Category: Uncategorized

Yesterday after work, I biked all over Albany for about 3 hours to take pictures of pay phones. Why do I want pictures of pay phones? Well, aside from my lifelong phone obsession, I just think that in another 10 years they’re all going to be gone and it’d be cool to have photographic evidence that pay phones once existed in the town I live in. (Even though I plan to leave this city in about 10 years.)

In the 2 years that I’ve lived here, I’ve seen a pretty significant decrease in public pay phones. In 2006, they renovated the mall and they didn’t bother reinstalling any of the pay phones that they’d ripped out. I think there were 12 throughout the mall. Now there’s none, except for one single pay phone that’s outside one of the doors. And I’ve also been seeing them disappear in public at a pretty significant rate. Most of the time they leave the booth or stand and just take the phone. It’s weird that I notice the decline in pay phones since I haven’t used one for legitimate purposes since… geez, probably not since about 2000 when I bought my first cell phone.

So I want to take pictures of all the public phones and see how long they last. I really think 10 years has got to be it for pay phones. I’m not going to be like 2600 and declare them officially dead this year. Because people obviously still use them. I think. Come to think of it, I guess I never actually see anyone using pay phones anymore. I just assume they still do.
I guess the homeless people probably still use them a lot, but when I worked at the Albany homeless shelter it seemed like a lot of them had cell phones. They were always asking us if we could charge them.

Here’s my set of Albany pay phones: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rbcp/sets/72157605149367852/

I added them all to the Flickr group called Pay Phone Planet, which is a place to preserve pay phone history. There’s a lot of good pictures on there.

I did this in Alton too, back in the early 2000’s. Here’s my small collection of pay phone pictures from there: https://www.notla.com/sites/altononline/payphones.php

I’m going to take another long bike ride later this week and get more pictures. I think I’m just going to keep at it until I’ve covered all of Albany. It shouldn’t take that long. Oh yeah, for the most part I tried to be somewhat stealthy about taking these pictures to avoid having conversations with other humans. But when I took the one in Two Rivers Mall food court, an old man asked me what it was for. I told him that I wrote for an internet publication and we were doing a story on the death of pay phones. So he goes into story mode and starts going on about pay phones and rotary phones and says he actually remembers crank phones when you had to tell the operator who you wanted to talk to. I told him how I had to teach my kids to dial a rotary dial phone (it took them awhile to master it) and that their friends that come over have usually never seen one. It was a fun conversation.

(I didn’t write any of these. But I found them on the imdb message board and just had to steal the good ones. You’ll either understand them or you won’t.)

1: Chunk stole his uncles toupee

3: Mikey is “a good ki…er..person”

6: Chunk’s top score on Pole Position is 1632.

7: It’s “booby traps”, not “booty traps”.

8: Stay to the right!

10: It takes 376 lawn mowing jobs to earn enough cash for a new bike.

11: Always separate the drugs!

12: Astoria’s water system supplies enough pressure to launch people 8 feet into the air off of toilets!

13: God puts large rocks in place for a reason, and we shouldn’t move them.

17. If God meant to put it that way we’d all be pissing in our faces!

21. You can tell where Mikey’s been by looking at pipes.

26. Michael Jackson never used the bathroom at Chunk’s house but his sister did.

31. Brand’s bike is his most flattest thing in the world.

33. The only thing that is served at the Lighthouse Lounge is tongue.

34. Ma Fratelli always sides with Francis.

38. The only thing that is in Chunk’s attic is Hanukkah decorations.

42. Those aren’t candles.

44. HEY YOU GUYEEES.

45. Mouth really believed that a quarter would grant his wish, and turned to petty theivery when said quarter failed to do his bidding.

46. Kissing Andy heals respiratory problems.

49) Troy’s such a cheap guy.

51.) There will be no signing today..or any other day.

53.) Abnormally strong adults born with birth defects can become great by the power of The Baby Ruth.

54.) When all else fails, treat it like a MAD Magazine. It might work.

55.) If it doesn’t work we’ll all “B-flat”.

56.) Dancing octopi, although enigmatic, are cut for a reason.

57.) When tracking kids, look for size 5 footprints and smell for bubblegum.

58.) Pack extra batteries. Because they don’t last so long.

59.) Drug dealers wouldn’t be caught dead wearing polyester wags.

65) puree is the perfect setting on a blender to grind up a kids hand

71) Stef’s looks aren’t so bad, when her face isn’t screwing them up.

73) Pirates liked waterslides.

74) Andi is not Liberace ya know.

75) Goonies never say die.

76) It’s there time up there and it is our time down here.

77) Wearing red undies when sitting down to use the bathroom is possible.

79) A dead body in a garbage bag is probably just restaurant trash.

80) The zoo will sell chains to wanted fugitives.

84) There’s 50 more houses to tear down after the Walsh’s.

85) Precious cut gemstones are more important than marbles.

87) If Mr. Walsh gets his next 400 paychecks in 24 hours he can fix the housing situation for everyone.

88) If you push your sister down the stairs, blame it on the dog.

89) Saying you don’t wear a hair piece doesn’t make it true.

90) If you pig out at fat camp, you will get kicked out.

91) Water is wet ain’t it, so drink it.

92) It’s all over the second we ride up Troy’s bucket.

93) Detroit is the birthplace of Motown and has the highest murder rate in the US.

94) There are pictures available of Chunk’s mom naked taking a bath and they are real cheap.

95) Brand does not wear braces.

97) Mrs. Walsh is going to commit Harri Krishna!

98) Mississippi Mud and Chocolate Eruption are ice cream flavors.

99) Fifty Iranian terrorists took over all the Sizzler steakhouses in the city.

108. The longer prisoners bark, the colder their lunches get.

109. Rosalita is in a crazy house.

114. Brand’s going to hit Mikey so hard, his clothes are going to be out of style.

128. Our parents are off buying Pampers for us kids.

130. The water is not going down yet.

134. If Brand hadn’t failed his driver’s test, they all would be goin’ out in style, cruisin’ the coast, sniffin’ some lace, downin’ some brews.

138. When translating Spanish, it is necessary to speak with an Old English accent.

140. Sixty and another forty is an even one hundred.

144. Chunks got it, he’s got it…he don’t got it…

145. It could have been a tremor.

146. Matzo Balls are comparable in size to bullet holes.

147. When watching a car chase, don’t press your Strawberry shake to a window.

152. When confronted with a murderous kidnapper, recite the Torah.

155. Frozen pizza is worth shooting someone over.

156. Brand hopes his house is turned into a sand trap.

159. No pen, No sign!!

163 – Chunk can smell ice cream

167. If all else fails…slick shoes!

170. Take any treasure you like but always leave Willy his share.

178. Bats carry rabies.

180. Trust in your old mother, boys!

199. If you do a bad job, you’ll be locked in the attic with the cockroaches for two weeks without food and water

213. The cops don’t care if you dump 3 or 4 gallons of gas outside the police station.

216. Mouse-trap is not only a kick-ass game, but a great way to open the gate.

217. You wanna scare the crap out of a girl? Stick a fish-head on a rake!

224. When depressed, often the best remedy is Ready-Whip straight out of the can.

226. When writing a pirate message in Spanish, always make sure it rhymes in English

245. If you bang on water pipes, water fountains can be lethal.

246. Police are afraid to jump over 3 foot flames.

251. There are no other houses to buy in Astoria if yours is foreclosed upon in order to build a golf course.

252. The price of fixing Sloth’s teeth is the same as a toupee.

253. Rosalita tends to search through the pockets of other people’s jackets.

257. Oregon contains a complex array of subterranean mazes that have went undiscovered for hundreds of years until a group of 12 year olds just happen to stumble upon them.

260. Booby traps hundreds of years old always work as intended.

261. If this is triple stones, then THIS must be copper bones.

272. It’s OK to borrow a small Asian Girl’s bike as long as you say, “I owe you one.”

273. Chickens lay eggs at the moment they are startled by popping balloons.

274. Air displaced by bats flying has the power to blow fireplace grates aloft.

292. You should always have an in depth conversation with a Pirates skeleton before taking his long lost booty.

321. The Hardy Boys put treasure in one tunnel and hid in another.

Obviously I skipped the boring ones. But if you want to read them all, they’re here:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089218/board/flat/89419998?p=1

Last night I had a dream that I was working on the PHP code on phonelosers.org to fix the problem with the “Comments” text being in Times New Roman font instead of Arial font.

A couple weeks ago I had a dream that I went to a bar with some lady who was a lesbian, she sat down and I went to the counter to get drinks. The bartender ignored me forever, and most of the dream was spent being pissed about the horrible service I was getting. I woke up before I got served.

You know you’re boring when your dreams suck this bad.

This week has been fun. The Spessas were here all week and just left yesterday. I drove with them to Portland to hang out for awhile before they continued back home. Today I’ve got nothing to do, which means I’ll probably be on the internet all day. So far this is what I’ve done today.

That’s my collection of magnets on the fridge. Over the past 3 or 4 years, I’ve been trying to pick one up from every city/state/place that I end up visiting. They’re a good thing to collect since they take up so little space and I’ll always have a place to put them since I’ll always have a fridge. Or a stove. Or a metal door. I also like that most of them are durable, they don’t get scratched up or dusty since they’re all stuck on the fridge, and they’re prominently displayed where people can see them rather than being put away in a box or a drawer. Magnets are the only thing I collect anymore.

I used to collect lots of crap. I had a gigantic phone collection, a basement full of outdated computer systems and accessories, dozens of boxes filled with miscellaneous plugs and wires, a sizable DVD collection, probably 1,000 books (95% that were probably only read once or less), business cards, hundreds of t-shirts. I collected all kinds of phone company related items such as pay phone inserts, calling cards, advertisements, plates and postcards.

I had most of an entire room of our basement filled with kids clothing that my kids either outgrew or hadn’t grown into yet. I didn’t want to throw any of it out, because I might know someone that needed that size of kids clothing someday. And of course I had to collect dressers, shelves, totes, and racks to keep all this stuff on.

Each year, I worked at building up my Christmas and Halloween decorations. In the days after each holiday was over, I would snag even more decorations to add to the giant totes that stored our various holiday things. I also saved every little scrap of wood from my home renovations and other projects. I built wooden racks to store all the spare wood on. I had piles of alarm clocks, piles of smoke detectors and piles of circuit boards.

At some point during the past 4 or 5 years, I realized how pointless it was to collect so much stuff. All it did was take up space, deteriorate and cost money to maintain. There was really no reason to keep any of it. My constant acquiring of stuff was turning me into a compulsive hoarder. I bet that’s how those people start out, just collecting things that seem useful at the time. Soon after my realization, I was lucky enough to get a huge kickstart in ridding my life of all those possessions.

In 2005, I moved from Illinois to Oregon. And thankfully, I deemed it way too expensive to move my giant house full of useless stuff to Oregon with me. I didn’t intend to get rid of all my stuff right away, though. At first, I decided I would just sell all the furniture, put my stuff in storage, cram what I really needed into the car and drive to Oregon. And that’s what I did. I made more than enough money to move myself to Oregon by selling 3 floors of furniture. And I just barely managed to shove everything else into a 10 x 12 storage unit.

I planned to try and move it all to Oregon. And while I still missed some of my old stuff once I moved to Oregon, it kind of made me realize how much I didn’t really need it and I began to despise the $50/month bill that I was paying to store 960 cubic feet of things I didn’t really even need. When I visited Illinois the following Christmas, I got rid of half of the things in storage. I either sold it, donated it to Salvation Army, or threw it away. It was painful to throw away so much good stuff, but it felt great. The following summer, I got to do it all again. It took about 20 months and over $1,000 in storage fees, but it was finally all gone. Sure, I still kept some of it. Mostly just sentimental and/or useful things, though.

That’s how I managed to rid myself of probably 95% of my possessions. And I’ve done pretty good at not letting it pile up again either. I’ve actually sold every single one of my DVDs during the past year. And I’ve been buying books cheap on Amazon, reading them, and then immediately selling them back. Sometimes even at a profit! I even use the library. It makes so much more sense than owning thousands of books I’ll never read again. I’m a regular donater at Goodwill and a regular seller on Craigslist. I throw out all of my kids clothes that are too small instead of waiting years to meet someone who has a kid that might need them. My own collection of shirts is at a reasonable level. I even get rid of electronics that I don’t think I’ll ever use again and I only own phones that I actually hook up to phone lines regularly.

Last year, I talked to this old man at a flea market who had a table full of baseball memorabilia. Everything you could imagine related to baseball was on this huge table. I asked him how he ended up with so much of it and he said he’d been collecting it since he was a boy. It was just something he obsessively collected for 30+ years, for no reason really. He told me he didn’t even need the money, but he didn’t know what else to do with it all and wanted to get it out of his house because it was just taking up space. So he rents a table every few weeks at the flea market, trying to get rid of it all. That’s your future, collectors of stuff.

So ask yourself…do you really need several closets and dressers full of clothing? Is your collection of stolen ashtrays really worth the space that they take up? Wouldn’t you love to make hundreds of dollars by selling your DVD collection? I ended up getting over $500 for all of mine. All those movies and TV shows are on cable all the time anyway, aren’t they? On-demand programming is growing quick on both the internet and cable TV, so all those DVDs (and even Blu-ray discs) are going to be obsolete in just a few short years. Better sell them while they’re still worth something.

How about making a few more hundred dollars by selling all of your books? I bet half of what you own is available at the library anyway, as well as tons of what you don’t own. Make a small fortune by selling them! Does your room full of Star Wars action figures and toys really mean that much to you? Do you really think it’s going to go up in value? Will that value even be worth the effort of storing it all for 50 years? How about those cute little figurines that you keep in a glass case. What are they good for? Are you seriously keeping those hundreds of magazines for reference? How many times have you actually referred to them?

In closing, watch this short video:George Carlin – Stuff. And I expect the comments area of this post to quickly fill with people telling me how I’ve made them decide to free their lives of clutter.

Made a new PLA Radio on Friday. Went hiking in Eugene on Saturday morning. Went out with Deanna last night. Going to search for an elusive Geocache today.

Got new glasses today, for the first time in 10 years. My old ones are in horrible shape and I only wear them while driving. These new ones are super light and they don’t give me a headache. I’ve been wearing them nonstop for 6 hours now and they’re not bugging me yet. This is good. I might wear these all the time.

Spent some time in Salem this evening. No kids this weekend, so I’m hoping to be as productive as possible for the next few days. I’ve got so much to do.

It’s really snowing out this morning. This is the first real snow we’ve had since I’ve moved here. I wish it’d just keep going until we had 3 feet of it on the ground. But it won’t. There’s no snow in the forecast, not even today. In a couple hours it will probably all turn into slushy rain. Then nothing but rain for the rest of the week. That blows. Hopefully the kids are having fun in it today, though.

I’ve put up a few home videos on YouTube this week, as I’ve been organizing my collection in the computer. I’m just about finished with the organizing, then I’ll throw it all on our Xbox 360 hard drive. Not that I plan to sit at the Xbox and watch my video camera stuff, I just think it’ll be cool to have easy access to it all.

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!

Christmas was fun. I got a car stereo (to replace the one that Warren stole) and a bike (to replace the 2 that Warren stole). The car stereo plays USB devices. I was hoping this meant it would play a 160 gig hard drive, but that wouldn’t work. I wonder if I need to put a powered hard drive in there instead. I know my Xbox 360 won’t accept unpowered laptop drives, I guess because there’s not enough juice in the USB cable. I’ll have to try using a regular external drive. I bought a 4 gig flash drive, though, and it works perfectly. Some day I’ll upgrade that to an 8 or 16 gig flash drive.

The kids got cool stuff. I got them bikes! There’s a pretty huge neighborhood right behind us that is perfect for biking. Then a few DS and Xbox 360 games. Emily got an Ipod and Payton one of those Radio Shack electronic hobby kits. Emily wrote me an awesome poem as a gift. And I guess that’s about it. I didn’t have them on Christmas day this year, but they stopped by anyway for a couple of hours. I was really bored the rest of the day. I was also feeling kind of sick on the 24th and the 25th, but luckily that went away. Last night I spent about 4 hours just watching TV.

I’m reading a new book, called Robbing Banks. It’s an American history of bank robbing from 1831 – 1999. Good stuff in there.

I just did laundry…IN MY HOUSE! After 2 years of making weekly trips to the laundromat, I’m finally able to do laundry at home again. Not that I’m complaining about the laundromat – it was a good place to catch up on reading and homework. But this is still exciting to me since laundry will be so effortless now. I found a washer and dryer on Craigslist for just $100 and the guy even delivered them to my house. I offered him money for gas and he wouldn’t take it. He said they’re 10 – 15 years old but parts have been replaced in them recently. So far I’ve done 2 loads and they seem to be working.

At approximately $5.00 in quarters a week for the laundromat, I should be saving $20/month by doing laundry here. So this will pay for itself in 5 months. I guess that’s not counting the extra water and electricity I’ll be using. Fine, I guess it’s more like saving $10/month. Maybe $15. Whatever, I like this way better.

I had to go to Home Depot and get a new plug for the dryer since the receptacle in the garage was some funky design that I’ve never seen before. I picked up a sheet of pegboard while I was there. Last night I put up a bunch of shelves and the clothes bar, which you can see in the picture. I’ve got quite a bit of shelving left over since the kids don’t need it in their rooms anymore. At some point this spring I’m going to build a work bench under the pegboard. Maybe one that folds down against the wall so the car can still fit in.

It’s nice having a garage again. Besides being able to park the car in it and not having to scrape ice off the windows every morning, it’s just cool to have a place to store things and possibly build things. I haven’t had a garage since 1997 and I’ve missed it. Hrmm, I need to research garage door hacking and see how easy that is these days.