2007 and I should be caught up by the end of this week. It’s by far my favorite new blog. To anyone who hasn’t – go read Violent Acres!

Website updates

After installing that email subscription thing this morning, I suddenly couldn’t stop updating my home page! I converted the rest of the site into WordPress since only half of it was done before. This ended up fixing a lot of broken links and pictures along the way. Then I started adding content. I reorganized my Instant Messaging page and added a bunch of new logs on it that had been sitting around my hard drive. There’s a whole section for Tannest, Tetris and a Taco Bell girl.

Then I added things to the Workshop. There’s now a tutorial on how to make a laptop car mount and some pictures of my old hidden bookshelf doors. I deleted tons of old broken pages and pictures that didn’t need to be there anymore. I converted the guestbooks into WordPress and fixed a lot of audio files.

While fixing something on my Eastgate Cinema page, I remembered this incident from about a month ago where I happened upon a Myspace Group for disgruntled Eastgate employees. Well, I’m certainly disgruntled! So I joined it. It seemed like a good way to brag about some of the Eastgate cheer I’ve spread over the past 15 years, as well as to promote my Eastgate page and a few links on phonelosers.org. Here’s the link to that thread.

As expected, a lady on there yelled at me for being immature. But she also let me in on something kind of interesting. After murd0c and I hacked Eastgate’s answering machine, Colleen called up the theater and tattled on me! I always wondered how Eastgate figured out so quickly that I was responsible for their answering machine. Now I know! “She was hoping that you would get some jail time on your little prank.”

This was all in the midst of our divorce and she was hoping I’d get busted for it to make her look better in court. Even though it didn’t work out for her, at least she still got to pull one over on me by sneaking out of town with the kids, telling them they were going to Disneyland but actually moving them to Oregon without letting them say goodbye to their dad, their friends or their family.

I wonder how often she trolls all the sites, looking for things to bust me on. Hi Colleen!

Subscribe to this site via email!

I just installed a plugin that allows people to subscribe to entries here. If you sign up using the form below, you’ll receive an email each time I post something. And what could be better than more junk email, right? I promise not to sell your address to spammers unless they offer me at LEAST $100,000.

I’m going to set this up on phonelosers.org too. Right now I’m using a 3rd party email system for PLA posts and I’m sure that even though they swear they don’t spam, they probably do or they sell subscriber’s email addresses. So this is cool and I’m stupid for not doing it sooner.

And in other news…for some reason last night, the nonstop Yahoo messages of HAPPY NEW YEARS! really annoyed the hell out of me. It started at 9pm PST from the people on the east coast. Every blog I read wished me a happy new year too. To protest the new year, I went to bed at 10:30, read for an hour, and fell asleep. Then the cat woke me because the fireworks freaked him out.

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