What’s in Your Fridge?

That’s a response video to one of r0xy’s video. I grabbed a bunch of random objects and stuck them in my fridge, just to confuse viewers. Judging by the comments so far, it worked.

A few days ago I created a weird sign and put it up on the bulletin board at McDonalds. Click here to view a post about it so I don’t have to explain it all in this post. Lisa and I were at that McDonald’s today and noticed that 3 or 4 of the tabs were torn off of it now. Some old man has called me twice about it, wanting to buy the snow plow. I didn’t think people would actually call about it when I made the sign.

A few weeks ago Jessica convinced me to watch a show called How I Met Your Mother. I hate admitting that I like a sitcom, especially when it’s got a cheesy laugh track on it and a lame title like that, but I love this show more than anything. It’s so bizarre and messed up and fun. It frequently has old cast members from the old TV show Freaks and Geeks. (Three that I’ve noticed now, one is a main character.) I’m up to season 3 now, about 4 episodes into it. Barney, played by Neil Patrick Harris, is the coolest character ever. If you’ve never seen it, give it a try. I downloaded the entire show from bittorrent, but it’s on Netflix if you want to wait for the discs in the mail.

The PLA Book is coming along great. I’m waiting on my sixth proof of it now. Jammie is doing an awesome job of copy editing for me and Rob T Firefly did a foreword for it and I’m waiting on some illustrations from him. I’m shooting for it to be all finished up by November 1st or so. I’ll be glad when this project is over so I can work on other things. Seems like all I ever do anymore is work on this book.

Camera phone dump 2009

Today I plugged my phone into my laptop to sync some music and decided to delete/move some of the pictures while it was hooked up. Here’s a few of my favorite grainy pictures. This first one is a smoke shop in Corvallis that I was walking by earlier this month.

Here’s my downstairs bathroom light fixture containing red green and blue lights. Only the blue light is more like a black light, so that throws the whole idea of turning RBG into white light out the window. But it still makes cool effects when you’re peeing.

The kids and I were driving in Corvallis and noticed identical shoes coming out of both windows. Look closely and you’ll see there’s feet out the other back window too, but his shoes don’t match. I don’t think the driver had his feet up, but it’s hard to see him.

Here’s a personalized plate we found at Albertsons. I’m wondering if the wife got it for him during a bitter divorce.

This one I took this one a couple days ago in Salem. I asked the guy getting in if I could snap a picture and he said sure and got out of the way for me. He was, as you’d expect, pretty weird.


I didn’t do much this weekend. The kids weren’t around, so I went to Salem to do some shopping and returning. Yesterday I vacuumed the house. Man, that was exciting. I had to dump the vacuum bin 5 times! On Saturday I got up at 5am to do a phone mob, which I turned into a PLA Radio yesterday. I only lasted 90 minutes into it, then went back to bed for a couple more hours. I watched Step Brothers which I didn’t expect much from but ended up LOLing at a lot. I also watched an old 70’s movie called Paper Moon which was really good. Oh yeah, Payton was here for a few hours on Saturday morning and we watched Stephen King’s Christine together. I hadn’t seen it in at least 10 years and it was fun to watch again. Payton liked it too. Geez, I watch too many movies.

A guy from an online “radio” station called Party 934 contacted me a few weeks ago about doing a weekly show on their station. He said I can do pretty much anything I want so I said sure and I’m doing an hour per week. They’re licensed to play actual music and insist that I play at least 4 songs per hour. He says it’s a terrestrial station too and goes out on 102.5 FM in the Hudson Valley in New York. I’m feeling a little skeptical on that part, though, since I can’t find any records on that and last week when I did the show I couldn’t get anyone to call in. It is the middle of the night there, though. From 2am to 3am.

I’m calling it The Phone Show since I’m sure whatever I do with the show will somehow involve phones. I set up a couple computers so that I can take calls on the air with it too, which seems to be working fairly well. (Thanks, Darin Abernathy, for helping me test!) And they gave me a really neat program made for broadcasting online stations. I guess tonight will be the first official show, since I’ve actually announced it on here and on phonelosers.org now. I haven’t prepared a bit for it and I have no idea what I’m going to do on it. It can be listened to on party934.com Monday nights from 11pm PST to midnight. Which is 2am to 3am Tuesday mornings EST. What a horrible time to do a show! The official page for it is www.phonelosers.org/phoneshow but there’s nothing on there yet.

The Dark Knight was stupid

Last week, I decided to finally watch The Dark Knight. I saw Batman Begins in the theater a few years ago and thought it was okay. And all I’ve heard this year is how The Dark Knight is a masterpiece and Heath is brilliant as the Joker and blah blah blah. I actually left my laptop upstairs so I’d have no distractions while watching this amazing film. And it sucked. It was two hours of complete boredom. I kept wanting to turn it off. I can’t believe people went so nuts about that movie. What a piece of garbage. I’m so glad I didn’t waste my money to see it in the theater.

I ran 3 miles straight again tonight. Maybe I’ll be able to do that daily now.

The whole Richard Cardo/Jonbenet Ramsey murder thing got incredibly hilarious again today. I decided to write to Patty, some girl who Richard decided lured Jonbenet out of her room as I cowered under Jonbenet’s bed before going downstairs to write the ransom note. We wrote at least a dozen emails to each other, both finding the whole thing equally hilarious and bizarre. We swapped a lot of good info with each other and it turns out we know several of the same people since we’ve run in similar social circles in the past.

Richard finished his video investigation on the Jonbenet Ramsey murder a day or two ago. It’s taken him years to complete (at least 4 years of his life that I know of) and he’s really poured a lot of time and energy into the project to bring The Truth to the masses. And then today, YouTube yanks down about 10 of his videos because Patty complained about them. And then YouTube yanks down 1 more because I made a copyright claim about the photographs of me that he was using. He has to be so pissed now! All those years of work and we get a giant chunk of it taken off the internet. And there’s still more to go – he’s still using plenty of my material in his videos that I can make legitimate complaints against. And it’s not that I even care that the videos exist, because I know that no sane person will ever believe them. Just the idea of upsetting Richard Cardo makes me giggle.

Also, I made a parody video of Richard Cardo last week, using video of him but dubbing over his voice to make him confess to the murder and say a bunch of other nonsense. He saw this and got really upset and wrote me a giant angry email about it. Then he submitted a copyright claim against the video for using his video without his permission and YouTube took my video down. I figured that would happen. So today I wrote him an email on YouTube and said something like, “How’s it feel to have YOUR videos removed from YouTube? Haha, I bet you’re really mad, aren’t you?” It’s fun having someone so deserving to be messed with.

Weekend and HOPE

On Saturday I went on a 2.5 hour hike, then drove to Portland for a few hours. Saturday I took my longest jog ever – about 4.5 miles. Normally I only do about 2. Sunday I hung out with Sheila all day, hiking, geocaching, dinner and a movie. For the first time in my life, I paid more than $40 to fill up my gas tank. It’s now at least $4.00 everywhere. It’s about $20 just to drive to Portland, which is the same price to take an Amtrak there.

As much as I hate that Rick Astley song, I finished up a pretty decent parody of it this weekend, complete with a video. It’s going to be the introduction song for the PLA Panel at HOPE this year. I’m going to wait until HOPE starts to post it on YouTube.

I bought rollerblades yesterday so I can skate with Emily. We skated around on the street for awhile last night. It kills my ankles. We’ll probably end up going all the way to the park on them this weekend.

Sacrificial Toasters

Today I tricked some people into taking their toasters apart. I never thought I would open up a journal entry with that sentence, but it’s true. Ever since we made the video in 2003 that showed us hijacking fast food drive-thru frequencies, people have been asking us how we did it. So after 4 years of being asked, I finally made a video that explains how we did it. The only thing is, I lied. The video tells people they need to take apart their toaster and pull out a crystal from the circuit board. And toasters don’t have crystals in them.

I submitted the video to a few blogs that I subscribe to and two of the picked it up – Gizmodo and Consumerist. These are pretty major sites and they managed to bring in more than 8,000 hits to the video. 82 people have favored the video, putting it at #19 on Youtube’s Most Viewed today and #15 on YouTube’s Top Favorites.

The comments on each of those pages are pretty funny. It took 6 hours on both sites for anyone to finally call B.S. on the video. One guy claims he took apart toasters and curling irons, looking for the crystal. And a guy chatting with me earlier today send me a link to an Ebay auction for a CB Radio, asking if that one would work with the mod. So not only are people going to take apart their toasters, but they’re also going to be buying CB radios. I am the biggest jerk ever! I’ve been giggling uncontrollably all day over all this. I can’t wait for the angry emails to start pouring in.

I’m a suspect in a murder!

Don’t you hate when you wake up and the first thing you read on your computer is that you’re a suspect in the murder of Jonbenet Ramsey? Man, I sure do. Check out all this video evidence against me. This guy has really put a lot of effort into proving that I’m the ransom note writer. And it’s not a joke either! The guy totally believes it and he claims to have taken his evidence about me to the authorities. He puts all this effort into comparing my handwriting with the ransom note. Even though some of the writing he’s comparing by other people who’ve sent stuff to me. (PLA fan art, contest entries, pictures, etc.)

He’s sure that Cuervocon 1997 didn’t happen that and instead we all had a PLA party in Denver, Colorado, which led to the murder of Jonbenet. I haven’t laughed this hard in a really long time. I needed this. Thanks, Richard! I wrote a bit about the whole thing on phonelosers.org which links to the most interesting stuff. I can’t wait to see his next video. Maybe he’ll even address my mocking entries about him!

My morning has been completely wasted on this. Listening to all the videos and writing about it on PLA. You’ve thrown my whole day off, Richard Cardo! At least I woke up early today.

Evening update: Here’s a couple forums that are talking about the videos…

320Sycamore.com Forums Here’s a discussion about the video series. This is the one that showed up in my logs this morning, which alerted me to all of this.

WebbSleuths forums Our old friend Jameson apparently is having a discussion with herself about this video series.

Thankfully, neither of them are saying, “OMG, this guy is right!”

This guy has spent, at the very least, months on all this. Combing my sites for clues, finding all those handwriting samples and pictures, cutting and pasting all the handwriting stuff together for the video presentation. Some of those screen captures were from about 2000 and then other parts of his evidence were from at late as 2005. This guy has been dedicating time and energy to me for EIGHT YEARS. That is completely insane. What a complete waste of his life. I think the guy desperately needs a girlfriend or a hobby or SOMETHING. Sheesh.

By the way, I just installed the logging system on WordPress that allows me to find this kind of stuff last night. It’s been over a year since I’ve bothered to check logs on my homepage. I set it up right before I went to sleep last night. So this is what I found after just 8 hours of it running. Imagine what kind of crazy shit I’m going to find after it’s running for a WEEK.

Things I’ve Found on Cassettes

Been importing tapes into the computer all week and I’m almost done with the non-prank call stuff. Most of it was music, pretty much all stuff I’d recorded in the 80’s and early 90’s. But there was plenty of non-music, non-prank call stuff. Such as…


  • Calling Dino Allsman and impersonating the IRS to find out where he works. Then on the next part of the tape we were pranking him and he was yelling at us. The quality probably the worse I’ve ever done. In some parts it blanks out completely. I’d forgotten I’d done the IRS call, but I guess that’s how I found out where he worked.
  • Bit of audio from the TV shows Soap and then I Love Lucy. Not sure why I had these, but I might of had something to do with me recording and archiving TV commercials all the time. Wonder what happened to all my TV commercial tapes. I bet there’s still plenty of old audio tapes at my parents house that used to belong to me. Oh yeah, the theme song from the Ewoks Saturday morning cartoon was in there too.
  • Red box tones. My original red boxing tape that was made from recording the tones from a pay phone. So much toll fraud was committed with that tape.
  • All the radio station IDs in between songs from radio stations in a lot of the cities I’d lived in. Those were interesting to hear. I recorded a lot of them while driving in my car – I’d cut out a giant chunk of my dashboard in the early 90’s and installed a dual-cassette deck stereo into it. The kind of stereo that belongs in a house. It worked great too. Any time I liked a song I heard while I was driving, I just hit the record button. Also entertaining were the DJs introducing some of the horrible music from the 80’s and 90’s.
  • Internet parody songs – at some point in the late 90’s I decided that it’d be a good idea to transfer a bunch of the internet parody songs that I’d collected onto cassette tape. Because, you know, the internet is just a fad and cassette tape is forever! I guess the reason was because I was running out of hard drive space and didn’t have a CD burner at the time.
  • Me and Sara (girl next door) playing Double Dribble on my NES and talking about things like Geraldo’s nose getting broken on TV, messing with people on the CB radio, prank calling the dean of boys, “did you record Freddy’s Nightmares on TV?”, putting Ozzy Osbourne’s picture on a dart board, Randee of the Redwoods for president.
  • Talking to El Jefe on the phone, prank calling Mr. Hack and lots of other random places. I entered in a lot of stolen credit card numbers throughout it all to make the calls. Guess I should throw that tape away instead of giving it to Goodwill.
  • Me prank calling some car lot in Albany. I yelled at some guy named Bernie and I have no idea who he is or why I was pranking him. Yeah, I know I said this is the non-prank call stuff and it is! Sort of. None of it was labeled as being prank calls. Most of the tapes weren’t labeled at all.
  • My brother practicing his saxophone.
  • Me listening to “I Just Called To Say I Love You” and playing along with it on my electric piano.
  • Quite a few long stretches of silence, but in the background you’d occasionally hear people in my family talking or things crashing around.
  • Me and Tracy (some girl from work at Eastgate Cinema) copying Def Leppard tapes using high speed dubbing. Geez, remember high speed dubbing??
  • House music from Eastgate Cinema. All the hits from artists like Lionel Richie, etc. For some reason I stole their muzak tape.
  • Me prank calling What’s Your Bid in the 80’s and then a bunch of other radio shows. The What’s Your Bid stuff is pretty rapid – we probably got about 15 calls in there. On some other radio show I asked the host “What if C.A.T. really spelled dog?” On another I said I was a telephone-to-telephone salesman and tried to offer him something for free before he hung up on me and called me strange.
  • A lot of stuff between me and this girl I used to babysit in 1986 named Christy. A lot of us is drowned out by loud music (we were dancing to Power of Love and the Neutron Dance), but in one part we’re using my TRS-80 and its speech card to input data to make prank calls to Dominos Pizza. I’d written a program that said all the important pizza-ordering phrases once you put in your name, address and phone number.
  • Me and Sara (girl next door again) walking all over our block, talking about our parents and the neighbors, telling jokes and singing songs loudly. A few times we saw cop cars and yelled “COPS!” and ran. We used to get chased by them all the time, just for running.

There was plenty of random weird stuff too. Like some live play that was recorded. A few tapes of church music and concerts. I’m sure some of my parents old stuff got mixed in there with mine. There was a tape of 1920’s-sounding music which wasn’t mine but I liked it so I converted it. Now all I’ve got left to do is my prank call tapes. There’s about 20 of them. Instead of giving them to Goodwill, I think I’m going to start up a new PLA contest for somebody to win all my prank tapes and CDs. Assuming that somebody will actually want a bunch of prank call audio tapes.

RIP, Cassettes! Hopefully the Goodwill will find you a nice, new home…

The Twisted Pickle

Last night I didn’t have much to do so I started searching around for some new podcasts to listen to and I happened upon a show called The Twisted Pickle. Now, I’ve been a podcast addict pretty much since the beginning of January and I’ve found a lot of really good and entertaining shows. And I don’t know exactly what it is about this show that I like so much, but I’m completely hooked on it. I listened to 3 episodes last night before going to bed. Then this morning I woke up and immediately started listening to more of them. I just added the show lengths together and I’m on my 8th hour of listening to this show and I’m not even close to being tired of it. It’s just really really good stuff.

It’s done by a guy named Corby in Nebraska and I can’t say there’s really anything particularly special about the show. He doesn’t do skits or pranks or play lots of music. He just talks about his average, ordinary life and it’s so…enlightening. Inspiring, maybe? I guess it’s just his delivery or something. He’s a good story teller and can make the most boring and mundane things interesting.

There is one very interesting twist to his show – his wife has no idea that he does a show. He’s been doing this podcast for over a year now and is up to 72 episodes. He’s got a domain name for it, a Frappr map, a Myspace and hundreds of listeners. He even went to the podcast expo. And his wife has no clue at all. Apparently his addiction to Everquest several years ago almost ended their marriage and he was afraid, when he first started the podcast, that she would disapprove of him getting involved with a new computer hobby. Which I suppose I can completely understand. He says he’s been trying to tell her for awhile now, but he just can’t do it.

So he continues to do this amazing show whenever she’s away. He’ll even record bits while she’s outside or in the shower or whatever. Even his 2-year-old daughter participates in the shows. It just seems insane, keeping something like this from your wife for over a year. It’s like he’s a celebrity and his wife has no idea. I sent him an email earlier today, telling him how great he was, and I suggested several ways to confess to her. My suggestions included sitting her down at the computer and doing a show with her where he confessed everything. Or writing the city newspaper with the story. Or going on Springer.

So I’ve rambled on for 4 paragraphs now about how great of a show it is. So it must be good, right? Go listen to it. His website is www.thetwistedpickle.com. If you’ve never listened to a podcast before, this is a great one to get started on.

About me…I have no kids this weekend. I won’t see them until Tuesday and this means that I’m incredibly bored. Although listening to The Twisted Pickle sure has entertained me a lot today. I biked to downtown today for lunch and then wandered around town, looking at various antique shops. I noticed a new store (I think it’s new) called Every Witch Way. They have tarot card readings there and all kinds of crazy witchy things. So Jammie, I finally found a place to get our fortunes read! Since every attempt we’ve made at that in New York has failed somehow.

Oh yeah, that sandwich place rules. It’s $1.00 cheaper than Subway (for what I normally get) and they have better seating and newspapers to read. So I’ve gone there almost every day this week, lounging around and reading the paper. Oh yeah, and they have Fritos! Neither of the Subways in Albany has Fritos. How the fuck can you eat lunch without any Fritos?? So this place is great just for their Fritos.

Stopped by the mall today and ended up buying a Flash MX book. I kind of thought learning Flash would be relatively easy, being all graphical and point and clicky. But it’s really not. So I bought a book, mostly for reference. Before buying the book I wrote down the name and author and went next door to Radio Shack used their speedy 56k internet connection to check Amazon to make sure it was a recommended book. I think that’s about the 3rd time I’ve visited this Radio Shack just to quickly use their internet connection and then leave. I could have saved about $5.00 by buying it on Amazon, but I’m a sucker for instant gratification.

Also went in Target to buy a few groceries. And to look for some Pez to stealthily put back into Emily’s room since I stole a couple packs from her. I couldn’t help it, they were there and looked delicious. In fact, it’s Emily’s fault because she left some clothes in the living room which I had to return to her room. I wouldn’t have seen the Pez if it hadn’t been for that. Target didn’t have any Pez, though. Maybe I’ll try Fred Meyer tomorrow.

Also this morning I worked on some promos for PLA Radio. They’re here:

PLA Radio Promos

With the Woodrow promo, I originally tried to call Orvil from Episode #6 but he wouldn’t play along. His wife is now screening his calls very well. I finally did get him on the phone but he hung up very quickly when he didn’t understand what I was talking about. In Episode #6, he told his wife that he thought I was with some “French radio outfit” or something like that. Maybe Orvil had an altercation with the French radio outfit after I called him for episode #6.

I also tried Mildred Monday and she was equally uncooperative. But I did speak with Mildred and I was happy to hear that she was still alive! I don’t think I’d spoken with Mildred since the 1990’s. We’d always reach her son or get a busy signal or it would just ring forever. I was sure she was dead. My original contact with her was in 1993 so it seems like she’d have plenty of time to die between then and now. She sounded just as healthy and snappy as I remember her.

Tomorrow I expect to be uneventful too. I was thinking of going to the movies all day. One theater has four movies in it that I would sort of consider seeing. The Benchwarmers, Mission Impossible 3, Scary Movie 4 and RV. None of them are worth the $7.00 alone, but if I were to sneak into all of them throughout the day I’m only paying $1.75 per movie so that’s a pretty good deal. It’s also supposed to be a little cold and rainy tomorrow so I could wear my coat and sneak in plenty of food and drinks for the day. On the other hand, I could live without ever seeing any of those movies. They all look pretty horrible.

It’s been a really crappy year for movies so far this year. Nothing really great has come out at all. Even the kids movies, which I normally enjoy, have sucked. I don’t even know what’s scheduled for this summer. Superman might be good. But I’m doubting it.

Here’s an FYI…you’re all gonna die…

Payton woke me up at 6:50AM today. Dammit. Why? “Dad, can I play San Andreas?” OF COURSE YOU CAN, LEAVE ME ALONE UNTIL AT LEAST 8:00! I made that very clear tonight at bedtime. I’ve been tired all day, even though I fell asleep at one point this morning and had a nap. Today was no school. Payton played PS2 for 3 or so hours straight while Emily slept all morning. Ran some errands, visited the post office, paid the rent, went to the park, had a picnic, played frisbee, went to volleyball practice, Target for groceries…and that’s it.

Not much happening with life lately. That’s why I don’t update the journal too often anymore. The biggest news is that the nearly 6 months of nonstop rain has finally stopped. It’s been really nice out for the past week and there hasn’t been any rain. Today was in the mid 70’s.

In PLA news: I’ve been working on a new podcast project for the past week or so and I should have a new PLA Radio out maybe this week or next. I’ve also done quite a bit of work on the site lately – mostly on the forums.

Somehow I mentioned to Payton the other day, just in passing, something about the Terminator. He seemed interested so I told him all about the storyline of the Terminator movies, how the T-1000 was liquid metal and the time traveling and all that. So finally I just end up downloading it and we all sit down and watch it. I don’t think I’ve seen the kids enjoy a non-kid movie like that in quite some time now. He talked about it a lot today. Once I get my DVDs out of storage, I’ll have to show them the cool deleted scenes. It’s always nice when they’re so into something that I’ve always enjoyed myself.

Podcasts, pictures

Picked up the kids from school, hung around the house for awhile, then rode bikes to the park. I’ve been trying to teach Payton to ride a bike for the past few weeks and he’s getting better. Today he had his first crash, right into a wall. It’s my fault. No crying or anything, though, he just got up and walked the rest of the way to the park. Stayed there for over an hour. Emily and I rode around the block a few times while Payton played with friends. Every time we leave the park, this cat a few blocks away greets us and we pet it for 5 or 10 minutes. It’s Payton’s favorite part about leaving. Today it was there again, as always.

Tonight we did homework, watched Sliders and ate macaroni. The kids are both addicted to the old TV show Sliders these past few weeks. I think I mentioned that in a previous journal entry. All they want to do is watch it. I downloaded all 5 seasons recently so I have them all. They’ll sit and watch 3 or 4 45 minute episodes in a row if I let them. Payton tells me about Sliders dreams he’s had at night and I’ve noticed him naming his lego men after Sliders characters when playing. They’ve been jumping all over the place, watching all the episodes from the different seasons. They’ve probably watched at least 2 full seasons by this point, but completely at random.

Not a whole lot else going on with my life lately. I bought a bike at Target last week but haven’t ridden much by myself yet. Emily and I went around the block a lot over the weekend, though. Been filling up my free time working on podcasts, listening to podcasts and working on the new forums and getting the web site back in full operation since the move to a new server. The new server rules. Everything works, my email forwards properly now, all the PHP works, it’s fast, I have normal access logs again. I wish I’d done this years ago.

I’m really addicted to the podcasting thing still. I’m really enjoying making my shows and listening to others. I can’t believe I’ve already put out 6 episodes in just 2 months with very little effort. Well, okay, 5. You can’t really count the email episode. I’m also spending lots of time finding new podcasts to listen to. I’m completely losing touch with music because of them. Jammie asked if I’d heard the new Eminem song the other day and I had no idea what she was talking about. I need to download that album.

Speaking of podcasts and music…everyone must listen to Re Your Brains RIGHT NOW. I’ve let several people hear this today and everyone loves it. Especially Payton. I’ve probably played it 20 times today. Jonathan Coulton’s website has lots of music on it, but that one’s definitely my favorite.

I haven’t done a dump of my camera phone lately. So here it is…

Me trying to appear even more nerdier than usual in my thrift store shirt a few weeks ago. I was trying to find an address awhile back and found this pond where you could feed fish.
When my ignition stopped working last month, I left my car in McDonald’s parking lot over night. When I came back the next morning, this was on my window. While waiting for the locksmith to arrive, I wrote this on the bottom of it, planning to stick it on their delivery door. But since the manager actually came out and talked to me a short while later, I didn’t.
Drug the kids to the laundrymat with me last week, but since they had tables there we turned it into a pizza party. Snapped this picture earlier today, attempting to give Jammie a little encouragement for her speech in class.
Payton rock climbing at the park today. Emily riding my new bike at the park today.
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