00:00:00 Gotta Get to the Phone by Al Philipp and The Woo Team

00:00:22 A Quick Intro

00:01:47 The Story Begins

00:24:45 The song is Bell Odyssey by Rob T Firefly

00:38:20 The song is I Phreak Alone by Bonecage

00:52:25 MF Boogie 1 by Joe Engressia, performed via the telephone

01:02:09 Boxing by Redbox and the Chilipeppers

01:17:47 This pretend radio bit is by Joe Engressia from the end of his song MF Boogie 2

01:28:03 More Bell Odyssey by Rob T Firefly

01:29:55 Background music is Deeploop by MicroKORGI

01:38:38 The Phone Trips Song by Evan Doorbell

Below are some related links.

Here is the issue of Esquire from their official site, which wants you to register with them

Here is the issue of Esquire that I read from where you don’t have to register to read

Evan Doorbell’s Phone Trips site

Learn more about Joe Engressia on his wikipedia entry

Listen to Stories and Stuff by Joybubbles (Joe Engressia)

Call the PLA phone line and listen to Stories and Stuff via your phone at 206-424-8422

Learn about Captain Crunch (John Draper) on his website or on his wikipedia entry.

Live out your blue boxing fantasies by calling Project MF’s blue boxable telephone line at 630-485-2995

What this show is really about, though, is the two completely different methods we used to call into 1-900 numbers for free back in 2009, both which involved opening up phone boxes that us regular citizens aren’t supposed to be opening up. Special thanks to positiveandmultiple on Reddit, who first suggested that I talk about some old phreaking adventures on my show. Sorry it took me 3 years to get around to it, positiveandmultiple!

Big thanks to MC Lars for the opening song about me. MC Lars is a rapper, just like a lot of other people are, and he does live shows that you should go to and heckle him from the crowd, asking him to do the Brad Carter song. And another big thanks to Andy Anderson who recorded the sexy jobs commercial for me at the very end of the show. Andy Anderson is a professional DJ at prankcast.com, and a part-time retired sheriff for the city of Phoenix. Listen to his shows, but also say hi to him when you spot him in Phoenix hauling the bad guys away. Finally, thanks to Posy, who not only makes all of the background music you hear in this episode, but he also does the coolest YouTube videos about light and other technologies.

I tend to just assume that people know what I’m talking about when I do a show like this and I casually mention things like beige boxing as if that’s something everyone knows about in 2025. But they do not. “Beige boxing” is an old form of phreaking where you bring your own phone to a telephone box on the outside of a home or building, or one of those giant green boxes on the side of the road, and hook your phone to the wires inside so you can make free calls from phone lines that don’t belong to you. There, now you know and it will be less confusing to listen to this episode. As I was editing, I dropped in new bits of audio to clear up other things I didn’t explain well enough. Hopefully it helps.

I think when I talked about how call forwarding works with the 72# code, I was remembering how remote call forwarding used to work, where you would access the service remotely to forward your calls. By just dialing 72# from your home, you would hear the stuttering dial tone, then dial the number you wanted to forward, and then the dialed number would ring so you can let whoever it is know that you’ve just forwarded your calls to them. There was no confirmation message for that, so I apologize to Jennifer Martino who runs thisisarecording.com for yelling at you for not having those recordings. Jennifer is the girl you hear mid-show saying the funniest lines ever to a psychic as we constantly sabotage her psychic reading call. I miss you Jennifer, please come back and I’ll never pimp slap you again.

Here’s a link to my 2010 blog post about Kevin from 7-Eleven. I kept this post set to “private” for many years because I didn’t want Kevin stumbling across it and losing his mind when he confirmed that it was me. I wonder if that ever crossed his mind when his fax line failed so badly that he had to call the phone company and the cops to figure out what the problem was. And I wonder if when the home office tried to fax things to Kevin’s store, did they get charged for the calls to 1-900 psychics? Or did he completely forget about me like I did about him until I saw his full name on Jessica’s Facebook page.

I’m surprised the police in that town didn’t automatically suspect me of doing that. Back in 1996, that police department arrested me for making thousands of dollars in illegal phone calls that apparently was the weirdest thing they’d ever had to deal with. They actually thought I was tapping into the phone box of a local power company to make these free calls and staked out the telco box waiting for me to show up and plug my phone into it, but I was doing it all remotely from my house which I had to explain to them after they arrested me.

The video that I refer to use making of horrible things to do to 7-Eleven employees kept getting taken down from my YouTube accounts, so I finally gave up trying to keep it up anywhere. You can still watch it, though, by downloading the 2025 Phone Losers of America Media Pack, and then looking for the video file named Causing Problems at 7-eleven.mp4. I don’t blame people for reporting it, since one of the things we do on the video is take a box of condoms off a shelf, poke a hole through the entire box with a safety pin, and then put them back on the shelf. Hilarious, right? Don’t worry, after turning the camera off I crushed the box of condoms in my hand and tossed it into their trash can. So none of you can blame your unwanted 2000-era pregnancies on me.

• Thank you Gus Gallucci for posting the video on MJ on our Reddit
• Here’s the video that I’m playing
• Here’s PLA Radio episode 14 – Wacky Morning DJ
• Read the chapter of the Phone Losers of America book that made MJ so happy
• After you read the book for free, you’ll probably want to buy a physical copy of it
• Listen to the MJ Morning Show

After recording all of this, I told a friend about it and he watched the video. He’s the one who got most of the backstory back in my MJ harassing days. He said even before I asked, when he heard MJ talk about my “it’s coming to your door” threat, he didn’t think that was something I would say even back then.

I didn’t look too hard for the manual for this machine, so I’m not sure what year it was manufactured. I’d guess the mid-to-late 1980’s. You can attempt to hack into this machine remotely by calling 505-608-6123 or 845-470-0336 and picking answering machine #4 in the answering machine menu.

This 90 minute Kmart cassette tape is labeled “FIRST BAND CONCERT” in my grade school era handwriting so I was expecting to hear terrible band music by 5th grade me. And there’s a little of that. But it appears that I purposely recorded over the band music to make classic comedy bits, which seems obvious when I take a break for music and you hear a few seconds of the band music that I recorded over. This tape is presented pretty much exactly as I found it, though I did move the Chariots Of Fire song to the beginning for an opening song, and I chopped off most of the music from the second half of the tape.

In this Brad’s Cactus Shack you’re going to hear about the invention of television, the history of radios, the invention of the dollar bill, the history of computers and exactly how they work, commercials, announcements, skits, a celebrity, and more. Right after the “I Love You” song, I will have a co-host named John and occasionally his sister Renae. John will be playing the part of Nothing Momigan and Renae will be starring as Miss Piggy. Sorry, that’s not the real Miss Piggy. The Old Timey tape recorder bit is by John and then it’s back to me with the calculator advertisement. I think I heard a bit of our friend Eric in there too. At the time I thought Microwave Milkshakes were my own stupid invention, but years later they became a real, actual product. I thought of it first, though.

This is the only photo I can find of me and John, which I stole from Renae’s Facebook. Sorry, Renae.

Enjoy this 30 minutes of terrible quality phone recordings where I talk to a girl from my school while she does her homework and I call kids who are hanging around the pay phones at Alton Square Mall. About 11 minutes in I couldn’t understand who she was asking if I knew. During my editing I heard the name clearly. She wanted to know if I knew Sammy Hagar from Van Halen. You probably already know this. I also play a few of my old answering machine messages from 1989 or 1990. The opening song is Welcome To My World by Nerf Herder. The background music is Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod. The ending song is The Sun Shines Down On Me by Daniel Johnston.

It came back on just long enough for me to finish up the show editing and get it posted. Then it went out again. This time it was dark out. I immediately got some shoes on and went for a walk toward downtown. No street lights were on and very little moon was out, so it was awesomely pitch black. It took over five minutes to cross the Ellsworth intersection because it was very busy traffic and the traffic lights were out. I had to wait for the cars to be completely gone so I didn’t die.

Since a lot of stores weren’t able to close down properly I kept bumping into their sidewalk signage. There weren’t a lot of people out, so I guess the bar never bothered opening. I’ve walked downtown before when they had the power shut off to replace all the streetlights, but this was a lot cooler than that since there was no light in any direction. I was able to see tiny LED lights for cameras or security systems or whatever else would be on the sides of buildings. The best part was being able to see the stars from downtown which is usually impossible. I wish I’d brought my glasses.

The outage didn’t last quite an hour and I was on 2nd when everything turned back on. A lot of the businesses forgot to turn off their inside lights when they closed down during the outage so it was extra bright. A lot of OPEN signs were still displayed. I got to see several ATMs attempt to boot back up. I walked around a bit more to admire the weirdness of everything being on at night, then headed down 3rd Street toward 7-Eleven.

A cop car pulled to the side of the road across the street from me. A minute later I notice a lady cop walking on the other side of the street right across from me in kind of weird stance. A second later I see another cop has parked on my side, crossed the street on foot and was meeting her at a building. As I passed the building, they were both at the door, I think looking in, possibly with guns drawn. No idea what the building was. I didn’t hear any craziness behind me for the next few blocks, so I guess that turned out okay.

7-Eleven said they worked at cleaning the store during the outage with flashlights, which sounds hilarious. So that’s my night. Now I’m listening to Justin play Ween on Mixlr, reading Facebook and writing this. Good times! Here’s a video I posted a day or two ago.

Above is the Echoplex hooked up to the Gibson amplifier, but not working because of a burnt out tube in the amp. Below is the setup I was using to record the Summer of ’85 portion.

Part Two is all about my neighbor Sara, who used to embark on all kinds of evil missions with me in the evenings. The missions included, but weren’t limited to, toilet papering trees, stealing porch light bulbs (or just loosening them to make them appear burnt out), peering in windows, setting things on fire, knocking and running, and avoiding police cars at all costs even if we hadn’t done anything wrong, which usually meant being chased by them because they thought we were up to no good. We’d rearrange people’s lawn furniture, we’d hang strings across the roads to confuse motorists, once on trash night we stole everybody’s trash and put it in one person’s back yard. In the trash area, not the yard. But it was about 5 blocks worth of trash in one single yard. I bet the trash men were a little confused about that one.

We started a club at some point, called the BASLC. The Brad and Sara Lab Club. Because my garage was the lab. We had monthly dues, but I don’t think we ever actually spent the money on anything. In fact, I never got my share of the money back after we went our separate ways. I was ripped off! We were hoping to save up for a set of intercoms to put in our rooms so we could talk to each other. Our windows faced each other, but were on different floors. So we had to contact each other by shining flashlights, throwing rocks, or doing half-rings on the telephone which annoyed our parents. I don’t think our “club” ever actually did anything besides collect dues and write songs.

She played guitar, and we recorded quite a few tapes of us singing and talking together. I think she ended up with most of those, because I only have one of them now. We wrote a few songs together, mostly weird parodies. I think I still have lyric sheets to them somewhere around here. I know we did a lot of hits of the time too, but the only one I can remember is Islands in the Stream. We were into the duets.

I spent weeks during the days drawing a colored, detailed, scale (more or less) map of our block to help us on our missions. This map was on a small piece of posterboard and included every rock, tree stump, garden, car, clothesline, etc. in everyone’s yard. I suppose the map didn’t really help, it was more just to make it all more fun for us. I even bought those pin flags, to mark important things on the maps.

My garage was command central, we carried walkie-talkies, we had code names, we had our own secret handwriting that we could read and write fluently. I still can, in fact. Anyway, we did these things for a couple of years. She finally grew up and became interested in a boyfriend so we stopped hanging out so much and I found new friends. We hung out a few times during jr. high and high school, but we’d outgrown our nightly missions by that point.

That’s a picture of us, in the attic, probably taken a year or two after 1985. Thanks, Mr. Biggs, for creating the guitar loop for me since I never got around to it. The ending song is The Moon Is High (And So Am I) by Roger Miller.

For more information about my six month stint in the drug and alcohol classes, listen to episode 10B of Brad’s Cactus Shack, and watch episode 10 of the PLA Show.

Earlier this month a very generous listener of The Snow Plow Show was nice enough to send me a sound board machine. It’s called an Instant Replay Hard Disk Audio 2.0 and it’s manufactured by 360 Systems. I’m told that radio stations across the country used these to play sound clips and promos during the 1990’s and early 2000’s before upgrading to something new.

It’s an awesome machine and works great. The buttons have an instant response time which is a nice upgrade from the Android tablet and soundboard app I’ve been using for years. This thing will make doing live shows much easier for years to come. The only problem with my 360 was that the hard drive wasn’t sounding too good. It made a high pitched noise the entire time it was running, which could be heard while recording shows. It also clicked loudly at every single button press. It seemed likely that the hard drive could die at any second.

Since the 360 was made way back in the 1990’s, finding a replacement drive for it wasn’t going to be cheap. The 360 uses a SCSI interface which, as far as I know, isn’t in use anymore except in really old machines like this. The documentation for the 360 wasn’t very clear on how big its drive was allowed to be, so if I purchased the wrong size, it might not work at all. I opened the 360 and looked at the drive, but the size wasn’t listed on the drive anywhere.

All the label told me was that it was a Quantum Fireball ST drive and that it was one of four model numbers: 2.1S, 3.2S, 4.3S, or 6.4S. I assume those are drive sizes, but it doesn’t tell me which drive this actually is. Some online searching found that Fireball hard drives were sold in those sizes. A 2.1 gig drive on eBay can go for over $150. Other SCSI drives are cheaper, but again, I don’t know how finicky the 360 is about sizes.

I counted the pins on the drive to find out that it was a 50 pin SCSI connector. I thought it might be easy to find a SCSI to IDE/SATA converter so I could try random sizes of old drives I have lying around the house, but that didn’t seem to be something that was available.

In the end I took Mr. Bigg’s advice and decided to try a device called the SCSI2SD adapter. It’s a circuit board with a 50 pin SCSI connector on one end and an SD memory card on the other, effectively tricking the 360 into thinking an old SD card is a SCSI hard drive. From what I could see online, a lot of people use the SCSI2SD card to keep old music samplers alive. I couldn’t find any mention of using one on a 360, but since I could define the size of the drive on the SD card, it seemed likely to work. And it did! Below I’m going to detail the installation process. Here is a picture of the SCSI2SD card I purchased.

I got my SCSI2SD from an eBay account called inertialcomputing. It’s version 5.1 – there is a newer version, but this one was less than $80 and seemed like it would work just fine, so I picked it. It even came with an 8 gig SD memory card. You might notice it has a weird power connector. That’s an old floppy drive connector. Since the 360 uses a standard Molex power connector, you’ll also need to buy a 4-Pin Male to Floppy Drive 4 Pin Power Adaptor Cable. It looks like this, and you can probably find one on eBay.

STEP 1: Something very important to know about the SCSI2SD board is that it runs on just 5 volts. According to their website, if you try to connect 12 volts to it, it will burn out the main chip. It makes me wonder why they even have the 12 volt pin wired up. Maybe they don’t and people just accidentally wire them backwards. In any case, cut the yellow wire off of that Molex-to-floppy cable, just to be safe. The yellow is 12 volts and the red is 5 volts. You don’t need the yellow and it could melt the board, so CHOP IT OFF.

STEP 2: Download files for your SCSI2SD. I was naive and hoped that my SCSI2SD board and SD card would work straight out of the box. I was wrong. You have to download a utility that connects to your SCSI2SD card, a bootloader, and a firmware update. The version numbers are confusing. I bought a v5.1 SCSI2SD card, but the verison numbers currently only go up to v4.8. That’s the one you would use for the v5.1 card. Unless, of course, they’ve released a newer version by the time you read this. (I’m writing this in mid-2018) Go into the directory and get whatever is the latest one.

You’ll want the utility program – scsi2sd-util.exe in the Windows directory, or scsi2sd-util.dmg if you use a Mac. The monitor program didn’t seem necessary and I didn’t use it for anything. Also grab the latest firmware file from the firmware directory and the bootloader files from the bootloader directory. I’m still confused about which bootloader files you need, so I took all three of the v5.1 files just in case – SCSI2SD-V51.hex, USB_Bootloader-V51.elf and USB_Bootloader-V51.hex.

STEP 3: Prepare your SD card. Put it into your computer and make sure that it’s formatted as a fat32 drive. Copy your three bootloader files onto the card. You probably don’t need all three files, but I put them all on there and it works, so don’t question my instructions. Just do it.

STEP 4: Install the windows software by clicking on the exe file. Once that’s done, insert your SD card into the SCSI2SD board, plug in a USB cable from your computer to the SCSI2SD card, and run the utility software. If all goes well, you’ll be connected to your SCSI2SD board.

STEP 5: Update the SCSI2SD firmware. Under the “File” heading there’s an option to update the firmware. Do that. It’s easy. Now your card works.

STEP 6: Set up your virtual SCSI drives on the SD card. The only way I could get this thing to work on the 360 was to create two virtual hard drives instead of one. The 360 seems to ignore the first drive and uses the second drive. There is probably an easier way to do this and I could probably make it work with just one drive if I knew anything about SCSI. But I don’t, so we’re creating two virtual hard drives.

Using your SCSI Utility, go to the Device 1 tab. Check the box that says “Enable SCSI Target.” Your SCSI ID is 0, device type is Hard Drive, no Quirks, Sector size is 512, and device size is 3.20 GB. You’ll want to check the “Auto” box on SD card start sector.

Now go to the Device 2 tab. Check the box that says “Enable SCSI Target.” Your SCSI ID is 1, device type is Hard Drive, no Quirks, Sector size is 512, and device size is 3.20 GB. You’ll want to check the “Auto” box on SD card start sector.

Leave devices 3 and 4 alone. Go to the General Settings tab and leave everything exactly how it was. The “Enable SCSI terminator” should be checked. Host speed is Normal. Startup Delay is 0. SCSI Selection Delay is 255. All the boxes under that are unchecked. Below are pictures of what each of your three tabs should look like.

Once all of that is done, go to the File heading and select the option that uploads your changes to the SCSI2SD card. If it gives you the confirmation message that it worked, then you are ready to install your card into the 360. If you get an error, don’t panic. That happened to me a few times. I had to retry and it worked the second time. If you keep getting the error, maybe try a different USB cable or a different USB port.

A note about hard drive sizes – when I first tried this, I set my first drive size to .25 because it wasn’t used and my second drive size to 7 gigs, thinking I would get a bunch of extra space to record things on. It seemed to work, but then I was getting drive errors on the 360. It’s probably best to stick to the standard drive sizes that are written on my 360’s actual hard drive. Those sizes are 2.1, 3.2, 4.3, and 6.4. It might not even be able to go as high as 6.4 gigs. I stuck with 3.2 gigs on each drive it seems to be working great so far. Maybe you can get more space by doing 2.1 gigs on the first drive and 4.3 gigs on the second drive. All I know is that 3.2 gigs on each drive works for me and I have no idea what the actual size limits are.

STEP 7: Take apart your 360. Disconnect the power and audio cables, obviously, dummy. When you turn it upside down, you’ll see five circular rubber feet – two in the back and three in the front. Remove the three in the front with a screwdriver. Stick a 5/16″ socket driver into each of the holes and remove the nuts inside. Good luck happening to own a 5/16″ socket driver that actually fits into these holes. Two of mine didn’t, but the third one I found did. It seems like it’d be really easy to lose your socket driver inside one of these holes. Be careful.

Once that’s done, turn the 360 back upright and take the lid off of it. To do this, slide the lid all the way toward the back as far as possible, lift up the bottom part of it and then pull it down. If that doesn’t work just jiggle it all over the place and figure it out yourself. There are four cables connecting the lid to the circuit board. Disconnect all four of them and set the lid aside. Now gaze into the beauty of that that 1990’s circuit board with all the chips lovingly labeled and spaced apart. You just don’t see craftsmanship like this anymore.

STEP 8: Remove the hard drive. Or Don’t. I left mine in there and just set the SCSI2SD board on top of it, separated by a thin piece of plastic. The holes on your SCSI2SD card aren’t going to line up with the holes on the hard drive, so you’ll have nothing to mount it on unless you buy a 3.5″ kit for your SCSI2SD card. Unless you have a better plan, just leave the old SCSI drive right where it is. If you want to remove it, the mounting screws are located on the bottom of the 360, making it awkward to remove. The rest of these steps will assume you left it in there.

STEP 9: Connect your SCSI2SD card to the 360. Remove the grey SCSI cable from the old SCSI drive and plug it into your SCSI2SD card. Remove the Molex power plug from the old SCSI drive and connect your Molex-to-floppy adapter cable. Make sure you’ve cut the yellow wire completely off of the adapter cable so you don’t accidentally send 12 volts into your SCSI2SD card, making it explode like a bomb. Plug the floppy connector into the SCSI2SD card.

Your SCSI2SD card will sit on top of the old SCSI hard drive, but you don’t want to have the metal pins underneath it touching the metal hard drive, so you need to insulate it somehow. I cut up a plastic lid from a container of ice cream into a SCSI2SD shaped rectangle. I taped the plastic onto the bottom of the SCSI2SD card. Then I taped that onto the hard drive.

You’ll notice I taped it at an angle instead of squarely in the middle of the old hard drive. This is because of that one capacitor sticking up on the SCSI2SD card. It sticks up enough that it might get crushed when you put the lid of your 360 back on. So just to be safe, it’s at an angle and looks very unprofessional. It’s okay, nobody will ever see it. Look at that tape job. I didn’t even try to make it look nice.

STEP 10: Put the 360’s top back on. Connect the four cables that you unhooked and place the lid back where it belongs. Don’t bother putting the three screws back in yet. Chances are something won’t work right and you’ll have to get back in there to tighten a cable or put out a fire caused by a plastic ice cream lid heating up and catching on fire. Connect the 360’s power cable and turn the unit on. If all goes well it will boot up and you’ll be greeted with a message on the screen that says WRONG DISK FORMAT – SELECT INT DRIVE?

That is a good message to see! This means that the 360 is seeing your fake SCSI hard drive, but it still needs to be formatted. This stumped me for an hour until I looked at the 360’s manual and found out that I needed to format. To format the drive, turn the 360 off. Press and hold down the STOP button and turn the 360 back on. Keep holding the STOP button until you see a message that states PRESS PLAY TO FORMAT PRESS CANCEL TO QUIT.

Press the play button and wait for the disk format to complete. For my 3.2 gig virtual drive it took around five minutes, so be patient and let it finish. Once it’s done it’ll flash your version number, a 1990’s date, a hilarious message about how much RAM we used to use in computers, and you’ll see the message NO CUTS AVAILABLE on your screen. Congratulations, your 360 is now ready to use!

Record some cuts and make sure it works. Once you’ve confirmed that it’s okay, it’s safe to put those nuts back into the bottom of the machine. Hopefully you taped your SCSI2SD card down better than I did mine. Good luck getting those nuts back on because it’s nearly impossible to do. For best results, magnetize your 5/16″ socket driver. My solution is just to never put them back in there.

STEP 11: Back up your SD card! Once you’ve added a bunch of sounds to the machine, it sure would suck if you lost all that work. The SD card isn’t readable by Windows, so you need to use an imaging program to copy the entire card into an .img file so you can restore it someday if you ever need to. This tutorial one howtogeek.com told me to use a Windows program called Win32 Disk Imager which worked great. Besides keeping a spare image on my computer, I taped a spare SD card backup inside the machine.

As I mentioned, the SD card isn’t readable by Windows, so the card will look empty to you, but your saved files are in there. It sucks that you can’t just see the files and upload new WAV files directly to it, but I guess that’s not possible.

I hope this tutorial has helped you. I spent hours getting this all to work for myself so I hope this page has helped you complete your conversion in considerably less time than it took me. Now it’s your turn to help me if you can. I have some questions about the 360 that I wouldn’t mind getting answered.

QUESTION #1: How do I upgrade the firmware on the Instant Replay 360? I can’t find an answer to this anywhere. Currently my unit is at version 2.014. I know that if I had version 2.3 I would have the extra featuring of editing my clips on the machine so I could take silences off the beginning and ends of clips and make them more loopable. Is there a place to just buy the upgraded chips?

QUESTION #2: What is the actual hard drive size limit on the 360? I played around with 6.4 and 4.3 sizes, but the available audio space seemed to be the same as when I chose a 2.1 or 3.2 size. Is it just ignoring everything over 2.1 gigs?

I hope to keep using the Instant Replay 360 for many years, so if you happen to know anything about it that would make it even cooler than it already is, please share in the comments. Below is a video I made as I installed the SCSI2SD into my 360. There might be a few extra details in the video that aren’t on this page, so if you’re stumped, try watching the video.

Thanks, Hackaday, for featuring my terrible workmanship on your website!

Thanks, Mr. Biggs, for finding the SCSI2SD solution for me! Everyone should be listening to the Ask Mr. Biggs podcast, one of my favorite comedy shows on Internet.

And while you’re at it, give my shows a listen too. I do The Snow Plow Show, Brad’s Cactus Shack, Phone Losers of America, Mr. Dobalina’s Wonderful World of Prank Calls, and Hobosodes.

For more photos of the 360, visit my Instant Replay 360 page on phonelosers.com

Here’s an old post I made about writing TRS-80 program variables on the wall in my closet. FML means First Middle Last, 2008 Brad. Derrr. Here’s a 2007 post mentioning things I’ve found on old cassettes. Here’s another post about importing my old tapes. Here’s Pauldotcom’s Security Weekly Show on his fancy new domain. Here’s a website that obsesses over TRS-80 Color Computers. Their setup is much fancier than mine where I had it plugged into an old TV, but you get an idea of the hardware we were using.

My crime didn’t involve weed or alcohol, but for whatever reason they seemed to think I need not one weekly 2-hour group session, but TWO weekly 2-hour group sessions, stretching out for 6 full months. The first class seemed aimed more at casual DUI and meth use offenders, but the second focused not only on overcoming your drug addictions, but adjusting to life on the outside after being in prison. I’ve also never been in prison.

I made this show the night after I came back from my first group session on February 21st, 2018, just trying to make sense of it all. I had planned to make a few more of these, but never got around to it.

For more information about my stint at the drug and alcohol classes, listen to episode 13 of Brad’s Cactus Shack, and watch episode 10 of the PLA Show.

• Here’s a video of some destruction from Celina’s tornado, then a guy filming his television like a hobo
• Stealth camping in Celina
• More tornado footage
• Holy crap, Dollar General was actually destroyed
• Look at this guy acting like Wal-Mart should sell cold food after the power’s been out all night
• Here’s one of those drive-thru convenience stores. I don’t know if that one’s in Celina, though. Here’s a Streetview of one in Celina I used to go to.

Here’s a link to Evvonne’s Skunkworks video

Subscribe to her channel and support her on Patreon

Here’s the FOX 5 article about Skunkworks

Here’s another article with a bit more information. This one claims that Skunkworks met the other guy as an adult, so I’m not sure where Evvonne saw that they were childhood friends. Maybe I was confused about what she said and it was actually a childhood friend of Askia Khafra who was talking about the incident.

Here’s the June 29th, 2010 episode of The Phone Show where Skunkworks calls in to ask for vocal chords

Here’s the June 22nd, 2010 episode of The Phone Show which was played near the end of this show. There’s a little more to it, but it seemed boring so I stopped playing it.

Haha, JUST as I was about to hit the publish button for this episode, I got a call from Maryland! It was a lady from the dumpster company that I called last night, saying she noticed they missed a call from me. I explained that I saw her number in a conspiracy video and was just calling to see if it was a real number. She was probably actually a CIA agent just checking up on me.

Listen to Neon every single Sunday night because she never misses a week
Here’s a Jack Nicolson soundboard prank to KFC
You can’t trust those Australians – FoTC says so
Those guys at Telephreak.org are a bunch of hobos who can’t keep their website up, so here’s a link to their Twitter
Listen to the Do You Know Who Jason Segel Is podcast – I’ve listened to 2 episodes now and it’s fun stuff
The Bone Zone podcast
Jack Helliquinn does a bunch of creepy-ass videos on YouTubez
Join the Hijinks Discord and watch Home Alone 3 this weekend
Here’s the link to the video of this show
The ending music is Carol Brown by Flight of the Conchords – it was the next video that played after I looked up their Australian video
For some reason, the background music I was using last night (by Emergency Pizza Party) reminded me of this old Disney song from 50 years ago. That’s the intro music I used.

I found a few old posts that reference Warren, but nothing specific about the blender timer. And haha, in that picture I can see that I had it set to go off FOUR TIMES A DAY. The timer automatically randomized the start/end times by about 15 minutes. I should have set up a sensor on the wall to count how many times it was banged in that 2 weeks.

I found a few old blog posts that reference Warren. Here’s where my car stereo gets stolen. There’s this one about contemplating moving. My first bike theft. Here’s where I badmouth Warren to the landlord. My breakdown of Warren-related living costs. Still bitching about Warren here. Here’s a picture of my broken car window and missing radio. Looking back on all this stuff really makes me love living at the Situation Room. Not that my stereo didn’t get stolen from here too about 5 years ago, but it was a normal random theft and not something that my neighbors did. Or did they….

Here’s the original What’s Your Bid phone mob
Here’s the old phone mob page on phonelosers.org
Cal’s old forums sort of still exist on archive.org
Here’s some info about the infamous John Sever who inspired me to prank radio shows
He also reminded me a few years ago that I made a bomb threat to our grade school during recess while on the playground.
Looks like my cassette-to-mp3 conversion mostly happened in 2007, as you can see here and here. How ironic, one of those posts has me making fun of a Metro PCS lady for not knowing what “dr” means.
1-800-THE-POOL commercial
What if C.A.T. really spelled dog?
Music in this show was Break My Stride by Matthew Wilder. I don’t even like that song, but the opening lyrics are awesome.

During post editing I realized that “dr” might mean deaf relay, but all of those messages began with dr, even the ones that were just regular voicemails left on my machine about wrasslin’ tapes and stuff.

Want to know the time and temperature in Alton, IL? Call 618-465-4545. I’ve been calling this number regularly my entire life. As a kid I called it each morning before school to find out how much walking to school would suck. As an adult I still call it at least once a month when I’m testing out new phone equipment or making sure my show recordings sound okay.

I’m kind of sad that the number was recently taken over by a new company and it sounds nothing like it used to. Before it was always run by St. Anthony’s hospital and would contain advertisements for dying old people by a lady who sounded like Pat Fleet. Now it’s all computerized and is run by a local website. Awesome of them to take it over though, so it didn’t die.

I can’t remember if I ever played the original What’s Your Bid files from the 1980’s. The sound quality on them is terrible and the calls are barely funny, but I was pranking that same radio station from the What’s Your Bid phone mob back in middle school and I recorded the calls. Have I ever played those anywhere? If not, I plan to play them in the next episode.

Pictured above is my new 2016 Nissan Versa, parked across a couple of handicap spaces because that’s just the kind of guy I am.

A few weeks ago, Liana and I spent one hellish Saturday afternoon, looking at cars and dealing with some of the sketchiest car dealership employees ever. We finally left with the Nissan and a new car payment that I don’t know how I’m going to afford, but it’s an awesome car and I love it. It’s very low-end and doesn’t even have power locks or windows, but it’s great to have a reliable car again. One that can go on extensive road trips, just like the good ole days, which I plan to do very soon. And, most importantly, it’s got an Aux In jack. So long to listening to Spotify through a cassette tape adapter.

My 2000 Ford Focus has been a great car for the past 13 years, but its numerous problems and break downs were starting to add up, and it had 211,000 miles on it. I listed it on Craigslist for weeks, one week for $400 and the second week for $300, and nobody ever bought it. But less than 24 hours after painting “FOR SALE” on the back window, it was gone, purchased by a guy who plans to fix it up and use it for work. I let him have it for $280 since the gas tank was empty.

I bought the Focus in 2003, for the sole purpose of taking a cross-country trip from Illinois to South Dakota to hang out with The Spessas, which I did within a month of buying the car. Since then my Focus has taken me all over the country, on road trips by myself and with the kids, with friends and girlfriends, it’s helped aid me in all kinds of wacky pranks and schemes, from Texas to New York to California and a bunch of other fun places, it’s been a great car and has been mostly reliable. I will miss you, 2000 Ford Focus. Since I have the address of the guy I sold it to, I’m tempted to occasionally drive by and look longingly at my old friend. But I totally won’t do that, because that would be creepy. Nope, not me.

Below is a video I made in 2014, demonstrating how easy it is to call oil change places and trick them into handing out my own personal information. Included in the video is every picture I could find of my Focus from my photo album. You’ll see pictures from when I made a laptop mount in my front seat because GPS barely existed yet, you’ll see how I turned the passenger seat into a desk for a few road trips, the Nova emblem that I drilled into the back of the car to confuse other drivers, the weird things we painted on my windows, the 1980’s-era radio I installed after the first time a crackhead stole my nice stereo, and other miscellaneous photos of my old car from the past 13 years.

Why is the Nissan Versa the last car I will ever own? Because the entire world is on the verge of a buttload of changes to transportation and pretty much everything else. Semi-autonomous cars are already here if you can afford them, and fully autonomous cars will be here easily by 2020. Once the cars are working and the government regulations are laid out, things are going to change insanely quick. Elon Musk recently said that full autonomy will be ready within 2 years and the government will be ready for them in 3. And Elon knows what he’s talking about since he plans to be selling 1,000,000 autonomous cars per year by 2020.

I’ve seriously hated being a slave to my car these past couple of decades. Sure I love owning a car, but only because that’s been the only option for me. In the medium sized cities I’ve lived in, public transportation generally sucks. In a few short years, I’m going to be able to call for an autonomous car to pick me up from a cell phone app, to take me wherever I want to go, quickly and cheaply. Owning a car will become pointless and expensive. Even if full autonomy doesn’t happen as fast as I’m sure it will, services like Uber and Lyft and all those car sharing companies are going to start showing up in medium sized towns. No matter how this all goes down, it’s going to end with nobody needing to own a car.

About 4 years ago I wrote about how it sucked that I would never live through another revolution. I got to see the internet happen and I got to see the entire world end up with tiny super computers in their pockets, but I felt like that was it for me. I thought in another 10 years, all we’re going to see is neater cell phones and faster internet. I had no idea this was coming and I’m incredibly excited for it.

Self-driving cars are going to change everything. I know most of you have heard it all by now, but they’re going to save 30,000 or so lives per year because they will rarely crash, they’re going to reduce air pollution, they’ll require less roads and parking spaces and they’ll let blind, disabled, and old people get around as easily as the rest of us. Insurance rates will plummet, cops won’t be able to give you speeding tickets anymore, and car ownership will become a thing of the past. When I finally get rid of my Nissan Versa 10 years from now, there probably won’t be a single incentive to trade it in for something new.

The world is going to be in a lot of trouble soon, and I’m excited for this. Besides self-driving cars stealing the jobs of taxi drivers and truck drivers, they will eventually cripple the auto industry. Imagine all the car dealerships in your town going out of business permanently. This is something I would love to see happen, after having to deal with those car dealership people a couple weeks ago. Sketchy car salesmen across the country will be out of jobs and will have to settle for mugging people in the park. All of the independent used car lots will disappear too. And then most of the service garages, oil change businesses, Auto Zones, and insurance companies. Cops won’t be able to ticket people for speeding anymore, but that’ll be good because everyone is going to lose their jobs.

And that’ll just be the fallout from self-driving cars. Automation is going to blow up in a huge way soon, stealing the jobs of fast food and factory employees, and I’m sure plenty of other people. No, seriously, this is all about to happen. In our lifetimes, within the next 10 to 20 years. They’ve already figured out how to fully automate a fast food restaurant, basically turning a McDonalds into a building-sized vending machine. Pretty much every non-skilled job will be gone permanently. I’m sure we’ll figure out a way to make all this work, but from the looks of where things are going, we’re either headed for the next great depression or we’re headed for an awesome utopia where machines do all the work and we just sit back and play on our fancy new cell phones all day.

These things are going to happen quickly and we’re probably all doomed, but I absolutely love things that upset the status quo. The economy as we know it is incredibly bad for the Earth and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next. The only thing I know for sure is that driving won’t be necessary 10 years from now, and I’ll be happy to never touch a steering wheel again.

I don’t think I’ve had an actual ticket since 1997 when I was pulled over for doing 31 in a 25 in Celina, Ohio. I’ve been pulled over 4 or 5 times since then, but I always get warnings instead of tickets. Never speeding really pays off.

I found out this week that my nick appears in a short scene on the new TV show called Mr. Robot. I watched the pilot of this months ago on YouTube and it seemed like an interesting show. The second episode, which I haven’t seen yet, shows an IRC chat room and one of the chat names in room is RBCP. I guess that COULD have been a coincidence, just a random 4 letters, but it’s also possible some guy on the staff of the show stuck it in there. I’m sure they have actual hackers working on the show that know of PLA.

So that’s weird thing #2 that’s happened to me in the past few days. Here’s the post on the 2600 Facebook, where I originally saw it.

These past few years I’ve discovered that anytime anything out of the ordinary happens here, it’s fun to turn on the local Twitter feed and watch everyone freak out about it. So I present to you all…People Who Are Way Too Old To Be Afraid Of Thunder, Being Afraid Of Thunder.

So I’m curious – outside of this weird little bubble I live in where normal weather doesn’t exist, are people really this afraid of thunder? In the places I’ve lived before here, Twitter and Facebook weren’t around yet so I never had much opportunity before to get so much enjoyment out of everyone else’s fear. Good times!

But I don’t, because by this point the water looks like it’s boiling. Imagine a pot of boiling water on the stove, but scale it up to toilet size and add poo. I figure if I hit the flush handle, it’s either going to overflow or spray poo at the ceiling. I’m pretty sure that I’ve fallen asleep and am in a Freddy Krueger dream. You’ll be happy to know, that my poo wasn’t too poo-ey. I mean, it was a healthy poo and not a liquid poo. So that was good at least.

I needed to leave the house to pick up the kids from school (no, that’s not a reverse poo euphemism) so I closed the toilet lid and left. I didn’t see much reason to be late for that since all I could do was helplessly stare at the toilet bowl of boiling water. As I left, I noticed that the pipe on the roof above the bathroom was really noisy. When I got back home, it had stopped. Things were about as I expected. I had a mess to clean up, but it wasn’t too horrifying. Mostly just toilet paper and water and little of it was on the floor.

But yeah, I’m pretty sure I have poltergeists now. Really, what causes that? I’ve lived in dozens of places all over the U.S. and I’ve never had a toilet being boiling before. There was some kind of road work happening about a block away, so I guess they could be responsible. I haven’t talked to my neighbors yet to find out if the same thing happened to them. I haven’t even seen them. Maybe they’re dead. Guess it’s a good thing I left when I did.

In other exciting news around here…Bonecage’s new album features ME leaving creepy voicemails for a girl. It’s the track called Charlie Loves You. Bonecage was also nice enough to record an entire song for PLA, which I’m currently in the process of creating a crowd-sourced music video for. I’m pretty happy about both of those things. Also, I just put a new PLA album out. It’s got all those car ding calls we did from a couple years ago. And I guess that’s it. When poltergeists aren’t trying to murder me, all my life news revolves around internet projects.

I owned a few answering machines of my own when I was a teenager, for the phone line that I’d purchased for my room. Some of them I would return before the 30 day return policy expired, but I did keep a couple of them. The last one I owned before moving out of my parents house was a Panasonic KX-T1450 (the answering machine from the movie Sneakers), which had dual-cassettes and remote access so I could check messages while away from home. The remote access also let me monitor my room using the machine’s microphone and it let me change the outgoing message. I know all that seems pretty useless for a teenager, but coworkers and I sometimes passed the time by creating wacky new messages for my machine from work.

I don’t remember exactly when I discovered the fun of hacking other people’s answering machines, but it had to be at least a year before I moved out of my parents house because I know I was keeping lists of numbers I’d found that connected to machines and I began recognizing brands based on how they behaved and the tone they used. I also began opening up answering machine boxes at Wal-Mart so I could read the instruction books on how their remote access worked and write down default codes if there were any. The first one I hacked was the same model my parents had, which had a 1-digit access code. Yes, a 1-digit access code. After the beep I had to hold down the single-digit code button for at least 2 seconds and then I was in. The machine I hacked had the same code as we did so I probably ended up getting it on the first try.

Some machines didn’t have any options once you got into them. They’d just play the messages and then hang up on you. Others would let you skip messages or speed forward and backwards through them. Deleting a single message was rarely an option, because almost all machines used tapes and you couldn’t delete a message from the middle of a tape. The best machines, though, were the ones that let you change the outgoing message. I’m sure plenty of people were surprised to call a person and hear whatever weirdness I put on the machines of their friends/family. I really don’t remember a lot of what I did on them. The fun part was just figuring out how to get into them.

Most machines had 2 digit codes and they would only recognize the CORRECT tones and they would ignore the wrong ones, so if you could cycle through 0 to 9 fast enough you’d be in. Three-digit machines were a little harder, but not much because of the same reason. You always knew what the last digit of the code was because that was when the machine let you in, so the next time you called, you’d cycle 0 to 9 for the first digit and then press the 2nd digit of the code.

Zak & I probably hacked a record number of answering machines in the city of Roy, New Mexico in 1995. Our goal was to prank every resident in that town, which wasn’t too hard since there were only a few hundred people living there. A lot of people weren’t home, so we hacked a lot of machines and changed a lot of outgoing messages. We probably hacked more machines than talked to people, and then we had a list of all the numbers and the codes to their machines, so we’d call back and do it again a few days later.

What this is all leading up to is my latest weirdness involving my phone obsession. About a month ago I bought a used computer and set up Asterisk/FreePBX on it. This software allows me to run my own telephone PBX system, complete with full IVR capabilities and about any phone feature you can imagine. A few weeks later I bought a couple of Linksys PAP2T phone adapters from eBay, which allows me to connect 4 actual phones to this phone system. And you can probably guess what I’ve hooked into the system.

I’ve connected answering machines to all 4 lines and people from all over the world have been calling in to figure out how to hack them. The machines have been taking calls all day and night for about a week now. I had to open each one of the machines up and disconnect the speakers in them so they would stop waking me up in the middle of the night when people called in. People have been leaving messages of frustration because they can’t figure out how to get into them, but plenty of others are succeeding, erasing messages, changing greetings, and probably monitoring my room because I haven’t disconnected any of the microphones.

I searched a few thrift stores for old machines to plug into the system and I now own a total of 5 old machines. Only one of them uses tape and it’s probably the least-interesting one since there are no options on the remote features, but I’m hoping to add a couple of more tape machines to it. I might not have spend anymore money on machines, though, because a few people have promised to mail their old machines to me. (You can too! Brad Carter, P.O. Box 465, Albany, OR 97321)

Over the weekend a couple of people donated money to PLA, totaling $50 (Thanks, JagTV and Snorlax Security!), so I was able to buy a couple more of the phone adapters from eBay, meaning this weird thing I’ve created will soon have 8 answering machines hooked to it, sitting and waiting for people to break into them. My plan is to stop at 10 machines, but who knows how long that plan will last. If people keep helping out with the project, it could really get out of hand. But I love that people who never got to experience answering machine hacking, either because they never thought to try it out or because they weren’t born yet, are getting to do it now, and in a way that’s completely legal.

The other cool thing is that I have home phone service again, through this Asterisk computer. I’ve hooked one of the lines into our phones downstairs, so we can use the pay phone hanging in our living room, and the phone in our kitchen. We used to have MagicJack for home phone service, but it expired awhile ago and I never bothered renewing it since we all have cell phones and Skype and a few dozen other ways to communicate with people that make more sense than picking up a home phone. I’m tempted to just start wiring phone jacks into every room of the house, and on the porch, and in the bathroom, and the closets, but yeah, I sure won’t do that. Nope, not me.

I’m really excited about the whole project, though. I’ve played around with Asterisk a few times in the past, but I never got as far as actually hooking up physical telephones to it. Around 2009 I set up a system with an incoming number that did a few IVR things, but I gave up because it was constantly crashing, it turned out because of bad RAM in the machine. I’ve got all kinds of plans for this thing, though. Fun stuff, that people calling in will enjoy playing around with. And fun for me, just to play around with this amazing combination of old tech and new tech. So thanks, Asterisk and FreePBX, for creating this completely free software that lets people experience the fun of running their own phone system.

Weeks before that I finished up a song called Free Water, then spent another week making a video for it. I figured simply writing out the lyrics in block letters would be a quick, simple video, but I was wrong. It took a full week of evenings to put it all together. Never doing that one again. Here it is:

I’ve been reading The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury for the first time. I’ve got a few Bradbury books queued up on my Kindle and I plan to read all of them before the year is over. The only thing I’ve ever read by him before is Have Spacesuit, Will Travel and that was a couple years ago. Still hating that I didn’t read tons of science fiction growing up instead of tons of horror. Nice that Ray thinks kids will still be playing “kick the can” far into the future.

A month ago the kids and I went to PAX. Tonight we watched Now You See Me. What else. Oh yeah, there was my crippling Breaking Bad addiction these past few months. People have been telling me for years to watch that TV show, but I never did because a show about meth sounded incredibly boring. But holy crap, was I wrong. I think I watched all 4 seasons in a month. Then the half-season of 5 the following week, just in time for the show to finish up. Then I watched almost all of the episodes again with the kids because they got into it. Best show ever. I’ve never loved (and hated) characters so much.

And now I’m watching Stargate SG-1 for the first time ever. I’m nearly done with season 4, with 6 seasons to go. My entire life revolves around consuming media.

I bought an Android tablet – a Nexus 7. This is my third attempt at owning an Android device. The other two attempts weren’t good at all, but I love being abused so I’m giving it another try. It started off bad with constant crashes and lockups, but then I factory reset it and updated it to the latest version and it’s been relatively stable for the past month. I’m mostly using it to play The Simpsons Tapped Out game, but the main reason I bought it was to use as a soundboard for Madhouse shows, which has worked really well so far.

It’s weird to think about where we’d be technologically today if certain key people from the past had died before they invented amazing things. Like Nikola Tesla, who did amazing stuff with electricity and radio, almost died in a boat on his way to America. And he almost died as a kid of some disease. And his father hated the idea of him being an engineer and wanted him to become a priest instead. If any of those things had happened to Telsa, we might be living in a 1950’s-like world right now. Or we might just now be getting home computers and connecting them to AOL on our dialup modems. All because of one man.

What if Einstein had died as a kid? What would life be like for all of us? Sure, someone would have figured it all out eventually, but how long would it have taken? Would that drag us back another 20 years?

There must be hundreds of amazing minds from the past that died of disease or in wars or their parents forced them to work as a coal miner to support their family instead of learning about quantum mechanics and making mind boggling discoveries that completely change the course of the world. Somebody important died in the past 100 years before they got to show us how to get free energy and flying cars.

At this point in my life, I’m fairly certain that I will never see any truly amazing advances in science. If I live another 30 years, all I’m likely to see is a bunch of neat things like cooler phones and smaller computers and faster networks and a bunch of medical advancements. Which is all great, but I really doubt anything revolutionary is going to happen in my life. It sucks but it’s true. At least I got to see the internet happen and that was a really great thing to live through.

I bet if Doc Brown went 30 years into the future to see what 2015 was like, he’d think his time machine had malfunctioned. “WTF, this can’t be right. Everything is the same!”

I got this email notification today from Meetup, under the completely fictitious name of Chris Tomkinson and for local events on the other side of the country. It took a few minutes to remember why I would have something like this set up, but I finally remembered a certain hilarious Sunday in 2005 where I spent the entire day hacking into accounts and harassing some guy online.

A certain girlfriend of mine was being constantly harassed online by a guy who was in her various circles of friends. He would join any online community she joined and post mean comments on her pictures and on her Livejournal posts. This went on for years and I don’t remember why it started, just that it was annoying to see his mean-spirited posts on everything she did. This guy was actually a relative of hers, so it wasn’t that he was interested in her or anything. The main site he did this on was a photo sharing website that existed years before things like Myspace/Facebook/Flickr/etc came around. As far as I know, there wasn’t a reason for the harassment of this girl. The guy was just nuts or something. He was in his mid-20’s and most of his posts were feces-themed, so that should give you an idea of his character. For the purposes of this story, we’ll call him Jerry.

One day I ask this girl if I can screw with Jerry and she gave me her blessing. I can’t remember if it was a reluctant blessing or not, because she knew about some of the things I’ve done in the past. Shortly after, Jerry decided to throw a party at his house and he used Meetup to organize it. This was the first I’d heard of Meetup and I signed up for an account, just so I could watch his party event. His event included his phone number.

I can’t remember exactly what I said to Jerry and I’m hoping my ex-girlfriend will read this and remind me. I called him late at night, though, and assured him that I would be attending his party. I don’t think I told him my name and I don’t remember what else I said, but soon after that he completely canceled his party because he was so freaked out by my call. I doubt I made any actual threats to him, because that’s just not something I ever do. I guess I’m just really good at being creepy. Me and Girlfriend laughed hysterically about the cancellation. I think all this happened on a Saturday night. It was the next morning when things got crazy.

Jerry was using Sprint PCS as his wireless provider. I happened to know that Sprint PCS was the only wireless company where the service reps could actually look on their screens and SEE a customers password. I was really good at lying to Sprint reps, so it didn’t take much effort for me to get Jerry’s password. Me and Girlfriend used it to log into his Sprint PCS account online and look at the giant list of people he called. It also told us his address information and other things. I can’t remember if we found anything scandalous in his list of dialed numbers.

I decided to try using his Sprint PCS password to log into his Yahoo email. It worked. The photo sharing site where he constantly harassed my girlfriend? Yep, same password. Meetup? Same password. Every single thing he did online used the same password. I scrolled through years of his emails on Yahoo, finding tons of other online services he used and I was able to log into all of them using that same password. This, readers, is exactly why you never ever use the same password on anything.

I spent most of that Sunday alone, getting into all of his accounts and doing hysterically horrible things to Jerry. My girlfriend was busy most of that day, but we’d occasionally call each other and laugh constantly about whatever new things I’d done to Jerry. I locked him out of most of the accounts and had started posting crazy things as him everywhere. On the photo sharing site where he’d been posting nonstop feces jokes on all of Girlfriend’s pictures, I began posting brand new feces jokes on EVERYONE’S pictures. This was a very small photo sharing community, with maybe just a few hundred members, and most of them all knew each other. I really can’t remember if there was much backlash from this community because of my hundreds of posts, but I definitely had fun making them.

He was on the dating site match.com and I had the ability to charge his credit card for another year or so of service through them, but I don’t think Girlfriend would give me clearance to do that. She also wouldn’t allow me to buy $1,000 in phone equipment through his Sprint PCS account and have it shipped to random addresses in bad neighborhoods. Not that I would do things like that anyway. That would be illegal!

Even though this guy had been harassing my girlfriend for years, he didn’t seem to have a problem calling her up and asking if she knew who was harassing him. He suspected that she knew something about it, probably because of all the feces posts I made on the photo site, but Girlfriend played dumb and told him that he was really good at pissing people off and it could be just about anyone doing these things to him. I listened in on one of the calls and he was really upset at everything that was happening to him. He was completely devastated by the loss of all his accounts and on top of that, people were getting pissed at him because of the things I was doing with his accounts.

There are certain days where I can remember laughing nonstop for hours at a time and this event was definitely one of those times. I think that day I probably laughed constantly from morning until bedtime, because of all the crazy things I did to Jerry, then getting to relive them on the phone with Girlfriend. That single Sunday was the end of it. I’m sure I wanted to do a few more things, but was probably discouraged by Girlfriend, either because she felt bad for the guy or because she didn’t want us to get in trouble over it all. Since that day, Jerry has stayed far away from her online. I just looked on Facebook and he’s not even friends with her on there.

There’s a lot to this story that I’m sure I’m forgetting because I’m so old and decrepit. Hopefully ex-girlfriend will make a bunch of corrections and additions for me.

Next day edit: I’m too lazy to go back through this to add/change things, so I’ll just paste the chat log of my ex-girlfriend correcting a few things…

ex-girlfriend: let’s see… i think his phone number was on the [photo sharing site] boards
ex-girlfriend: and you immediately knew it was sprint and got the password
ex-girlfriend: so you got everyone’s contact info and then cancelled the party and had it mass send emails to everyone or something like that
ex-girlfriend: then he said it wasn’t cancelled
ex-girlfriend: and you called him and i think his mom answered or something and i think you actually did threaten him or her
rbcp: no way
rbcp: not me
ex-girlfriend: and she made him cancel the party anyway because you’re nuts
ex-girlfriend: i think you did! like you said you were gonna show up and beat him up or something
rbcp: haha
ex-girlfriend: you may have told his mom that
ex-girlfriend: either way she shut down the party
ex-girlfriend: so he had to recancel it
ex-girlfriend: then you logged on his AIM and spoke to his friends and said terrible things
rbcp: haha
rbcp: i rule
ex-girlfriend: pretending to be him
ex-girlfriend: and you told me all the weird sites he was on
ex-girlfriend: like some yahoo group about chicks with dirty boots on
ex-girlfriend: and you changed his [photo sharing site] profile picture to his picture with ‘PWNED’ on it
ex-girlfriend: and he called me asked me to tell whoever it was to call it off
ex-girlfriend: i was in the middle of studying so i said i didnt have time for that bullshit
ex-girlfriend: and he said “who hates me that much?”
ex-girlfriend: and i said “who doesn’t?”
ex-girlfriend: and he then thought it was this dude greg who was the boyfriend of some chick on [the photo sharing site] and jerry had been mean to him
ex-girlfriend: so he was convinced it was greg
ex-girlfriend: i think he got his accounts back a couple of weeks later but he stayed away from [the photo sharing site]
ex-girlfriend: and yes he’s been out of contact with me since

I can’t believe that so many people are behind this OS when it has so many problems. It’s basically like time traveling back to the late-90’s and dealing with Windows 95/98 constantly crashing. My iPhone never crashed and rarely had to be rebooted. Android lovers can make fun of the iPhone all they want, but at least it WORKS and it’s not frustrating to use.

Besides all the crashing, my phone started overheating really bad and the battery was lasting only a couple of hours, even when I wasn’t using it. When me and the kids were in Seattle for Comicon, I decided to factory wipe the phone in hopes that whatever was causing the problem would stop, so I could keep in touch with the kids at Comicon without having to charge my phone up. I lost all my apps and information, but it fixed the problem. Within a week, though, the overheating and the battery draining was back, and I hadn’t even installed many apps yet so I have no idea what’s causing it. On Friday I mailed my phone to Samsung so they can hopefully fix or replace it. They’ll probably just factory reset it and claim that it’s fixed.

A few days ago I blew $450 on an Android tablet. After installing just a couple of basic, popular apps, CRASH. Various apps crashed throughout the evening and next day. I went to Amazon.com to look up some info on tablets and the entire thing locked up, I assume because of the Flash on the web page. I had to get on my computer to look up the magical button combination to soft-reset it. Within 24 hours I had 2 complete lockups. I used this as my excuse to return the device for a refund, and the AT&T store guy admitted that crashing was a common issue. I use friends Androids and they crash too, doing the most basic things. Why are we all putting up with this?

If anyone reading this is thinking about getting an Android, DON’T! Sure, they do more and look prettier and they’re made by a completely different giant evil corporation, but they suck! Another thing I started to do last week before I mailed my phone in to Samsung was root my phone with CyanogenMod. I’m told that rooting your phone gets rid of a lot of the bloat and makes it more stable, which I’m sure is true, but I was about 12 steps into the billion-step process and I quit, just for the principle of it all. Why should I be putting this much effort into making my cell phone not crash? Even if I didn’t want to deal with learning how to root the phone myself, I have local friends who could easily root my phone and keep it working for me, but screw that. It should just work! Why not just get an iPhone and never have to worry about retarded shit like this again?

Here’s what I did instead. I completely ditched my AT&T wireless plan. At first I attempted to keep the plan turned on by signing up for the $15/month Android tablet data plan, but not only did the Android tablet suck balls, I just couldn’t see the need for even having a tablet. It was neat to play with (all the crashing aside) but I just didn’t NEED it. And I was blowing $450 to keep from being charged the $275 early termination fee, when I’d still end up paying $270 over the next 18 months (plus all kinds of taxes and fees, I’m sure) for the $15/month data plan. When I returned the tablet, I had them just cancel my account. And then I bought a cheap, crappy prepaid phone for $50 and $25 of prepaid credit.

The phone looks like an old Blackberry and it’s capable of email, texting, taking pictures and making phone calls. And a lot more, I’m sure, but it’s all stuff I’ll never use. So now instead of paying $80/month for my Android with texting and unlimited data, I’m paying approximately $8.00 per month. I’m going to have an extra $72/month now to pay bills and have fun with. I never talk on the phone anyway and I was mainly just paying the $80/month so I could check my email or play on Facebook while I was out. Now when I’m standing in a long line at the post office, I’ll have to think of something else to do to avoid talking to people.

I still plan to keep a smartphone of some kind – I’m just not going to pay a subscription for it anymore. I’ll give my Android another try when it returns from Samsung and I really hope the overheating issues stop. It’s a fun little device and it does a lot, but really I don’t even leave the house that often so I can just use my home’s wireless connection to play games and listen to online radio stations.

I’m actually borrowing an iPhone from my friend Jessica this week, just so we can continue playing Drawsomething together while my phone is being repaired. (We’re both really addicted to that game.) She wants me to sell the phone on eBay for her when my phone gets back, but I’m kind of thinking I’ll just buy the iPhone from her. These past few days I’ve filled it up with all of my music and my old iPhone apps and it’s really nice to just have a device that works so flawlessly again.

I’m really loving the idea of not paying $80/month for a phone anymore. Prepaid plans have come a long way since I last looked at them. Prepaid wireless used to be kind of a ripoff, but now the rates actually seem better than a postpaid account. This card that I got with the phone says they have monthly plans for texting – $10/month for 1,000 texts or $20/month for unlimited. AT&T wireless forced me to pay around $40/month BEFORE my texting and data plans, for the 450 minutes that I never came close to using up. They even have a $50/month plan for unlimited talk/text and web. This makes so much more sense. If your cell phone bills are as nuts as mine was, look into some prepaid plans! See if you can save as much money as I am.

April 29th Update: After two weeks, I’m not regretting the decision to ditch my smart phone plan. I’ve been using the iPhone at home just as much as ever and I don’t miss it while I’m away. It’s a little inconvenient sometimes, like today when me and the kids were out and wanted to check movie times, we had to go drive by the theater to see when our movie started. Evie gave me her old GPS unit for her car since she’s got a car with it built in now, so that takes care of that. A lot of times I leave the house now and I don’t even take my cheap prepaid phone with me.

Samsung sent me an email to let me know that the phone was broken and they’re replacing it and it’s been shipped back to me. So maybe I was a bit harsh about my hatred for Android, but I’m still probably going to sell it to help recoup my early termination fee. This prepaid phone of mine lasts about a week without being charged. It’s like magic! I think I might buy a watch soon, so I can be amazed at the batteries that last 7 years.

I ended up shutting down the group because a friend of mine set up her own hiking meetup and I was getting kind of bored with it since I’d already explored all of the woods and we were just going on the same hikes we’d already been on. I introduced a lot of new people to the game of Geocaching. Soon after I killed my hiking group, my friend killed HER hiking group (damn her) so the whole hiking thing just died.

I miss all the weirdos I met there, though. My favorites were Dan, who had this stereotypical Canadian way of speaking (he sounded just like one of the Moose in Brother Bear) and he spent an insane amount of time biking places. And this really old couple, George and Shirley, were a lot of fun to talk to. I usually don’t click well with old people, but those two were awesome. And a bunch of other ones that I’ve completely forgotten by now. I don’t miss hiking at all, but just the odd assortment of people that I met during the hikes and the few strange things that happened during some of them that I don’t even know how to explain here. And it was kind of cool, causing lots of people to wake up early on Saturdays and Sundays just to hang out in the woods.

Last weekend, Evie and I drove around Mount St. Helens which was the first time I’ve seen real snow in several years now. I don’t miss the midwest, but I really miss the awesome snows and the sledding. I need to visit Illinois one of these Christmases and hope they have snow.

Today I went skating for the first time in awhile. Me and the kids drove to Eugene, where my friend Kate told me about the skating rink there a few days earlier. It was lots of fun. Each of us wiped out a few times. I’m good at roller blading until I need to slow down or stop, then things turn bad. Some little kid cut me off and I crashed. Before that, we went to a flea market and I ended up buying a mid-1990’s Motorola flip phone, hoping to use it for nefarious purposes, but instead making this video:

Speaking of videos, I’ve put a lot of them on PLA’s YouTube channel lately. Just this past week, I’ve uploaded one of our pizza shenanigans, where we demonstrated how easy it is to talk pizza employees out of customer data, and another of mine and Evie’s adventures at Target this past Black Friday, where we tricked Target employees into registering our own telephone on their phone network. Both of these videos also demonstrate that I’m a huge jerk. There’s also this video of a lady who hates PLA. I hired her from fiverr.com, which is a site I’ve been completely addicted to for a few weeks now that lets you blow $5 to get people to do ridiculous things. Like this girl who danced around in a dinosaur costume for me.

I went to an improv comedy show on Friday with Kate and Cameron at the Reed Opera House in Salem. I’m only mentioning this so I’ll remember to go back there one of these days and explore the stores and restaurants inside there. The comedy was standard improv stuff and they were really good.

My car stereo got stolen again a couple weeks ago, so I’ve been driving around with a giant glob of duct tape over my back window that was broken out. So far the cheapest replacement window I’ve found is $65, and that’s without the rubber/adhesive stuff that goes under it. I’ve never replaced that type of window before and I’m having a hard time finding YouTube videos or other information on how to do it, so I might end up paying over $200 to just have a shop do it. If anyone reading this has any advice on that, please share! It’s a 2000 Ford Focus hatchback non-door window – it’s just triangle-shaped part in the back. No idea why they broke THAT window since it seems like it’d be hard to reach through that one and get the door unlocked. At least with the door windows those are easy to replace since I’ve done it several times before. So car thieves, please be nice and do that next time. I’m officially giving up on owning a nice stereo.

In other exciting news, our house almost burned down! When the kids and I got home that afternoon, we smelled something burning. I was super proud of both of them for immediately knowing that it smelled exactly like a soldering gun. (I bought them both electronics kits for Christmas.) I Googled the smell and read about how that’s usually what people smell right before their houses burn down. It was less than an hour before smoke started coming out of our electric wall heater and we could see fire behind it. Luckily, it’s all enclosed in metal, so after the rubber insulation burned off the wires, it stopped.

We were at Goodwill a few weeks ago and I spotted the tape recorder in that video. I bought it for $3.00, just to use for making this video, then returned it for a refund. Before you yell at me for being a bad person, you should know that it was broken when I brought it home, so I had to take it apart and fix it. (The belt had slipped off the motor.) So really, Goodwill should be paying me whenever I buy stuff from them just to play with for a few days before I get a refund.

That’s the exact same model of tape recorder my parents bought me one Christmas in the late 70’s or early 80’s. I would assume that I’d somehow come across the actual same tape recorder that I owned as a kid, but my old tape recorder ended up like most electronic items I owned back then – in pieces because I needed to salvage some random part from it. I remember being stealthy about throwing the casing of the tape recorder away because my parents wouldn’t have been happy to see it in pieces. To bring things full circle, the red tape from the video was used in my original tape recorder in the 80’s and still has some 80’s weirdness of mine on it, including a mid-80’s version of What’s Your Bid? and other live radio pranks, and a 1986 recording of me and a girl I babysat for programming my TRS-80 to make prank calls to Dominos and then dancing to hits of the 80’s.

It’s 1:12am and I have to wake up at 7:30 to take the kids to school. I can’t sleep, which is why this post is so long.

“Well if you have a business account, then you can claim expenses for your business!” he tells me, as if this is revolutionary advice that I’d never have thought of myself.

“I already claim expenses for my business,” I tell him. “I don’t need a business name or a business account to do that.” Then he really starts getting into arguing with me, telling me how I should claim fake expenses and how I should buy an entire car and claim it on my tax return, all while taking FOREVER to give me my money so I can leave. He constantly uses “air quotes” as he tells me about all the things I should be claiming on my return and tells me about how his uncle has his own business and does this stuff all the time.

I tell him that I really don’t think it’s a good idea to cheat the IRS. This, of course, starts another argument where he says it’s not cheating, but it’s “getting creative!” or something like that. It was another air quotes term. I couldn’t believe a bank teller was insisting that I cheat on my taxes, though. Sadly, none of the other tellers or employees were nearby, so they didn’t get to witness this weirdo giving me the worst advice ever.

A day or two later I was back in the bank and once again he was the only teller there. He was just as enthusiastic about cheating the IRS this time, but I managed to escape quickly. All I can remember from this conversation is that I should buy 30 flatscreen computer monitors to claim as expenses, or something like that. THIS IS THE GUY THAT HAS ACCESS TO MY MONEY!

I went home and looked up his name on Facebook, finding him easily. If he’d had his uncle listed under the Family section, I probably would have called him up to ask him about all the tax cheating advice that he gives his nephew, but he didn’t so I didn’t look into it further.

Between that and the other tellers trying to hard-sell me stuff every time I go in there, I’ve mostly stopped going inside the bank anymore. At least in the drive-thru I can avoid eye contact and ignore their sales pitches by turning up the radio. Thanks for making an asocial person like me even more asocial, bank!

I tell her no and run back upstairs for my cell phone. I make the call for her, we say our goodbyes and she walks to the business next door. At this point going back to sleep is impossible. Once I’m up, I rarely go back to sleep, so I’ve been quietly hating that lady today as I drink Pepsi to stay awake.

The only reason I’m posting this boring story is because a few hours later, as me and the kids left the house to go to lunch, the blanket is gone. I guess the lady came back and took it. I was too asleep this morning to even wonder why she would ask me if a blanket sitting in my chair was mine. Why would she ask me that? It makes no sense. She knew something about this blanket that I didn’t! I told the kids about it as we walked to lunch and we concluded that the old lady was actually a ghost.

A couple days earlier, in the afternoon, the doorbell rang and I went downstairs to answer it. To get to the door, I have to walk down two flights of stairs and across the house, but I don’t think it really takes me that long to get there. I wasn’t fast enough for these old church people, though, because they were nearly out of the driveway by the time I opened the door. I stood there and watched them as they climbed into their car. When the man looked up and saw me, he waved so I slammed the door and went back upstairs.

Five minutes later, they come back and ring the bell again. Five minutes! What were they doing for five minutes? I sure don’t know. I opened the attic window, leaned out and yelled, “Hey, stop ringing my doorbell and running away!” Both of them looked around in confusion, but didn’t look up and see me. I yelled at them “Satan rules!” and the old lady gave an irritated “Okay” and began walking away. I felt bad so I yelled “I love you!” before shutting the window.

Last year, kids items started showing up on the table by my chairs. One day it was a purple stuffed dragon. About a week later a pair of shoes and toy gun was out there. I left the stuff out there for more than a week, hoping whoever mistakingly brought them by would come back and take them. I ended up giving the dragon to Emily and the shoes to Goodwill. I’m pretty sure a homeless man stole the gun. A neighbor of mine yelled at a homeless man one day because he was at their door, stealing cigarette butts from the ashtray. That’s the day that the gun was missing. This was one of those old toy guns made out of metal and could possibly be mistaken for a real gun since there was no giant orange tip on it. So if a 7-Eleven gets robbed by a homeless person, it might be my fault.

The last weird thing at my door was a sandwich in a ziplock bag, along with an unsigned note telling me that if I didn’t post a picture of myself eating it on Facebook, they would kill my children. This was last week and I’m pretty sure it was a drunken Lisa (friend of mine) and her sister leaving it. I threw it away without eating it and so far my kids are still alive.

The first one was in French and didn’t have a name on it, so I addressed it to “Someone” on the envelope. I was too lazy to paste their short letter into a translator, so I have no idea what I wrote.

The next one I did on post-it notes and faked the lipstick kiss that they requested since I don’t own any lipstick.

And finally, I transcribed some guy’s girly letter to a girl he obviously has the hots for. He requested a unicorn near some trees and mountains. He failed to specify the type of unicorn, though, so I decided to draw a homicidal unicorn who’d just killed a bear.

The project at snailmailmyemail.org seems to be over now, but you can visit their site to look at some of the letters that other people did. It’s too bad because I would have enjoyed doing this kind of thing maybe once or twice a week for the rest of the year.

Yes, in the early 70’s / late 80’s, it was completely acceptable for your teacher to suggest that you give babies GLASS to play with. Of course, it was completely safe, being wrapped up in PAPER. What could possibly go wrong?

So that I wouldn’t have to spend any extra money on a single piece of pipe of perfect length, I bought a coupling and joined two of my old pieces together. I think those are 10″ and 4″ pieces. I also had to buy the 90 degree coupling. Fourteen inches is pretty high for a monitor, but I wanted it to be high enough so that my laptop could sit in front of it. I drilled 4 holes into my desk and tightly secured the pipes.

The plexiglass is looking pretty beat up and I didn’t even bother taking the piece of metal from the top of it. It’s all behind the monitor, so who cares. I had to drill 4 new holes into the plexiglass to mount the monitor on. Most monitors have mounting holes in the back.

Here are a couple shots of the completed project…

It’s the perfect height to have my laptop in front of now, and I have a ton of extra space on my desk. Using a “T” connector for the pipes, it would be easy to add a second monitor on top of the first or beside it. The pipe is strong enough to hold two monitors and I think my pressboard desk would be strong enough to support them both. I could have saved even more space by buying a 4′ or 5′ pipe and mounting it to a stand on the floor. This way is better for me, though, and now I can’t knock over my monitor in drunken accidents. I lose so many monitors that way.

The monitor easily swivels back and forth and I could even turn it vertical if I wanted to. The only downside is that it doesn’t swivel up and down. This isn’t a problem, though, since it’s nearly eye-level for me. If I do add a second monitor on top of it someday, I will probably use a 45 degree connector so that it’s facing down at me.

UPDATE! A few months after building this monitor stand, I added another one next to it. Instead of attaching a 2nd monitor onto a single stand, I just built a second stand next to it, mounted on the desk. Since I’m stupid, the new stand is about an inch lower than the first. It’ll be easy to fix that, someday when I decide not to be lazy anymore.

There’s a rating system, similar to eBay, so you can rate both drivers and passengers with things like “10 STARS, he took me directly to my destination!” or “1 STAR, he drove me into a back alley and molested me!” You’ll be able to set up your account so that you’re only picked up by people who have “x” amount of stars. On a normal day you could stick with 8+ star drivers, but when you’re desperate, you make an exception for any driver available. Same thing with passengers, you can set it up so you’re only alerted to 8+ star passengers so that you don’t get mugged or driven into the middle of a drug deal.

There would be minimal cost to passengers since drivers would already be out on the road, doing whatever it is they do. Maybe drivers could even set their own prices, but ideally this could all be based on some kind of credits system, where you earn credits for picking up passengers and you spend credits for getting rides. That way if you’re both a regular driver and a regular passenger, you might be able to get away with never having to spend any money. For those that only take rides, they could buy credits. Credits could be exchanged with other members of the service, so you could barter credits for goods or services. People would start listing their stuff on Craigslist or eBay with things like, “Dining table for sale. Price: 50 ride credits, or best offer.” Kind of like those existing online bartering services, where you trade stuff/services for stuff/services.

Since this would rely on existing smart phones that everyone already has, there would be no new infrastructure to build. All it would take would be an app on your iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc. And I’m sure we’d work out a system for non-smart phones so that it could all be done via texting or by regular phone calls, like, “Press 1 if your GPS location is ________…”

This could become huge without government approval if an app were made for it for all the major smart phones. By the time government got around to whining that they’re not making any money from it, it would already be such a popular service that they’d have to accommodate the people who use it. Maybe they’d enforce some kind of tax on it, but it’d still be an awesomely cheap way to travel and run errands. Smaller cities would probably love an excuse to ditch their city buses since nobody ever uses them. Enterprising individuals could buy their own vans and make a living from going around and picking people up. Taxi companies would hate all of this and lobby for an end to it, but they would still have a few decades of life left from senior citizens that don’t know how to operate a cell phone.

If something like this existed, I would be both a driver and a rider. I like picking up hitchhikers anyway, and it’d be fun to have random strangers in my car as I drive to the grocery store or up to Salem. And I’d definitely use the service for my regular trips to Portland. That’s a 90 minute drive for me and at current gas prices, it costs me $15 – $20 just to drive to Portland and back. I usually park my car as soon as I get there so I can take the train everywhere. If I could “pay” half of that in credits, that would be awesome. And it would basically be free if I was giving people rides around town all the time. Eventually I would ditch my car if a service like this really took off.

And imagine having the ability to electronically hitch a ride with someone to take you across the country. The app would find people who’ve scheduled a trip to Florida and you could contact them to drop you off in Texas along the way. You wouldn’t have to worry about their car breaking down halfway there, because you’d just use your app to find a ride the rest of the way there from Arizona. You could also ditch that person halfway through the trip because they were annoying or listened to country music. I know people do this already on Craigslist, but this would even better.

In the end, a fairly large chunk of any given city’s population would ditch their cars because the service is so reliable. Even if a tiny percentage of the drivers on the road offered the service from their cars, that would still be a faster way to travel than by bus. Albany’s population is about 50,000 people. What if just 1% of the people offered the service? That’d be 500 rides available throughout the day. Compare that to the half dozen buses we’ve got in Albany, if we even have that many. Even 1/4th of a percent would be huge, compared to current public transportation. And the service could become so popular that we’d end up with a lot more than just 500 cars a day on the road. The government might end up loving the idea so much that they’d offer some kind of incentive for people to utilize the service.

It could go the other way too, though. The government might hate that people suddenly aren’t buying as much gas or paying taxes on their costly car repairs and they’d ban the service. Insurance companies might have issues with people using their cars “commercially.” Taxi companies would surely hate the entire idea and bus companies in big cities would too. But screw all of them! Somebody steal this idea ASAP and make it happen. And when you become rich from the idea, fly to Oregon and buy me a steak dinner.

I’ve posted before about how much I hate being such a slave to my car. Car payments, car repairs, oil changes, GAS, insurance, having to trade in for a new car every 5 – 10 years. That stuff really adds up. I would love having the option to ditch my car forever, and I probably will once my kids are grown up. Ditching your car isn’t an easy thing to do in a medium-sized town like this, though. Maybe by the time I’m ready to do that, someone will steal this idea of mine and we’ll have freelance bus drivers all over the road. Or maybe something like this already exists and I’ve just never heard of it. Hrmmmm, time to go look at my phone’s app store…

Sub7 was amazing. Not only did it have a nice, clean interface, it allowed me to do amazing things to random computer users, like see whatever their webcam could see, listen to their room through their microphone, watch their screen, control their mouse, type on their keyboard, change their Windows themes, open and close their CD tray, make official-looking alert boxes pop up on their screens, play sounds for them to hear, flip their screen upside down, reboot their computer, and so much more. I had a blast with this program for a year or two. I never infected a computer with the server software myself – I just scanned IP ranges that I found from users on IRC and from email headers. Nearly every IP range I scanned would find at least 1 computer to “hack” into.

I was surprised one day when my redneck neighbor Tom told me that he had been doing the exact same thing, finding infected computers and spying on them with Sub7. We became pretty good friends after that and regularly exchanged lists of infected computers with each other. I taught Tom to do more than just spy on users by actually having some FUN with them.

At the time, everyone used either Windows 95 or Windows 98. I created several kinds of “theme” packs for each system and uploaded files whenever I got into a new system. It would change a few of their key system sounds to silly things like farts or other annoying noises. It also changed their startup screen and their shutdown screen. Instead of seeing only the words “Windows 95” on bootup, they would see added text which made it say something like, “A hacker has infected your Windows 95 machine and has complete control over everything you do! Have a nice day!” The shutdown screen displayed something similar. I had other screens that were a little more subtle, but I can’t remember what many of them said. I made at least one set of them that advertised phonelosers.org, thinking it would be great if people started emailing me because phonelosers.org hacked their computer. Surprisingly, these systems wouldn’t usually disappear from my list of infected machines immediately after I uploaded these images. Either they didn’t care or they just didn’t know what to do about it.

I built my collection of mp3 music with Sub7. I think at the time the only way to get pirated music was from Usenet. We didn’t have Napster or Limewire or torrents back then. There were FTP sites and IRC channels to get music from, but I just wasn’t into piracy enough to bother with all that. But when I started finding mp3 files of popular music on peoples’ computers, I began slowly downloading them on my speedy 56k modem. This, of course, slowed down their internet connection to unbearable speeds. Sometimes they would log off in the middle of my download and I would end up with an incomplete song, something I wouldn’t notice until I was listening to music and it would stop playing before the song finished. It was a fun way to build up a music collection though. And it was a really sad thing when I’d find a computer full of mp3 tunes that I really wanted, but they would log off before I could take it all and I’d never find them again.

I won’t even get into all of the personal data I found on peoples computers, but there was a ton of it. I read financial documents, letters to friends and family, diaries and telephone books. I remember reading this incredibly long journal that a guy was writing in Microsoft Word, detailing his sadness and feelings over the divorce he was going through. I popped up a window on his screen one night that looked like a standard Windows alert box, telling him to hang in there and it would all get better soon. I bet he was confused to have his computer try and console him.

I did something to about 10 users in Bend, Oregon that I’m not too proud of. I deleted all of their files. At the time I was involved in a battle with Tannest and she worked at her brother’s Internet Service Provider in Bend. So I would regularly scan the IP ranges for her ISP (BendNet) and when I found an infected one, I would log in and delete pretty much the entire hard drive. I would leave most of the Windows directory intact so that their system wouldn’t actually crash. Then I would pop up an alert box titled BendNet Services. It would read, “You are currently more than 30 days past due on your internet bill. We have removed all of your computer files and will not return them until your bill is paid in full. Thank you for using BendNet internet. -Tannest.” I used her real name, of course. I’m sure she had a tough time convincing the angry users that stormed into her office that they weren’t the ones responsible for deleting all of their files. I seriously felt bad about doing this to people, but the hilarity of pissing off Tannest outweighed the guilt so I kept doing it. After awhile I could never find infected BendNet users anymore, so I always wondered if Tannest started scanning for them herself so she could contact them and fix their machines before I got to them.

I also helped a lot of infected people in my local area. After going through their files and figuring out what their ICQ member number was (Remember when we all used ICQ? Ugh, past, I don’t miss you at all.) I would send them a message on ICQ, using my real account, and explain to them that their machine was infected. I’d direct them to a website that contained a program that would remove Sub7 from their computer so that nobody else could hack them. I made a few local friends by doing this, people that I kept in touch with for years afterward and even met some of them in real life.

I could make a user’s modem dial phone numbers by adding standard modem commands to certain files. A few times I would want to know the identity of a computer that I had access to, but I couldn’t figure it out from their files, so I’d command their modem to hang up from their internet connection and call my home. A look on my caller ID box would give me their identity. Once they logged back on, I would remove my phone number. I could set up their systems to automatically dial any phone number I wanted each time they turned on their computer. It sure was tempting to buy a 1-900 number and make computers all over the country dial my number.

It was fun era of pretending to be a hax0r in the late 90’s and early 00’s and I doubt it’ll ever be so easy again. It’s just too bad that I never used Sub7 to pull any truly epic pranks on anyone. I saw other people post webcam shots of computer users looking thoroughly confused at the weird messages popping up on their computer, but I rarely found computers with webcams attached to them. That’d sure be a fun thing to do today with everyone owning laptops that have built-in webcams and microphones in them.

I brought magazines outside to the pay phone and called directory assistance in the appropriate cities, using my red box to avoid the long distance charges. I took notes in the magazines, writing phone numbers of people related to the case next to their names in the magazine. I bet the people who purchased the magazines were surprised to find their home phone numbers written in there.

I can’t remember exactly what I said to people, but I’m sure I wasn’t entirely creepy about my calls. I mean, I wasn’t all “This is the ghost of ________ _______, and I’m going to haunt you with phone calls!” I’m sure it was still bizarre to get phone calls in the middle of the night about murder and fraud cases. I think I mostly just asked questions about the case to see if I really had the right people, probably posing as a reporter or something.

I still remember this one story about a teenager named Kenneth Glenn Milner, who attempted to murder a bunch of people in his small Texan town. The story was filled with tons of fail, because I don’t think he managed to actually kill anyone. I came across someone with the same last name as him today and suddenly remembered the whole thing, so I Googled his name and found this interview with him.

The end of my job at that particular Circle K ended my hobby of interviewing crime victims in the middle of the night. That is, until 2002 when I started interviewing random people in stories that I saw on Fark. I doubt any of those sound clips on that page still work.

I’m sure Richard Cardo will be noting this entry in his file on me. “Oh, so he has a FASCINATION and a HISTORY with murder!”

I discovered a lot of awesome new music last year, but one artist has really stood out among my favorites and the more I listen to his music the more I like him. That artist is Rappy McRapperson. I think my love for Rappy has gone far beyond just a passing phase at this point. I originally found just 2 tracks of his on some compilation torrent – the Lick Your Own Butthole Party Dance and I’m A Gangster.

Months after being thoroughly amused by those two songs and giving them plenty of airplay on Cacti Radio, I began to crave more. I listened to all of the clips of his music on Amazon, but I was too cheap to pay for them. More months passed, and I eventually found a download link for 8 of his albums. This is when discovered the true brilliance of Rappy McRapperson.

Sure, his songs are funny and they make me laugh, but his music goes way beyond that. His musical style is truly unique and some of the lyrics are amazing. His latest album, For The Kids In Juvenile Detention is a masterpiece from beginning to end and it’s easily my favorite album by Rappy. (That’s his latest solo work, but he’s done an album since then with the frontman for Emergency Pizza Party.) That’s another great thing about Rappy – he’s good friends with all the members of Emergency Pizza Party, which is another band that I happen to really like and I’d discovered them completely separate from Rappy.

Last week I suckered Rappy into giving me his phone number, and after he realized what a huge mistake that was, we made a deal that if he did an interview with me, I would stop screwing with his Sprint wireless account. So here it is! After a 3.5 year hiatus, the Big Beef Bueno podcast is back! And to make up for those 3.5 years that I abandoned my listeners, I’ve made this episode 3 times as long as any of the previous episodes! And as an extra added bonus, the entire episode is filled with Rappy McRapperson’s music and our interview! You can’t go wrong, listening to this…

Eight of his previous albums are available to download for free by clicking on this link. If you like them, you should send no less than $300 to Rappy’s PayPal at mcrapperson AT gmail.com. If you’re not into paying for music, though, consider this amazing investment opportunity… Rappy will draw you blueprints for a spaceship for a mere $10!

Click the Buy Now button to take advantage of that amazing offer!

Rappy writes regularly in his blog at mcrapperson.blogspot.com and occasionally updates his website at rappymcrapperson.com. He also has a YouTube page with lots of homemade videos to his songs and a Facebook. If you’ve ever watched Captain Underpants, you might recognize Rappy’s voice in the theme song:

And here’s one more video of Rappy’s. Go to his YouTube page and watch them all, though.

I’m done with this post for now, but I’m sure I’ll come back and add a little more to it soon. If you want to subscribe to Big Beef Bueno on iTunes, the RSS feed is still notla.com/rss.xml. Subscribe!

We’ve emailed each other occasionally over the past 10 years. He used to call into The Phone Show and it always seemed to be under bizarre circumstances, like he’d be calling from pay phones but connected through weird PBX systems or something like that. Anyway, back in the early 2000’s, the thing I really loved about flamoot was his journaling. He wrote some really incredible stuff on his web site. Very lengthy posts. And of course he couldn’t write down his thoughts on LiveJournal like a normal person. He had to put them on his own weird system where the URL ended in cgi-bin/index.pl because that’s how real hackers do it.

I’m not even going to try and describe how much I loved the stuff he wrote on his page, but there was a ton of it and I read every word. I think I even went back and read a lot of it again when I was finished. It was like reading my favorite book or something. Some of it was just mundane, day-to-day stuff, but then he’d rant about random things and it was just so fascinating to me. His writing really made me admire him a lot.

Of course, his personal server disappeared eventually and all his writing went away with it. I was sort of devastated and I think I asked him about it and he told me he lost it all too. Maybe a crash or something, I don’t know. Years later I found archive.org which archived a huge portion of the internet starting back in the late 90’s. Ever wonder what Google used to look like? Yahoo? CNN? Your own homepage? It’s all on there. His page was missing from it, though. Archive.org missed a lot of sites that weren’t really popular and his didn’t make the cut. Until recently.

Every couple years I’ll remember how awesome Flamoot was and I’ll go looking for his journal on archive.org and it’s never there. But today I was talking to a mutual friend of ours and that reminded me to try again and there it was. This is pretty exciting for me. I’ve read half of it already and I plan to try and read the rest of it tonight. It’s not all there, unfortunately, but my hope is that archive.org will someday have the rest of it up. I think he was writing at least as early as 2000 and that’s probably where all the really intense stuff is. Maybe I can click on some of these links from the 2003 archives and be taken back to then.

This post from December 3rd, 2003 where he’s pushed to awareness of something by the pattern adorning the surface of his bed’s comforter is a perfect example of what I love about his writing. (Just a short excerpt here) “It bears only a vague resemblance to the mini-spirals on my comforter. It does bear a passing resemblance to an “e”. But none of that need mean anything. In those and other numerous recent incidents, the theme of magical numbers, cosmic constants, natural geometry and how they’re all interrelated has come up again and again, unreally often. It hasn’t been ME talking about it — it’s been a series of things I’ve been subjected to which have been RELATED to each other, which are tied to each other with a web of common-sense-defying convenience. I guess my hypothesis is that this is because I’ve been thinking about this stuff lately, or maybe this was just a statistical hiccup and I started thinking about this stuff before it happened as a reaction to a future memory, or like, the backwards time-quake of solving this deep fucking fractal synchronicity period shit. But what’s a statistical hiccup? What the hell kind of weird primal shit-magic fills your life with cosmic constants? Man. So I wonder if it’s gonna stop now, with my bedsheet (which had the Pi tie-in through Graham, remember ^-^). The universe, in conclusion, is an INSANE FUCKING PLACE TO LIVE.”

I’m off now to read some more of his rants and you should too!

Thanks for all this, Snee. And thanks, archive.org, for saving it!

Sunday Update: So what is the elusive Flamoot up to now, you must certainly be asking. He’s been developing some weird game for Linux called telepathic-critterdrug that I don’t fully understand because I don’t ingest nearly enough acid, but you may want to check it out. Here’s a video of what it looks like.

This summer I started working heavily on the project and finally decided to give up the 3rd person story thing since I discovered how much I suck at actual story writing. And this time I didn’t quit until it was finally finished. Around September I started receiving proofs of the book, making corrections and continuing to add content. I used a service called CreateSpace to have the book printed, which is an excellent service for people who are too lame to get published for real. They even put your book on Amazon and make it available to order from real book stores.

At the very last minute, I managed to convince Rob T Firefly to write a foreword for the book and to do some illustrating for a couple of the chapters. Also at the very last minute, I switched from Microsoft Word to OpenOffice since I’d just switched to a Mac. Once I figured out that OpenOffice couldn’t do everything I wanted, I switched again to iWork’s Pages.

Anyway, what I’m getting at is that the book is now available. The PLA Book page has details about what can be found in the book and the PLA Store has all the links you need to buy it, in both book and e-book formats. It contains quite a bit of stuff from my homepage, like the eBay pranks, the travels and a few other things. Then it’s got a ton of stuff from the PLA web site, like call forwarding stunts, cordless phones, Dino, Fred Meyer, Boulder News Frenzy and the Richard Cardo investigation, the McDonald’s Sign Prank, Curtis Lee Jones, PLA history and a lot more. So if you’re the type that likes this kind of thing, maybe you should get a copy of it.

Now I need something new to do with my free time. I have all kinds of new projects ready to work on, but so far all I’ve been doing for the past few months is hanging out on conferences for hours at a time and video Skyping a lot.

ME: type type type type on the phone’s keypad.

THEM: “We have your account pulled up. Please say your house number.”

ME: “819”

THEM “For verification, please enter the last 4 digits of your social security number.”

ME: type type type type!

THEM: “Please tell us why you’re calling today.”

ME: “Cancel my account.”

THEM: “It sounds like you’d like to cancel your account. Is this correct? Please say yes or no.”

ME: “Yes.”

THEM: “Which month and day would you like your account canceled?”

ME: “November 18th.”

THEM: “You said November 18th. Is this correct?”

ME: “Yes.”

THEM: “Please hold for a representative…”

Then a rep. comes on the line, asks for my account number, my address, my SSN and asks why I’m calling. Don’t fall for those automated systems, people! I think they’re there just to make you not realize that you’re actually on hold. At least its not as bad as when AT&T’s system once said to me, “You said yes, is this correct? Please say yes or no.”

I moved into a new home last month. It’s awesome. The rent is super cheap, especially compared to my old place, and its got an extra bedroom. I’m just a few blocks from downtown Albany now, meaning I can walk to the post office, the bank and to lunch. I can go for days at a time without driving my car now. It’s a nice change from being way on the edge of town and having to drive miles to everything. The only downside is that there’s no washer and dryer here, so it’s back to making weekly laundromat trips for me. But I’ve got a plan for hooking up a washer and dryer in this place, if I can get the landlord to go along with it.

I’m sick today. It sucks. I haven’t figured out if I’ve given myself food poisoning with hamburger helper or if it’s just flu stuff. That’s all to report for this month. Good day…

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.

I wrote on Facebook that I used it to steal a kabillion dollars from the phone company back in the day, but I think that estimate might be a little high. So I’m wondering how much I did steal by red boxing calls from pay phones.

To initiate a call, I’d have to deposit about $2.80. Then I’d have to deposit 80 cents every 3 minutes. So that’s 20 times each hour that I’d deposit 80 cents ($16.00), making the total for an hour of red boxing about $18.80. Now that’s just if I placed a call and actually stayed on for an hour, without ever hanging up. And I did that a lot, for hours at a time. But many times my calls would be short, sometimes lasting just a minute or two, but I would make calls one after the other. Let’s say I did THAT for an hour, placing a new call every five minutes – $2.80 x 12 = $33.60.

Hmmm, that still doesn’t sound very impressive. There were times in the early 90’s that I really did spend hours every single day sitting at pay phones and dialing random phone number, party lines, phone company news lines and talking to friends. I red boxed before work, after work and during breaks. At certain jobs, like at Circle K, even during work when there were no customers around. I could have easily spent 5 hours a day at a pay phone, racking up between $94.00 and $168.00 each day. This lasted from 1991 until maybe 1995.

So if I red boxed 5 hours a day for an entire year and averaged only 1 call per hour, I would have stolen $34,310. ($94.00 x 365 days) If I was making short calls lasting about 5 minutes, it would be more like $61,320, but I’ll go with the lower number since I’m sure I took occasional days off. Four straight years of that would be $137,240. This is assuming I only called within the U.S. and Canada, but I did call overseas quite a bit for a while and those calls would take about $8.00 – $15.00 to initiate.

I guess 1994 or 1995 is when I really got into using credit cards and phone cards, though, so my red boxing use went way down after those years since using calling cards was easier and less of a pain since I didn’t have to enter more money every 3 minutes. 1994 was the year I racked up a $15,000 phone bill with GTE while living under a fake name. So I guess I wasted a lot more money without a red box than I did with one.

I was hoping to find out that I red boxed some astronomical amount like $1,000,000, but I guess the most I can possibly claim is $137,240.00.

Speaking of YouTube videos, I’ve been making a lot of them lately since R0xy and Tombstone have been getting me to respond to their vlogs. Here are some of the latest:

The oldest phone in my house

Using an old ATM in Corvallis

My son dancing in a Super Mario costume

Shutting off TVs at PAX

After switching to a Mac recently, I decided to put my old laptop up for sale to help recoup a little of the Mac cost. I received an email almost immediately from a girl named Rebecca and we had this email exchange…

After letting Becca (I can call her that cause we’re tight) know my PayPal email address, she immediately sent me the payment. But, as I expected, this was a Nigerian scam. The payment emailed looked very real, although the color scheme was a little off. Just to be sure, I checked my PayPal account to make sure there really wasn’t an extra $500 in it. There wasn’t. My dreams of receiving a bonus $100 for my old laptop were crushed.

The next day, I found an email from the FBI waiting for me. Except that it was another very obviously fake email.

Stuff like this puts me on the side of the Nigerian scammers. If people in the U.S. aren’t suspicious of free money, PayPal payments that look fake, the absence of a payment in their account, fake emails from PayPal’s FBI department or just Nigerians in general, then they deserve to have their money taken from them. If I hadn’t noticed this was a scam already, then this email would have let me know. I couldn’t believe they’d try to draw attention to themselves like this when a person otherwise might have gone ahead and mailed the laptop out.

I also got another email from Rebecca, accusing me of being a scammer.

At some point during this exchange, someone gave me the idea to mail them a fake laptop for my fake payment. It seemed only fair. I think it was Angela that came up with this, but it’s been so long (over a month!) that I don’t remember. Instead of doing it myself, I told my kids all about Nigerian scammers and asked if they would make me a fake laptop to mail to this guy. Er, I mean girl, because I’m sure she wasn’t lying to me about that.

I cut out pieces of cardboard, using my real laptop to make them the right size. Then Emily and Payton began drawing a laptop on the pieces. Emily quickly got bored with it, but Payton finished it all up, even copying the vents and screw holes on the bottom.

The last picture shows the top of the closed cardboard laptop. For hinges we used black electrical tape. It was Payton’s idea to make the screen show the Google homepage, but I had him write “Nigerian scammers” into the search box.

I shipped it the next morning at the cost of around $9.00, which almost made me feel bad about all the extra money she sent me for shipping. On the customs form, I put the value at $500 and the description said “cardboard art.” I’m not completely sure of this, but I think Nigerians have to pay a small percentage of the value to customs, so putting a high price on the customs form hopefully cost them a little money. Although the post office promised me that it would arrive in about 10 days, I didn’t hear back from Becca until this morning. As I was eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes, she begins messaging me.

9:25 AM: rebecca: you are stupid for what you did
9:26 AM: rebecca: you are crazy
9:27 AM: me: why do you think that?
9:27 AM: rebecca: what did you ship to my boss
9:28 AM: me: a Dell laptop, just like you ordered
9:28 AM: rebecca: is that a laptop
9:28 AM: me: of course
9:29 AM: rebecca: ypou are crazy
9:30 AM: me: what are you talking about? did the laptop not work?
9:32 AM: me: please tell me what’s wrong with it
9:35 AM: rebecca: suck my divck
9:35 AM: me: what’s a divck?
10:08 AM: me: please don’t be mad at me
10:18 AM: me: helllloooo?
10:18 AM: me: talk to me rebecca!

Soon after that chat, she tried to voice chat with me on Google, but I couldn’t do that since I was on the phone. I’ve tried talking to her a few more times, but she refuses to answer me now.

3:30 PM: me: sorry i can’t voice chat with you. i don’t have a microphone
3:32 PM: me: i really would like to work out any problems you might have with the laptop though
3:33 PM: me: maybe you could turn it on and i could help you troubleshoot from here
3:37 PM: me: let me know when you’re there and we’ll get started
3:48 PM: me: are you ready to troubleshoot yet, rebecca?

So that’s about it. Tee hee! Interesting that she said she has a boss. Guess she’s just a minion that does the scamming since she’s so good with her people skills and it gets sent to the boss. Kind of like a pimp/ho relationship. I’ll keep trying to chat with her and append anything else that happens to this post, but I doubt she’ll say anything more to me.

2 years later update: Jesus, people, I know this scammer was from Nigeria because I SENT THE PACKAGE TO NIGERIA. Quit accusing me of being racist and hating all Nigerians and teaching my kids to stereotype.

(It appears that his ability to construct sentences was stolen too!)

Brad Carter: bummer
Robert Spuds Holloway: I was attacked returning from the mall back to the hotel room,i was hurt on my right hand, but would be fine
Robert Spuds Holloway: sucks and scary!
Brad Carter: i bet. what are you doing in london?
Robert Spuds Holloway: on a short vacation
Brad Carter: with brenda?
Robert Spuds Holloway: It was a Brutal Experience but Thank GOD i still have my life and passport
Brad Carter: yep that’s a good thing. is brenda there with you?
Robert Spuds Holloway: yes

(Oh weird, Spuds doesn’t know anyone named Brenda…)

Robert Spuds Holloway: the police are investigating it but nothing came up yet
Brad Carter: good thing they didn’t mug her too
Robert Spuds Holloway: she was hit on her head
Brad Carter: oh, well thank god for that metal plate in her head
Robert Spuds Holloway: my return flight leaves in few hours but having troubles sorting out the hotel bills
Robert Spuds Holloway: I need your help
Brad Carter: just ditch the hotel man. just like we did in orlando that time!
Robert Spuds Holloway: wondering if you could loan me some money to sort out the hotel bills and also take a cab to the airport?
Robert Spuds Holloway: I will definitely refund it back tomorrow
Brad Carter: no way, you already owe me five bucks for lunch from last year
Brad Carter: not until you pay that back
Brad Carter: but i can still help you out
Brad Carter: i know this guy in stonebridge that will loan you a gun. he’s a drug dealer
Brad Carter: get a cab to stonebridge and i’ll give you the address
Brad Carter: you can use the gun to rob a store so you’ll have the money
Brad Carter: you’ll need to return the gun before you come back to the states though

Robert Spuds Holloway disconnected 11:57

We failed a Geocaching repeatedly, even on one Geocache that I’d found before. We swapped a few iPhone apps and I’m now addicted to a game called Angry Birds. As if Desktop Defender doesn’t eat up enough of my time. Thanks, Jammie. We visited Albany’s history museum, which is always good for a laugh. We also visited a furniture store across the street from the museum and this place was like a wax museum of celebrities. They had a Terminator and a Charlie Chaplin and a Hulk Hogan. Jammie asked what was up with them all, and we were told that the building was once used to make life-sized characters and a lot of them got left behind when they took over the building. Weird. But awesome.

We visited the carousel place and a couple antique shops. I ended up finding a good item to place in a Geocache as a PLA themed travel bug. We rode bikes and hiked through the woods, failing at another Geocache. Played minigolf. Jammie surprised me by telling me she hadn’t heard of the “Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work??” internet meme yet, so I showed her all the related material and got to watch her laugh hysterically at a months-old meme.

We had our traditional dinner at Red Robin with kcochran and Chad, then went to Game Time and played darts. Attempted some android red boxing and failed. Attempted some 11pm minigolf and failed. A day or two later, kcochran and Chad came over and we all did The Phone Show together. (Episode here.)

On Wednesday, we had breakfast at Rogers and I drove Jammie back to the airport, with a brief stop at Fry’s Electronics. The end.

On Friday, we had to put our cat Charcoal to sleep. He’s been having issues the past couple weeks and on Friday we were told he had irreparable liver damage. The kids were at their moms that day, so I picked them up for a few hours so they could say their goodbyes. Charcoal seemed really happy that entire day, hanging out with Emily on the chair while she played on her laptop and purring a ton. It was great to see him seeming so happy, but just made me feel more guilty for what I had to do. I stayed with him until he was gone. Saddest day ever.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

I’ve been up to a lot lately. So much that I haven’t really written much. Most of it’s all revolved around Evie. We went to Bend for a weekend and I’ve been hanging out in Portland a lot lately. Went to the coast a few weeks ago. Took the kids to Wunderland in Portland, which was much cooler than the one in Salem. It’s been a month now since I’ve written much in here, aside from silly Ebay happenings. A lot has happened. But who cares about all that. Instead I’ll write about Linux!

I’ve been wanting to attempt a transition to Linux for years now. It seems like I try every 1 or 2 years for the past 10 years, but there’s always something keeping me from using it 24/7. When I bought this laptop in 2007, I actually had them ship it with Ubuntu on it, which I turned into a dual-boot, which I eventually just wiped Linux off of. This past weekend, I made more of an effort than usual, but I think it’s going to end up being another failed attempt.

It’s not that I have troubles adapting to it. I’ve used it off and on for years now. I like Linux and wish I could completely ditch Windows for it. The problem is the software. Looking at the selection of software for linux is like time traveling back to the 1980’s. Remember those old ads for Commodore 64 and Tandy computers where they’re like, “You can manage all your finances on your new home computer! The kids can play games and do their homework on our word processing software!” It’s kind of like that. You would never dare balance your checkbook on a TRS-80. Everything for linux is in beta or on version 1. You look at the revision lists and they say things like “Version 1.18 has 500 bug fixes!” which makes you think, “Holy crap, their software was THAT terrible just a tenth of a version ago?”

Well okay, fine, Open Office is pretty nice and wasn’t really around last time I gave this a try. But I NEED invoicing software and I can’t do without it. Currently I use Quickbooks for Windows. Guess what the big invoicing software package for Linux is called. Business Accountz. Yes, with a Z. It’s like some retarded junior high kid named it. I’m supposed to trust my business to a software package that can’t even spell right. I could overlook that if the program didn’t completely suck, but it does. I’ve spent hours looking for alternatives, but there doesn’t seem to be any. I could use Quickbooks via the web for $10/month. But that just means I’m paying $120/year for Linux.

The latest iTunes doesn’t work yet under Wine. And I can’t seem to get Evolution to sync to Google so that I can sync that with my iPhone instead. Even if I could, it’s not going to sync my notes which are very important to me to have both on the computer and on my iPhone. All these issues just lead me to wonder why I should even bother changing when Windows does everything flawlessly. It’d make more sense to switch to a Mac. Or just stay with Windows. I’m going to keep working on things and see if I can come up with acceptable compromises, but I don’t have my hopes up too much.

On the upside of all my playing around with my laptop this past week, issues with dual-booting forced me to upgrade my 10-year-old Windows XP OS to Windows 7. And wow, Windows 7 kicks ass. I’ve been using it for a week now and it’s great. So many issues have been addressed. Thanks, Linux, for helping me to discover the latest version of Windows!

In other breaking news…I’m downloading the entire Black Sabbath discography. That might be fun to listen to, but I predict that I’ll get sick of them after a couple of hours. Also, Kick Ass comes out this week. I can’t wait. I’m gonna see it at least twice – once with Jessica and once with the kids. It’s going to be the most amazing movie since Mystery Team. I’m also attempting to watch the entire 7 seasons of Star Trek TNG. I’m 19 episodes into season 1 now.

I started small, but quickly advanced to having huge things like couches and refrigerators and other huge appliances sent over. As my mom and I stood in line, waiting for our turn to check out, I was in silent hysterics as I surveyed all the items sitting behind the counter waiting for pick up that I was responsible for. Sometimes I would have so many huge items sent that walking space behind the counter would be scarce for the employees. If I ordered 5 couches, they would almost always sent out 5 couches.

The other awesome part of this was that they would eventually page the names I used over the store intercom. I started out using random character names from books that I liked. Hearing them say “Harriet Tubman, your order is ready in the pick up area.” was hilarious enough. But soon I started making up wacky names for them to say. I went through a phase of using names of illnesses so that they would end up paging Mrs. Amneisia or Mr. Cancer to the pick up area. Then I just started putting nonsense into the fields. I remember one I wrote was Mrs. Teetertotter, which caused a lady to announce over the store’s paging system that a child was playing with the computer terminals and that employees should be on the lookout for them.

I got to relive some childhood memories in 1992 when me and Sylvia lived in Los Angeles and were walking around and found a Service Merchandise. I was happy to see that they still had the computer terminal system in place, so we placed several orders for the largest items we could find. I remember a getting a complete living room set and some large kitchen appliances, such as a fridge and a stove. Their pick up area was much smaller than the old one in St. Louis, so the employees were pretty cramped back there, waiting for customers to come and get their giant items.

I saw my last Service Merchandise in 1994 in Austin, Texas. Their computer terminals there were slightly updated and had credit card readers on them. I taped some strips of cassette tape around my drivers license and tried sliding it through the reader, hoping that it would cause an error and let me enter one of my hundreds of stolen credit card numbers manually. I don’t know why I thought that would work, but at least I tried. Soon after that, I used a stolen money order at that same store to purchase a police scanner. It was in the days when you could buy unblocked 800/900MHz scanners, which I used for years afterwards for all kinds of phone fun, including the Dino incident that happened a year later.

Ahhh, good times with Service Merchandise…

Should I purchase this harddrive, can I trust that you’d ship it in a protective manner at to not let it get damaged should someone drop the package?

I replied back with this:

I don’t plan to package the drive at all. Instead I’m just going to write your name and address on it with a sharpie and put a stamp right on the drive. I’ll probably throw it into the mail slot at the post office from across the room, yelling “SCORE!” as it goes in. Once you receive the drive I will leave you scathing feedback that will hurt your feelings.

I set it as a public question/answer so all potential buyers could see it. Somehow I still sold the drive. He replied back with, “Thank you for your honesty.” I love eBay.

From Douglas Frank:
Hey Brad these pins that I bought are these issued by Illinois deer harvest or did someone make this up to look like the original pins these are much smaller if so i would like to send these back for a refund let me know please thanks Doug

From Brad Carter:
Hi Doug. Yes, those are replicas. It was stated very clearly in the auction that they were replicas. The first thing written in the auction was this:

“This auction is for REPLICAS of the 4 Deer Harvest pinback buttons
that you see in the picture. They are each approximately 1″ in
diameter. The original deer harvest buttons are 1.5″, I believe. So
there is a small difference between the sizes of my replicas and the
originals. Please keep this in mind when bidding.”

Also, the auction listing details showed that returns are not accepted. This was written right below the price and shipping cost.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=180471029210

From Douglas Frank:
sounds like your willing to lose a future customer for 10.00 dollars or are willing to work with me I guess buyer beware with you

From Brad Carter:
Buyer beware? What have I done wrong? The items and the return policy were exactly as described.

From Douglas Frank:
I got just the answer I thought I was going to get have a nice day.

From Brad Carter:
Good luck learning to read auctions descriptions before you buy things. Sorry you don’t know how to shoot a deer and have to resort to buying replica pins on the internet. :)

From Douglas Frank:
Good luck with your pins ive filed a complaint with Ebay and thanks for you last comment because they asked me to forword all trans actions to them . By the way I wasnt old enough in 78 to hunt bunt since I became old enough I know I have shot bigger deer in my life then you will ever shoot thanks for showing me that you sound like your still in middle school with your adult comments good luck with Ebay……………

From Brad Carter:
A complaint about an auction where I sold you exactly what was described and followed the return policy. Makes perfect sense and I’m sure they’ll take you seriously. You should spend less time shooting deer and more time learning to read auction descriptions before you blow $10 on worthless crap. Please forward this email for me too, sexy.

From Douglas Frank:
your Id phoneloser fits you perfect for selling worthless crap on ebay and i wont stoop to your level because I am not your type I like woman not men(sexy) in tour comments

From Brad Carter:
Your spelling and punctuation skills are atrocious. The more you email me the more I can understand why you were unable to comprehend the simple few lines of my item description. From now on, get a friend or family member to read auctions to you before bidding. I might refund your $10 only if you’ll promise me that you’ll put the money towards classes at your community college and not towards chewing tobacco or Nascar memorabilia.

Yours heterosexually,
Brad

From Douglas Frank:
Brad you must be a teacher , so are willing to settle this like a gentleman. I will be glad to send these pins back to you asap and I will quit buying chew.but you may want to look in your own closet see (subject) pins not pinsed so back to school for both of us so whats your decisions

(This is weird, because the original subject line was “pins” but then HE changed it to “pinsed” several emails ago and is now trying to blame me on that misspelling.)

From Brad Carter:
I was going to, but then you made fun of me, so no. I’m off to cry in my pillow now. I’ll probably lose sleep tonight, knowing that Ebay will surely shut off my account for following their policies so well. You win this round, buyer!

From Douglas Frank:
I had already new your answer was no because theres men and then theres boys in this world and with boys that still cry on there pillows there mommy still wipes there a– to, just this email was worth the 10.00 to me good luck selling worthless crap hope you raise your children to treat people in life then you do !

From Brad Carter:
You should have already “new” my answer when you read the item description. It would have saved you a lot of time. So now you’re pretending that you’re bigger than me by just dropping it when before you were pretending that you’re reporting me to Ebay. Wonder what you’ll pretend to do next. I bet you’ll pretend to shoot deer by showing off your cheap knockoff buttons to your friends.

From Douglas Frank:
So mature ,I bet your wife likes it when talk stupid in your own little pretend world so have a nice life .I think we became freinds if Im ever in Or ill be sure to look you up.

From Brad Carter:
I think it’s hilarious that you’re trying so hard now to capitalize/punctuate/spell correctly just to impress me and you’re still failing at it.

———–

That was the end of it as of a couple weeks ago. But I just emailed him again with this: “Hey Douglas! Remember that time you vowed to get my Ebay account shut down, but then it never happened? Those were good times.”

If he starts replying again, I’ll append our emails here.

March 13th, 2010 UPDATE: He replied back! Here’s his response:

From Douglas Frank:
May are paths never cross because you will lose and thats one promise I will keep so when you visit Chicago write me be glad to meet with you.

From Brad Carter:
You’re going to beat me up? I hope you do it yourself, unlike the way you pretend that you know how to shoot deer. You’ll probably get someone else to beat me up for you, then tell everyone that you did it. Like you do with deer killing.

I can only assume my first attempt at helping out worked, because the car was gone about 24 hours later. It might have had something to do with the cops ticketing their cars too since apparently it’s illegal to park your car there. People do it all the time, though, so I’m sure I’ll have plenty more opportunities to try and help out.

I think Thursday might have been the same night that I came up with the brilliant idea of stalking Foursquare users. Foursquare is a service that lets you use your cell phone to “check in” everywhere you go. It annoys your friends on Twitter and Facebook by posting your check in updates. Like “LOOK AT ME EVERYBODY, I JUST ARRIVED AT ROY’S TAVERN!” I tried it out since I’m addicted to social networking sites and my first thought was, “Wow, this is stupid to check into places because the type of people I know are the type of people to call these businesses and have them page me.” It’s happened to me plenty of times before, long before Foursquare existed.

So I started calling up places around the country that people check in to and having the Foursquare users paged so I could say silly things to them. I recorded the calls and they can be heard at www.phonelosers.org/stalker/. My favorites are I’m From The Future and Red Cross Telemarketing. There’s now a board on the PLA Forums dedicated to calling up Foursquare users. Several bloggers have written giant, complainy posts about my calls, one of them vowing to shut down the PLA forever. It’s been a lot of fun so far.

I went to Chasers later to tell Jessica and Anne about all my craziness that night. I still had the window paint in my pocket, so I ended up writing on a few more car windows as we left. The van outside the bar got FOUR SAIL on it.

FRIDAY we went to Geeky Karaoke in Portland again. This time it was me, Jessica and Kelsie. Me and Jessica started drawing on each other and soon the half the tables were drawing all over each other. Here’s the Facebook album. We sang My Own Worst Enemy and Don’t Stop Believin’. Both times we were introduced as Roy Gerbil and The Atlantas. On the drive home we kept stopping and writing on car windows. We wrote random, crazy things and then we wrote FOR SALE on a few along with my phone number, hoping the angry owners would call and yell at me for trying to sell their car. Turns out I can’t remember my phone number when I’m drunk though, so we accidentally put someone else’s number on them.

Saturday the kids and I went biking/geocaching. We went about 5 miles and found 3 or 4 geocaches. I think Sunday we hung around the house all day. Looks like awesome weather tomorrow so we’ll probably do some more of that.

Somewhere in between all this, the kids and I went to see The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus at Corvallis’ Darkside movie theater. It was our first time visiting that place. A very cool and bizarre independent theater. And the movie was nuts.

This past weekend, Angela and I went to some weird photography event in Salem. About 60 people showed up and our orders were to walk all over downtown Salem and take as many pictures as possible. We only took a few before quitting and just browsing random stores, geocaching and eating in a downtown bar. Then we went to a film festival at Northern Lights. It was like paying $3.00 each to watch YouTube videos. I’m not complaining, because we had a good time there, but the movies were pretty bad. They were fun to make fun of though.

On Tuesday, Evilgold and Evie visited me. They were passing through Albany on their way to Portland from California and timed it so they could do The Phone Show with me. That was a lot of fun. Apparently they stole my porch light before they left.

On Wednesday I met Cecelia and we went to Salem for a flash mob, but we were late and didn’t make it to the mob. Missed it by about 10 minutes. It was a pretty lame flash mob, though, involving about 100 people singing Singing In The Rain. It wasn’t even raining. Salem was more active than I’d ever seen it before – I guess it’s an event they do every week or month. We did a little downtown geocaching, had some food and just walked around a lot. I checked into the bar we went to on Foursquare, just to see if anyone from the PLA would call me. Apparently someone tried, but they we’d already left.

Tonight should be fun. I’m going to 2600 in Portland. Evilgold and Evie will be there. A guy who calls The Phone Show a lot will also be there, since I owe him some buttons and stickers from the game show he won. After 2600, we’re going to attempt to do some Foursquare stalking in person. Surbo and me came up with an idea to turn this into a game, where we drive to a place that a person checks into, find the person and confirm with them that they’re the Foursquare user. Kind of a combination of Foursquare and Geocaching. I’m not sure if people will like being found or if I’ll get punched in the face a lot, but I’m sure it’ll be a great time either way.

A year or two back, I’d written a text file explaining ways of pissing off 7-Eleven employees for the PLA zine (You can view it here.) and I thought the sysop (his name was Kevin) might enjoy it. After all, I wrote it mostly while working in a 7-Eleven in and it started out as a list of things customers did to piss me off. Then I started writing about things customers could do to piss me off. Then I just started making up crazy stuff near the end. So I uploaded the text file to Kevin’s BBS. He didn’t like it. In fact, he deleted my account on the BBS and he called the police. He took the text file as a personal threat against him. I think it was a few days later that the police called me to ask me about it. They told me to leave Kevin alone and as far as I can remember, I did.

Soon after that we started getting hang up calls at our house. Usually just one a day. Sometimes I would answer and sometimes Colleen. They always hung up. At first we ignored it, but it kept happening every day, so we checked the caller ID and it was a local number. I tried calling it back, but didn’t get an answer. I don’t think our caller ID box displayed the name of the caller, so I called up the phone company and got them to tell me the name belonging to that number. It was Kevin! It’d been a week or two since the BBS thing happened and I wasn’t bothering him, but for some reason he was calling up my house every day.

So this was bizarre. We didn’t know why Kevin would be doing this. It turned out that he was married, so it might have been his wife and not him. He later claimed that he’d never called our house before, so it could have been her too. This was back in PLA’s prime, and I loved bizarre phone-related drama like this, so I was excited to find out that these hang up calls were an attempt to harass me since that gave me a great reason to retaliate. Later that evening, I gave Kevin a call and talked to him. I dialed him after diverting through AT&T, using a stolen credit card number so he wouldn’t get my caller ID. I don’t remember what all we said, but I remember lots of disagreeing happening. He denied the hangup calls and so did his wife. And he actually asked how I could be calling from a local number and not have my number show up on his caller ID display.

Originally I figured he hadn’t even heard of caller ID (it was sort of new at the time) and that’s why they wouldn’t bother blocking their number when they called. But he clearly knew what it was. We theorized that maybe they were hoping to get us to call them back a lot so they could *57 (trace) us and get us in trouble with the police. That’s probably a stupid theory, but who knows what these people were thinking.

I honestly don’t remember what all I did to Kevin and his wife since it all happened 14 years ago. I do remember one afternoon, I was sitting out on the porch and a couple of girls came up the sidewalk and asked if I was Alex. I said yeah and one of them told me she was Kevin’s wife and wanted to know what my problem was. I don’t remember exactly how that conversation went either, but they left peacefully. Whatever I was doing to them caused her to come and visit me in person, though, so that’s saying something about the effectiveness of my harassment.

Another time I was working at Target and Kevin’s wife happened to come into my checkout lane. I didn’t recognize her until she wrote and check and I read the name on the check. I said hi and we chatted for a minute and were friendly to each other. Then after she walked away, I wrote down all the personal information from her check, figuring I could do something horrible with it. I never got around to it though. (I’m not just saying that to protect the guilty, I really didn’t!)

I’m sure I must have been harassing them in some way throughout our stay in Albany, though, because I remember that during the time of our trip from Oregon to Ohio, they flooded my homepage’s guestbook a lot. Also Kevin’s wife called me in Ohio once and yelled at me for something. I’m sure it all ended soon after that, though, because I haven’t thought about either of them at all since we left Ohio. Whatever, details are sketchy.

This brings me up to the reason I’m writing this. This morning on Facebook, my feed tells me that my friend Jessica and Kevin are now Facebook friends. I wonder if it could possibly be the Kevin I once knew. So I clicked on his profile and sure enough it’s him. In fact, I’m surprised to see that he’s still working at 7-Eleven – the one just a couple of blocks from my house that I go to just about every day. Jessica told me that she worked with Kevin and his wife briefly at an Albany event. So I LOL’ed a lot as I told her my story of Kevin.

After looking at the photos on Kevin’s Facebook page, I realized that I’d actually seen him a few times there and he even rang me up once a few months ago. He kept screwing up on the register and apologizing to me, saying he wasn’t used to being on the register these days. I smiled and said it was no problem, that I wasn’t in a hurry. I wonder now if I was wearing a PLA shirt that day. That was my first time ever meeting Kevin, so I doubt he recognized me. I’ll have to say hi to him next time I see him and maybe we can reminesce together.

And here’s where it all comes full circle. Last year Spessa and I had the great idea of turning that old issue of PLA into a video by actually performing the things on the list that pissed off Kevin so much. So we did, and one of the items were done in Kevin’s store. Not by me, but by Mr. Spessa. (I’m only mentioning this so that when Kevin reads this, he’ll be less likely to try and ban me from the premises.) So it’s possible that Kevin actually had to mop up after our shenanigans. Sorry, Kevin

I’m going to pretend that each day Kevin goes to work and sees the new Red Box machine on the sidewalk and it reminds him of his old nemesis RedBoxChiliPepper.

Rich or poor, every living space in America is nearly identical. Probably in every other country too, just with subtle changes, like up in Canada all this stuff is in their igloos. Even those movie stars and musicians on MTV Cribs all live in identical places, and they have the money to do anything they want. Sure, they’ve got pools and mixing booths and giant garages for their exotic car collections, but aside from that there’s really not much difference. Seems like someone could come up with a radically different way to live by now.

I’m cheering for the death of music stores, newspapers and the post office too. I would love for the entire postal system to just crumble, leaving us all without U.S. mail. UPS and FedEx would figure out ways to take over for us since they actually know how to run a business. I think it’s hilarious that magazines are clinging on for deal life, hoping that the Kindle and iPad will save their outdated print formats when we all just read blogs everyday instead of month-old magazines. Die, corporate scum! And welcome, new corporate scum, good to have you here!

Spessa gave me a new digital camera yesterday and I’m taking it apart right now to clean it. It was a mess. She got it used from somebody. I’m glad not to be cameraless anymore. Thanks, Spessa!

Roxy started up a new website called amuseyou.net and she stupidly trusts me with full access to the admin functions there. I changed the site’s theme and made a header for it and even posted an article on it. I’m going to build up her trust for awhile, then suddenly wipe out her site and replace it with goatse or tub girl. She’ll never see it coming. Until then, everyone reading this should go read the stories at amuseyou.net. Because they’re amusing.

The kids and I have been playing the new Super Mario for Wii nonstop for weeks now. I got it for them for Christmas. I’ve always kind of resented owning a Wii, thinking it was pointless and a waste of money. I got it for free a few years ago and I was originally just going to sell it on Ebay for money, but a friend convinced me to keep it. It’s free, so good deal, right? Not really. I’ve blown so much money on extra Wiimotes and games and Wii Points and other accessories. And the games are rarely that great. I look at all the stuff we have for it and think how it could have been better spent on our Xbox 360. Not that I even play any games without the kids, so why should I care. Anyway, Super Mario for Wii has given me a change of heart. I love that game and we’ve had a lot of fun beating it and we’re still having fun, doing extra stuff on all the levels now.

Remember a few posts back I ranted about how much I loved Yelp? I still love them, but they deleted my review of Target. Check out this letter I got from them.

Hi Arbie,

We hope you will continue to provide great reviews, while keeping in mind our Review Guidelines. See you on Yelp!

I knew that would happen. At least they kept up my review where I talked about hitting on the 16-year-old girl at Arby’s. I pasted the Target review they deleted to Roxy’s new site.

Alot’s happened in the past couple weeks. A spelled “a lot” like that just to annoy Spessa. I post all my crap on Facebook now. I remember last weekend the kids and I went bowling. Then we went to Jessica’s to eat her food. Work has been busy lately so I’m really behind on all my important blog reading. I’m going to paste stuff from Facebook now.

I got this email from someone and I thought it was kind of cool: “Hi Brad, I was wondering if you could do me a favor. My fiance passed a little over a year ago and she left our voice mail greeting. I would like to know if you could send me a recoding in WAV and MP3 format if possible. I would appreciate this very much. The number is 856-….”

So I hacked into his voicemail and deleted her greeting. Then I sent him an mp3 of a chimpanzee screeching. Okay, just kidding, I sent him an mp3 file of her voice. I even put the mp3 in an editor and brought up the voice levels for him. He wrote me back: “”They are perfect; thank you very much. I do not have any real skills with the exception of financial analysis but if you need that or anything done in the South Jersey area I owe you one.”

Even better is this email that I got a few days before that one. “Brad – I told my friends about your food coloring prank an before school we booby trapped the phone an railings, an we were calling the pay phone luckly enough people curiously picked it up an not to many people were happy with blue food coloring on there spirt week costumes thanks for posting that!” He’s referring to my old food coloring prank from high school, which you can read about on this page. I’m so proud that my shenanigans from 20 years ago are ruining kids clothing still today.

The same guy sent me a video of another prank from that page where he replicated the prank where I put a note on a classroom door, telling students to meet for class in another room. Only he actually videotaped the class hanging out in an empty auditorium, waiting for the teacher. Here is the video of it.

Not many interesting things have happened to me yet this decade. Last week, Snopes disproved my fake ATM stickers. Here’s the link to it. I think it’s great that someone was worried about it. They posted a picture of one they found with the message, “This is so scary. If true, it may be a warning sign about freedom in America.” I bet they’re disappointed that the sticker is fake since it means they can’t be upset at the government. As a result, signhacker.com has been getting a lot of new subscribers and comments.

Last night Jessica and I drove 90 minutes to Portland, just to see a movie at the Hollywood theater. I’ve been waiting to see Mystery Team (trailer here and here) for over a year now. It was even better than I expected. Funniest movie I’ve seen in a really long time. There was even a Q&A afterwards with a couple of the creators of the movie. One of them was Duncan, the boy genius! If I didn’t have my kids this weekend, I’d probably attempt to drag another friend or two to see it. Unfortunately it’s not kid-friendly enough to take my kids to it.

I noticed a friend on Facebook this week joined a group called Geeky Oregon so I joined it too. Last night after the movie, we went to a Geeky Oregon event, which was a karaoke bar. The karaoke was the most messed up karaoke I’ve ever heard. A few Jonathan Coulton songs, Rick Astley and songs from various Disney movies like Little Mermaid and Aladdin. I even sang an re: Your Brains duet with Nate. Me and Jessica kept turning off the karaoke TV with my keychain remote during peoples songs. They eventually rolled out an old 80’s TV to replace it which was impervious to my remote. www.geekyoregon.com

I think that’s about it for this year so far. Not sure what me and the kids are gonna do today. It’s sort of nice out, so maybe we can do some Geocaching. It’s been awhile since we’ve done any of that. But first, time to go watch my last episode of Lost.

This is a picture of Yelp running on my iPhone, pointed in the direction of Albany so that it shows me a few restaurants and other businesses down the road. It’s a really neat application that shows you user-submitted reviews of businesses, parks and anything else. It’ll come in really handy when we’re walking around big cities and need to find our way to places. For that kind of thing it’s a much better application than regular maps, mainly because you can point your camera at a group of buildings and it labels them all for you. And the reviews are a great way to have an idea of what you’re getting yourself into or to watch for hilarity in certain employees.

Of course I’ve started using it to make crazy reviews of my own on places all over town. My profile is at rbcp.yelp.com where you’ll find reviews that I’ve done on Target, Arby’s, the post office and other places. I’m really loving Yelp and I hope they don’t kick me off for being too bizarre since most of my reviews are mostly honest. I plan to take pictures and review as many businesses as I can.

My BFF Spessa is doing equally hilarious reviews, which you can read at spessa.yelp.com. In her reviews you can learn about how to steal chips at Subway and that Petco employees are creeped out when you ask them to figure out the gender of hamsters.

In other exciting news, I started watching Lost this week. I was browsing around on Hulu and nothing looked interesting, so I decided to give Lost a try. So far I’ve watched the first 8 episodes of season 1. Even though I enjoy the show, I doubt I’ll keep watching after season 1 because there’s just too much to watch and I don’t have time for it. Great show though!

Ahhh, the memories. Quite possibly the edgiest record I ever owned as a kid. Rock music wasn’t allowed in our house because it was all satanic. Televangelists were really into playing records backwards at the time to prove it back then. Even our own church’s pastor had a lot to say about the evils of rock music and my parents believed every bit of it. I remember my older brother getting a huge lecture when they caught him listening to K-SHE 95. I think we got a joint lecture when they happened to come into the living room and heard the song Reproduction when I was watching Grease 2.

My neighbor Sarah used to let me copy some of her music onto tapes, which I kept a secret. When she got me into Weird Al around 12 or 13, they didn’t seem to mind that at all. Maybe they didn’t realize he did more than polka. I won’t even get into all the “Christian rock” we listened to back then, which was acceptable. Around 14 is when they both seemed to be working all the time and I got enough privacy to start listening to whatever I wanted, including the then-amazing MTV.

Last night, though, Kate and I were flipping around Netflix and saw some movie called Interstate 60. The description sounded interesting so we turned it on. And holy crap, it’s got Doc Brown in it! And Marty McFly! And then we see that it’s written and directed by Bob Gale. Michael J. Fox had just a small part in it, but he was actually yelling and cursing and being funny. It was great. The whole movie was just bizarre and really funny.

Yesterday I drove to Eugene for the giant flea market, thinking I might find some cool gifts for the kids. I found something awesome, which I can’t mention because they might see this page. I also got myself an army coat for $5.00 and a jigsaw with a broken blade for $2.00. The jigsaw guy said if I bought it, he would give me a free grahmcracker cookie. And he did. Then he tried to sell me this bulky tape recorder from the 70’s or 80’s, calling it a spy recorder. He was telling me I just need to put a couple D-cells in it and I could hide it anywhere and record things. It was so tempting, but I passed.

Aside from that awesome guy, I hate how those flea market vendors stare you down while you’re at their table, looking like they’re going to die of hunger if you don’t buy their stuff. I can’t stand to hang out at some tables for too long because they’re just LOOKING at me.

Saturday I went to the Albany tree lighting and parade, then to a Mexican restaurant to eat with Kate, James and some other girl.

I’m downloading all the BTTF Animated Series now, since I just noticed that Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis wrote them all. I remember not being that impressed with it in the 90’s, but it might be fun to try and watch a few of them.

We drove around the block and I got out and took a picture of the sign while two guys on the porch eyed me. I sent it to the passive aggressive notes blog, but they never used it. All that month I kept noticing that kids kept drawing on the side of the post office, under the windows, with chalk. The only thing I remember is an anarchy symbol, but there was other random stuff too. They also kept writing WELCOME in chalk on the ground in front of the post office doors. Just kids being silly, right?

So weeks later I’m walking to the post office, past the chalk drawings under the window, and the guy in that house is screaming “FUCK YOU” over and over in my direction. I ignore it and continue into the post office. I’m not sure if he was yelling it at me, because it sounded like he was already yelling when I got out of the car. But weird…

The NEXT day, Spessa and I noticed caution tape all over one of the sets of doors. Then later that day, I’m reading the local police log from my RSS feeds and I see this:

Post office vandalism — Police received a call from the 520 block of Second Avenue S.E. at about 12:45 this morning, saying a man who lives across from the post office had been screaming off and on for the past two hours. A deputy responded and found a man visibly intoxicated and being very loud. Police calmed him down and were about to leave when an officer noticed one of the south side doors to the post office had been shattered by a rock. They also saw “disturbing” messages referring to Fort Hood and 9/11 scrawled on the walls of the building in what looked like chalk. Police talked to a witness and she said she saw the man at the post office then heard a loud crash. The man had fresh cuts on his hands. Trent A. Fox, 38, of Albany was cited for second-degree criminal mischief.

It seems as if this guy has been drawing on the post office with chalk for weeks now! Two or three weeks later, Payton and I are stopping by the post office and there’s a TREE in the middle of the road. Someone had dumped a bunch of potting soil in a pile on one of the lanes and it looked like there was a small tree planted in it. Next to it was a large potted plant. I grabbed a handful of change from my car to give to the Salvation Army bell ringer so I could ask her what was up with the tree. She told me the guy in house over there did it earlier that day and I told her about his other crazy antics. I don’t know why I didn’t think to take a picture of the tree in the road.

The tree incident didn’t make the police log this week, but I can’t wait to see what this guy will do next.

That was lulzy enough for me, but when Emily asked Payton what he would wish for, he said he would wish to punch her in the jeans all 3 times. This is probably only hilarious if you’ve heard this Lonely Island song.

Wednesday I went to the Veterans Day parade with the kids. Eventually we jumped into the parade and started marching with everyone else, walking the entire length of the parade. Last year we kind of blended in, but this year we were in sort of an empty section so we were more noticeable. We got frequent claps from people and even cheers a couple of times. We had a little candy with us, so we threw that at some little kids. Some old guy yelled at us to throw some candy and Emily says “Okay!” and threw Nerds at the ground in front of him. Not boxes of Nerds, but open candy. It was great. There’s a small video clip of all this on my Facebook, which I will attempt to embed below, but I’m not sure if my privacy settings will allow it.

I think it was also Wednesday that we drove to Portland, sans kids, and saw the Mountain Goats. It was a pretty small venue and we were just 20 feet or so from the stage. Was an awesome concert. On either side of the stage there were giant flatscreen TVs and while waiting for the show to start I tried turning one on with my keychain remote and it worked. On the screen there was a Verizon page that allowed people to text words and pictures onto the screen, which people immediately started doing. I managed to get a few messages on it myself before the show started.

As the show started, the TV was turned off, but I kept turning it back on during the show. Since the lights were down, it was really bright on the crowd. The staff eventually decided to shut off the Verizon feed, so that the screen was black when I turned it on. But after about 30 seconds of blackness, the screen would turn bright blue, flooding the crowd with light. It was enough to make everyone squint. I kept doing it in between songs, hoping the Mountain Goat guy would say something about it, but he never did. Finally the staff cut the power to the TV so I couldn’t do it anymore. I resisted the urge to make my way to the other side of the auditorium to start in on that TV. I need to get a more powerful TV-B-GONE.

A lot of other things happened throughout the week, mostly kid-related. We took the kids to Wonderland (the nickel arcade) and to see 2012 and some other miscellaneous things that I can’t remember. On Saturday we went to see The Pixies in Eugene, which was really great. They played the entire album Doolittle, in order. Halfway through the lady announces, “Okay, here’s side B.” Then after that they played a bunch of stuff I didn’t recognize.

It was a standard haunted house – giant maze with people jumping out at you all the time. We took a few deliberate wrong turns, just for fun. Ended up in a back hallway at one point, where we weren’t supposed to be, and could stick our hands out through the walls and scare people. We ended up coming out of a hole under a desk/table thing. Found an empty room later that we hung out in for about 15 minutes, jumping out at people as they came in. After the haunted house we went to a bar in Albany and listened to horrible karaoke renditions of old country songs and played tons of pool.

Saturday: Tried to sleep in, but failed. I don’t know why I can never sleep very late. Hung out around the house most of the day with the kids. Made some Halloween cookies around noon and they ended up being our lunch. At 6pm, they dressed for trick-or-treating and we drove to a neighborhood that Jessica recommended. It was awesome – hundreds of kids walking around in the streets. Much more active than our own neighborhood. Went around a few blocks there, then headed home. Would have stayed longer, but Emily hasn’t been feeling that great. Left her at home while me and Payton hit up all the houses in our own neighborhood.

Got quite a few submissions these past couple of days for the PLA pumpkin carving contest. I’m surprised at how much effort some people put into it.

Sunday: Went to Salem to see Up at a ridiculously cheap movie theater, only to find out that it was sold out. So we bought tickets to Harry Potter 6 instead, which started an hour later. I hadn’t seen it yet, but the kids had. They both really wanted to see it again. The theater was awesome! There were long tables in ever aisle to set your food and stuff on, which meant tons of feet space. In the very back aisles there were reclining chairs instead of movie theater seats. There was a full bar in the lobby. The theater does all kinds of non-movie things like football games and comedy shows. Definitely gotta go back there someday.

Since we had an hour to kill, we walked across the street and I noticed we were in front of the same bar Jessica and I were at on Friday. Walked over to an ice cream place and hung out for about 30 minutes.

As long as I’m doing several days of updating here, I should mention Wednesday. I didn’t have much food in the house and didn’t feel like going shopping, so we went out to eat at Applebees. Turns out Wednesday is kids night there. You’d think that would just mean low prices for kids food, but not here. They had a magician going around to all the tables, doing tricks for everyone. He did tricks for us as we sat there and waited for a table, keeping us there for an extra minute or two after our table was ready. Then he came over and did card tricks while we were trying to eat food. It was annoying, but funny. They also had a giant table set up to decorate mini pumpkins, which the kids did for about 20 minutes after we ate. We’ll definitely have to try Wednesdays there again someday.

Man, xkcd.com has been doing amazing stuff lately. But that image up there, that’s just insane. Click on it to view the full sized version of it. I want to know how long those took him. And the Primer one cracked me up – I just happened to see that movie last year when Netflix recommended it to me.

So, complete collection right? WRONG! Less than a month later, a SIXTH HHGTTG BOOK is released. The author has been dead for like 7 years now! The fifth book was released way back in 1992ish. The new book is written by the guy that writes Artemis Fowl for some reason. I guess it’s based on stuff they found in DNA’s computer for a 6th book. But dammit.

The Roger Zelazny book I ended up buying on eBay for $15 plus shipping. For a 15-year-old used paperback! If I wanted an unused copy, it would have been $65. No kidding. It turned out to be a pretty good book, though, so thanks for recommending it, John!

I’ve got a stack of 5 books to read still. A Mark Twain that I’d never heard of until last week, a Carl Sagan, that book of crazy letters Angela gave me, and a couple others I can’t remember.

I miss MTV suddenly. That’s the only thing about not having cable that I miss. Watching nonstop music videos in the background all day while I work and do other things. I know it’s awesome that today every music video ever made is on demand on the internet, but it was nice just having them play nonstop videos at me all day. A big portion of them sucked, but there was the occasional gem in there. It’s so tempting to blow $60/month on a cable package, just to get MTV back. But I won’t do that.

I haven’t had regular cable since I left Illinois in 2005 and decided that the internet was so awesome that the kids don’t even need cable anymore. And that’s true. I never watched it much myself, except for the cartoons that the kids were watching and MTV. I think Yahoo streams videos like that somewhere. I should look into that again.

I can’t seem to get this song out of my head. I heard it last night while listening to Luke & Carrie’s Bad Rapport podcast. I ended up playing it on The Phone Show a couple hours later.

Two months since my last update. Hrmmm. I was in Idaho for a couple of weeks, doing all kinds of things. I built the Spessas a bathroom, which was great. I miss doing home renovations a lot. Now they can stop going out in the woods to poop. We went to see live music at a bar – a band called Stillborn. If that’s not an awesome band name, then I don’t know what is. Too bad it didn’t make their music awesome, but we still had a lot of fun there. We also went gambling in Washington and bar hopping, where Mr. Spessa kept disassembling bathrooms everywhere we went. And we did the best Phone Show episode ever.

This past weekend I went with Angela to a Facebook party in Portland which was lots of fun. I spent Sunday recovering from the Facebook party, which was not fun. Oh yeah, last week I went by myself to see live music at a local bar. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this on here before, but this bar in Albany features tons of local hip hop bands. You’d think Albany would have lots of local country bands or lots of local hair metal tribute bands, but no, they have lots of local hip hop bands. And the music is actually pretty good. The problem is that this bar never has many people at it. When I got there, the band was hanging out outside, smoking. I sat down and commenced Facebooking. Soon I noticed that the entire band was playing video poker while a CD of their music played on stage. One of them was occasionally singing with the CD as he played poker. After about 45 minutes, I left. Guess they just didn’t like playing to a nearly empty bar.

I catsitted for a week for Kate’s cat. That was cool, having another cat here. I know there’s more that’s happened in two months, but I can’t remember. I always say that. Each Halloween I try to find scary movies to watch with my kids, which is usually really old movies. Tonight it was Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. That was fun to see again. My kids have seen just about everything by Stephen King now. This weekend we’re going to visit Albany’s House of Terror, then trick or treating on Saturday. On Friday Jessica is going to a haunted house with me.

I met a few old friends on Facebook recently. Jeff Boggs from high school and some other girl from the 80’s. It’s so weird seeing everyone I’ve ever known in my entire life on a single web site. I keep getting all these people from my high school adding me as friends, even some people that I never said a single word to. Which weirds me out a little, but I let them add me anyway. I guess they just want tons of friends and don’t care who they are. I responded to one with, “Wow, I’ve learned more about you in 5 minutes than I did our entire 4 years of not saying a single word to each other!” and she replied with, “LOL sorry i was such a stuck up bitch then but not no more!”

Speaking of wanting tons of friends and not caring who they are, add me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/bradthecarter! Facebook is the reason I don’t update much here anymore.

Oh yeah, I wrote a new song called Play The Game, based on Curtis Lee Jones. He’s hilarious.

Me and the kids took an Amtrak to Portland to catch our plane to Illinois, mostly just because Amtrak is cool. Except when it’s running late which is just about always. They only got us into Portland about 40 minutes late, though. We stayed in a hotel overnight since our flight left at 5am.

I know I’ve probably said this before, but flying is just a huge scam now. It sucks. They charge you for every little thing they can possibly think of now. I had to pay an extra $20 to check just one bag. They don’t even give you the first one for free. Emily wanted a blanket on the plane so we asked for one and they told us we’d have to pay $7 for it. Which I refused, because that’s just the kind of dad I am. They started all this scaminess when gas prices were around $4.00/gallon, but it’s been down below $2.00 plenty of times since then and they’re still doing it. They’ll never stop, now that people are used to it.

I can’t remember everything that happened in Illinois, but there was a day of City Museum for me and the kids. I think we only spent one day at the pool, because the weather got too cold near the end of our visit. We saw District 9. The kids and I walked to BP one night for Slushies and they were out of napkins (Payton needed one) so I asked the clerk for one and she handed me a used, wadded up napkin that was sitting on the counter next to her. Instead of demanding an unused napkin, I just laughed at Payton instead.

I did the Phone Show 3 times from Illinois, but mostly just played music since my microphone didn’t work very good. And I moved phonelosers.org to a new server, along with a bunch of my other sites. I’ve been meaning to do that for months now since the old one kept crashing. So far it’s been over a month and no crashes.

While Spessa was here we took a trip to the coast. On the way back, we saw a roadsign flashing something about construction, so we pulled over and Spessa spent about 40 minutes working at the controls to change it. It had a password on it, but she was persistent and managed to figure out what it was by guessing. We couldn’t think of anything brilliant to write on it, so she wrote HACK NAKED, which is the slogan for PaulDotCom. They posted a picture of it on their site and we also posted it on signhacker.com.

I was actually wearing a HACK NAKED t-shirt that day, but we didn’t think to snap a picture of me standing in front of the hacked sign. It was so nuts because it was in the middle of the day and it was a very busy road. Spessa was sitting behind the sign, but could still be seen by traffic and she kept getting up to open this giant door on top of the sign to reset the power. For 40 minutes. I hung out in front of my car, playing on Facebook on my phone and hoping to divert attention away from her and onto me.

Me and her also went to some casino last weekend and gambled. I normally hate gambling, but I played $20 on blackjack. I had it up to $30 before losing it all. We saw Extract and Inglorious Basterds. We saw a couple of live shows at local bars, played pool and drank too much. We did 2 Phone Shows together and went to the state fair in Salem. I think that’s it.

It’s been an overwhelmingly busy and fun summer for me and so far I’m really enjoying the complete isolation of this weekend. I’m hoping to barely leave the house and just work on projects that I haven’t had time for in the past couple of months. Last night I put together a commercial for Sign Hacker, which is here. I’ve got two other video projects that I really want to finish up song and I’m working on another song and have ideas for 2 others. I wish I could just be alone for an entire week and get all this done. I really need to clean this house up too.

The people in each of these podcasts all know each other since they’re both computer security podcasts. In fact, each year all the security podcasts get together at Defcon during the Podcasters Meetup and do a show together, which just happened to be a couple weeks away. I imagined my horrible songs causing enough friction between the members of the podcasts to cause a fistfight to break out during the show. This was going to be the most exciting podcast meetup ever! I ended up writing and recording both songs that same evening. Here they are:

Sadly, nothing terrible happened at the podcaster’s meetup. I even sat a few rows back so that I wouldn’t end up getting hit in the head by a chair and so that I could make a quick escape when Larry pointed at me in the midst of the fight and snarled through his bloodied lip, “You caused all this, RBCP!” You can’t say I didn’t try my very best to create drama, though.

Security Justice ended up playing their promo in Episode 69 of their show, with the cursing bleeped out. And PaulDotCom played their promo in the pre-show, but not on the actual show that goes on the podcast feed. Apparently they have a problem with the word “cocks” and don’t possess any bleeping out skills.

Security Justice and PaulDotCom are two of my favorite hacker-related podcasts, and you should listen to them if you’re into that sort of thing. But first, you should visit my new music page and listen to some of the other music I’ve done lately.

Thursday: Drove to the airport with plenty of time to spare. I expected to have my backpack searched extra because I had about 200 PLA CDs in it, all stacked neatly at the bottom in two rows. On an x-ray machine it probably looked like two cylinders. But he took me over to the bag searching area and open a different part of the bag and swabbed the inside with cotton, then put it in a machine. Either looking for drug or bomb residue, I guess. That’s when I remembered that I used that compartment of my backpack on July 4th to stuff all the trash from our fireworks. He didn’t tell me why he did that, but I wonder if they had something that picked up some gun powder residue. After that he dug in the regular part to see my stacks of CDs. Then let me go.

The plane ride was boring. The guy next to me kept drifting off to sleep and leaning on me. I kept elbowing him awake. Had a layover in San Francisco and that plane was delayed by an hour, but I didn’t mind since it gave me more time to charge up my dying iPhone. The girl next to me on the next plane kept bumping into me, she kicked me once, flipped her hair into my face another time. I ignored her a listened to a podcast the whole time.

I listened to the latest episode of 2600’s Off The Hook and was surprised to hear them play Rob T. Firefly’s latest hit song, called Bell Odyssey, at the end of it. Thirteen years ago I wrote this song in a PLA issue and he decided last week to actually record it, and it’s amazing. Go take a listen to it on robvincent.com or listen to it at the end of Off The Hook for July 29th, 2009.

I-Ball rented a car for the weekend so he was able to pick me up from the airport and take me to the hotel. We walked around for awhile and ended up in the room he was staying in, where there were stations set up all over the room for soldering electronic Ninja Party badges. Both of us soldered a couple of them. I checked my Twitter and noticed that Pinguino was at Defcon. A few minutes later, I noticed that Pinguino just happened to be in the same room as me. So I went over and said hi to her. We hadn’t seen each other in 8 or 9 years. I also finally met Strom Carlson.

Got a message from RijilV and T. that they were at Peppermill, so me, I-ball and RTF walked over there to have some dinner with them. Then we hung out in the Chillout room for awhile and met Labythan (an old school Cal’s Forums guy). That’s about all I can remember from Thursday.

Friday: Woke up early and hung out at the hotel’s food court for a large portion of the morning and afternoon, working. Bumped into Rogueclown and RTF for awhile. Then Paul and Larry from PaulDotCom, who gave me a Hack Naked party pass. Went to the Playboy Club with a bunch of i-hacked.com people. I think it was Adam (not completely sure) who sent two of the employees over to me to try and get me to dance and drink with them. Not sure what their angle was, I declined everything. I thought they were trying to lure me into a private room for an expensive dance or something. Apparently Surbo was snapping pictures of us. Beer was free and I drank a lot.

Later we went to a party at the Hard Rock Hotel, which was in a small room and way too full. I ended up sitting in the hall for awhile, resting and texting. Before we left, hevnsnt wanted to sit at the elevators on Floor 5, constantly hit the buttons and cheer for people when the doors opened. There were about 10 to 15 of us doing that for 30 minutes until a hotel guy came up and told us to stop.

Saturday: Hung out by the PaulDotCom table for probably an hour, chatting with them and random people who walked by. I met Rachel and Georgia from GRM n00bs and a girl named Drollee (I’m sure that’s spelled horribly wrong) who was a listener of The Phone Show and had called in and talked to me on the air a week or two before. Then for the next 2 days, I seemed to bump into her nonstop. The PaulDotCom guys were nice enough to let me put about 200 PLA CDs on their table to give away for free.

Me, Surbo and hevnsnt entered the social engineering contest and I ended up meeting notkevin at that. We expected them to give us an assignment or something, but we were just told to social engineer anything we wanted as long as we didn’t drop any docs. So we got the hotel’s housekeeping frequencies and listened to them dispatch things to rooms. Then we called those rooms to talk to the guests about whatever they needed and tried to make them as unhappy as possible. “You need an extra cot in your room? Sure, that’ll be $100 extra per night and I just charged it to your credit card.” One lady said she was coming down to the front desk to get me fired, so we went down there and stood next to her the whole time and listened.

I-hacked got honorable mention for our entry, which is their nice way of saying we’re huge losers. We got to play a couple of the calls for a crowd of people and it got some laughs. I couldn’t stick around for the closing ceremonies since I needed to catch my plane. But notkevin brought me and I-ball up to his room and gave us some really cool t-shirts. Thanks, notkevin!

There was the Podcaster’s Meetup where a huge panel of podcasters did a live show, which I wasn’t cool enough to be invited onto. I got to meet Stankdawg there, and a few other people whose names I can’t remember. One guy lives in Eugene, just 45 minutes from me, and we talked shit about tr0n for awhile. There were parties afterwards. I talked to Grey Frequency a lot and I finally introduced myself to Jason Scott. Bumped into yomama, thepublic, nekid amy.

Oh yeah, I twittered a lot throughout the weekend which occasionally caused people to show up and say hello. And during the podcaster’s meetup, altalp tried to send a phone up to the room and have me paged for a phone call, but the hotel staff wouldn’t cooperate. So instead she had them deliver a trash can to me. I didn’t notice it until after the meetup was over and the party started, but there was a big, gray trashcan sitting in the middle of the floor for the rest of the night. I explained to several people that it was my trashcan and one guy was nice enough to take a picture of me standing next to my trashcan. I didn’t take many pictures on my own camera and I’m counting on all these other people to send me pictures so hopefully that happens soon. If you have pictures you think I’ll like, my email address is bradcarter at notla.com. Maybe I can stick some pictures in this entry eventually.

(thanks, Labythan, for this pic!)

Sunday: I met Shane! He’s a guy that I worked with in 1993 in Indiana and I lost touch with until just a few months ago when I noticed a video of him online from Shmoocon. I saw him briefly after the social engineering contest, then briefly in a hall somewhere, but on Sunday we actually got to hang out for awhile and do some catching up. I was able to impress him with my memory of everyone’s names from our old job, asking him if he still kept in touch with anyone. So that was really cool and I guess I’ll be seeing him at various cons from now on.

I refrained from blowing money on any t-shirts this year except for one that I had to have. It was at the EFF table and required a $40 donation. $40 for a t-shirt, but I did it anyway. It’s for a good cause. What really sucked was that they were out of that t-shirt by Sunday, so it has to be mailed to me. I went to lunch at Kadie’s with Stankdawg. I swapped CDs with dualcore. I actually bought his CDs. I told him that I didn’t own any CDs at all and I would just rip them and give them to friends, which he said he was fine with. Damn this physical media!

Went to Kadie’s again with I-Ball to have dinner, then we went to closing ceremonies. Had to leave early since I had a plane to catch. Stopped by the goon room to say goodbye to RijilV. Met notkevin and went to his room to claim our prizes of XXXL t-shirts. (That’s the only size they had left.) Went to the parking garage and I-ball couldn’t find his rental car. We walked down 4 stories looking for it before he finally spotted it. He got me to the airport about an hour before my flight, plenty of time to charge my iPhone so I could listen to podcasts for 2 hours.

I think this is a new feature, or maybe I’m just noticing it for the first time – when I’m listening to podcasts I can hit a “2x” button and it doubles the speed of the shows. Not the pitch at all, just the speed. So I was able to listen to 4 hours of podcasts during my 2 hours of flight. The people on those shows talk too slow anyway. As long as there’s not much music, it sounds fine.

So that was my Defcon. Pictures later. Or you can listen to an audio review of it by me, linear and Rogueclown by going to www.phonelosers.org/phoneshow/ and listening to the 8/3/2009 episode or clicking here.

One last thing…on the drive home after the airport, I was listening to the HipTrax podcast, which is a music podcast that the Geek Dads do. And I’m in love with this new song called Ode To Alderaan by Glenn Case. It’s a great tune and great lyrics. Listen to it.

	Glenn Case – Ode To Alderaan
	Found at Ode To Alderaan on KOhit.net

The Cherry Poppin’ Daddies played there on Friday, which I missed. They would have been fun to see. There was also a Geocaching booth, which I donated a bunch of buttons and my old GPS unit to. I volunteered at the booth, but they were overstaffed so I didn’t have to stick around. Instead Payton and I entered the geocaching competition, where we walked all over OSU’s campus, looking for caches. We found 3 before quitting and going to Circle K for lunch. The best one was at a bike rack, where we searched for 30 minutes and finally found it in a water bottle that was attached to a chained up bike on the rack.

I wore a sleeveless shirt, showing off my Bell tattoo, and some girl came up and asked if she could take a picture of it. She said her mom used to work for some phone company. Then she asked if I worked for a phone company and I replied, “No, I work against the phone companies.” That’s a standard reply I used to give to reps/operators at phone companies when they’d ask me that question after starting to wonder why I was asking them so many weird phone company-related questions.

My paid Flickr account expired, I just noticed. I guess they notified me by emailing me at my Yahoo email address, which is impossible to use because their spam filters suck so bad. One of the limitations of a non-paid account is that I can only have a certain number of pictures up. And from what I can tell, they just deleted all my old photos from the past 20 years instead of archiving them for me for when I pay again. So that sucks. Not that I actually lost anything, but I’m sure not going to pay and upload all that stuff again. I need to just set up a photo album on my homepage again. Screw paying $25/year for photo storage.

I wrote a song dedicated to Electric Dreams, which is a movie I loved in the 1980’s.

I set up a page for my music at notla.com/music/ and added that song to it. It’s the first non-parody song I’ve ever completed. I realize I can’t sing that great, but I love doing all this stuff and I’ve actually written quite a few songs in the past that I never got around to finishing. I have a bunch that were half-performed but I’d given up on because I hated how they sounded or it was just too difficult to create the music for them. But in May or June I discovered a program called Mixcraft that lets me easily record multiple tracks of music and makes creation with my Casio keyboard so incredibly easy. Looking back now, it’s insane, the lengths I went to to create those older songs using Cool Edit.

This month I’ve actually used Mixcraft to write and perform 2 songs for podcasts, which I’m not going to post anywhere until after they play them. And I put together music for a song that Spessa wrote and redid an older song of mine with it, which I’m still not completely happy with. And I’ve got a couple more ready to be started on AND I put together a few random beats/tunes to be used in future songs. So I’m expecting to do a lot with this. I’m even planning to pay for the software once I can afford it since it’s so reasonably priced. Well okay, it’s actually because I can’t find it on bittorrent. But it’s totally worth it – less than $100.

A couple weeks ago I got sick of the kids not going outside all day, so I printed out a Google map of about a 1 mile diameter in our neighborhood and sent them on a mission. Which was to bike on every single street in the neighborhood, coloring in the street with a marker as they finished each one, and to take pictures of every interesting thing they saw. It took them over an hour and they came back with about 20 pictures. I need to think of more weird stuff like that for them.

Speaking of that, though, I love the way kids play today. I know it’s probably not good for them to sit in the house staring at LCDs all day, but it’s so cool, seeing the different games they come up with within these multiplayer games. It’s basically the same stuff we did as kids (tag, etc.), only they have heavy artillery to play with in games like Halo 3 and they’re playing with kids around the world instead of kids on the same block. Instead of exchanging phone numbers with each other like I did in school, they’re exchanging Xbox Live and YouTube IDs. A few months ago Payton pulled an orange peel out of his pocket, explaining that a girl had carved her Runescape ID into it with a fork. Ten years ago I never would have suspected that every grade schooler in America would be so computer savvy.

Several days later edit – Emily’s latest Halo video….

One last thing – I’ve been watching a lot of weird movies lately. Netflix is awesome at recommending weird movies to me based on other movies I watch, and I usually take its advice. This week it was Noise and Cashback, which were both really interesting and bizarre. I’m watching more independent movies than I ever have before. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m old or because Netflix makes me. I set up a page of movies I own awhile back, which is here. Actually owning a movie is so pointless these days, but I want to keep some sort of list of movies I’ve seen because I know I’m going to forget the names of some of these and it’ll drive me nuts in the future if I want to see them again. So that’s my half-hearted attempt at cataloging my movies. I’ll get around to making it better eventually.

One more last thing! Michael Jackson died last month and they’re still talking about it on the news and blogs. Seeing all this nonstop coverage about him makes me wonder why he’s the “king of pop” even. Sure he had some hits in the 80’s, but so did other people. What makes him so special? His music sucked in the 90’s and 2000’s, just like the other 80’s hasbeens. Some infomercial guy died too and I can’t understand how that was big news. Do people like infomercials that much?? And two other people died, who people claim were icons, but I know nothing about either of them. And oh yeah, we went to the moon 40 years ago this week. I’m having a hard time understanding what that accomplished other than, “Oh neat, we spent kabillions of dollars going to the moon instead of feeding starving children.”

Also Geocached the other day with Mr. Spessa and the kids, which was fun. Their visit netted us a full week of insanely fun fun fun, much of which I’m not going to talk about. But it was fun. Last Monday we did The Phone Show together, which was so great that it lasted 2 hours instead of 1. Spessa taught all our kids to play D&D, which I couldn’t figure out on my own. She found a cool D&D store in Albany too.

Today I was quoted in this Fox news article, which is about Dex and PrankNET. I’ve been tired all day. All last week I stayed up late and got up early. I need a Pepsi. Tonight I’m going to a concert in the park with Kate & Co.

You know those pink tube things that just spin around on the ground making cool colors? Did you know if you light it in your hand, wait for the fuse to burn almost all the way out and then throw it up into the air, it flies around in the air really good? That’s what I’ve always loved doing with them and surprisingly I’ve never set one off in my hand that way.

As a teenager I decided to tie fishing line around one of these and dangle it out my 2nd story window by a broom handle to see which way it would fly. It immediately burned away the fishing line and quickly hovered up and then over – straight into my bedroom window as I jumped out of the way. I watched in shock as this glowing ball of fire hovered in the middle of my room for a few seconds. Then it went out and fell to the floor, not burning anything. It was awesome, but I decided not to try that experiment again.

The cool fireworks were illegal in Illinois, so we had to drive across the Mississippi into Missouri for the good stuff. I think my brother and his friends actually biked over there for fireworks before they had drivers licenses. Apparently fireworks stands didn’t care that kids were buying things. I think it was when he was 16 and I was 14 that we drove over there and got a ton of bottle rockets. And for days we drove around, shooting them at people from the car. We’d just hold them in our hands, light them and aim at people, houses, cars, etc.

Probably the funnest thing was driving up to the golf course in Wood River and shooting them down at golfers. It was great seeing them down there with tiny explosions of smoke happening all around them. They just stood there, looking up at our car, helpless to do anything about it as we laughed hysterically. This was the 80’s, so nobody had cell phones to report us with.

In high school I set off a pack of 100 saturn missles in a hallway during lunch, which is detailed on this page.

Dropping lady bugs (I think that’s what those tiny firecrackers are called) into a 20oz bottle of water is fun because it makes the bottle bounce up into the air and sprays water around. And dropping those colored smoke bombs into buckets of water creates the coolest effect ever.

Once I got a drivers license, Mike Tankersley and I had a lot of fun reliving the things my brother and I used to do with fireworks. Mostly driving up and down alleys, shooting bottle rockets at houses or throwing exploding things over fences. We had a few close calls with cops, like when I’d just shot a bottle rocket out of my hand into a yard and I looked up to see a cop driving by on the cross street. Luckily he wasn’t looking our way.

In Junior High I used to boobie trap everything in class with poppies – those white balls of paper that pop when you throw them at the ground. A few times I boobie trapped doors with those firecracker-type things with the strings on either side of it that are about as loud as a firecracker, so that when doors were opened they would explode. During lunch we’d tie these to classroom doors that were in session and we could hear them explode from anywhere in the school.

I know there’s more, but I can’t think of anything right now. I’ll have to come back and revise this with more of my stupidity later. Today the kids and I are driving up to Portland for the day and we’ll watch the fireworks display there tonight. I bought some sparklers, poppies and confetti poppers to do on the riverfront. I don’t think they allow anything stronger than that there.

7/5 EDIT: Kristine commenting reminded me of my Eastgate fireworks escapades! During the construction of the additional auditoriums I started bringing bottle rockets in and shooting them off inside. They would hit the ceiling and explode. I can’t remember what the ceiling was made of it but it never burst into flames and killed all the moviegoers in the other auditoriums.

After awhile I started sticking a few dozen bottlerockets into the launcher at once and using a lighter and an aerosol can as a flamethrower to ignite them all at once. The noise was fantastic! Eventually Debbie got sick of it and posted a list of rules on the bulletin board which included no fireworks, no skateboarding behind the concession stand and no radios. She wasn’t really into confrontation. The list was hilarious.

I picked the Bell symbol since the phone company has been a life long obsession for me and because I’ve always loved the simplicity of their logo. Also because the name Bell as a phone company is almost dead now, which is kind of sad. Only Cincinnati Bell and Bell Canada are left, I think. Everything else has been assimilated into AT&T and Verizon.

It took about an hour and was $80. They put my image into Photoshop and made a transfer out of it to stick on my arm, then just traced the lines. I thought that a skilled artist would just draw it from the picture we brought in. Not too surprisingly, the tattoo guy says it’s the first Bell symbol he’s done his 14 years as a tattooer.

Not only was his name Harry Potter, but his name was stated quite clearly many times throughout the movie as he battled trolls and talking plants and befriended a witch that lived upstairs from him. So I decided to throw a little more confusion into the world by editing together all of those parts into a small collection of clips and put them on YouTube, claiming that it’s common knowledge that J.K Rowling based her Harry Potter books off of the original Harry Potter movie from the 1980’s. Here’s the result:

I blew 2 or 3 hours on this last night, just to hopefully confuse a few people before YouTube yanks it down for copyright violations. I’m truly a dedicated jerk! If you’re too lazy to read the description I put on YouTube for it, here it is:

I caught this on TV a few weeks ago and decided to Tivo it. I never realized that J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books were based on an early 1980’s movie by the same name.

Pretty interesting to watch and see what the original vision of the Harry Potter universe looked like! Look for it on cable TV, because it appears that it’s never been on DVD and the VHS is out of print.

Looks like someone forgot to fill in all the important fields in their spamming script before sending it to billions of people. I submitted it to The Fail Blog, which is why it’s got the big FAIL on there. But the weird thing is the insane amount of WATCH spam that I get. I bet 1/4th of my spam is for watches. Like, those metal and leather things people wore on their wrists back in the dark ages before cell phones. Check out these weird subject lines and emails though:

Our watches are popular all over the world. Precious watches that look elegant and expensive are actually very cheap. No , this is not a dream, this is replica watches. Order yours today and it will reach your place in no time.

Your watch will be delivered to any destination. What can be better than fast and secure shipment of elegant designer watches? Maybe just an extremely low price of these watches. For a few hundred dollars you can buy as many watches as you want.

Check out Bling Bling watches Only limited to 1000 pieces worldwide, they are expected to sell out within a month.

Our stylish watches are priceless but not pricy. Being elegant and trendy takes too much time and money but we know how to help you. First, you save your time by ordering online, second, you save your money by buying replica watches that are identical to the brand ones.

Very lovely watches at very lovely prices. The top quality and low price of our watches attracts customers from all over the world. So no matter where you live you can be a happy owner of such a timepiece as we ship them worldwide.

Watch the prices drop for that cool watch.

Today is a great time to think about getting a watch.

No, spammer, 1997 was a time to think about getting a watch! I think the last time I wore a watch was 1999. I had one of those phone book watches that could sync to my computer by just looking at the flashing computer screen. It was cool. IN 1999!

Sorry, watch wearers. I’m not actually that anti-watch. I do think watches are cool and look nice but I’m just not that stylish and I can’t imagine blowing money on a thing that does what my cell phone already does since that goes everywhere with me. The spam is just weird though. I’m used to business opportunity spam and “your rich Nigerian uncle died” spam and magic hair growing potion spam and this spam I have here that says, Your manhood will come back to you like a boomerang. But watch spam? That’s just strange. Do any of you get watch spam?

Yesterday I was driving Payton home from school when this car pulls up next to me and the fat lady in the passenger seat is loudly arguing with the 3 heavily tattooed men in the car with her that my Ford Focus is a Nova and they’re wrong about it not being one. So she decides to get confirmation from me and I say, “Yes, this is definitely a Nova!” and she seems satisfied that she won the argument as one of the tattooed men eyes me from the back seat like he wants to kill me. I wonder how many more confrontations like this I can expect with my new Nova emblem.

Today we went on a hike and ended up finding about 5 Geocaches along the way. Kate was there and so was Dude and his family. One of the Geocaches was hanging from a very high tree branch and impossible to reach with just your hands. To even get that far you had to walk across a fallen log to reach the tree that it’s in. Dude is coming back with some kind of 8′ pole/hook combination. I’m not that dedicated though.

Kids and I went swimming this afternoon. Emily told me she’d tried to call me from the pool phone while I was away, but the phone wouldn’t dial. I tried to prove her wrong, but realized she was right because the keypad didn’t respond to anything. So I was able to pass on a bit of wisdom (aka show off) by showing them how switchhook pulse dialing worked (You tap the switch hook quickly for each number you dial.) and I was able to dial another extension. Some boy who was hanging out with them thought it was the coolest thing he’d ever seen and immediately started dialing random numbers that way. As we left and shut the door, we could hear him pounding on the switch hook from the other side of the wall.

Been cat sitting a lot this weekend, which is fun just for the change of scenery on either side of my laptop screen. Saw Star Trek last night with Angela. And wow. It was awesome. The only other Star Trek movie I’ve seen is Generations in 1994 and only because I worked at the movie theater. And I really liked that one, but this one was great. It makes me want to put every Star Trek movie ever made on my Netflix queue. So I did.

For some reason I just never got into Star Trek. As a kid, I would come across the 60’s version occasionally on TV and I would try to watch it but I thought it looked stupid. I caught just a few episodes of Generations while it was on TV and thought it looked neat, but not neat enough to watch it every week. I’ve probably seen less than 10 full episodes of that. Just about every friend I had in the early 90’s was a Trekkie and most of them would insist that Star Trek is the kind of thing I would like and that I’m crazy not to watch it. Guess I was just too busy being homeless or obsessing over BBSes back then.

In 1997 I got into Voyager for a short time, mostly because Colleen worked in the evenings and I was at home with Emily on Sunday nights and nothing better was on. I got to see the whole 7 of 9 drama unfold, from the very beginning, during my month or two of watching that. I think BNF must have happened soon after that, which completely killed my interest in everything that wasn’t BNF, including Voyager.

Tomorrow night is The Phone Show. Listen to it!

I’m listening to Per Gessle’s Son Of A Plumber this evening. It’s good stuff and much different than his current Silly Really hit, which I’ve been loving for a couple of weeks now. I need to get his new album. murd0c tells me that he used to be one of the guys who sang in Roxette, which is an 80’s band I used to like. But murd0c is a filthy liar, so it’s probably not true.

Yesterday, though, I decided to do a search for the names of the people currently renting that house and I found one of their Myspaces. And in her photo album is my completed stairs! Here’s the picture:

Kind of cool to see it all done. Too bad the other families Myspaces are private or I might be able to see more pictures of the finished house. I’ll have to keep secretly stalking this lady, hoping for glimpses of my old unfinished projects.

This makes me want to find Myspaces of people who live in other old houses of mine to see what they’ve done with their places! I’m so creepy.

EvilCal called me up and IMed me yesterday. I hadn’t talked to him on the phone in at least a year. He was telling me about his current renovation projects and I think that’s what made me decide to stalk this lady to find pictures of my house.

Yesterday it’s better but still kind of itchy. I took more Benadryl first thing in the morning, not realizing that Benadryl makes you really tired. I’m rarely sick so I just don’t know these things. Spessa clued me in about this later in the day after I complained about how tired I was. So I spent the day eating tons of junk food to stay awake. I got a gigantic Slurpee from 7-Eleven which helped a lot, but kept giving me major brain freeze issues. Ate a whole bag of Fritos, half a can of Pringles, pudding cups, toast, and KFC for dinner. Around noon I took a 20 minute nap, but then forced myself up to continue working. Kids and I went to Payton’s open house and then to the gym/pool. I was really happy to finally go to sleep last night.

Today my eye is looking much better, but still a little red and slightly itchy. No Benadryl today, since I need to be awake. Sleeping in tomorrow will be nice. This weekend I’m catsitting for a friend, which means instead of sitting around my house on the internet all day I’ll be sitting around her house on the internet all day. While my own cat sits at home, bored, alone and ignored. I might be going to see Star Trek this weekend too.

This week Spessa and I had fun messing with a FreeCycle group, which is in a protected area of the PLA Forums or I’d link to it. One little spoofed message by me to the group caused a huge uproar from the members. It was great. Said goodbye to Molly – she’s moving to D.C. for a job.

I joined the collective this week – I upgraded to an iPhone. I’d been a Blackberry user for nearly 2 years up until now, which I really loved but it still lacked in a lot of areas. Like effortlessly syncing podcasts, which I really missed after giving up my ipod. Plus the Blackberry has been crashing a lot lately. I’m really loving the iPhone so far though. I thought I would hate not having a real keyboard, but I’m already typing pretty fast and mostly error-free on its virtual keyboard.

The Geocaching app is not only a billion times cooler on the iPhone, but it’s not $5.99/month like the BB one was. So I’m saving money on that now. And the Slacker streaming radio program actually works on the iPhone and it sounds great. On the Blackberry is was either cutting out constantly or was at a horribly low bitrate that sounded awful. It’s almost enough to make me want to cancel my Sirius radio subscription and just listen to Slacker in the car. Skype and YouTube also works really well on the iPhone so far. It’s a $200 phone, but I’ll be making around $150 by selling my Blackberry on Ebay.

In just under a week, we visited San Diego, Galveston and Cincinnati. Cincinnati was the town we nearly got arrested in after a cop, suspecting us of vandalizing a pay phone, searched my bag and found a bank’s courtesy phone that I’d stolen earlier in the day. Later that night we were both sleeping in a friend’s basement and heard the cops upstairs, apparently taking our friend away. Luckily they didn’t come down for us too. Early the next morning we quietly slipped out a basement window and got the hell out of his neighborhood, hoping not to be spotted by cops on the way to a bus stop. It was fun and more details are at www.notla.com/travels/. While we were eating somewhere in San Diego, Shane drew this comic of Jim Bayless, a man who is kind of a staple of PLA. It was a great vacation and it’s a miracle that we made it back to Indianapolis with no legal mishaps, considering I was scamming these airline tickets on the fly as we reached each new city.

Colleen and I visited Shane once again in 1994 when we took a vacation (free, of course) to Indianapolis to see him. After that, I never saw him again. UNTIL…15 years later (last night) I noticed his name on a ShmooCon site. A little more digging around found that this Shane was also in Indiana. And then even more Googling found a video of Shane and it was actually him! From reading various websites that him and his friends were on, I found that Shane and I have probably been passing each other at various hacker cons for years now. He’s been a ShmooCon, PhreakNic, Defcon and Notacon.

So I emailed him last night and we did some catching up today. He was equally surprised to hear from me. Both of us assumed that we’d never hear from each other again and it’s kind of a bizarre way to come across each other, especially since back in 1994 neither of us knew that the other was even into computers. Turned out he was manning a table in the very room we kept using to sneak into ShmooCon and his voice can even be heard in the video I made of us sneaking in. A friend of Shane’s showed me an email today from 2005 where he’d written me to ask permission to use PLA material on a broadcast they were doing at a con.

Just bizarre that we’ve been at all these same places together and never knew it. Kind of reminds me of how I was friends with my biological brother in high school, both pining for the same girl for a couple of years, then finding out we were brothers 10 years later. Shane’s going to be at Defcon this year so I’ve got to hunt him down.

Oh yeah, speaking of hunting down old friends, Kristine and I managed to find Brad Thompson last week, a guy we both worked with back in the 80’s. He’s part of the reason (indirectly) I ended up moving to Galveston when I left my parents house in 1991. When I got there he got me a job as a painter with him. Was kind of fun catching up with him too. The internet rules for tracking down random old friends. I need to do this more often.

Last week I was browsing through the television selections on hulu.com for something random to watch while I did some other things and I picked Roswell. And I’ve done nothing productive since then. It’s a ridiculous show, with nonstop love scenes that make me wanna puke and the gayest music ever, but it’s still great. In just a week I’ve watched 2 1/2 seasons of their 45 minute episodes. Only the first season was on Hulu so I downloaded the rest on bittorrent. Only 8 episodes to go and I’m free! Free to resume my life and quit staring at my laptop all day.

In non-Roswell news, Emily had a birthday. I got her a D&D starter kit, even though I know nothing about D&D. The kids and I and two of their friends went to see 17 Again at the theater, which I expected to not enjoy at all but it was actually not so bad. Today we had dinner at Denny’s and then stopped by Goodwill for some speakers. This evening I ran speaker wires to the new speakers for my stereo. Doesn’t that sound like an 80’s thing to do? Who has a stereo anymore? I use an old stereo that I got from Goodwill for the sound on my computer. While stripping various wires tonight, I remembered how much I got yelled at as a kid for using my mom’s scissors as wire strippers and butter knives from the kitchen as screwdrivers. And I think it was my babysitter that used to complain at me for using my teeth to strip wires. (Which is how I discovered that phone wires have enough current in them to shock you.) Now that I’m an adult I get to do all that stuff guilt-free.

Hrmm, more things happened but as usual I’m old and can’t remember much. Molly came by to pick up all my boxes because she’s moving to D.C. I’ve been texting the hell out of Jessica this weekend, and she is currently watching the pilot episode of Roswell because I ranted to her about it, so I might have a new recruit for that show. Tomorrow night is The Phone Show, which I’m being ordered to clean up my act on. (No more cursing.) I think that’s it. Time to go watch the rest of episode #10 in season #3 before I go to sleep.

Closing in on a cache.

A microcache, hanging from a tree.

I think I’m going to bye this truck.

Hey look, a 38-year-old car for just $4,000!

A ripped up old chair with an arm missing for FREE!

Went Geocaching yesterday too. We did 8 or 9 of them during a hike. Had Mexican food and saw Knowing, which was a really bizarre movie.

You can still see traces of the word Focus under it, but I plan to blast those away the next time I end up at the car wash. This is how I spend my Friday nights.

This week I’m really loving Silly Really by Per Gessle and We Made You by Eminem. I know I’ll get sick of the Eminem song eventually, as I do with most of his hits. But for now it’s hilarious.

As we’re leaving I notice a cell phone sitting on the seat of an empty booth. A Motorola Razr which belonged to one of the teenage girls who’d been sitting there earlier. She was the loud, obnoxious girl who was yelling across the restaurant at the bus full of soccer players. The screen was caked with her makeup. That’s when you know you’re wearing too much makeup, when you can barely make out the text on the screen because it’s covered in makeup.

Anyway, I pick it up and bring it home with us. I’ve found cell phones before and we’ve used them for all sorts of nefarious purposes, but I decided that I didn’t really want to do anything with this one. If The Spessas were here, sure. But they weren’t, so today I looked through the phone’s address book and called her dad to tell him I had the phone.

He was really happy to hear that it’d been found and said he’d like to come over right away. He even said he’d give me a reward for it, but I told him that was okay. He showed up about 30 minutes later to retrieve the phone and tried to give me $10, but I told him he should tell his daughter to repay the good deed to someone else instead. He laughed and said he would.

Oh yeah, I changed the phone’s background wallpaper to one of the girl’s many slutty self-portraits she had stored on it. Hope her dad loved see that when he turned it on. Even when I do nice things, I’m a huge jerk.

The Gamma Dose Rate Meter was probably the coolest thing I saw at the Picc-A-Dilly flea market on Sunday. Me, Kate, Eric and a few other people drove there and spent a few hours. It’s been close to a year since I visited that place. I didn’t buy it, though. I did buy a couple books, some padlocks to pick and a 9-LED flashlight for just $3.00. Went on some hikes too, one on Saturday morning and another on Sunday evening.

Last night me and linear did epiosde #4 of The Phone Show. If anyone reading this wants to listen to the archives, visit www.phonelosers.org/phoneshow/. I’m enjoying doing it. I thought it would be kind of a drag, having to come up with an hour’s worth of show every week, but we’re not even preparing for it. We just take phone calls for most of the hour and hope for the best. So thanks a lot for the show, Party 934!

Last month while looking through all my old envelopes to discover my old addresses, I also came across this handwritten chart, written on the back of my work schedule from Union Station Cine, showing how much money I could make doing quarter roll scams:

This is something I wrote about on my Travels page, but never went into too much detail on. But here’s how it went… In 1992 I discovered that I could pass off rolls of pennies as rolls of quarters to convenience store clerks and other businesses. I did this by taking a roll of pennies and removing 4 of the pennies, then wrapping a couple strips of construction paper around the roll. Stick the finished product into an ordinary paper quarter roll and you’ve got yourself a roll of quarters worth just 46 cents.

In 1992 I’d passed a few of these around Alton and it seemed to work perfectly every time. So Chris Tomkinson and I decide that we’ll spend an entire day, driving from Alton to Paducah, Kentucky, passing out quarter rolls to as many businesses as possible. And by we, I mean me. Chris wasn’t dumb enough to pass the quarters, but I still wanted to split the profits with him if he came along with me.

We had a great time during the trip and the fake quarter rolls paid for our gas and excessive amounts of food and drink all the way there. We also had fun exploring some of Paducah. I don’t know why Chris picked Paducah of all places, but it was a good destination and we got to visit Metropolis, Illinois, the home of Superman! (Or so they claim.)

What I would do is buy something for under $1.00 (usually) and then say, “Could you use any quarters? I happen to have this roll here.” and they would almost always accept it. Then I’d get my $9.00 in change and quickly leave. For the most part, passing the rolls of quarters went smoothly, but I did have occasional close calls. Like one lady who really needed the quarters for her register and started banging them on the edge of the counter to break them, only they wouldn’t break because of the extra layers of paper. I quickly made my way out the door and ran to the car.

Another time the guy opened the roll before giving me my change and saw that there were pennies inside. I had to pretend that I was the one who got scammed by some other store. “The clerk at 7-Eleven had to give me this yesterday because they were out of large bills!” I can’t remember if he seemed to believe me, but at least he didn’t jump over the counter and tackle me for it.

And then there’s the lady who discovered the fakes as I was talking to her and backing out the door. She sees the pennies and goes, “Hey!” I quickly exit and run to my car. Luckily she had to walk around the long counter before she could make it out the door. I was in my car and starting it when she burst out of the front doors and towards my car. I backed out of my place and just kept backing up out of the parking lot and down the street. This particular incident actually happened before Paducah, in East Alton right across the street from the police station.

In between hitting stores, Chris put together the fake rolls of quarters while I drove. I had a metal file box filled with all the necessary supplies for making fakes. I guess we weren’t too worried about fingerprints because I don’t remember us taking any precautions against that. Guess it’d be hard to lift prints from construction paper, though.

Our last close call was very late at night as we were making our way home. On some Illinois highway, cops were stopping all cars and checking for drunks. Before we got up to the checkpoint we were pretty sure that it was some kind of state-wide manhunt for quarter roll scammers. They check my drivers license and talked to us for a few seconds to make sure we weren’t drinking. They shined their light all over the inside of my car. The metal box full of counterfeiting supplies was on the floor in the back.

The problem came when I couldn’t find my insurance card. I looked everywhere for it and couldn’t find it. Not in the glovebox or the visor. Checked all over the floor. Nowhere. The cop kept leaving and coming back to see if I’d found it. And each time he kept shining his light around my car. He finally had us pull to the side of the road to get out of the way of traffic. Chris was freaking out, sure that they would eventually search the car and find our box. After what seemed like forever, I finally found my insurance card amongst all the trash on my floor and we were allowed to leave. It was a stressful search though.

Our final profits for the day were pretty pitiful. Nowhere near the possible $9,500 that I fantasied we could take in. We didn’t keep track of the money during the trip, but we just spent a lot of it on food, gas and other junk and didn’t have much left by the time we got home. But it was still a fun and completely free trip. After our scamming roadtrip, I gave up on the idea of quarter roll scamming being profitable and never tried it again, mostly because it seemed just too risky. Took me a few more years, though, to give up my dream of scamming for a living.

Our quarter roll scamming did make the police log in the Alton Telegraph. I remember they claimed we’d hit places that we didn’t actually hit, such as the Wood River Donut Shop. So either the police were trying to anger us into calling them and telling them how wrong they were, or there was a copycat criminal out there.

This is kind of weird – this morning in my email I had 20 notifications of all these different sites linking to an old entry of mine from 2006 where my car stereo was stolen. It’s a story about car stereo thefts going down and they’re all using the picture of my broken car window and linking to my site for credit. Nice of them to give me credit for it. (To read the story, look at the comments on the original entry.) Wonder if actual newspapers will end up using my picture.

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.

Then I had more to test so I needed to call another number. I dialed a familiar exchange and then a random 4 digits afterwards and immediately realized that those 4 digits weren’t exactly random. They belonged to a childhood nemesis of mine named Darin Abernathy. This is a guy I haven’t thought of for about 20 years now, but somehow I’m suddenly calling him up and talking to his mom. I have no idea how his number suddenly popped into my head.

So I start in with lots of nonsense to Darin’s mom, asking her meaningless questions like, “So, how’s your dog?” “Uh, we don’t have a dog.” And I needed to test the music function of this software I’m using so I said to her, “Hey, listen to this really awesome song!” and I start playing Roses by Outkast. You know, the piano part. She tells me it’s very nice and I ask her if she was able to hear it okay. It wasn’t too loud or distorted was it? She says no, it sounded fine to her. Then she resumes asking me who I am. I’m Dave.

I don’t know why I didn’t like Darin Abernathy as a kid. He was about 2 years older than me. I know me and John Sever both had something against him. I’m not sure if I brought John into it or he brought me into it or if John was even that much a part of it. I’m not sure if Darin actually did something to warrant my dislike for him or if it was just completely random. I do remember that he seemed to really hate me, but it’s probably because of whatever irritating things I was doing to him. It’s just been so long that I don’t remember. Maybe John will know.

I do remember a few specific things that I did to Darin and his friend though. They would play tennis behind our garage and I would hang out in the garage making insane noises inside. Crashing into things, yelling, starting up the lawnmower, setting off fireworks, etc. Just whatever I could do to irritate them. And it worked too. They would bang on the garage wall at me and yell back. I wasn’t yelling at them though. I was just performing theatrics in the privacy of my own garage. How dare they listen in on me!

I had this plan to mount a big speaker at the peak of the roof inside the garage and run a wire for it underground so that I could annoy them even when it wasn’t possible to go outside and bother them in person. I was dedicated! I even went as far as running the wire along the fence and hiding it with leaves, but I think I ran short of wire or something because I never completely.

Something I did often in the 80’s was hang out on our patio’s swing. You know, a bench hanging from chains? And from this swing I had a perfect view of Darin’s front porch on the next block over, which him and his friends seemed to sit around on a lot. So when we got our first cordless phone I discovered the hilarity of outdoor prank calling by calling his phone number whenever they were outside, just to see them get up and go inside to answer it. I’d hang up before they got in the door, they’d come back out, sit down, then it repeats. At the time it seemed so innovative, having a remote means of dialing the phone from outdoors. Cordless phones were amazing!

Eventually they must have noticed me on the swing talking on the cordless phone in completely unrelated phone calls. And also noticed that I was always there when their phone was mysteriously ringing, because they started yelling at me (from a block away) whenever I called them. I forget exactly what they were yelling.

This tormenting of Darin continued until at least when I was 16 or 17 years old, because I remember using the phone line in my room (which I had installed when I was 16, after I had a job to pay for things like that) to call the Alton Telegraph and set up a fake newspaper ad, listing Darin’s home for rent. This is back in the day when newspapers would set up an ad before getting paid for it. I gave them my own telephone number so that people could call me about the house, I think with the intentions of recording the phone calls and saying funny things to the callers. But then I started telling people to come and look at the house and if we weren’t home to just walk around the house looking in the windows to see what it looks like inside. I made it a really awesome renting deal so there were lots of calls.

I guess when I left home and went to Texas I completely forgot about him. Weird that I dialed his number like that, after all these years. And even after I was so weird at his mom the other day, she still kept talking to me so I asked if Darin was around. I expected her to say, “Oh no, he hasn’t lived here for 15 years!” but instead she told me he was out for the day and then she gave me his cell phone number. I called it for another test of my system, but only got his voicemail. I babbled to his voicemail for awhile and played Roses in its entirety, then talked a little while longer, mostly about issues I was having with software. His voicemail seems to have unlimited recording capacity. I should give him a call later and apologize to him! I bet he’d love that.

Kristine sent me an awesome wooden Mark Twain to keep my existing Mark Twain company. As you can see, it was just in the nick of time since he was getting pretty lonely and hitting the scotch. (Yeah, I know, I’m hilarious!) Thanks, Kristine!!

This weekend the kids and I saw Witch Mountain. It was dumb.

By this time I’ve met a few people who agree to be roommates with me, so I’m spending a lot of time looking at places to live since I seem to have the most free time. I find this one place on Avenue M which is 4 or 5 bedrooms for just $600/month. I go to the office that own it and they give me a key to it and tell me to go look at it by myself. How trusting! The first thing I noticed about it is that the window on the door is broken and the door is already unlocked. It’s an awesome place, though. Huge rooms, really old decor, the floors are all going up/downhill and creek a lot, some of the rooms have these giant wooden doors that slide into the walls instead of opening, there’s a balcony, lots of character and you get the feeling that a few people have been murdered there before. Later I take Tammy to see it and she agrees that it’s awful, but awesome. I take pictures and show the other guy who’d be living with us and his flamboyant response is, “You want to live on Avenue M? M stands for murder!”

For some reason, I decide that I really want to go see that house again in the middle of the night. The front door is broken so I know I can get in. And even though I own a flash light, I decide that the best way to explore this house once more is by candlelight. What better way to explore a creepy old house in the middle of the night, right? I park a few blocks away and walk up to the house, reach in the broken window and turn the doorknob. Once inside, I light my candle and start leisurely wandering around, exploring each room on the first floor and discovering a new door in the kitchen that leads to a cellar. I wasn’t brave enough to go down there. I eventually begin walking up the open staircase, long candlestick in hand, and as I get to the top steps I see some kind of movement down the hall.

I stop, trying to see what it is. I move my hand that’s cupped around the flame to the other side, trying to shine light in that direction and I see a face peering from the bedroom door at the end of the hall. Holy crap! Neither of us say a word to each other and I slowly back down the stairs and then quickly leave the house. I bet this squatter was a lot more freaked out than I was, hearing someone creaking around downstairs and then coming up the stairs with a candle. Who uses candles???

Here’s my old picture of the house and then the Streetview of it:

View Larger Map

I don’t know why, but I was using black and white film during my first few months living in Galveston. It was a brown and yellow house, but appears to be much more colorful today. We didn’t end up getting that house because we found a tiny one at 5517 Ave K instead, for just $300 per month. Finding that house on Streetview made me think it might be fun to find all the other places I’ve lived on Streetview. So I did. Well, most of them. I dumped out my box of old letters, postcards, Christmas cards, etc and noted the addresses that people wrote me at.

I found most of my old addresses this way. I have no idea what our address was on Avenue K, since I never got mail there. I also don’t know Edwin’s address or the addresses to the other houses in Galveston that I lived at. There was 3428 Cove View Blvd in Galveston, though.

Brad Thompson lived there and I stayed with him for a night or two and he got me the painting job. I didn’t get any letters there, but I found a pawn slip from 8/3/92 and a seat belt warning from 4/12/92 with that address on it. I ended up using his address to get my Texas drivers license when I moved there, so that address ended up being on a lot of paperwork over the next year.

Another address I found on an old ticket from the cops (10-10-91) was 1108 Ave O, Galveston, TX. Streetview says that doesn’t exist, though, so I guess I lied to the officer. I couldn’t make out what the ticket was for, but I guess that would have been shortly after I’d just moved to Galveston. I mostly got all my mail at PO Box 821, which was the big post office in Galveston on 25th Street. (Gina wrote me a letter at that address.)

My next move was to Myrtle Beach, SC, but “Myrtle Beach” didn’t sound awesome enough for my new P.O. Box, so I got a box 10 miles away from where I lived and worked, which was PO Box 15993, Surfside Beach, SC 29587. Myrtle Beach is another place where I have no idea what my address was. It was a few blocks from the beach and I shared it with a varying number of other guys for the summer.

A library card from 1992 says I lived at 513 Van Buren in Normal, IL, but I guess that address isn’t exactly right since Streetview can’t find it. It was on the ISU campus in the Van Buren building, room #513 where me and Sylvia lived with Chris Tomkinson for a month or two. Soon after that, Sylvia and I moved to Los Angeles where we lived with Kristine on Romaine and Vine in Hollywood for awhile. I searched Romaine and couldn’t recognize our old place, but here’s a Streetview of the street.

We were in there someplace. We also lived on Jumilla Ave in Canoga Park, CA, but that’s another one where I don’t have the exact address and I don’t remember what the house looked like. It’s only a block long, though.

A letter from Shonna shows that we lived at 1021 Broadway #4 in Highland, IL, but Highland hasn’t gotten a visit from the Streetview gods yet so there’s only an aerial view.

Next was Indianapolis, living alone in various places. A lot of the time I was homeless on the IUPUI campus, but there was a really cool giant house I lived in for awhile, though I have no idea what its address was. I lived on the 3rd floor with the mice and the roaches. I also spent a lot of time living at the Skyline Motel at 6617 E Washington Street:

My permanent address here was PO Box 441403, Indianapolis, IN 46244, which I found on a letter to me from Kristine. The letter was addressed to Alex Carbon, the name I was living and working under during my entire time in Indianapolis. (On the lam from Madison County authorities.)

From Indiana, I retired to the small community of Celina, Ohio, where I lived at 129 1/2 W Fayette where I received a letter from Martini.

Ohio was next. I lived in an area of Cincinnati called St. Johns in a tiny apartment above some businesses. A collections letter from MCI Telecommunications tells me that the address was 6004 Vine Street, Apt. #3C, Cincinnati, Ohio, and that I owe them $216.75 OR ELSE!

I used to walk down the street to use the pay phone that was several blocks away, in front of a church. There was a pay phone closer to me, but it wasn’t in front of a church with a giant rotary dial on the front of the building.

I spent some time living with Colleen on 161st and SE Stark in Portland:

I also lived at the Jack London Hotel which some website claims is at 415 SW Alder St in downtown Portland. Doesn’t look familiar to me, though. Probably cause they appear to have cleaned that area up.

I lived in that house, which was at 5225 NE Wyngat in Portland, shown by a letter addressed to my new name Alex Kelley. It was a really nice house where I had 3 roommates. The lady who owned the place stupidly left all of her stuff there and the 19-year-old girl who rented one of the rooms stole a ton of it while she lived there. Her and her friends went through the garage and all the closets, taking everything that they wanted. Luckily she stayed out of my room when I was gone since there was no lock on my door.

I had post office boxes all over Portland too, for mine and Colleen’s various mail order scams and credit card fraud. There was the PO box at 950 Lloyd Center #62, but the one we used the most was 2000 N East 42nd, Suite 128, which was in the Hollywood area of Portland.

I had at least 4 different post office boxes while in Portland for all our crazy scams. I had an apartment with a girl named Lisa too, but then she bailed out on it after we’d already paid the first month’s rent because she couldn’t handle a few roaches living with us.

I used the address 213 Congress #314 in Austin, TX 78701 with mail being addressed to me in the names Chris Tomkinson and Alex Kelly. I lived in a very strange place in Austin which was underneath a skating rink, but don’t remember the address or the area it was in.

Next is 810 Morgan #4 in Corpus Christi, Texas:

This place featured the live entertainment of the guy next door screaming at and beating his wife often!

A letter from Kristine shows me next living at 825 Ermine Avenue SE in Albany, Oregon. I love how she always went with the flow of writing to whatever name I happened to be using at the time. It was Alex Carter at this address.

Colleen and I next lived at 1013 Kingswood Court in Celina, Ohio, but there is no Streetview there.

1.5 years later we moved to Illinois, where we immediately set up P.O. Box 483 in East Alton, IL before moving to 3504 Meridocia Street in Alton, IL for the next 7 or 8 years. (Not much Streetview in Alton yet.)

Below is 805 Elm Street SW in Albany, Oregon:

I recently spent a full 2 years living there, but moved just last year. It was cool having my front door open onto a city sidewalk, but not so cool having people walk by as they talked loudly at all hours of the night.

Only the back side of my newest domicile is on Streetview, but it’s probably best not to post it so all you weirdos don’t start sending me pizzas and taxis.

Somehow last night I ended up watching Family Ties on Netflix. It’s a show from the 80’s I loved which I haven’t seen since the 80’s. Usually when I attempt to rediscover some old show from the 80’s, I can’t believe how awful it is and that I ever liked it. But Family Ties was great, despite that God-awful intro song where the hippies sing about how much they suck at math and English. I watched about 6 episodes. And I was really surprised to find out that Alex P. Keaton was friends with George McFly a year before Back to the Future came out. He had a small part, but it was cool to see them together in something else.

I’m given a whole page detailing my Ebay feedback antics, even though they chose to display the most boring of my comments possible. If you’ve never read my Ebay feedback, it’s here:

http://www.notla.com/ebay/

The cable guys sure like to eye all the weird stuff in my room when they come to repair things. My phone keeps going out so I’ve had two of them over in the past month. I’m surprised they never comment on the abundance of phone stuff everywhere.

Back in 2000, I was at my parents house to pick something up and my parents had a couple of cable guys in the house installing high-speed internet for them. I’d just had it put in my house the previous month. After I left, one of them asked my dad, “He lives over on Meridocia, doesn’t he? I remember he had a basement with all this STUFF in it.” Nice to know my weird decor is worth remembering. I think.

I wonder if there are people who have a phobia about using toilets that have the auto-sensing “eye” that flushes the toilet for you. There must be people out there that think that little red window on the flusher is an actual camera (after all, it sees you and knows when to flush!) and is too shy to pee in the presence of it. Even if they don’t think a human is on the other end watching, I bet they’re afraid for the machine to watch them.

My car freaked out the other day when I tried to start it. The “ding” sound was stuttering, no lights came on and I heard a relay switch under the dash going nuts. It was weird. I tried a few more times and it finally started like normal, but not before resetting my car stereo, causing it to prompt me for a code which I didn’t know. Guess that’s an anti-theft device for when people steal my stereo. I checked the instruction book and I’d written my code inside, but there were also instructions for resetting the code in case you lose it. So what good is that as an anti-theft device? I’m betting that a thief could reset the code just as well. Now I’m paranoid to take my car out of the city because I’m sure it’s going to have some bizarre breakdown and I’ll end up stranded somewhere.

My HD Flip camera is great. It takes excellent video, even in the dark, and has great sound. The only problem is that the file sizes are huge and that my laptop is too slow to edit HD video within a reasonable time span. So I think I’m going to take it back and get the regular Flip camera again. I don’t even care about HD quality video – I just wanted a wide screen camera and the only one they had was in HD.

Hey CK, thanks for introducing me to that UGK song in your LJ the other day. I downloaded two of their albums and I’ve really been enjoying them.

Thursday: Drove to Portland, parked my car in a cheap parking lot. Took the Max to downtown and did a lot of wandering around. While passing a pay phone phone, I noticed an odd sign attached to it. It warned of an unnamed man who was suspected of jamming pay phones. Here it is:

I guess the guy is referring to pay phone stuffing. I’ve never heard it called pay phone jamming before. Decades ago, a popular money making scheme was to stuff tissue up into coin slots. People using pay phones would never get their money back because it would land on the tissue instead. Later the thief would come back, pull out the tissue and be showered in free change! Supposedly that worked pretty great from the 50’s to the mid 90’s. I can’t see how it’d be very profitable today though. Maybe the sign is referring to something else. I love the picture of that old man, though. I should call the guy and get the story from him.

I got on the train and headed to the airport by midnight since that’s when the trains stop running. I spent the night in the airport, reading a new book part of the time (No Sanctuary by Richard Laymon) and doing as much sleeping as possible on their uncomfortable seats. Around 3ish, a cop came over and hassled me for a few minutes, but left me alone when I convinced him that I had a flight in a few hours.

Friday: Woke up around 4:30am or so and got checked in, went to my gate and looked for breakfast. I didn’t find anything good, though, so I waited til my layover in Denver where I found some McGriddles at McDonalds. Both of my flights had empty seats between me and the other person, which was nice. Got into DC around 5:00pm, took a subway to the hotel and wandered around for awhile, Twittering in hopes of meeting up with some people. I finally got spotted by vixen and Trevelyn, said our hellos and went in search of Altalp. Met RTF and RogueClown at some point before heading towards Altalp’s room.

A few of us went across the street to eat at Chipotle’s. Then we went to the Podcaster’s Meetup and stood around until the end of the show, then talked to a few people there. Seems like more happened on Friday evening, but I can’t remember. I think it was between 9 and 10 that we all piled into a cab (minus Trevelyn and two of us in the front even though the cab driver insisted that wasn’t allowed) and went to the HacDC party, which was awesome. I met tons of people there and saw a few old acquaintances. Drank a lot (free drinks!) and played i-hacked’s Labyrinth game which was rigged up to a Wii fit board for controlling it. Pretty neat even though I sucked at it. The night came to an end when the fire alarm was pulled and everybody went outside. After about 15 or 20 minutes in the cold, we decided to go back to the hotel. We all got to sleep between 2 and 3.

Saturday: I woke up first, around 9am, which Trevelyn, i-ball and vixen close behind. Altalp continued to sleep while we went to McDonald’s for breakfast. Looking at a map from the Shmoocon program, we headed for what we thought would be a back route to sneak into the con for free. I tried buying a badge in November and their payment system failed so when I retried it was too late. That’s my justification for sneaking in. Turns out it was really easy to do. The hotel is enormous and there were several back ways in by just going up some stairs and sneaking across some empty conference room. (With lots of unguarded computer and sound equipment along the way.) At one point we took a wrong turn and ended up in a very busy employee area (a kitchen I think) where employees were all staring at us as we walked by, but none of them told us to leave. I think I got video of that.

Altalp made a really cool fake badge the night before, out of a piece of thin plastic which she cut into the shape of a badge with a razor and then imitated the markings with my red Sharpie. I made fun of it and her, saying that it would never fool anyone. But I guess I should admit that I was completely wrong and she didn’t get questioned once. A piece of plastic that she found in the lobby gained her free admittance for the entire weekend. Not to mention hilarious admiration from everyone she showed it to.

I-ball’s trick was pretty good too. He wore an official-looking button up blue shirt and a hat that said SECURITY on the front of it in big letters. I guess he was just walking in the doors, getting by on the assumption that he was someone official. (I think he told me he got an employee discount somewhere because of it too.) The getup looked pretty good, but around noon we were standing around and suddenly there were 3 or 4 Shmoocon staff surrounding us. I didn’t even notice them until one said to I-ball, “Excuse me, do you have a badge?” Being the true friend I am, I immediately walked away as fast as I could so they wouldn’t notice my missing badge too. Minutes later I signaled Trevelyn who was walking by, and we looked out the window and noticed I-ball heading down the escalator. He’d been kicked out. (But only until he snuck back in, in less conspicuous clothing.) We went downstairs to meet him and on the way out heard one of the door checkers talking about the guy wearing a security hat.

Before all that happened, I borrowed Trevelyn’s badge to go to the registration desk and get a wristband for the Saturday night party. I asked if I could have two of them since my friend needed one too. The lady said to me, “Your friend needs to come and get it himself or you need to figure out a way to social engineer me.” A challenge! About 10 minutes later I went back with I-ball’s sunglasses on and my hood up, saying to her in a loud, monotone voice, “Hello! I would like a badge for the party tonight! I’ve never been here before and this is my first time asking you for one!” She smiled and handed me a badge. I kick ass at social engineering!

I got the elevator extensions, but we never got to do anything hilarious with them. I started out by calling Verizon’s assignment office, who checked the hotel’s address to give me all the phone lines working there. Unfortunately they were all special circuits, so there was nothing to give me. So I called the hotel, said I was with Verizon and that I needed their elevator phone extensions. They were happy to help and I can’t remember if they even asked why I needed them. They sent their phone technician to the phone room, where all the numbers were written down. They ended up calling me back 15 minutes later with the numbers. Unfortunately the elevator phones weren’t speakerphones, so we couldn’t just call in and talk to people that got in. That would have been fun there. (If you’d like to try that out, though, here’s a page full of elevator phone numbers.)

We did some exploring in downstairs hallways which was clearly for employees only. But the few employees that passed us didn’t say anything to us. I’m guessing a lot of them didn’t speak English. We took tons of pictures and videos and Altalp scored a nice robe from a laundry room. (Had to find the thing to tie it with in a completely different room on a different floor.)

Tried to go on the roof, but that failed. We found the access door, but it was locked and there was no sign of a way to unlock it. There was a phone nearby which instructed us to call a certain number to have it unlocked. I called later from my cell phone and ended up talking to Loss Prevention about it. I said we simply wanted to go on the roof to dance around all crazy-like, but the grouchy guy on the other end of the phone said that would never happen. Sadly, he was right.

The hotel’s ATM was hax0red by someone by using the default password to get it into admin mode and playing around in the menus. There wasn’t much to do with it though. We also kept putting stickers on the ATMs, which warned that smiling into the ATM’s camera was a crime, punishable by something. Hevnsnt and Surbo later discovered that the entire cover of the ATM could be opened up, which they wrote about here. And where you can see a picture of our sticker, available for download from signhacker.com.

I made a sign for our door that read CACTUS. Later we noticed that the people down the hall put a sign on their door that said The Blue Oyster. (A awesome, obscure reference.) Altalp retaliated by putting some Post Its on their door which read Blue Oyster Sucks and Cactus Rules! We were hoping to start up a war with whoever was staying inside, but they didn’t play along. Though they did leave our extra signage up. On Sunday I added PostIts reading DOWN WITH BLUE OYSTER! and VIVA LA PLA! but I think they may have checked out by then.

I think this is where our obsession with PostIts began. I don’t know why AltAlp even brought those with her, but those, combined with my Sharpies, kept us entertained for quite awhile. We traveled the halls, putting PostIts on everything we could find. Glass is Fragile was one that we put on a fire extinguisher door. Push for Killer Robots was stuck next to a room’s doorbell. I jumped up and stuck a Low Ceiling sign up on the ceiling and the whole Ye intruders betware, crushing death and grief… shtick on an access hatch on the ceiling. There were tons other others, but I can’t remember all of them. Oh yeah, Break Glass For Candy is one we put on a glass fire extinguisher door. I took pictures and I think there’s a few more in them. I think we did even more PostIts after Saturday’s party.

Oh yeah, the party. Altalp inexplicably drug a chair into our elevator as we were leaving to go to the party, I guess so she wouldn’t have to stand up for the entire 3 floors down. The elevator opened and we all walked out, leaving the giant chair inside. And who would roll up to that elevator to go upstairs but…a guy in a wheelchair. What are the odds of that? I think it was I-ball who suddenly grew a conscience and went back to take the chair out for him.

RTF can make PostIts funny without even writing on them.

The party was about a mile away and the weather outside was amazing (50’s or 60’s, I think) so we walked. Had some insanely large slices of pizza on the way there, (a slice was big enough to feed my family for a week) and then went into the party. Unlike last night’s party, this one didn’t rule quite as much. It was overcrowded, the line to get drinks took forever to get through (free drinks though!), and the music was just loud enough to make conversation impossible. Trevelyn was the first to leave, after maybe 30 minutes. Altalp and I lasted maybe 45, before walking home. I-ball followed about 15 minutes after us, who I met when I went back outside to visit CVS.

I think the 4 of us walked around and did some more PostIts, then went down to the lobby to go down some escalators that descended into a completely dark room, figuring there must be something to explore down there. And holy crap, was there a lot to explore! I think we spent close to 2 hours exploring all these basement rooms, and didn’t see a single employee all night. It really made us realize out incredibly huge the hotel was. There were several enormous banquette rooms and a lot of small conference rooms too, lots of storage areas, eating areas, long hallways, and rooms that had no business being open for just anyone to walk into. Each room was full of new laughs for us. We played Frisbee with giant serving trays, Trevelyn danced on tables, we moved some walls around trying to create new rooms, we shut giant automatic doors, we tried to get a waxing machine started so we could drive around on it, and Trevelyn gave a great speech in front of a podium which I videotaped and I’ll put up on YouTube someday this week.

And then there was the network room. Several racks full of internet stuff with cat5 running into everything. Trevelyn made a pretty funny video about taking down Shmoocon’s network, but I should point out here that we put it back how it belonged afterwards. Then off in another room, where we had to duck under a concrete wall to get into, was the phone room!

Two walls, completely covered with giant banks of modular jacks and phone blocks with phone wire running everywhere. There was even a phone in the middle of the room to plug into them all. It’s just a good thing that we’re not the type of people to take advantage of a situation like that. Can you imagine?

The hotel got really weird when we found an elevator down there that went DOWN. And we were already in the basement. We went down another 7 or 8 floors and ended up in what appeared to be freezing, abandoned hallways with more rooms for people to stay in. But then we found a garage that apparently opened up into the street when the giant metal doors were open. The cars in that garage had a layer of dust on them. I’m still a little confused how 7 floors below the earth is once again street level, but I guess the hotel is so huge that this is somehow possible. I wanted to walk around the hotel the next day to find out how, but never got around to it. I think we probably just walked into another dimension at some point, but luckily got back up to the basement level and eventually went back to our room. Those couple of hours exploring the hotel’s basement were awesome though. Made me glad we left the party.

As we found our way back out, we spotted a giant, framed USA Olympics picture filled with signatures. Noticing that there was ample room for more signatures, we used a Sharpie to fill in the extra space.

I-ball and Trevelyn fell asleep shortly after that and Altalp and I hung out on our floor’s foyer, watching the drunk people occasionally pass by and making more evil plans for the remainder of the weekend. Skydog happened by and sat down to talk to us for awhile. I met him a few months ago at Defcon and found out that he was the one who had to fix my mess with Phreaknic’s hotel phones a few years ago. He told AltAlp all about it, and his version is so much funnier than mine. Later we made some PacMan art on the floor out of chair cushions, which made people passing by either laugh or give us WTF looks. Didn’t get to sleep until it started getting light out.

Oh yeah, around 2am or so, a message came across Twitter from hevnsnt saying, “I’m going to punch Brad Carter in the face the next time I see him.” Holy crap, what did I do?? This slightly worried me for awhile as I tried to figure out exactly which of our shenanigans had he pieced together enough to find out that I was somehow responsible. It wasn’t until the next day that I found out he was just kidding around. Luckily I didn’t break down and start confessing all the awful things we’d done to him that day.

Sunday: Slept until 10 or so, then got the hotel room packed up and checked out at 12:30. Trevelyn left us around 11am. Put our bags in vixen’s new room (she’s stayed an extra day) and went out to eat breakfast/lunch at a pizza place. Taxied back to the hotel, got our bags and sat in the closing ceremonies for awhile, long enough to see RTF win an award for his barcode design. Went to say goodbye to him and RogueClown, and to get them to sign Altalp’s PLA coffee mug. Me, I-ball and Altalp took the subway to the airport, where we all went our separate ways.

I thought I was wide awake on my flight, but when I started reading my book I kept drifting off, so I finally put it away and fell asleep for a large portion of that flight. Managed to finish up my book on the 2nd flight. Got to my house around 1am and went right to sleep. Bed felt pretty great after 3 days of sleeping on hotel room floors, in airports and on airplanes.

Hacker cons are great. There should be more of them that aren’t across the entire country. Here’s some more pictures on my Flickr page.

“Oh, okay. Sorry about that, I won’t do it again.”

“Could you go ahead and move it back a few feet?”

I looked and I wasn’t even in front of his mailbox. It was about a foot in front of my car. “It doesn’t look like I’m in front of it anyway.”

“Just back up a few feet for me!”

“Not now. I won’t park there again though, I promise.” And I keep walking towards the school.

“YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE!” he yells.

This makes me smile. I pause for a minute and then go back to where he can hear me.

“Hey, I’ll probably park there tomorrow too. And every day from now on.”

“Go ahead! I’ll call the police! You’re an asshole!”

“Bye now!”

And I continued walking to pick up my son. I told him about it so that if the guy started yelling things at us again, he would be prepared. I was kind of hoping for more, but he wasn’t outside. He was probably on the phone with 911, frantically telling them all about me.

I usually can’t even park in that spot because some other mom is already there. And is it even illegal to park a foot away from a mailbox? I know it’d make it difficult for the mailman in his truck, but that can’t be illegal. Or maybe it is, who knows. In my 3 years here, I’ve never seen that guy in his yard but I can’t wait to give him a friendly hello every time I see him from now on.

I really want to see this movie. It looks so beautifully weird and interesting. I remember that head janitor guy from Rat Race. I’ve watched the trailer 3 times now. I can’t wait to see this one. It’s in my Netflix queue.

Speaking of movies, we saw Mall Cop this weekend. Despite a lot of very obvious plot holes that even my kids were spotting, it was a fun movie and we really enjoyed it. I was surprised at what a clean movie it was. I expected the usual dose of bad language, fart jokes and general raunchiness for this type of movie, but there was none of that. It was unexpected. My mouth is still in pain from the crazy amount of butter salt we put on the popcorn. (We always bring our own.)

I discovered a new comic today that I really like. It’s called Being Five and it kind of reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes. Both me and Payton read every single one of them from the blog today. Here’s a sample:

All of the gloves on the rack were labeled for Boys, no matter the style. Today I sent the image in to The Fail Blog so maybe it’ll end up on their site one of these days. (That’s why it has the FAIL writing on it.)

I can’t tell you how much I want to take my TV-B-GONE to the gym and turn off all the cable boxes and TVs with one press of the button. It’d be complete pandemonium, with 20 people looking around, confused and wondering what they’ll do now that the TVs are off. Even better would be to bring my old remote control watch in and switch all the channels up a few times.

In other YouTube news, every single one of Richard Cardo’s investigative videos have disappeared. Either they all got taken down due to complaints or he hid them from the public to make them stop getting taken down. Also, I think I got Richard grounded from playing investigator today when I called his wife and yelled at her over this whole thing.

And in even more YouTube news, Shay Carl is awesome and so is his Shaytards channel. Watch his Turkey Bowling in Wal-Mart video first. Him and his wife are hilarious.

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.

I ran 6 MPH for 30 minutes straight today. That’s my longest time at that pace. Usually I take a break at 20 minutes.

Payton was doing some report on beavers for school and I found out that they’re not allowed to call beaver dams dams. They call it a lodge instead. Because “dam” is a curse word. Isn’t that the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard? It’s like we’re moving backwards.

The Mysterious Stranger transcripts is awesome. Three separate versions of the same story, which happens to be my favorite book. And the first version, which is the one they used in the book, is an extra 50 pages. It’s like seeing the deleted scenes on a DVD.

While scrolling through old pictures, I found this one from 2004:

I’d forgotten about all the weird messages I left behind walls and under floors during all my renovating at the old house. I wonder if anyone will ever uncover this one. I remember another one that I did (but I couldn’t find the picture of) where I wrote on the subfloor something like, “Underneath you’ll find the 3rd $5,000 stash. Only 3 more clues until you find the $500,000 prize. Here is your next clue.” and then I wrote a bunch of gibberish underneath it. I know it’s unlikely that anyone will ever fall for it, but there’s always a chance that 20 years from now someone will find that and begin tearing up the house, looking for hidden treasure.

We did normal things to, though, like helping each other out with computer problems and helping each other with home improvement issues. We traded computer components all the time. We built walls in his basement together and he trusted me to completely rewire his basement and put porch lights on the front of his house and in his shed. He let me borrow his truck anytime I needed to go to Lowes and buy drywall or other big things. He was a great person and I’ve kind of missed him since I left Illinois.

I can only imagine how hard this must be on his son, who is about 12-years-old. His other son is 3. His older son and Emily were really good friends for the first 8 or so years of their lives and spent a ton of time together. Payton knew him for his first 5 years too, until we moved. Just, wow. Rest in peace, Tom.

I like following other people on Twitter too, even though I prefer actual blogging more. I’m currently following 35 people and I have 68 people following me. I tried getting my updates via cell phone, but that just annoyed me nonstop all day. So now I use a plugin for Outlook called OutTwit, which delivers all my Twitter messages to a folder in Outlook. I use Outlook all day, so it’s really convenient for me.

Also, Twitter was really cool for Defcon. During that weekend I had tweets delivered to my cell phone and it made keeping up with everyone else at the convention really easy. I’ll probably use it the same way during Shmoocon next month. Anyway, the point of all this is so I can post all my Twitter messages from 2008. Here they all are:

Then he’s back in the street, wandering around in an odd way. And continues up the street, looking on other porches and eventually disappearing between two of the houses, into the back. So I get dressed and start casually strolling the neighborhood, wondering where he’s went. I spent 30 minutes, walking around and hanging out on my porch, waiting for him to reemerge, but he never did. I was convinced he’d broken into someone’s house, but I guess he just left and I missed him.

A couple weeks ago, he starts coming back almost every day. Instead of stealing bikes and wandering the neighborhood, he walks directly to the neighbor’s house across the street, finds a few cigarette butts, pockets and few, lights one up and walks away. While that’s pretty disgusting, he’s no longer acting high like that first day.

What I really want to do is buy some of those exploding cigarette loads and put them in the butts on my neighbor’s porch. That’d be hilarious to watch him light up and KABLOOM! Maybe I could get a cigarette and leave about an inch of tobacco on it, so it looks like the most appealing one in there so he’s sure to take it. Even if I don’t get to see it blow up as he lights up, it’d still be hilarious to think that it’ll happen to him at some point in the day.

Should I really do this though? He’s just a guy looking for a smoke. Is it wrong to set off explosives in a stranger’s face? Is it legal even? I mean, they’re just a prank item, something I used to occasionally do to friends of mine in school and at work as a teenager. They can’t actually hurt you. It seems kind of cruel do to do a stranger, though. On the other hand, he is stealing from their porch. But he’s just stealing trash. But he did try to steal a bike! Even if that might be purely circumstantial and he was just walking up to a bike that someone else had attempted to steal earlier that morning. Oh, the decisions I have to make…

They’ve even got a domain at theinvisiblehope.com and a YouTube page made just for their invisible rope videos. As much as I love these videos, I still want to grab these guys by their big fat heads and scream at them, “I WAS PRETENDING TO HOLD ROPES ACROSS THE ROAD BEFORE YOU WERE EVEN BORN, KID!” I’m such a grouchy old man. It makes me wish even more that we could have had a video camera when we were kids. John and I would have taped so many awesome things.

Speaking of prank videos, I set up a YouTube page just for PLA videos. Now I won’t have my personal videos all mixed in with PLA stuff, even if those two categories are more or less the same. The YouTube is located at www.youtube.com/user/phonelosersofamerica.

Christmas has been a lot of fun! The kids got cool stuff and so did I.

The ice last week caused 3 snow days for the kids. So they got 3 days off in addition to Christmas break, which begins today. Oh, I mean “winter break” as the school calls it to avoid offending anyone who doesn’t celebrate Christmas. We had a couple days of good snow where the kids could actually go out and play in it. On Friday we bought some sleds and went sledding at Bryant Park for about an hour in a mixture of melting snow and mud. We were a mess by the time we left. It’s the first time we’ve been sledding since we moved to this state since the snow here sucks.

Really I need to just start driving to the nearby cities with higher elevations so we can go sledding in real snow, instead of complaining about Albany’s lame snow. There are plenty of places I could go for that. Maybe we’ll do that this week.

Friday night I tried going to the gym and they were closed “due to the weather” even though there was was absolutely no snow on the ground or ice on the roads. Lazy jerks. On Saturday we went to see Yes Man and The Day The Earth Stood Still. (Why didn’t the aliens just turn off our power to begin with instead of trying to exterminate us?) Sunday was swimming. Yesterday I downloaded Spore and put it on the kids computer and they played it nonstop. It looks really neat. They attempted to stay up all night playing it, but Payton told me this morning they only made it until 1:30am.

This morning I biked to some nearby woods to fix some problems with a geocache that the kids and I found recently. I’ve been itching to try out my new gorilla tripod for something, so I wound it around my bike frame and videotaped my trip there and back.

You know, I could take the message from that movie and use it in a way to make what I did on Black Friday seem like a noble cause. My childishness could have meaning!

I met Karalee’s parents this week. In fact, I met most of her family because it was a family reunion, but I’d met her parents earlier in the week when we came over to dinner. Siblings, nieces, cousins, everyone. We all hung around the house all day, played a lot of Wii, and a group of us went wine tasting at 3 different vineyards in the afternoon. I ate a lot of food that I’m not used to this week. Seems like I’ve met everyone associated with her at this point. We’ve bumped into every one of her friends at some point in the past year and I’ve met most of her coworkers and boss. Clearly it’s getting way too serious and I should dump her ASAP. SORRY, KARALEE!

Finally though, after it had been in the theater for a few weeks, I caught the ending chase scenes and was intrigued enough to start sneaking in as often as I could while working to catch parts of it. Eventually I saw the whole thing and I was hooked. Soon after that I rented the first Terminator movie and I liked it as well. Not as much as T2, but it was still a good movie. I ended up staying after work several times just to watch T2 in the theater again.

The reason I was working in downtown St. Louis (a 30 minute drive from my home in Illinois) was because I was hoping to move there. I was looking at apartments and other job opportunities in the area, saving money, and happily planning my new life in the big city. My parents didn’t even know I was working there for the first couple months. They thought I was going to work in Alton each day. I finally mentioned that I was when some guy from their church was surprised to see me working there and I figured it’d be best for my parents to find out from me instead of some random person at their church.

Earlier in the year, my girlfriend and I had been apartment hunting in Illinois. We’d also been talking about moving to Galveston, Texas. At some point during all of this she decided that I sucked and broke up with me, which is when I decided to move to St. Louis. The only reason I picked a city so close is that I knew my move would upset my parents and figured they could cope better if I were a mere 30 minutes away. But then I liked the scenes of Los Angeles so much in T2 that I suddenly decided I would just move there instead. And I was tired of waiting, so I put in my 2 weeks notice.

Over the next 2 weeks, I made my final preparations to move which included looking in Los Angeles newspapers for rent prices. They were insane and I knew if I drove there, not only would I blow a lot more of my saved money on gas, I would probably be homeless too. So I settled on Galveston, which I really wanted to see anyway since I’d been reading all about it earlier in the year. I left and I made it there. Thanks for the inspiration, T2!

A few years ago Terminator 3 came out. I was excited to hear about that, but then I heard they weren’t using the original John Connor, there was no Sarah Connor and James Cameron had nothing to do with it. By the time it was released, I was expecting to be disappointed and the movie didn’t let down my expectations. It had neat effects, action and a cool ending, but it just sucked overall.

Now they’re preparing to release Terminator 4, with ANOTHER new John Connor, no Arnold and no James Cameron. It seems weird to use Batman as John Connor, though I’m sure he’ll be better than that guy from Terminator 3. I actually have higher hopes for this one than 3. I know there’s a pretty good chance of just being disappointed again, but I think it could be good.

For the past year I’ve been really enjoying The Sarah Connor Chronicles on TV. It’s the only show on that I never miss. I actually watch it on TV and not hulu.com because I don’t want to wait the extra day to see it. I like all the characters in it and it’s a fun plot with them going around battling random terminators and hoping to stop Judgment Day. And they keep throwing all these random filler episodes in, like the girl Terminator losing her memory and thinking she’s a real girl with amnesia or the Terminator who’s accidentally sent to the 1920’s and becomes a real estate mongol. Silly, pointless stuff, but it’s great.

Each week, after the episode ends, I spend sometimes more than an hour reading the Sarah Connor Chronicles message board. That’s how much I like this show. Today while on the message board, I found a link to The Secret Diary of Cameron Baum. It’s hilarious stuff, especially the first couple chapters. It’s a humorous take on Cameron’s (the girl Terminator) day-to-day life. Read about her adventures in making a miniature reptar terminator for her science fair project, her failed attempts at being on top of the cheerleading pyramid, her night of big winnings in Vegas and her Terminating ants and dogs that wander onto their property. This is why I wrote this giant entry, because this diary story is cracking me up. One chapter to go…

Last weekend I created my own geocache called the Telephone Cache which contains a bunch of telephone-related items. 5 people have found it already. One guy went out at night and found it within an hour of it being posted on geocaching.com.

Tonight I’ve been cleaning up my computer’s hard drive. Deleted probably 50 gigs of old stuff that I didn’t need anymore, most of it video. Back in the days before YouTube, I used to find funny videos through file sharing sites like Morpheus and I would store them in directories so I’d never lose them. I had gigs of the stuff, ranging from about 1998 to 2005. Lots of stuff. All gone now. I checked a few things just to make sure they really were on YouTube and, of course, they were. I love the internet.

Found quite a bit of old stuff that I’d forgotten about and did some organizing. Put up a few new videos on YouTube. So I was sort of productive tonight, even if it was only in front of the computer.

Speaking of loving the internet, I think it’s so cool that I can check my daughter’s grades in real-time on all her classes. Every assignment in every class is logged on a website that I can log into and it’s updated every few days. When there’s an ‘F’ or a missing an assignment, I can yell at her immediately instead of waiting for progress reports. It makes being a nosy parent so much more easier. If they’d had something like this when I was in Jr. High, maybe it wouldn’t have been so easy for me to fail everything.

Earlier this week I took a screen shot of my desktop for this thread. I added a bunch of weird icons and titles. I’m only stating the obvious so nobody reports me for being suicidal or for having plans to become a mass murderer.

Skipped 2600 tonight.

Not sure what the kids and I will do this weekend. Put up the Christmas tree I’m sure.

I was doing random YouTubing today and I came across an old Disney cartoon which talks about how awesome smoking is. As much as I was ripping on Disney and Goofy a few entries back, this has gotta be the funniest cartoon ever. Just for the absurdity of the message. Better than the Flintstones smoking, even. Watch it.

It was made about 15 years before Walt Disney’s chain smoking killed him.

Two Sundays ago my back started aching. Right after seeing Bolt, for no reason at all, it was just killing me. By Monday it was even worse. Walking, sitting, sleeping and pretty much everything else was painful. Bending over was nearly impossible. I’ve never had back issues before and I’ve always been really thankful for that, especially since I’ve seen my dad and brother deal with all that forever. The pain was gone by Wednesday, but I can still feel a hint of it. I’m hoping it was just a pulled muscle or something and it’s not me getting old. It’d suck to have to deal with that all the time.

I’ve gone through quite a few methods of Geocaching since I started in 2004. For my first year, I lugged a full sized laptop around with me with a big USB GPS thing attached to it. Surprisingly I never dropped my laptop while climbing up rocks, through forests and around lakes. Then for awhile, I used an HP organizer, connected to a wireless GPS via Bluetooth. That was nice for a couple years, but it sure was a lot of extra gadgetry to own.

For the past year, I’ve been using my Blackberry phone to find Geocaches. It’s got built-in GPS and free Google Maps, so I just print out the geocache on paper, manually type the coordinates into Google Maps and follow the dot until I get there. I’ve tried a few Blackberry applications for Geocaching, but I never really found one that I liked. Until now.

About a month ago, I decided to look around for Geocaching software for my Blackberry phone once again. This time I came across a program called Geocache Navigator. It seemed like a nice program, so I decided to give it a try. The catch was that it would cost $5.99 per month for a subscription or $39.99 per year. I’d have to like a program an awful lot to pay a subscription for it. I gave them $5.99 to try it out for a month.

I can’t express how much I love this program. It does everything I could possibly need. When I turn on the program, it immediately finds my coordinates via GPS. Then I can click one button to find all the Geocaches that are near me. I’ll get a list that looks like this:

Check out how it lists the distance from each cache. Those numbers automatically update as I walk around. And when I click on the cache that I want to retrieve, I get to choose from these screens:

My favorite for zeroing in on a cache is the “radar” screen. From the Cache Details screen, I can read the full description of the cache, look at all the log entries and even view the unscrambled clue. The GPS claims to work to within 3 feet of the coordinates, though I’m unsure if GPS is really that precise. The map section allows me to view street maps, topographical or aerial photos.

This program makes geocaching completely spontaneous. Like a couple weekends ago I was in downtown Portland and had some time to kill, so I viewed the caches around me, picked the closest one and went to find it. It’s so great not having to put any effort into looking on the website and printing out cache info anymore. I can just whip out my phone anytime I want, wherever I am, and go Geocaching. Preparation is a thing of the past.

Another advantage this program has over using Google Maps, is that this program will keep working even when your internet goes out. I ran into a problem earlier this year when I was in the woods, using GPS and the map would no longer load because I wasn’t getting good reception anymore. The GPS still worked, but it was just a red dot on a completely white screen so it was useless. This program will continue to track the coordinates even when the internet connection dies.

Here are my few gripes about this program…

1. I can’t log my find on geocaching.com from within the program. For that, I still have to visit the website when I get home and log it like usual. I suppose I could log it from my phone’s web browser, but I’ve never bothered to try. If I could log my find, I’d never have a reason to even visit geocaching.com again.

2. The aerial and map view doesn’t zoom in far enough. When I’m using my Google Maps application to geocache, I can zoom in pretty close which makes tough caches a lot easier to find. If I’m really stuck, I suppose I could copy/paste the cache coordinates into Google Maps (since the Blackberry allows you to cut and paste, unlike some other nameless overhyped phone), but that’s extra effort. I wish the program could just zoom as much as Google.

3. The price. I really shouldn’t complain about that since $39.99 comes out to just $3.30 per month if I pay for a year up front. It’s worth every penny of that. Disregard this complaint. I just hope they don’t suddenly realize how awesome they are and start charging $10/month for this.

If you have a Blackberry that lets you use your GPS (sorry Verizon Wireless users) then you should definitely give this program a try. I’m loving it and plan to pay for a year of usage very soon. This program is spoiling me and making me wonder how I ever got along without it. You can find it at www.geocachenavigator.com for Blackberry and a few other smartphones.

The Geocaching was fun today. I discovered a few new places in Albany and found 4 microcaches. I want to find every cache in Albany, so I’m going to work on finding the micros by myself and the bigger caches for when I’m with the kids. Micros are usually in 35mm film canisters and only contain a log sheet. The bigger ones have toys and other random junk in them, which is what the kids enjoy trading for.

One of my finds today was underneath a pay phone in front of a convenience store curiously named the GPS Market. Another was hidden inside a guardrail. And the one that took me the longest to find was hanging in plain site from the remains of a hundred year old bridge. I spent over 30 minutes searching for that one. One of my failures required me to climb up a pine tree. I only didn’t because I was alone and people were around. I’m betting it’ll be much quieter there tomorrow morning though. I think I’m going to spend half the day doing this again tomorrow.

The 3-D didn’t really add anything to the film either. They didn’t do a whole lot with it. All the glasses do is darken the screen and make your face slightly more uncomfortable. Welcome to the future! On the upside, I actually was able to see the 3-D effects. My vision has always been screwy enough to make 3-D movies completely pointless for me, but I’m guessing that wearing glasses for the past year straight has done something for me, because the 3-D worked. This is a first for me. It still wasn’t worth the crazy ticket price, though.

Saturday we hiked and found a geocache. Sunday we did some local geocaching where we failed a lot. Then I took them to see the cool fence post cache. We also found a cache in the parking lot at the movie theater after our movie was over. We’ve decided to find every cache in Albany. We’re off to a bad start, though, with our 3 failures in a row on Saturday.

That image should indicate how many caches I’ve found. The number is low because I’ve always been lazy about logging my caches. I’m sure I’ve done over 100 now, between Illinois, Montana, Idaho, Texas and Oregon. I’m going to start logging all my finds though. If you’ve never heard of Geocaching, you should check it out at www.geocaching.com. Chances are, you walk or drive by several hidden caches every day. You don’t really even need a GPS to do it, just visit the website, put in your zip code, then zoom an ariel view map to the location you choose and print the map. Or cut/paste the coordinates into Google Maps for an even closer ariel view. You can even hide your own for other people to find.

Zoom this map to your current location and you’ll see how many caches are near you. There are over 100 in my city. It’s simple, fun, addictive, GO DO IT! And then post in the comments about how awesome I am for getting you started on a fun new hobby.

“We should start a Geocaching team called the GeoCrashers and we’ll go around just destroying caches and taking all their stuff.” -Emily, in the car last week, just me and her talking about random stuff.

Today the new Xbox Experience update happened. Among other things, we can watch Netflix movies on the Xbox now. Hopefully I can still get some good money out of my Roku box when I sell it on Ebay. … Just checked! Looks like I’ll get anywhere from $80 to $100 for it. I think I paid $120 for it early this year so that’s not too bad.

I throw my bike into the back and leave, planning to go straight to the repair shop. But since it seems to be doing okay, on the way I decide to stop by the post office and mail all my boxes and letters. I’ll just leave the car running while I’m in there so I won’t have to worry about starting it again. As I make my turn onto the road that leads to the post office, it dies again. Luckily, I’m able to get it started by holding down the ignition for about another 30 seconds. It finally starts up and I continue to the post office. Just to make sure I don’t accidentally turn my car off out of habit when I arrive, I take the key out of the ignition and lay it on the seat. (My key can be removed while the car is running.)

As I pull into my parking space at the post office, the car dies again. Argh. I begin to wonder if I’ll ever make it to the repair shop, which is still 10 minutes away. I grab all of my boxes and go inside. This is when I realize that I’ve added to my problems by locking my keys in my car. Since they weren’t in the ignition, I didn’t grab them on my way out of the car like I usually do. Argh again.

While standing in line to mail my stuff, I come up with a brilliant plan to get into my car without having to pay for a cab ride back home to get the spare keys. I walk to the park behind the post office and into the woods and find a giant rock long, sturdy stick. I’m able to stick it into the top of the window, which was luckily down an inch or two, and press the unlock button on the other side. I’m such a hacker. I jump in and hold down the ignition for close to a minute before it finally starts up again. At every stop I’m throwing into neutral, keeping the engine revved and hoping this will keep it from dying. It works and I finally make it there.

It ended up being the timing belt. I think it’s going to be $382 to fix and I’m supposed to have my car back tomorrow. It’s a lot of money, but my monthly average is still way less than what I used to pay for car payments, so I’m thankful for that at least. Plus I thought timing belts cost a lot more than that to replace, so I actually feel like I’m getting a discount. I’m just happy this didn’t happen while I was in Portland this weekend. That would suck being stranded up there until my car was fixed.

While biking home I realized what an amazing day it was outside. Passing by a bank, I saw that the temperature was 68 degrees. It’s been in the 50’s and rainy for the past week, so it was kind of a surprise. I had a nice ride home and stopped by Dairy Queen for an Oreo Blizzard for lunch. I couldn’t have had a more perfect day for riding.

When I got home I saw the perfect ending to my day – I left the garage door open for the 3 hours I was out. I guess with all the excitement of having my car actually start, I forgot to close it as I left. I left a brand new Xbox 360, still in the box, sitting on the washer and dryer. (Not mine, it’s someone elses.) Luckily nobody walked in and stole it and everything else I own while I was gone. I left my office door unlocked too. It’s not the first time I’ve left the garage open when I left, but definitely the longest.

While I was waiting for my Blizzard, I Twittered about my car problems and Rogue Clown replied to it, “was it a medium pepperoni timing belt?” which I found extremely hilarious. It was a reference to one of the old auto parts prank calls. Thanks for making me laugh, Rogue. I needed it today.

Lately I’ve been listening to a podcast called Welcome to Mars which is actually a 12 part radio series that some guy produced for some station. Between 1947 and 1959, the future was written about, discussed and analysed with such confidence that it became a tangible presence. This is a story of weird science, strange events and even stranger beliefs, set in an age when the possibilities for human development seemed almost limitless.

Subscribe to that podcast here. I’ve only got a couple more episodes to listen to. I still listen to lots of podcasts, but I’m too lazy to post names or links to any of them. I need to update my list in the sidebar.

On Saturday I went on a hike with some people, which included finding a few Geocaches. One was in a tree, about 12 feet up, so you had to climb it to retrieve the logbook. I was happy that Holly did that so I didn’t have to. Another one was inaccessible because of overgrown thorns and brush. And the 3rd was the coolest Geocache I’ve ever seen. You had to pop the cap off of an aluminum fence post, then pull on a bolt that was stuck in the side of it. The bolt was attached to a long piece of wire, which pulled a pole up through the post, knocking the cache out of the top. It was like something you’d see in the Goonies. I took a video of it and I’ll post that on here later if it doesn’t suck.

Today I spent most of my day in Portland. I ate a lot of Pez. Caught up with some really old friends on Myspace.

I rarely buy a newspaper anymore since I get all my news and entertainment from blogs now. But while reading the paper this morning I was reminded that Albany had a Veterans days parade, so I took the kids to that. The Albany paper recently started up an online edition of their paper, but to get access to it you have to subscribe to the paper version too. How stupid is that? I’d really like to read the local paper, but only if it’s on the computer. (They have a website, of course, but it mostly just has the front page headlines.)

So I’m thinking of asking on Craigslist if anyone wants to give me access to the online portion of their subscription if I can pay them for half of the paper or something like that. Either that or just subscribing to the paper and throwing it in the trash every day. Or maybe I could pick a random subscriber of the paper and secretly set up an online account for them. Maybe I could subscribe but give them some random person’s address. Geez, why can’t they just sell web-only subscriptions?

The parade was a standard Veterans Day parade. After about 30 minutes of standing and watching it, we decided to join in so we got behind a Christian school group and walked with them for about 7 blocks. The kids both threw all the candy they’d gotten from other parade people back out to the crowds. Payton saw quite a few people he knew from school along the way. We stopped at Big Town Hero for lunch, then, 30 minutes later, the parade was still going on so we got back into it and continued along the route until we were just a few blocks from our car.

Here’s a picture of the flash mob crowd several minutes before the event started:

This is us, lined up on either sides of the doors, waiting for the next victim:

And here’s a father, running towards the finish line with his son in his hands, thankfully not tripping and falling on the way:

I managed to get a parking spot close to Target so I could point my camera out the window of my car as the event happened. I also tuned my scanner to Target’s frequencies, hoping to hear employees talking about us, but I only heard one thing which I think was related to us and it wasn’t that hilarious. I had a digital recorder with me to record the sound up close.

Even though I told the other guy with the camera that I was videotaping from the back of my car, which I pointed out to him, he decided to stand directly in front of my window for most of the flash mob, rendering my already spotty video even crappier. If I’d known there would be such a large turnout (at least 40 people) for this event, I would have just held my camera with me since I’d probably be unnoticed in the middle of the crowd. I was only expecting maybe a dozen of us to show up. Here’s my video:

Everyone had a really great time with this. Most of the customers entering the store seemed to think it was hilarious. A lot of them ran through the crowd, reveling in the cheers, raising their arms in victory and breaking through our finish line. Some took pictures. Others were too shy to deal with large crowds screaming at them, so they went to the side of us instead.

I was really hoping for some conflict with mall security, Target managers and/or the police. Especially the security guy that works at Target who doubles as their floor sweeper. I would have been thrilled to have been asked to leave by any of those people. But only the Target manager came out near the beginning, asking who was in charge and what we were doing. I told her corporate said it was okay, but she ignored me. After a couple minutes of questioning us, she smiled as she ran through the finish line and back into Target as we all cheered for her. For the rest of the event, quite a few Target employees gathered at the doors to watch us from inside.

Fifteen minutes later, we quit on our own. It’s too bad we couldn’t have continued for another 15 minutes, but I guess the organizers wanted to keep it short to lessen the chance of us getting on everyone’s nerves and/or getting thrown off the premises. It was a great time and I can’t wait for the next one.

11/11/2008 EDIT: A picture of the mob was in yesterday’s newspaper with a short paragraph about the event. This seems counterproductive to a flash mob. Isn’t the point to weird people out without them ever knowing who you are? Here’s the picture, click it to enlarge:

11/13/2008 EDIT: PabloMac uploaded his video and it has considerably less ass in it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whTkx-63AeM

Later that day, the Spessas and I took the kids to the Wunderland, which is a nickle arcade in Salem. They left this afternoon, and I took Emily and Payton to Springfield with me since I needed to visit Best Buy. While we were there we saw Madagascar at the theater. It’s a movie I didn’t necessarily want to see, but I still enjoyed it a lot.

On the way out of Best Buy, the security alarm went off. I did what I always do in this situation – I yelled to the kids, “RUN!!!” and I bolted out the door. I was hoping for a chase, but it never happens. The only place I’ve ever been chased was at Wal-Mart where the old lady at the door walked after me (running would have been too strenuous on her) saying, “Sir? Sir? Please come back!” (By the way, I wasn’t shoplifting at Best Buy. They just forgot to deactivate my tag since I bought it from the return desk.)

On Friday afternoon I came home and decided to check my mailbox which is out on the sidewalk. I rarely check it since all my mail goes to my PO Box, and it was filled with a huge pile of junk mail as usual. As I was opening the box I spotted 4 young men in suits getting out of their car. Mormons! I had one of those movie moments where I’m frantically trying to get the key into the lock to escape the impending conversation. I wasn’t quick enough, though. As I pulled my junk mail out one of them walks up and cheerfully says, “Hi there!”

“Hey.”

“That’s sure a lot of mail you’ve got there!”

“Yep.”

“How are you doing today?”

“I really don’t want to talk to you. Bye!”

“Do you know of anyone who might need help from us?” he asked as I turned to leave.

I quickly walk back to my house. As I shut my door I turn to notice that they didn’t see which apartment I went into. A minute later I watch as two of them begin knocking on every door in the complex. The other two, I assume, went into the other neighborhood.

So I did what any other normal person would do. I took off my pants, put on the weirdest pair of boxers I own (red ants all over them) and grabbed my video camera. When they knocked I ran down the stairs, quickly shoved my cat into a closet to keep him from running out the door, flung open the door and screamed, “I am the true lord of the dance! No matter what those idiots at work say!” and then I slammed the door on them. I videotaped it all, of course, and you can click here to see the video.

It’s hard to see their expressions in the YouTube video, so here’s a frame capture from the DV version.

I’ll leave it up to the viewers to decide what emotion the one on the right is feeling. I like to think terror, but it’s probably more like WTF. WTF is an emotion, right? I went upstairs to my open window afterwards and listened to them for several minutes while they giggled about me. I was surprised to hear one of them repeat what I said to them verbatim. I wonder if they visited any of my other neighbors afterwards and asked them about “the weird guy.”

If you’re wondering why I shouted what I did, you should listen to this song, especially around the 30 second mark. Well, I guess that doesn’t explain why really, but at least you know what the reference is from.

Spessa has been showing no mercy to roadside construction signs lately, as you can see in the latest two entries on signhacker.com.

For my birthday, I bought myself The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts which are the original 3 manuscript drafts of Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger. He died before he completed it, but it’s still the best thing he ever wrote. I would love for them to make a movie out of this book. It could have so many cool visuals. (This disturbing video on YouTube shows a smart part of it in 80’s claymation.)

I also bought a recliner for the living room a few days ago and I’m going to pretend that it was also a birthday present from myself. It’s another piece of furniture that I’ve been putting off buying for the past two years as I try to find the perfect chair on Craigslist. This one is pretty close to perfect and it was crazy-cheap. It mismatches the rest of my ratty old furniture perfectly.

I watched the Obama’s acceptance speech on hulu.com today. It’s the first time I’ve heard him speak and the first time I’ve seen his family. I think it’s cool that most everyone seems to be so excited about him. Was anyone excited about Bush 8 years ago? I think I remember everyone hating Bush until 9/11 happened and then we were required to like him in order to consider ourselves patriotic. Anyway, I’m not excited about Obama. I just have a hard time caring. I do hope he does interesting things, though, since I’m in it solely for the entertainment value.

I probably would have voted Obama today, just to shake things up a bit because he’s black. And because Obama doesn’t look like a grouchy old man. I’m tired of grouchy old men in the white house. In 1992, I would have voted Clinton because he was younger and had cool hair. I wouldn’t have voted for either of the Bushes because they look old and crotchety. See why I shouldn’t vote? My votes are based soley on looks and age, not issues. I think democracy is great and America is awesome, but I’m just glad everyone else is so into voting so I don’t have to be. Thanks, people who voted today!

9:27PM UPDATE: Obama won. See? My vote didn’t matter!

9:53 UPDATE: Ugh, does every single blog I subscribe to have to inform us that Obama is president?

Also, Spessa is certain that her Obama sticker campaigns (here and here) were solely responsible for the election results. Way to go, Spessa!

Payton is Mario, Emily is Patrick (from Spongebob) and our neighbor is a sumo wrestler. I’m proud of two details on their costumes. One is the M on Payton’s Mario hat, which I cut out of felt and sewed on. I had to buy the hat for $15 from Amazon. The other is Emily’s Chumbucket nametag, which Patrick worked at for a short time. It helps identify her costume since a lot of people don’t notice who she is.

We went to the House of Fear in Albany this evening, which is some guy’s house which he converts into a haunted house each year for people to walk through. It was pretty neat and it looks like they put a ton of work into it. That’s the only haunted house we did this year. I waited til the last minute to do some others and we missed them.

Went trick-or-treating this evening in our neighborhood for about 2 hours. Payton kept telling everyone that our sumo wrestler neighbor needed extra candy since he was so fat and had more to fill up. A lot of them actually gave extra candy for the effort, but one grouchy lady said, “You only get TWO each!”

Check out this awesome PLA pumpkin that altalp made. It made my day.

A couple days ago I went on a midnightish walk where I ended up at the park and I decided to go into the woods and cross into the other neighborhood. It’s pretty scary in there when it’s so dark and quiet. Animals kept jumping away as I walked by them. Probably rabbits, but they sounded big.

My weekend plans will either be awesome or land me in jail. Either way should be interesting.

I picked it up the next day and it lay around my house for a week. Yesterday morning I finally got a chance to start it and I couldn’t put it down. I read it all day yesterday in between activities with the kids and finished it around 1am. Occasionally I would pause and wonder what it had to do with Jack the Ripper. This book was about a guy who went for late-night walks through neighborhoods and began stalking a girl, peeping in windows and going into peoples’ houses. There were bridge trolls, rape, murder, bludgeoning, stabbing, kidnapping, chasing after crazy old ladies on bikes, etc. I thought it was supposed to be Jack the Ripper: The College Years or something. It was a great book, though, and I’m really glad I made the mistake. Thanks for accidentally making me read this, John! Now I need to go pick up the Roger Zelazny version.

Speaking of books, I’m attempting to use Amazon’s Your Media Library to catalog books that I own or like. I’m still not sure I like it, especially since it requires others to log in to view it. Maybe I should just catalog my books/movies/music on my own website.

Yesterday I read that book all day, but we still managed to do a lot of other things. We went Geocaching in the morning and found two geocaches fairly easily. Then we went to the mall to return something at Target and had lunch in the food court. We stopped by the pottery place in downtown and picked up the plates that we painted earlier this week. Here’s what they look like:

Emily’s is the one with food drawn on it, Payton’s is a depiction of the video game N+ and mine is supposed to look broken. These plates were crazy-expensive! I was expecting them to cost maybe $8 – $10 and they ended up being $20 each. Quite a bit more pricey than the mismatched plates I currently use, which I got for free from Craigslist. It’s going to hurt if one breaks.

After going back home for a couple hours, we drove back to downtown Albany at 6:30 and attended a free magic show at the Venetian Theater. And man, did we get what we paid for! Actually it was a good, fun show. I guess as an adult I’m bored with magic since I’ve seen every possible trick that can be done about a million times now. After that we came back home and I read my book nonstop until it was finished.

I can’t really think of any other notable things that have happened this week. Last Saturday and Sunday I didn’t have the kids so I spent most of one of those days in downtown Salem, writing on the laptop. Mostly in the Blue Pepper internet cafe and a few hours in the mall food court where I had lunch.

Today we may or may not: find a haunted house to visit, go to Salem to buy Emily curtains for her room, go geocaching, go on a bike ride, or just sit around the house all day staring into various LCD screens.

I’ve done a lot of stuff lately, but I can’t seem to remember much of it. This evening the kids and I went on a hike with the hiking group, then had pizza at Woodstocks. There were about 7 of us total on the hike. At the top of the hike we were all just kind of hanging around and a guy was looking on his iPhone and mentioning that there was a Geocache up here. I said, “Oh really, let’s find it!” and he said that his dumb, useless iPhone doesn’t even have GPS so we couldn’t. Only he didn’t insult his iPhone like I did there. I said, “Well my Blackberry does because it’s about a billion times more awesome than your stupid phone that can’t even cut and paste text. Give me the coordinates.”

So he started reading the coordinates to me and I was typing them in. And before my GPS could even lock in, my kids emerged from a group of trees with a plastic container yelling, “We found it!” I guess it was hidden in a pretty obvious spot. They sure know how to take the fun out of a Geocache though!

Yesterday we saw City of Ember at the Pix theater. I don’t know how that theater stays in business. It was opening weekend for that movie and there were only 20 people in there. And that’s the biggest crowd I’ve ever seen there. I’ve spent the last week moving all my websites to a new server, which I think I finished today. I vacuumed a lot today and the kids cleaned their rooms. I know there was more. Dang memory. I’m going to bed.

Oh wait, I got a funny message on YouTube today. It’s from some girl named Ashley and she says, “I know you killed JonBenet Ramsey. Everything Richard said was right. I may be young at age 14, but I already have even more evidence pointing to you than Richard does. I know what I’m doing and you WILL pay for hurting this little girl and i will make sure of that if it’s the last thing I do.”

I replied with, “Shut up, bitch, or you’re next! Just kidding. I hope you’re more competent with your investigative skills than Richard is, though.” And I just now noticed her response. “trust me…I am a thousand times more competent…..is that a confession? did you really do this? please just tell me I won’t like turn you in or anything I’m 14. nobody would believe me anyway…and the Boulder police are complete dumbasses so even if i knew who killed jonbenet I wouldnt tell them because they’re retarted.”

I’m not sure what I’ll write back to her. If anyone’s forgotten, last February I found out some nutcase was claiming I was involved in the murder of Jonbenet Ramsey. Which I suppose I should point out isn’t true. I got an email from some other guy on YouTube last month asking if I was the guy they were talking about. I wrote back, “Yep, I’m the one he’s talking about. My friends and I have nothing to do with Jonbenet though. Richard Cardo is a nutcase.” I actually love Richard Cardo for making my life more interesting though.

Every once in awhile I go through it and throw out the membership cards that I don’t use that much, to keep the bulk down. The unfortunate side effect of this is not having certain membership cards when I need them. Like earlier this year when I bought 3 used games for Emily’s birthday at Gamestop, my Gamestop card would have given me a free game. Luckily the Gamestop guy was nice enough to let me use his own card that time. I hate the very idea that I have to carry a card with me to get discounts like that. Like at Albertsons, I can save $10 – $20 per trip by having my card with me. Why can’t they just make it that cheap for everyone so my keychain isn’t loaded down with membership cards?

I finally decided to try something that I read about in a blog earlier this year. I scanned all of my barcoded membership cards into the computer, edited them into a nice looking 320 x 240 JPG, and put them in my cell phone. Now when they ask for my card, I can have them scan my cell phone screen. Here’s what they look like on my cell phone.

I pixelated portions of the barcodes on these images, in hopes of keeping you stalkers from giving me reward points at Fred Meyer. The scanners are able to scan these cards just as well as they can scan a laminated card. Now all I have to deal with is the weird looks people give me when I hand them a phone to scan instead of a card. So far I haven’t been turned away by a rogue employee enforcing a new “no cell phone membership cards” policy, but I’m sure that’ll happen if I give it enough time.

I put all the card images in a folder on my phone called “Wallet Cards” so it’s easy to quickly pull them up while I’m waiting in line. Another thing I’ve always done to enhance my thin wallet lifestyle is keep pictures of my kids in the cell phone too. So if I feel inclined to show off pictures of my kids (or myself, posing with MC Frontalot) I can pull them up on my cell phone instead of digging through a giant wallet for them.

I think this is something that could work on almost any phone. I’m not sure how well a scanner could pick up on one of those tiny screen cell phones, but it’s worth a try. You probably don’t even need to be as fancy as me about it – just snap a picture of your barcode with the phone’s camera and that would probably work just as well.

For the past 2 weeks I’ve had the innards of the October 2008 Esquire e-ink display sitting on my desk, blinking at me. Yesterday I got sick enough of the blinking to just try and destroy the display. Instead of doing something sensible, like putting it up on a shelf where I can’t see it. Here are the results:

The I, Y and S are variables in the program. I is initials, Y is year and S is semester. Since it was ’87 it was either my Freshman year in high school or 8th grade. Wait, 4 semesters? Maybe I’m wrong about that one. No idea what FML means. I have no idea why I would want to track my grades with the computer, though. Maybe I was just looking for an easier project to tackle after my database of the entire phone book was such a failure. (I didn’t understand that 64k of memory wouldn’t hold the entire phone book, even if I had unlimited storage on my cassette drive.)

For a couple of years, this walk-in closet was my computer headquarters. I think I moved my stuff in there to get away from my brother who shared the attic room with me. HQ included the TRS-80, a car stereo with cassette deck, a CB radio, phone and television. I fit a lot into a closet. Best of all, it was located over the kitchen which meant I could stay up late harassing people on the CB and my parents couldn’t hear me.

This happened in the arcade around the corner from the 2600 meeting. What, what’d you think I meant? I know, not an impressive score but it’s still the high score. I failed to 0wn Galaga last night. I also failed to attend 2600 since there was a $10 cover charge to get in and I wasn’t willing to pay it. Would have sucked if nobody showed up and I was stuck in there watching a crappy band play all night.

A few days later we went to see a movie. The Rocker. The night before, Mr. Spessa and I collected 20 – 30 moths from their porch light and spent a lot of time getting them all into 2 mason jars. We sat in the back row, right under the projection booth, and set them free. It wasn’t quite as chaotic as we’d hoped, but there were a steady stream of giant moths on the screen throughout the movie. They were blurry moths and I was hoping for crisp, clear, black moths on the screen. I guess the window is just too close to the projector. And the billion candlepower light in the projector shines right through the moths. I’m not saying it sucked, but it wasn’t as epic as I was hoping for.

About 1/4 of the way through the movie, the projectionist opened up the projection booth window and captured the moths that were just sitting on the window. So we got to see a giant hand on the screen for a few seconds, then the blurry moths disappeared. Some new moths appeared on the window later during the movie and moths occasionally flew around in front of the screen. Next time we hope to capture twice the number of moths. And also, capture them right before the movie instead of 24 hours before the movie, so they’re more active.

After a week in Idaho, we drove to Seattle to attend PAX 2008. It’s the first time we’ve ever attended it. The kids really enjoyed just hanging out in the wireless lounge and having hundreds of DS users to chat with and play games with. Had their pictures taken with lots of video game characters, many which we didn’t even recognize. Payton was playing the newest Destroy All Humans game for awhile and suddenly the alien from the game comes up behind him and taps him on the shoulder. That was great.

I met MC Frontalot and got my picture taken with him. That was awesome. Jonathan Coulton was there too but the line to talk to him was too long for me to want to stand in it. Wil Wheaton was at a booth too, and so was that red haired girl from Dr. Horrible and The Guild. We bought pointless t-shirts and picked up tons of free swag.

I brought PLA Flyers with me, hoping to leave them on a table somewhere for people to take. But I couldn’t find any tables, so I just started handing them out to people as I passed them, saying “Free cactus” to them. (It was the flyer with the free cactus coupon on it.) Then the kids started passing them out to people and Payton was handing them to vendors and characters. He even waited in line for 15 minutes, just to hand MC Frontalot a flyer. The next day we passed the Jonathan Coulton table and I noticed a stack of PLA flyers sitting in the center of the table, right next to his other giveaway stuff. I told Payton and he says, “I know, I gave them to him.” So I guess he left a bunch with him and they just left it on the table for the rest of the weekend.

After a day of going up to video game characters and asking if we can have pictures with them, I said to Payton, “Wouldn’t it be funny to just go up to a normal guy and act like he’s a celebrity and ask to have your picture taken with him?” Less than a minute later, Payton runs up to a random guy and tells him he’s a huge fan and it was great to meet him. I bet it was the most bizarre thing that happened to him that weekend. He was nice enough to let us take a picture:

We also visited Archie Mcphee’s again since the Spessas had never been there. Spessa ended up buying about 50 super balls for us to throw around the expo. We (Mr. Spessa and I) ended up taking them to a balcony on the 4th floor and dropping them all down into the lobby at once, as Spessa stayed below to watch. It was great. They were bouncing everywhere and hitting people. And then people started picking them up and continued to bounce them. We went to the lobby and started throwing them everywhere and surprisingly no convention center staff came over and told us to cut it out. No, we didn’t take pictures of the balls falling so you just have to use your imagination.

We left Seattle Sunday afternoon and arrived back in Albany around 9:30pm.

Today the kids and I went to the pool for about 3.5 hours. They’re only open for 4 hours on Saturday which is stupid. All the pools in Oregon suck like that. But yeah, it was fun. I hung out in the pool for about half of it and read for the other half.

I’m really starting to like Twitter now. Maybe not to update myself so much, but it’s cool to keep tabs on everyone I know. And it actually seemed really useful at Defcon. I couldn’t get Twitter to IM me when new updates came in, so I ended up finding a completely new IM program. It’s called Digsby and supports all the major IM services, email updates, Myspace updates, Facebook updates and Twitter updates. The only thing it doesn’t do is IRC, but I’m hoping they’ll come around with that soon. I’ve been using Pidgin for most of this year, but it looks like I’ll be sticking with Digsby for awhile.

(7:15:52) brad_the_carter: make a twitter account
(7:16:00) murd0c: my boyfriend is trying to get me on that
(7:16:13) brad_the_carter: well now that RBCP is telling you to, you HAVE to!
(7:19:25) murd0c: YEAH
(7:20:04) brad_the_carter: you can tell him he was the influence if you want
(7:25:40) murd0c: FINE
(7:25:42) murd0c: i’m registered
(7:25:45) murd0c: as ‘notmurd0c’
(7:25:48) brad_the_carter: wow!
(7:25:54) brad_the_carter: you’re a pushover
(7:26:35) brad_the_carter: make sure to update it every hour every day

I sat to the most talkative girl ever on the plane (really, she just went on and on and on to me.) and got into town just in time for rush-hour traffic. Arrived at the hotel and bumped into el jefe about 5 minutes later. Had drinks for awhile, then set off to find RijilV and Co. He was awesome enough to somehow get me a free badge so I didn’t even have to wait in line or pay.

We ate at Peppermill, I gambled $5.00 because Spessa ordered me to. I also have to share my winnings with her, which comes out to $0.00 each. We walked all over Vegas for an hour or two and then went back to the hotel.

On Saturday I woke up around 10am and walked to 7-Eleven for breakfast. I tried Dennys first, but there was a line out the door, so I settled for Hostess cupcakes and milk. I ended up trading 2 PLA t-shirts for other shirts that were being sold in the vendor area, which has always been my way of saving a few bucks at Defcon. Set out PLA stickers, media DVDs and business cards on an empty table. I also got the guy at Sticker Nation, who had a bunch of buttons on his table, to take a bunch of PLA buttons and sell those too. I think I gave him about 30 PLA buttons. Thanks, Sticker Nation guy!

At some point during the day, I was walking alone and someone passed me and yelled, “PLA!” Then someone walking behind me yelled back at him, “Cactus cactus!” As I rounded the corner into another hall, I looked back at him and told him there was no cactus here. He ended up telling me that he found the PLA when he heard it mentioned in a Nerdcore song. It was, of course, Trevelyn’s song called Blackhat Life where he mentions PLA Radio. This guy wondered what PLA Radio was, so he Googled it and seems to know a lot about us now. So thanks, Trevelyn, for bringing even more hapless people to the PLA.

Met hevnsnt from i-hacked.com and a bunch of other people in their Skybox. Went with RijilV & Co. to the Star Trek ride which was a lot of fun, even though I’m not much of a Star Trek fan. Was a really great ride, though, and I can’t believe they’re going to tear it all down after this summer.

Ended back up at the i-hacked.com Skybox a few more times and watched their live podcast. Hevnsnt gave me a cool badge with “RBCP” laser-etched into it which gave me a few free drinks. Drifted between the i-hacked party and the 303 party for several hours and met a ton of people that I hadn’t seen in years or that I’d never met in person before. One of those people was Skydog from Phreaknic who luckily didn’t punch me in the face for my phone stunt at the last Phreaknic I attended. He told me all about how he was on the floor, under their PBX system, trying to figure out how we’d messed up their phone service. He said I’m allowed back, but I have to be punished publicly, or something like that. I met Grey Frequency too! I didn’t even know she went to Defcon so that was unexpected.

I woke up pretty early on Sunday but didn’t feel tired for some reason. So I showered and got ready to wander around the hotel. But midway through shaving, I suddenly felt really sick and wanted to pass out and/or puke. I barely made it out the bathroom and fell back to the floor to sleep for a couple more hours. I think it’s been about 5 years since I was hung over. I got up later and went to Denny’s for breakfast. Felt a lot better after that. Attended a lot of talks throughout the rest of the day, mostly just so I could rest.

Rode a Limo back to the airport in the evening – between 7 of us it was $10 each. Pretty uneventful flight home. It’s always funny to see a billion hackers walking all over the airport, waiting for flights home. Got into Portland at 11:30pm and then home at 1:30am. And that was my weekend. Here’s a few pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rbcp/sets/72157606674289675/

Somehow we ended up with a TV in our living room. I forget where it came from – probably from someone’s trash since it was one of those giant wooden console TVs. We were sitting around the living room and trying to tune in shows, but having very little luck. We briefly talked about splitting the cost of cable, but that didn’t do anything for our need of television right now. $5.00 each was probably out of our budget ranges anyway. So that conversation turned into ways that we could steal cable.

Our apartment didn’t even seem to have any cable wires running into our building. But the building across the street did. We found a few people who we guessed had active cable in their apartments, so we started making plans. My idea was to hook up a splitter to their cable line and run a new wire underground up to our building. We would have to go buy a splitter and a bunch of coax, which would cost maybe $20 or $30.

But my roommates weren’t as patient as me. They wanted to watch cable TV tonight. So instead of being stealthy about it, they walked over to this other building and started ripping down their coax cable from the wall. They yanked on it until the cable came loose and we had the end that plugged into the TV. Then they pulled it from the other direction and I believe they ripped some of it from the telephone pole. In the end, we had just barely enough cable to reach over to our building, into the window and hook it up to our TV.

We had to pull the TV right up to the window and there was no slack at all left on the cable. In fact, outside the cable was at a very tight angle from the ground to our 2nd story window, probably obstructing people from walking by on the sidewalk. I can just envision a guy on a bike not seeing it and getting clotheslined. There was no connection on the end of the cable since we’d apparently ripped it off while pulling the wire off the side of the building, so I used my wire cutters to lengthen the leads and get them hooked up to the TV.

So we turned it on and it worked great! After the 1 minute warmup period that giant wooden consoles take to turn on, we were sitting around and happily enjoying Doogie Howser, M.D. or whatever the hell people watched in 1992.

After a few hours, somebody begins knocking on our door. Guess who it was. Yeah, it’s the guy we stole cable from. Literally, stole cable from. Stealing in the sense that we actually deprived him of cable TV because we took it from him. Not only did we end up stealing his cable, but when they yanked his cable off the side of his apartment building and pulled on it until it came out of the wall, it actually pulled his TV off the shelf and it fell to the floor. There was no mention of his TV being broken, but he wasn’t a happy man. We apologized to him and handed his mangled cable TV wire back to him. I don’t remember much of the actual exchange between us and our angry neighbor that night, but I do remember that it ended with him giving us a very weak, “Well, uh, don’t do it again!”

I guess we got our fix of cable that we needed, because we didn’t buy or steal any more cable for the rest of the summer.

I’m still really enjoying Sirius, obviously. I think when I get back from Vegas I’m going to try listening to Launchcast and last.fm for awhile and see if those are comparable. Sirius is definitely worth $12/month, but $2/month would be nice too. At least Launchcast would allow me to completely block songs that I hate. I think they have more selection too – I don’t hear Jonathan Coulton and Lemon Demon on Sirius.

A couple weekends ago Sheila and I went to Detroit Lake and afterwards drove up a mountain to find some hiking trail. The narrow road was covered with boulders and there was a giant cliff on one side. We kept having to edge around the boulders, sometimes scraping the car on them. I was just waiting to have one fall on us or for us to fall off the edge. We passed some people on the way up who were stopped and told us that the road didn’t look good for driving so they were going back.

Yesterday Kylar’s dad stopped by because he wanted to ensure that we hadn’t accidentally kept some Xbox 360 games we’d borrowed from him. I told him sure, come on in and we’ll check. The weird thing is, Kylar doesn’t visit us anymore and we’ve never borrowed games from him. The kids all just play Halo 3 together all day instead of actually visiting each other in person. So we take a look at our games and, as expected, none of Kylar’s games are there.

Then he pulls out the big guns… “Well, we looked at your online high score list (whatever it’s called) and noticed that you’ve been playing the games that we’re missing.” “Oh yeah? Which games are those?” “Well there’s Bioshock.” I remember Bioshock – it’s the first game we ever rented on the 360. He tells me that Civilization Revolution is on our online list. I’ve never even heard of this game. Emily looks and finds Dance Dance Revolution on the list. “Is this the one?” “Oh yeah, I guess it is.” It was so lame. I was nice about it, though. But he still didn’t give me a friendly, “Oh sorry about coming over here with my lame detective skills and accusing you and your family of stealing our games” on the way out.

I bought a cheap Sirius radio yesterday in an attempt to keep up with The Spessas. She was bragging to me about her new Sirius radio so I just had to run out and show her how frivolous I can be. I’m still not sure I’m going to keep it. It’s about $12/month and I’ll mostly be using it in my room. Seems like Yahoo Music might accomplish the same thing for $25/year. But I’ve been enjoying Sirius so far – it’s been playing nonstop for 24 hours now.

Jammie, who rules, sent me a video of the PLA HOPE thing. I cut it down to about 10 minutes this weekend and put it on YouTube. Here it is. I mainly just kept the parts in that got the most applause and laughter to make us seem extra cool.

July 4th: After a nutritious lunch of 7-Eleven hot dogs and Slurpees in front of the store, we took a taxi to the Albany hotel where the airport shuttle takes off from. Hung out in the lobby for about 45 minutes, playing checkers as we waited for the shuttle to arrive. The shuttle trip took about 2 hours and was slightly cheaper than an Amtrak, especially considering we didn’t have to take the Max to the airport after we arrived. Took another shuttle to our hotel and hung out in the pool area for a couple hours. Took the Max to Skidmore Fountain, walked around a bunch for about an hour and then watched the fireworks display. Was lots of fun. Went back home (actually beat the huge crowd to the Max somehow and got on the first one) and to bed by midnight.

July 5th: Up at 5:30am to get ready to leave. Pretty uneventful flights. Watched a movie with Payton on the laptop for about 90 minutes of it. Read my book a lot. (Yet another Mark Twain biography) Hung out in Chicago’s airport for a nearly 2 hours for our layover. Ate at Johnny Rockets in the airport and it was an insane $40 for just 3 of us. Played on the pay phones for awhile. I was having the kids dial random things, like ANI numbers, and I noticed that they didn’t know you’re supposed to wait for the dial tone to start dialing. When I said they had to wait for the dial tone, they didn’t even know what that was. They’re so used to using cell phones. Got into Illinois at 5:15pm.

July 6th: Woke up and looked at my phone – 5:30am. So I tried to fall back asleep for awhile. Then I remembered that yesterday my phone hadn’t switched time zones yet, so I called Alton’s time and temperature number to find out it was actually 7:30am. Still too early, but I got up anyway. The kids and I rode bikes for awhile and stopped at Vanpreter Park. Ate lunch at Steak N Shake with everyone. Went to see Wall-E in Edwardsville, which was great. On the way there, I glanced at Walgreens and noticed that the 254-7111 pay phone was missing! Yet another casualty in the pay phone deaths of 2008. I’ll miss that one most of all. I wonder if the Vanpreter Park pay phones are gone yet. Tonight I went to a concert at Haskel Park. Emily found a huge, unfolded pocket knife in the playground area. 6″ blade, I think. Gotta love Alton…

July 7th: Went to my dentist at noon. After 2.5 years, I still don’t have a dentist in Oregon so I made an appointment with my old Illinois dentist while I was in town. Luckily I didn’t have any cavities since I probably wouldn’t be here long enough to make an appointment to come back. This evening I got to meet John Sever. Yes, the celebrity from the John Sever Fan Club. I was a little star struck, but I tried to play it cool as if I hung out with celebrities all the time. The kids and I went to his parents, ate, swam, caught up, etc. I hadn’t seen his dad in about 20 years and his mom in about 10 years. I traumatized John’s kids by forcing them into the pool against their will and he traumatized mine by hitting Emily in the face with a volleyball and picking up Payton by his ears. Good times…

July 9th: Left at 3:30pm to go to John Sever’s house (without my kids), which is about an 80 minute drive from me. Had tacos for supper there, then went ditch exploring! (You should click here to read about The Ditch.) His wife and kids explored one direction of the ditch with us, then we went back home. After the kids were in bed, we headed to the ditch again and eventually ended up exploring the tunnel side of it. By this time our shoes were soaked. It was approaching dusk and it was pitch black inside. We each had a tiny LED flashlight that put out just enough light to keep us from tripping over anything, but they didn’t give us any light into the distance. Just as we were about to turn around and go back, we saw a hint of light in the distance so we kept going and ended up underneath a manhole cover with open vents on the sides. I turned on my GPS and stuck it outside the vent to find out where we were, which ended up being a couple blocks from his house. John lifted the manhole cover and we climbed out. A car parked on the side of the road with its headlights on seemed to completely ignore us and eventually drove off. John replaced the cover to keep people from falling through and we walked back to his house. John’s account of this whole thing is much more detailed and hilarious. Read it here: http://johnseverfanclub.blogspot.com/2008/07/manhole.html.

July 10th: Payton and I took a bike ride and ended up at the Icee stand. Patty was working and gave us free Icees and asked if I could come by their house and fix their computers. Said she’d give us free Icees for the rest of the week if I stopped by. So that’s cool, even though I hate fixing computers.

July 11th: Emily and I went for a ride this evening and ended up at Piasa Pantry (it’s a BP now) for some Slushies. Around 8:30ish I went to Mark and Patty’s to fix their wireless router issues. The kids came with me since they wanted to see the kids too. It took about an hour to get everything working. Now we have free Icees for the next week and they gave us some drive-in movie passes for some place in Belleville. I’ve never been to a drive-in movie before. Got to hear all kinds of gossip about my old neighbors.

July 12th: Got up around 9 and Payton and I went to get donuts. Went to Raging Rivers for the day, which ended up being a half day since it started storming and they closed the pool. We were all pretty exhausted anyway though. We were too lazy to hang around and ensure that they were closing so we could get free passes for next week.

July 13th: I’m a little sunburned today. It’s Payton’s birthday. We had a cake, tons of pizza and a pinata. And this evening we went to see Hancock at Eastgate.

July 15th: Got up at 7am and left for the City Museum by 9am. The City Museum was the same as always, which is unusual. Usually there’s always something new there. We stayed until they closed, though, and had fun. Emily ended up with a bunch of free Crusin’ USA games somehow (it just kept giving her free games) and was playing forever and me and Payton tried to convince her to come and do something else with us. Once when she protested, Payton replied, “Puh-lease, this game is so easy we could play it on paper!” I don’t know exactly what that means, but it sounded pretty awesome. He always says the weirdest things.

When we got home, my mom told me that Paige called and would be at a game in Vanpreter Park. So we went there and met up with Paige, Gary, Richard and Shirley. Oh, and Casey. Was nice to catch up with them all.

July 17th: Visited Wood River pool all day. Kids got busted several times for stopping on the waterslide so they would run into each other. I finished reading Fight Club, which was supposed to be my book to read on the plane ride home. Now I have to find something else to read. It was a good book and gave lots more detail than the movie, but I still like the movie better. I’m officially going to Defcon this year – I ordered my tickets today.

July 18th: Met John, Liz and their kids at the zoo today and spent all afternoon there. Went to their house afterwards, moved a couch and a giant TV. We didn’t do anything very destructive or crazy, just had fun with all the kids. (Well, I did redirect a sprinkler into a crowd of old people.) John and Liz, you guys are awesome. I hate myself for not getting together when we all actually lived in the same area.

July 19th: Time to go home. Got to the airport around 11am. I guess I shouldn’t have been in such a hurry to get there because check-in was super quick and so was the security checkpoint. We had nearly 2 hours to kill before our plane left. Our layover in Denver was another 2 full hours. Emily wheelchaired all over Denver airport until some airport guy yelled at her and took her wheelchair away. I kept trying to get her to greet passing wheelchair users with, “Hello, fellow cripple!” but she wouldn’t do it. Got into Portland around 7:30pm and into Albany at 10pm, all of us completely exhausted.

I spiced up the barf bags during one of our flights. The pictures are here: http://www.signhacker.com/2008/enhancing-barf-bags/

The PLA Panel at HOPE happened on the 19th too. On our shuttle ride home from the airport, I sent text messages to murd0c and RTF, hoping that I would see them check their cell phones during the presentation on the video. murd0c called me last night and told me that the panel ran about 45 minutes late, so I guess my texting was in vain. He told me the crowd liked my Rickroll. I think I mentioned this in a previous post, but doing a Rick Astley parody was extremely painful for me because of how much I hate that song. I put it up on YouTube, though, so here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGFEyxW1MsM

Today I’m just recovering from the vacation. I slept in until 8am, which isn’t too bad considering it’s 10am Illinois time. Went to McDonald’s for McGriddles since there isn’t any food or milk in my house. Stopped by the post office and my mailbox at home. On the way to the post office, I passed by my old place and I noticed that my old neighbors have moved out. The ones that Warren lived with. This kind of sucks, because I liked living there and only moved because Warren’s friends kept stealing things from me. I should move back! But on the other hand, HAHA, they finally got kicked out!

I’m not sure what’s in store for the rest of my day, other than I’m hoping to go pick up my cat from the people who are watching him. I wonder if he still remembers me.

I’m too lazy to add accompanying pictures to this entry.

I tell my kids that the teens pictured in this roadside memorial are buried under the metal doors.

What’s with this roadside memorial anyway? It’s been there for almost as long as I’ve lived in Albany. Don’t these kids have real graves that can be decorated with pinwheels and stuff? It used to be across the street, taking up some of the sidewalk, so I guess it was moved to this newer place to inconvenience less people. But geez, 2.5 years now. How long does a roadside memorial need to stay up?

Biked for a few hours this evening and ended up taking more pay phone pictures. It’s only been a month since I last went on a pay phone picture taking spree and already some of the phones I photographed have disappeared. The Goodwill phone disappeared just a couple weeks after my photo. And last week I noticed the 1 phone at Target was missing. Every pay phone on the community college campus has been removed. These have all been Qwest phones, so it looks like they’re tired of dealing with pay phones.

(This post is dedicated to Sheila and Wenonoa, who fully understand and can both personally relate to my obsession with pay phones.)

This thing makes me even happier than I ditched 100% of my DVD collection last year. And I’m sure the service is going to just keep getting better, especially once Blockbuster releases their own TV box later this year and they have to keep up with the competition.

I’m surprised stuff like this isn’t bringing the cable TV rates down. I haven’t had anything more than the basic network cable for the past year, which I never watch. I only keep it because of the promotional thing I’m on with Comcast makes it cheaper to have cable with my phone and internet than to not have cable at all. Last week the promotional thing ran out, so I called them once again to cancel my cable TV and they set me up with another promotional thing so it’s cheaper to keep my cable. They desperately want me to have cable TV. Speaking of cable TV, look at these girls. I want to punch them both.

My Netflix queue is down to 15 movies now. It’s been consistently over 100 movies ever since I had it, as I’ve been copying just about everything that’s come in. But I’m almost finished with building my collection. After that I’ll be moving to the $8.99 plan on Netflix, which will make my Roku box even more awesome because it’ll be crazy-cheap. Wonder how many months until my personal digital movie collection is rendered completely useless because the Roku box will stream everything Netflix has.

I wonder what would happen if I told that cashier of my hilarious prank on her when it was my turn in line. “Yeah, that was me on my cell phone. His pipes weren’t really free. I sure tricked you a good one!” Would she be shocked or amused? Would I get slapped? Would she call security? Thrown out of the store for life? I guess I’ll never know.

Reminds me of when I was at the same Lowes buying the 4′ molds for my concrete footings for the deck. Or whatever those big cardboard cylinder things are called. I had 3 of them, costing about $8 each. And they were all inside of each other so it looked as if there was just 1 of them in the cart. The cashier scans it (just 1) and the rest of my merchandise and I begin to pay. I wasn’t trying to scam her, that’s just how they were stacked on the shelf and that’s how I put them in my cart. Just then her phone rings and she picks it up. I can hear the voice on the phone telling her that I have more mold tubes inside of the one tube she scanned. She hangs up, explains her mistake to me, and scans another $16 for me to pay. I’m guessing it was security who zoomed in on my tubes. How sneaky!

Makes me wonder what kind of crazy things I could get a cashier to believe if I called her on her register phone.

“This is Steven from security. The man in line has a bucket of joint compound hidden inside his coat. Ask him to open his coat for you!”

“Hey Cindy, your credit card machine isn’t authorizing that card properly for some reason. You need to write down the full card number, the expiration date and the 3 digit code from the back. And just stick the paper you write it on in your pocket and we’ll just get it from you later.”

“It’s employee discount day. You’re supposed to be ringing up ALL purchases at the employee discounted rate.”

Or I guess I could do something like this.

Today the kids and I biked to some railroad tracks and put coins on the tracks. Even though I’ve lived most of my life near railroad tracks, and played around them often as a kid, I never bothered to try this. Back then I was more into putting logs and giant pieces of metal on the tracks, hoping to derail the trains. We hung around the tracks for about 30 minutes, hoping for a train to stop by, but no luck. We left our coins there and ended up going back home.

Tonight I went jogging and noticed a train passing as I was out, so I stopped by the tracks and picked up the coins. I only got about half of them since I was searching for them by cell phone light and they were hard to spot. But here they are:

I love how the edges still exist perfectly on some of them, but other are cracked and sharp. I honestly didn’t know they would really flatten this well. Or I thought the vibrations would knock them off the track before the train actually hit them. The kids want to go retrieve the rest of them tomorrow. I told them they should try and spend them at 7-Eleven.

A couple days ago, I was reading this entry from Renae’s blog and she mentioned that she always walked with her Garmin GPS to track her distance and speed. I can’t believe I never thought of that! My phone, which I always take with me to play music on, has built-in GPS on it. I use it all the time in the car with Google Maps to keep me from getting lost. So I searched crackberry.com for some software that would track time/speed/distance and found GPSed which is perfect. And best of all it’s a free program. It’s making me love my Blackberry even more.

The program works like a social networking site where you can automatically upload your jogs/hikes/whatever to your profile. It lays out your route on top of Google Maps and displays your average speed, distance and all that. It rules. I could post links to my routes, but they begin and end at my front door and I don’t want any PLA weirdos doing evil things to me. Thanks for the inspiration, Renae! Here’s what the program looks like on my phone…

Looking at my route from tonight makes me realize I underestimated my distance from the other day. I went for about 8 miles, not 6. It’ll be nice to know my exact distance now. Also, I kicked ass with the running tonight. I ran for the first 1.5 miles without slowing for a break. My average speed was around 5.3 MPH. And I ran nonstop for almost another full mile on the way home. I’m getting better at this.

Someone asked what’s with all the fitness stuff lately. I’ve been doing this for almost 2 years now and I’ve lost close to 35 lbs. I plan to lose another 30 or so lbs, which brings me to a healthy weight according to some fitness website. I had a gym membership for about a year, which I kept mostly in private posts. Again, because I didn’t want PLA weirdos trying to figure out which gym I was at. Now that I’m running on my own I guess it doesn’t matter so much.

I also cut down drastically on my horrible eating habits. I still have horrible eating habits and don’t have plans to change that too much, but at least I’m doing a lot less of it. Like, I rarely eat a dozen donuts for breakfast anymore. Or a whole box of those powdered ones. Or 2 orders of Crazy Bread from Little Caesars for supper. Or an entire box of EL Fudge for lunch. A few years back I found out that once you get old that stuff actually makes you fat.

And I’ve given up Pepsi. For as long as I can remember I’ve had at least a Pepsi per day, usually several. Stopping by Quiktrip for a 44oz cup of it was a daily thing for me in Illinois. I always tried to not buy Pepsi in bulk or in 2 liter bottles, because I knew that would make it too easy for me to access. But even then, I still went to the store at least a couple times a day to buy some. But now I’ve quit. At the very most, I only have maybe a 20oz bottle every 2 or 3 months. And strangely enough, the annoying insomnia that I’ve suffered from my entire life has nearly vanished. It’s crazy how well I sleep these days. Speaking of that, I need to quit writing and go to sleep.

Speaking of new albums, Nerf Herder finally put a new one out. It’s not amazing, but it’s got a couple of really good tracks on it. I actually purchased it. With money! Was my first experience with Amazon’s mp3 download service.

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.

That’s a picture of Emily throwing her arms up to block a picture from being taken during a small break from riding bikes. We biked about 5 miles to the movie theater today, then back. Definitely their longest biking trip to date. We stopped at their moms, Fred Meyer, and Circle K for movie theater candy on the way. We saw, of course, Indiana Jones 4. Normally we stay at the theater for a 2nd movie, but nothing else really worth seeing was there.

Indiana Jones was good, albeit incredibly unbelievable. I know you’re supposed to suspend disbelief and just enjoy movies like this, but they were just asking us to accept way too much. Like, did you know that you can lock yourself inside a refrigerator and be launched hundreds of feet through the air (via a nuclear explosion) and walk out of the fridge perfectly fine? Or that you can drive your boat car off a 100′ cliff into the water and you don’t even fall out? Then the same boat can fall down 3 separate water falls and you’ll still be fine? They barely even fell out of the boat and just climbed right back in each time. Gotta love movie physics. Oh, and then there were at least 4 scenes with Indiana and his friends running away from heavily armed bad guys, all of them shooting but nobody ever gets hit. There’s just no way they all missed him.

The kids and I watched the first 2 Indiana Jones movies this week and last. I’ve actually never seen either of them all the way through. I’ve only caught bits of them on cable throughout the years and thought they looked kind of boring. I have seen #3 many times, though, since I worked at a theater when it came out.

So that’s my weekend so far.

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: http://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’ve also listened to 3 “seasons” of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy BBC radio show now. I did a lot of driving around this weekend, so I was able to finish up the 3rd one. It’s great stuff as well.

I ended up at a Wal-Mart and picked up a few phone calls for customers when I heard someone paged to pick up a phone line. It was mostly because I’d been itching to test out this telephone recording device of mine, which resembles a wireless phone earpiece that people wore before everyone had bluetooth. I stupidly messed up the recordings of most of the calls I answered, but here’s one I got:

http://www.phonelosers.org/stuff/do_you_sell_tires.mp3

Yesterday I went on a 4 1/2 hour hike in Corvallis.

So that’s what I ended up doing. I signed up with Verizon Wireless a few days later (yes, I had to sign up for 2 years of Verizon Wireless) and then I called Sprint PCS to cancel. The man at Sprint said he was sorry to see me go and asked what he could do to retain me as a customer. I told him that he could change my calling plan without locking me into another 2 years of service with them. He said he couldn’t do that, but ended up transferring me to some other department who are supposed to do whatever they can to keep their customers. At this point I had no intentions of staying with Sprint PCS since I already had my shiny new Verizon Wireless phone. I just wanted to see if they would change their minds.

And they didn’t. All I wanted to do was pay them more money per month and remain their customer like I’d been for several years. But they weren’t having that. So today when I read several times in all my blogs that Sprint has lost 1.09 million wireless subscribers and $505,000,000 so far this year, that made me happy. Neener neener, Sprint!

This weekend the kids and I (and a neighbor kid) went to see Speed Racer and Iron man. Both were great. I actually liked Speed Racer better than Iron Man. Which is weird since I really didn’t even care about seeing it. It was amazing, though. Really cool visuals and story. Too bad it bombed horribly at the box office.

I’m unhappy with my new web host. The sites keep slowing to a crawl and locking up. Their tech support claims that MySQL doesn’t work so great with virtual hosting. So I guess going with an actual dedicated hosting plan will clear things up, which I’ll do soon. It’s just annoying, though. Why even offer MySQL if it’s just going to lock everything up?

Today I listened to the first 3 episodes of the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio show. I downloaded them all a couple years ago, intending to listen to them. But then I discovered podcasting, which has become an obsession of mine that leaves very little time to listen to non-feed based audio. But talking with John recently has reminded me that I have them, so now I’ll probably listen to all of them over the next few weeks. I’ve never heard any of them before.

I’ll never understand how that song made it to #1 on the Billboard charts. I had to listen to it on the radio for about a year. And after that song’s momentum died down, he came out with another single called Together Forever which was even worse than Never Gonna Give You Up. (Click here to watch the video for that one.) I don’t remember if that one made it to #1 or not, I just know they played it nonstop on the radio and MTV too, making me endure even more endless months of Rick Astley.

So I go about 15 years without thinking of Rick Astley or his horrible music. And then some jerk creates Rickrolling. Sure, I thought it was amusing at first and I remembered that painfully awful song. But geez, people have been Rickrolling for a year now. That’s about how long I had to endure Rick Astley the first time around. When’s it going to stop? I’ve heard that song so many times over the past year. Not as bad as when it was on the radio, but still a lot.

The reason I’m going on about this is because I kept hearing that song in my dreams last night. Yes, my dreams are being Rickrolled now.

You know what’s going to suck? Now that Rick Astley’s song is sort of popular again, somebody is going to remake it. And it’s going to end up being played on the radio all the time again. I’m surprised it’s taken this long for that to happen.

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

Actually, I continued inside to pick up my mail. I probably wouldn’t have said anything to him, but a lady who works in the post office (one of the higher ups, who gets called to the counter when a customer demands to talk to a supervisor) was at the door and telling him not to do something. She was saying something like he needs to approach people on the way out instead of the way in.

So I stopped and said, “You know, I wasn’t lying to you. I really don’t live in Linn County.”

He says nothing. So I continue, “So you don’t need to call me a liar.”

“Huh?” he replies.

“You said I was fibbing when I told you I don’t live in Linn County and I don’t appreciate it. I shouldn’t have to be called a liar whenever I come to pick up my mail.”

“Oh. Well I was just kidding, buddy!”

By the time he says this I’m getting into my car and the post office lady is giving him an evil look. As I pull away she’s talking to him again. I don’t know how much authority she has over those people who stand out there, but it would be great if she made him leave. I hate having to dodge them every single day.

Oh, and I really am a Linn County resident. Tee hee! I love being a jerk.

EDIT: Just to prove that I’m not a complete jerk all the time, I should point out that in December I give those Salvation Army bell ringers at the post office money almost every single day.

While it sucks that gas costs so much and this is seriously screwing up my recreational travel, I think this is exciting news. Insane gas prices like that sure would give the U.S. a much-needed shakeup. We’ll finally be forced to find alternatives to everything. As much as I love owning a car, I would love to have an excuse to get rid of it. Maybe some of the awesome stuff that I always read on ecogeek.org will actually start happening. Maybe middle class people will have to start riding the bus. It’ll be anarchy! The prices are going to suck but I’m positive that good things are going to come out of it.

In more important news…

• Payton finished Harry Potter #7 this morning.
  
• Emily turned 12 last week.
  
• My 2 week long prank to Renae finally paid off.
  
• The new WordPress 2.5.1 control panel is confusing.
  
• I’ve upgraded to another new server.
  
• Chris Tomkinson.
  
• There are new hotel calls on phonelosers.org.
  
• My cat-proof desk is stylish, yet effective.

And it’s really freaking the cat out.

Also, I’ve tried pretty hard to not collect tons of books since I moved here. I think I currently own less than 20 books, since I usually sell them back after I’ve read them. But I’d like to have some kind of catalog of books that I’ve enjoyed, so I don’t forget about the book. You know, if you have a giant book collection, sometimes you’ll come across an old book that you haven’t read in years and you’ll decide to read it again. I need a way to create lists of books, preferably with cover art, that I can browse. Amazon has wish lists, but I don’t want people buying me books on a wish list. They don’t have just a regular list of stuff you like.

I’m thinking I’ll just set up an Amazon Store of my media, even though I’m not too crazy with the way they lay everything out. I already have a store for phonelosers.org. I guess it would be cool to have the added bonus of receiving a commission if anyone decides to buy anything in my personal store.

About the movies, I’m sure Netflix will come out with a way to make lists of favorites eventually. They already have Top 10 lists that users can make and share. I don’t think it goes much further than that, though. But if anyone has any other suggestions for doing what I think I want to do, other than making an Amazon Store, I’m open to them.

EDIT: I just set up a quick list on Amazon. Click here to see my Amazon store. Right after I made that, though, I discovered that Amazon actually does have a thing called Your Media Library which might do everything I was looking for. I’ve only spent a minute or two looking at it now, and I’m not sure if I like it. I’m going to look it over now, though. I’m still open to any alternative suggestions.

ANOTHER EDIT: I just remembered that after RijilV moved out of my spare apartment in Illinois, I had this insane idea of converting his old apartment into a library. As if I didn’t have enough useless space in my house as it was, I thought that turning every wall of his old living area into a bookshelf was an awesome idea. I came really close to actually beginning this project too, but luckily someone I knew needed a place to live so I rented it out again.

I didn’t even own enough books at the time to fill more than 1/4th of one of the smaller walls. So besides the lost rental income, I would have spent all this money on wood for bookshelves, lowered the value of the house, and then probably spent thousands of dollars after that just buying books to fill up the shelves so it would look cooler. Sure, it would have been a fun project, but I’m so glad I got sidetracked on that idea.

I bought some fabric today and made a green screen. Payton and I did a test video and it worked really well, even without any lighting. The kids have been making nonstop videos the past week. Mostly puppets and stuff. But we got on the subject of green screens and I told them how easy it is to do, one thing leads to another, and I’m buying fabric. It’s a lot cooler than the green screen out of posterboard that Herman and I made a few years ago. Who knows what we’ll do with this though.

Here’s our test video with the green screen. It’s very spotty since the lighting in the garage is dim:

And here’s my favorite video of theirs so far (not green screened):

Eventually I began spending a huge part of my free time at John’s house. I guess I wouldn’t say that we got into a lot of trouble together, but we sure caused a lot of trouble. John is mentioned several times on my pranks page for things like tying strings across the road (or sometimes just pretending to) to annoy drivers and causing merchandise in the grocery store to talk to customers via walkie talkies. Not since John have I ever had a friend where it seemed like every single day for us was just another insane mission to accomplish. We didn’t just “hang out” when we were together. We plotted and schemed and accomplished things.

He had the kind of parents that were more likely to encourage our craziness, than to punish us for it. Whereas my dad might whip me with a belt and ground me for a week for tying strings across the road, John’s dad would suggest hanging newspapers along the length of the string to create a giant wall for cars to crash into. (He actually did suggest this to us, though I doubt he was entirely serious about it.) This is the main reason 99% of our time was spent on John’s side of the block and not mine. I only remember John being at my house once, and it ended with my dad yelling at me for whatever we were doing and sending John home.

I lost touch with John after 8th grade, when their family moved into a different school district. I did visit his new house once or twice, after he moved but once I was 16 or so, I completely lost contact with him. In the late 90’s, maybe a year or two after moving back to Illinois, I sent his parents a Christmas card and we ended up visiting a few more times, but I guess life kept us both too busy hang out much more than that. But just a few days ago, John tracked me down! I was surprised to find that he has a blog and that I was even mentioned in it once or twice. Since he’s contacted me, we’ve been catching up via this post and email which has been a lot of fun.

So in honor of John’s sudden return, I’m going to list a few of the things we used to do to keep ourselves busy in the 80’s.

• First of all, apparently we attempted to make a bomb threat to our grade school from the playground in the 1980’s. John just reminded me of this incident yesterday. I don’t remember any of it happening, but I’m sure I’d do anything to get out of school. John’s account of the story is hilarious.
  
• Since we lived right next door to a busy grocery store, we got to screw with customers as often as we liked. Sometimes we’d yell at them from his porch, other times we would go into the store and do things like putting hidden radios inside boxes of merchandise so we could talk to customers. Once we had a robot campaign and election and made a few of the customers vote for us.
  
• We used to dumpster dive in the store’s dumpster, which seems kind of gross now that I look back on it since it was a grocery store that cut up their own meat products. We mostly took cardboard boxes from it for projects, but what we really liked to find were Procut stickers. They were these sheets of 6 stickers that I assume the meat guy in the store was supposed to stick on the products. But instead he seemed to throw them all in the trash. We stuck these all over our block, mostly in the alley. We would ride our bikes up and down the alley, slapping them on everything we passed, such as houses, garages, fences, the ground, telephone poles, the church, etc. You couldn’t walk down our alley without seeing at least a few Procut stickers.
  
• I know this is written somewhere else on my page, but during one of our years in grade school, our MO was to blow up the school (and later the world). We drew up blueprints involving bombs in the boiler room and talked about it often. The teachers seemed to have no problem with this, though John tells me I did get in trouble for writing a paper about wanting to be a terrorist when I grew up.
  
• John came up with the idea of prank calling talk radio stations. I think we only did KMOX and I later branched out to WBGZ (What’s Your Bid?) on my own a few years later. But John would wait on the phone for nearly an hour sometimes, just to try and say something silly on the air. The only one I can remember was when he called about his son being on drugs and he was able to talk to the host for quite awhile before the host finally said, “This is a child, isn’t it?” and John responded with, “Right! I’m a prankster!”
  
• He also came up with the idea of calling up a pay phone, just to see if anyone would answer. So we got the number to a phone booth at the Wilshire shopping center and began talking to people there. This began our obsessive collecting of area pay phone numbers. We didn’t even call the numbers that much, we just wanted to build up our list of pay phone numbers. We both kept separate lists, organized in our own ways, and routinely swapped numbers with each other. I started keeping a small notebook on me every time I went out with my parents so that I could write down new numbers. When they would ask if I wanted to go to the store with them, my answer usually revolved around whether or not I had the pay phone numbers at that particular store. By the time grade school ended, we both had over 100 pay phone numbers.
  
• We used to draw arrows on the sidewalks everywhere, hoping that people would follow them. As if someone leaving the store would think, “Oh, an arrow on the sidewalk. I better spend an hour following these all over the block to see where they lead!” We sure put a lot of effort into it, though. I always had to make everything official with a business name too. This one was Arrows Incorporated.
  
• We also left treasure maps lying around, hoping people would find them. The maps were usually a series of steps, with things like “Walk 72 paces straight ahead. Turn left at the pole and walk another 40 paces.” Once I taped one underneath a pay phone, then called the phone and told the guy who answered to look under the phone for the secret map. Nobody would ever do it, though. You’d think a random person would want a little adventure in his life. Why else would they pick up the phone?? I signed a lot of these DOT Inc, which stood for Don’t Open This, which is what I wrote on the outside of a lot of them, hoping to entice people into opening them.
  
• One birthday, I received some CB walkie talkies. This is another thing that’s mentioned on my pranks page. Within a year, John and his sister also received walkie talkies and we all drove the local CB community nuts with our antics. Leadfoot was the man who was ready to kill all of us. I still don’t understand how he never found us. We sure gave him plenty of incentive to.
  
• We wrote a paper together called The Weirdo Weekly. I don’t think we ever got a full issue out. We also wrote magic spells and John started his own language. (Not sure how far he got with that.)
  
• Speaking of newspapers, we would deface their newspaper before his dad could read it by using a pencil to erase and change certain letters in the headlines. Simple things, like maybe changing the word Loose to Noose or something. I’m sure it made interesting/irritating reading for his dad.
  
• Out of nowhere, my dad once grounded me from hanging out with John any more, his reason simply being that he was a bad influence. I can’t remember how long this ban on John lasted, but I do remember getting in trouble one evening because my dad drove by the playground during recess and saw us playing together.
  

At this point I’m tired of writing so I’m going to stop. But it’s great that John has gotten back in touch. I count him as a major influence in my life, and he made my grade school years approximately a billion times more interesting than they would have been without him.

Also, Netflix’s Instant Play is awesome. This is my first time using it. The picture quality is a lot better than the movies I rip myself. Once they build their catalog up, there will be no reason for me to own movies and TV shows anymore. They didn’t have Season 3, so I had to spend a day downloading those from bittorrent. I was downloading them one at a time so I could watch them as they came in. But Netflix is great and I hope they work on making a lot more available soon.

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.

We brought our cat with us for all of this. He did great in the car and with the other animals. The kids have probably spent a total of about 5 or 6 hours in the hotel pool since we’ve been here. And we’ll probably hang out there for another 3 tomorrow before we start driving back to Oregon. It’s been a fun trip and I’m glad I finally got to take the kids to Seattle like I’ve been meaning to do for the past 2 years that I’ve lived in the Northwest. Next on the list…San Francisco.

Here’s a few pictures of this week.

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.

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.

Today I failed at sleeping in. I woke around 8 and got up around 9. But since it’s daylight savings I technically woke at 9 and got up at 10. Bought a Pepsi from 7-Eleven to try and wake myself up (My first Pepsi of the year, I think). Watched most of T-2, then put together this Mildred Monday song for the rest of the evening. I wrote that in 1997 and I’ve been meaning to do that ever since then. It’s not done – the sound levels are all wacky.

Geez, where did my day go? I didn’t start the song thing until 5 or 6. I must have fallen asleep at some point. I didn’t do anything today.

What’s up with haikus? I hate haikus and anyone who writes them. No really, what’s so clever about them? I just read a history of haikus hoping for a little understanding, but I still don’t get it. And I don’t understand why they’re so common in America. Nobody should like them, because they’re dumb.

Wait no, that’s only what I thought. I said nothing and just ignored them, so they continued to rant to each other about the man who had the audacity to come into a post office and mail his letters. I bet they’re at home, lying in bed right now, still complaining about that guy. I bet they go to Starbucks and complain about people there ordering coffee. And then they stand in line at the bank, amazed that the people in front of them are depositing checks. There wasn’t even a bad line today. They should come in around noon when the line is out the door and everyone is whining to each other that there’s only 3 people working at the counter. Those people have tried to get me involved in their complaining too. I avoid eye contact and say nothing.

Go ahead, make fun of me for writing a complaining rant about ranting complainers.

I smiled and said, “Sure!” I reached into my pocket and handed him my ticket.

He looks it over. “Oh…Uhhh…Okay.” Then he hands it back to me and turns to leave.

“Do you need me to leave or something?”

He turns around, pauses for a few seconds, and says, “Uhhhh…not at this time.”

I left on my own about 30 minutes later and walked to The Blue Pepper where they have internet access.

On Sunday I spent all day in Portland. I ended up stabbing myself in the hand with a screwdriver. Not just a little scratch either, but I giant gaping hole in my hand. Blood was everywhere. It wasn’t just dripping out, it was squirting out. Gross, eh? I went into a store and purchased some heavy-duty band-aids, went into the restroom and cleaned up. My hand still hurts. I was at Dennys last night and couldn’t even lift my drink. Murder suspects enjoy talking about blood and wounds in great detail, you know?

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.

This weekend was filled mostly with Geocaching and bike riding. Gotta love free entertainment. I bet we rode about 5 miles. (More for the kids, since they’ve been riding by themselves every day.) Most of it was riding to Geocaches. We found one in the woods by the park and then one right next to our apartments. We also biked to the college to try and find a couple near there.

This is my first time Geocaching with my Blackberry. When I first switched to a Blackberry for my cell phone, I purchased a program called Spot. I paid $50 for it and it’s never worked right. I exchanged a few emails with them, hoping to get it going, but no luck. I thought it would be the perfect program for Geocaching since I’d gotten rid of my PDA. This weekend I learned that GPS coordinates could be entered into the Google Maps application for the Blackberry. So screw Spot, I’m just going to use Google Maps for free. It worked out great for us this weekend.

Back in my day, there was no email, no cell phones, no twitter, no pagers, no instant messaging. If I wanted to contact a friend I had to call him on a land line and sometimes I’d call and get nothing but a busy signal for hours. The entire family shared a single phone line and they were much busier back then since it was the only means of remotely communicating with friends and family. If your friends and family lived far away, you couldn’t talk to them very often or very long because long distance was expensive. And if you were away from home and needed to make a call, you had to stop at a pay phone. Imagine that, regular people using pay phones all the time.

Oh sure, things like cell phones and pagers existed, but only businessmen and drug dealers owned them. The first cell phone I ever saw was a gigantic bag phone that someone in our church brought in with them in the 1980’s. It was 3 times the size of his wife’s purse. So even if you could afford a cell phone then, you’d look like a douche carrying it around.

Most high-tech communities revolved around C.B. radios. They were huge back then and you could find normal rednecks chatting with each other on a dozen channels in any given night. There were battles between rednecks, just like in chatrooms and online communities today, which sometimes evolved into tire slashing or coax cutting. Guess that doesn’t really compare to the harshness of SWATTING someone, though.

I had to look up facts in things like dictionaries and encyclopedias. There was no instant access to any kind of information I could possibly want 24 hours a day. If I needed some information and the library was closed, I was out of luck. My parents didn’t even own one of those giant sets of encyclopedias so I had to trek to the library to find anything. I couldn’t even access the library’s computer from home. If I needed a library book I had to look in a card catalog that was taller than me, flipping through hundreds of cards manually and hoping to find what I was looking for. The Dewey Decimal System owned me.

Phone books were also a necessity in any home. I couldn’t text Google for a number or look it up online. I either had to find it in the phone book or call 411, which charged money for it. And 411 only handled information in Illinois. If I needed a number across the river in Missouri, I had to call 314-555-1212 for Missouri information. Just to contact information in a different state, you had to know an area code in that state. Sure, 411 could tell you the area code, but then you’d be double-charged for information.

In 1990, I finally got a computer that had a modem (that only displayed green text on a black screen) and I became interested in BBSing. But to connect to one of the dozens of BBSes in my area, I had to get past the busy signal first which could sometimes take hours on the really popular boards. Luckily my modem software would automatically redial a BBS number over and over until it picked up while I did other things. Hopefully I would notice when it connected, before the BBS would hang up on me and become busy again. Oh, and remember 56k modems? Imagine the speed of a 56k and divide that by 46. That’s how fast BBSing was at 1200 baud. When I upgraded to a 2400 baud a year later, I was astounded by the increased speed. And when I finally got a computer with a 40 meg hard drive (that’s MEG, not GIG), I knew that I could never use up all that space.

When I left home in 1991, I didn’t have MapQuest to plot my route to Texas and I didn’t have GPS to bail me out if I made a wrong turn. I had to buy a map to get me there, and at each rest stop I’d have to refold it so I would be looking at the part I was on. There was no little green dot on a screen to guide me anywhere. Once I arrived in a new state or a new city, it was time to buy a new map. By the mid-90’s I had a huge collection of maps that I was dragging around the country with me.

Pornography was not easy to come by. My parents didn’t have any porn in the house, so my brother and I would have to rely on friends to supply us with Playboys and Hustlers. The soft-core images in those magazines was about as good as it got. We might score a new magazine or two maybe once per year. Compare that to the unlimited supply of free porn available to any kid on the internet today. The difference there is just unbelievable.

When it came to watching movies and TV shows, I was at the mercy of cable TV. When the monthly TV Guide arrived in the mail, I would flip through it and highlight the movies that I wanted to watch. Then I would just have to hope that I didn’t forget about it. There was no automatic popup on the TV to remind me that my movie would start soon. There wasn’t even an on-screen guide to show me what shows and movies were playing. I either had to memorize the TV schedule or refer to the TV guide, which was usually buried deep under a pile of newspapers and magazines.

There was no database of movie and TV trivia either. I’m sure there were movie magazines back then, but I’d never seen one. If I wanted to know which actor played a character in a movie or what a song in a movie was, I had to find a time when the movie was playing and wait for the credits to roll. The only problem there was that the resolution on our TV wasn’t meant for reading the tiny text on credits. I was lucky if I could make any of the words out in the credits. And it’s not like I could pause the picture to try and decode the print. Movie trivia just wasn’t accessible back then.

Imagine a life with no Ebay and no Amazon. I lived that life. If we wanted to purchase an item, we had to purchase it at a store and pay full price for it. Our only hope for a discount was to drive from store to store, comparing prices and hoping to save a few bucks. If I wanted a cassette tape, I paid full price. I couldn’t log onto Ebay or Amazon and find a few hundred people selling the same cassette for a fraction of the cost in a store. I was almost always stuck paying full price for just about everything.

And if I wanted to get rid of some old junk I had, there wasn’t much hope of making any money at it. Garage sales were about our only option. My parents had a garage sale once and I put my old TRS-80 computers out, hoping to make $10 off of each of them and some other low prices from the accessories. Years later, I tried selling those same TRS-80’s at a yard sale of my own, for 50 cents each. No takers. Just a few years ago I tried selling all my old TRS-80 stuff on Ebay and I made over $100 from it all. Without the internet, I either had to keep stuff forever, practically give it away for free, or just throw it in the trash. Listing an item for sale in the newspaper was your best shot, but if nobody bought it then I was stuck paying the fee for the classified ad.

If we thought school would be closed due to the snow, there was just one AM radio station we could check to find out for sure. Sometimes it would take up to 30 minutes to finally catch the announcement and we’d wait quietly as the DJ read through an enormous list of closed schools, hoping ours would be in the list. Today, my kids’ school sends out an automatic email or text message to let us know. I don’t even have to wake them up.

People always talk about how great the 80’s were, but how could anyone want to go back to when none of this existed? I love having my entire life’s music collection, my address book, calendar and hundreds of pages of personal notes in the palm of my hand. Being able to take a call in the middle of the woods or at the lake or in your car is awesome. So is instant access to any kind of information imaginable 24 hours a day and an active social life beyond local friends. As a teenager in the 1980’s and even the early 1990’s, I never could have imagined how awesome things would turn out just a couple decades later. And I can’t wait to see how much things have progressed in another 10 or 20 years.

After that, I stopped taking the web site so seriously and turned into a comedy site based on things in the Alton area. I started posting humorous pictures and writing about things around town. I complained about things and promoted the pranks that EvilCal and I pulled. I guess it was basically my blog before I had a blog.

I think it was in 2002 that EvilCal had this great idea of turning Alton Online into an ISP. He would set up the hardware end of it and I would try to get local customers for it. We would split the profits and I would get free dialup internet in return. So I sent Cal the domain name, he never did anything with it and it expired. Thanks, Cal!

A domain squatter immediately picked it up and put a bunch of paid links on it. A friend of mine, who was an aspiring stand-up comedian, frequently used a joke in his act that went something like, “I’m from a small town called Alton. Ever hear of it? Didn’t think so. You know what Alton is spelled backwards? Not L.A.” That actually got laughs. Anyway, I stole his joke for my new site and notla.com was born.

All the old Alton Online content went onto it and I continued to slowly add more. But once I decided that I was moving to Oregon, I didn’t see much point in continuing a website about a town thousands of miles away from me. For the past 2 years, notla.com hasn’t seen much change. You can see what the site looked like before today by going here: http://www.notla.com/sites/altononline.

I had two evil plans for Alton Online that I never got around to completing. The first was this – I was going to write a very serious article about a retired old man on a farm who decided to build a life-sized replica of downtown Alton on his property. I visited downtown Alton early one holiday morning when the streets were completely empty and snapped dozens of pictures of the buildings surrounded by empty streets, bare parking spaces and no people. I also took pictures of some corn fields.

My plan was to do some photoshopping to make it look like a few blocks of Alton had been replicated in the middle of a field. I could show a road abruptly ending where a grass field began. Instead of seeing the Mississippi in the distance, you’d see corn fields. From another angle, down a bare Alton street, you’d see a farm house where the rest of downtown Alton was supposed to be. I’d tell a heartwarming story about how the man used to be into model railroading, but wanted to build something bigger on his acres of land and decided on a full-sized model of Alton, Illinois.

My hope was that people would actually believe this and that some might even drive along the road that I mentioned it was on, keeping a sharp lookout for Alton in the middle of a field. The emails I would get from people calling my bluff or begging to know where it was located would make me laugh several times a week. Sadly, we’ll never know how great it could have been.

Evil Plan #2 – Urban exploration of the vast collections of sewers, tunnels and caves beneath the city of Alton. I collected a bunch of pictures of cool tunnels and drains from legitimate urban exploration sites that I planned to use. Of course, there’s nothing interesting underneath Alton. But I planned to change all that with some photoshopping and lies. I was going to list some specific entrances and show all the amazing pictures of this hidden underground city. It would put the abandoned NYC subway tunnels to shame. In the end I would probably be responsible for some kids climbing into sewers and dying. Is that hilarious or what??

So that’s the history and would-be history of Alton Online and www.notla.com. The word is essentially meaningless now that I don’t live in Alton anymore, but I’m keeping it anyway. Welcome to my homepage!

I thought about going back to my original home at phonelosers.org/rbcp which I had from about 1997 until 2005, but nah. I want to keep my homepage separate from phonelosers.org. I thought about moving it to phonelosers.COM like I did for a short time in 2005. And I thought about trying to register redboxchilipepper.com, but I’m sure people would mess up the spelling on that even more than they forget the hyphen in this domain.

I need something short and simple. That’s why I’ve moved my homepage to my old Alton Online home – notla.com. Even though it’s technically not even a word, I think it’s still easier to remember than all the other domains my homepage has resided on in the past. So update your bookmarks. My new homepage is at www.notla.com.

If you’re a subscriber by email or RSS, you don’t have to do anything. I’ll hold on to the brad-carter.com domain for a few more years before letting it go, so old URLs and my email addresses will still work until then. But everything has moved over to notla.com now. See you there!

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.

I read something last week that said spam robots are now able to recognize captcha images. I thought they were referring to random letters in crazy, jumbled fonts with lines running through them. Maybe they can recognize pictures of trees too, though.

I’ve been working on website things again lately. Miscellaneous stuff on phonelosers.org, such as this Captures page. It’s got a few good old-school PLA things in it. I’ve had a directory full of captured stuff since the very early 90’s and I’ve always wanted to throw some of it up online. I’ll have to make one on this site that is more me-specific. I’ve also been converting old pre-Wordpress entries from this site to WordPress posts. This has caused me to accidentally post really old entries to the main page a few times. Sorry for any confusion.

Payton finally knows how to ride a bike on his own! He’s still a little wobbly, but he’s doing 100% of it on his own now. I ran up and down the street with him a couple times today but he barely even needed me to. Some neighbor kid showed him how to get started. So that’s great! We can all take rides together now, once it gets warmer.

Sold a couple monitors on Craigslist today. The guy was a Geocacher, so he hung out and talked about geocaching and GPS stuff for awhile. He’s the 3rd Geocacher I’ve met since I’ve lived in Oregon. I guess Geocaching is just more popular here than it was in Illinois.

“No, I don’t watch that shit,” I said. Yeah, I cursed. I could tell that she wouldn’t be used to hearing the Superbowl referred to as “shit.”

“What?? Why not??” She asks me, not believing what she’s hearing. She was in shock. We exchanged a few more words. I think I told her I wasn’t very good at being a man, or something like that. She finally went away and I went back to listening to my podcasts. I bet she told all her friends and family about the guy she met who didn’t want to watch the Superbowl.

This week I got a dresser on Craigslist to put in my closet. I’ve been needing one for a long time now and I’m glad to finally have one. $25, 5 drawers, and all my clothes fit into it. Also a week or two ago I found a dining room table at Salvation Army. A really nice one too. I’ve officially got all the furniture I could possibly need now.

Payton rules. He’s been reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince for months now and he finally finished it this week. 652 pages. I wasn’t reading books at all when I was in 3rd grade. I discovered reading in 4th grade and stuck to tiny Judy Blume-like books until Jr. High when I switched to Stephen King. He’s been reading Judy Blume this year too (all the Fudge books), but I never thought he would actually finish a Harry Potter book when he brought it home. I’m surprised and proud. He said he would read the 7th Harry Potter book if I bought it, so I found a used copy of it on Amazon and it should be here next week. It’s 784 pages. That just seems like a lot for an 8-year-old.

A couple days before he finished it, I told him I would take him out to eat at a place of his choice once he finished the book, to celebrate his first large book. He picked Pizza King, so we went there this evening. Between food and games, that place is crazy expensive. We had fun though. I blew tons of money on the crane machine and won a couple things.

I finally finished reading every single entry on Violent Acres. Her latest entry is #328 and they’re usually pretty long entries. For me to read all 328 of her posts, you know it’s gotta be great stuff. So everyone should go take a look at her site. Wow, 328 entries. Probably 2 or 3 pages per entry. I bet her collection of stories is about the same size as Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

The page is www.signhacker.com/ and the first official entry is one I’m sure most of the readers here have seen already. Hang in there, though, because eventually you’ll see some sign pranks that you haven’t read about. I’m not sure how often I’ll update the site. It’ll probably end up being like www.oldpeoplearefunny.com where I’m lazy and update it twice a year. My plan is to try and update it about once per week. We’ll see how that goes. There are links to subscribe via email and RSS. And please excuse the weird and broken links along the side bar. I’m still working on the theme.

Speaking of sign pranks, the McDonalds Sign Prank got Dugg, Stumbled, and then linked to from about a dozen different blogs yesterday. It pushed the page views on phonelosers.org up to about 10,000 for the day. Which doesn’t seem like much, but it was enough to cause the site to stop responding periodically. I kept getting MySQL errors when I tried to visit a few times. Today I think it’s been alright, though. I’m surprised that a mere tripling in traffic was enough to do that, though.

Today I drove to Salem today for an eye appointment. It’s my first one in 10 years now and it’ll be the first time I’ve bought new glasses in 10 years. The doctor said my prescription has barely changed since then, which he claims is unusual for such a long time. Maybe I’ll actually wear them all the time instead of just when I’m driving. And I won’t leave them on the floorboard of my car for days at a time either. My vision was so screwed up for the 30 minute drive home. It was dark and rainy out and I still had to wear sunglasses. I couldn’t read any of the signs and I actually missed the first Albany exit.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

• The Umbrella Man – by Roald Dahl
  
• Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life – by Roald Dahl
  
• Boy – by Roald Dahl Roald’s childhood biography. Man, schools really beat the hell out of kids back then.
  
• Going Solo – by Roald Dahl Mostly a bunch of Roald’s personal war stories from WWII. Which, for some reason, I really enjoyed.
  
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – by Roald Dahl I read this one in just one evening.
  
• Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc – by Sieur Louis De Conte, translated by Mark Twain Somehow I’d never read the story of Joan of Arc in any form before. I’ve never even seen a movie about her, aside from Bill & Ted. This was a great book and she ruled. It was written by a childhood friend of hers who went to war with her and was present at all her trials.
  
• Cell – by Stephen King: Another one of his “the whole world has ended so me and a small group of people must travel somewhere” books. I really liked it though!
  
• Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator – by Roald Dahl: This one was stupid. Really stupid. I didn’t even like it a little. Stupid stupid stupid.
  
• The Mysterious Stranger – by Mark Twain: My favorite Mark Twain story from the past couple years. This is about the fourth time I’ve read this one. It’s short – just 100 pages or so.
  
• The Prince and the Pauper – by Mark Twain

The other day a guy posted on my 618 BBS shrine page a link to his page at telnetbbsguide.com. So I decided to give some BBSes a try yesterday. I logged into two of them and played around on them for about an hour. One of them was a WWIV BBS, which I haven’t seen since the late 90’s. It’s weird, because they still scroll slowly as if I’m on a 9600 baud connection and they still use ANSI graphics and you have to hit the space bar after each page to scroll through long posts and stuff.

The two BBSes I visited weren’t exactly active. The WWIV board hadn’t had hardly any posts from this year. A few of the games (Tradewars, Pimp Wars, etc) seemed to be somewhat active. There were files areas, voting, and all the other stuff that used to come with BBSes. I don’t know if they still update software like WWIV, but it looked and felt just like it always had. It was neat, feeling like I was in the early 90’s again.

But I really don’t understand the point of running or visiting a BBS. I mean, anything that can be done on these things can be accomplished just as well on a website. Forums and file areas, obviously. The games are mostly text-based with a few ANSI screens thrown in. It’d be easy to port those into web sites or flash. Seems like the only appeal to BBSing would be to connect with people in a certain geographical area. But since these are all using telnet instead of dialup now, that part of it makes no sense either. Besides, you can find local people, things, conversations on Yahoo Groups and Craigslist.

I just don’t get the point of any of it other than to feel retro. A lot of the posts on the WWIV board were things along the lines of, “Oh, this brings back so many memories!” and there wasn’t much conversation besides that. I guess that’s all BBSing is good for. If someone wants to point out something to prove me wrong, I’d like to hear your opinion on it.

Tomorrow’s gonna be busy.

A couple weeks ago, blog after blog began featuring these stickers from evilmadscience.com that read “Now Slower and with More Bugs!” I ordered a set of 10 and they arrived in the mail a few days later. The obvious thing to do with these stickers is slap them on copies of Windows Vista. A few blogs have shown people sticking it on their own copies of Vista, but so far I haven’t seen anyone put them on software in stores. So I stopped by Target today and stuck a few on some Microsoft products.

I accidentally put one on upsidedown since I was trying to be all stealthy about it.

You can order these stickers from evilmadscience.com.

UPDATE @ 4:45PM: I was out again today and stickered some more products. What was it, you ask? Apple software? Intuit? Linux? Nope, just some grocery items at Albertsons…

As I was snapping a picture of the Tampax (with the flash on) a girl walked by me with her cart. I’m sure she saw the flash and probably wondered why I would be taking pictures of tampons. A minute later she was blocking the isle and I was just kind of hanging out, waiting for her to move. She looked over at me and said sorry. I told her it was no problem, I wasn’t in a hurry and was just browsing. In the tampon isle.

I’ve still got 3 stickers left. Any suggestions?

UPDATE on Sunday: The Evil Mad Scientist site posted my pictures and some of the users there think I’m a horrible person because of it! They’re saying things like “That is illegal, and disgusting. Regardless of your loyalties, that is just uncalled for.” and “Ridiculous, childish and weak, weak humor. Vandalism is a sign of vacant creativity.” What a bunch of boring prudes! I should start putting “This product causes cancer!” stickers on merchandise and see how they react.

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.

• Boing Boing Lots of weird stuff on this one.
  
• The Consumerist
  
• Perez Hilton Last week I found out that Brittney wore the same clothes TWO DAYS IN A ROW. I’m not kidding, that was a big deal on this blog.
  
• Dilbert The Dilbert comic.
  
• Engadget Reviews and news on consumer electronics.
  
• /Film Movie news
  
• Get Rich Slowly Good financial advice in here sometimes.
  
• Gizmodo My all-time favorite. It’s more reviews and news on electronics, but with great writing, sarcasm, hilarity.
  
• Hack A Day A hack. Every day.
  
• MAKE Magazine The blog version of MAKE magazine.
  
• Neatorama
  
• xkcd My favorite comic strip.
  
• Unshelved This is a comic strip for people who work in a library.
  
• Slashdot
  
• I can has cheez burger LOLCATS!

I was going to list all 53 of my blogs here, but screw that. Those are my favorites. Everyone should go visit a few of them. But more importantly, please use the comments to tell me what your favorite blogs are. 53 is not enough for me and I need more to read.

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.

On Friday the kids were home from school so I didn’t get much moved since they took up too much of the car space. Around noon we rented a U-Haul and they helped me fill up the back with tons of stuff. I think we took just one load in the U-Haul, then spent some time in the new place, organizing and cleaning. We also officially moved the cat – he was pretty freaked out about the car ride and the new place. Colleen picked up the kids around 5:30. That night, a guy from Craigslist came to help me move all the heavy stuff. I was starting to get worried since he was 3 hours later than he planned to be and my U-Haul had to be back at 8:00 the following morning. But once he arrived, he was great. We got everything moved in just two truckloads. The couch was the worst and we could barely fit it in the front door of the new place.

When we first arrived at the new place, the cat came down and greeted us. Then he disappeared. After not seeing him for awhile, I started to worry that he might have run outside while one of the doors was open. So me and this guy, Alex, start searching the apartment and calling for the cat. I thoroughly search each room, looking up on shelves, under blankets, and behind everything. No cat. We walk around outside, looking for him in bushes and stuff. No sign of him. So we leave the garage door open a few inches, just in case he’s outside.

We go and pick up the 2nd load from the old place and bring it back. And still no cat. It’s pretty unusual since the cat is always running around when people are here. I’m starting to get kind of worried. The kids would be really upset if the cat turned up missing. Alex and I do a little more searching, both inside and out, and then he leaves. I start searching rooms and closets, shutting doors as I’m 100% sure that the cat isn’t in a room. After maybe 20 minutes, I’m finished and still haven’t found him. I decide that I’m going to start searching outside so I head to my room to get my flashlight. I’m starting to think about what picture of the cat that we’ll use on LOST CAT posters and I’m thinking maybe I’ll sit on my porch for half the night, hoping to see the cat running around in someone’s yard. And there’s the cat, right in the middle of the hallway.

At the time I had no idea where he could be hiding, but after telling Emily about it yesterday she told me he was probably inside the couch. If he wasn’t there, then he’s found a pretty amazing hiding spot. But yeah, he was probably in the couch. Later that night I took my first walk to 7-Eleven! It’s just 3 blocks away, which to me is a major perk of living here. Dari-Mart was 8 blocks from us at the old place, which was a little too far for a quick walk for a snack. I’m going to love having a 7-Eleven so close. I got some Nutter Butters and an empty cup for milk. That was my supper.

Saturday morning I woke up at 7am to take the U-Haul back. I had to stop by the old apartment to use my broom to sweep out the back of the truck, then put $5.00 of gas into it. Got a McGriddle for breakfast and went back home to wait for the cable guy. The kids came over around 9ish and they spent the day playing and occasionally helping me clean and organize things.

I can’t get over how much I like this new place. Warren issues aside, I’m just liking it here tons better than the old apartment and it’s worth every bit of the increased rent. My closet and room are huge. I could easily fit 3 dressers into the closet and still have room to walk around in it. Not that I have that many clothes, but it’s great that I can stuff all my bedroom stuff into there and have the rest of the space (aside from my bed) for nothing but office. My giant wall of shelves is several feet longer than in the old office. And it’s so nice to have a garage to store things in. Things like empty boxes, computer parts, random electronics and car parts. I had to keep all that junk in my room before. And no more scraping the ice/frost from the windows in the mornings!

The neighborhood rules and there’s a cool park about 10 blocks away that we walked to yesterday. There’s also woods everywhere. We went for a long hike in the woods next to the park yesterday. It was freezing, but fun. I’m going to search them for Geocaches soon and if there aren’t any, we’re going to place a new one there.

There’s woods right next to the apartments too that are fenced off, but easily accessible if we enter from the other side. I’m sure we’ll end up checking those out once it gets a little warmer out. On the downside, I can’t walk/bike to the post office and lunch anymore since I’m no longer close to downtown. Not that I could bike there anyway since Warren kept stealing my bike. But on the upside, I can walk to school now!

My Flickr page has pictures of the new place. And a few pictures of the old place being disassembled. I have 3 weeks still, to get the old place cleaned up in hopes of getting my full deposit back.

I was talking to Spessa earlier today about the increased cost of rent and I came up with the following excuses on why the increased rent isn’t a big deal:

• I’ll be saving $13.00 per month on garbage pickup since it’s free there.
  
• I’ll be saving $20.00 per month on doing my laundry at a laundromat, once I spend about $150 for a used washer and dryer.
  
• I’ll be saving $41.00 per month by canceling my gym membership, once I buy an elliptical machine for a couple hundred bucks. (My current apartment is too small for one.)
  
• Decreased power bill since I won’t be running a dehumidifier every other day.
  
• My car will be paid for in just 4 more months! That’s $210.00 I won’t be paying anymore! Yeah, I know this has nothing to do with moving, but it’s still a good excuse for increased rent.

Here’s a big one, and I didn’t realize it until I joked about it to Spessa…I will save a few hundred bucks per year by not living next door to Warren the meth addict. That guy has actually cost me a lot of money. Here’s my damage estimate, from 2 years of living next to Warren…

• $55.00 – bike I bought from Target stolen
  
• $250.00 – car window smashed
  
• $150.00 – car stereo stolen (from car theft)
  
• $44.00 – cool 3,000,000 candlepower flashlight stolen (from car theft)
  
• $40.00 – replacement bike I bought at a yard sale stolen (it’s a good thing I didn’t buy nice bikes)
  
• $10.00 – lock to gate cut with bolt cutters to steal this bike
  
• $15.00 – lock and chain on bike/bike rack cut to steal this bike

At various points during all this, I decide to beef up security for 2 reasons. One is that I really do like this apartment because it’s nice and it’s very cheap. And two, because it would be cheaper to periodically blow money on increasing security than it would to spend another $100 – $300 per month on rent. Here’s the increased security breakdown…

• $60.00 – Motion controlled security lights in the back. There was NO light back there before, so I had to do some rewiring in the hallway, installed a new switch, etc. So $60 is about what I paid for all those materials.
  
• $100.00 – Alarm system. With as many out of town trips as I take, an alarm system that could call me while I’m away seemed like a great idea. I think it also worked as a deterrent for Warren because he heard the door chime whenever it was opened and he was outside. And a few times I forgot to enter my code when I came home, so the alarm went off and I’m positive they had to hear that. Just from him knowing the alarm was there might have saved me from a break in.
  
• $50.00 – new motion sensor lights. The old ones stopped working correctly so I had to replace them. Guess that’s what I get for buying the cheapest ones they had.
  
• $30.00 – locking doorknobs for inside doors. I liked to keep my office locked when I was gone for more than a few hours. My hope was that anyone breaking into the house might not bother with the locked doors.
  
• $30.00 – Miscellaneous security items. Such as window locks for the sliding windows, an extra lock on the back door, a new padlock for the gate since they cut the old one.
  
• $100.00 – cameras. I set one up on the back patio area. The other I was going to point out the window at my car, but I never got around to it.
  
• $40.00 – USB to video, to hook the camera into.
  
• $50.00 – Security software – this is a neat piece of software that can handle up to a few dozen cameras. Whenever it detects motion, it starts snapping pictures and saving them in the computer and uploading them to brad-carter.com. Plus it was updating a single image of the patio area every 1 minute. It could also email any detected motion to me or send a text to my phone about movement. I loved messing with that software.

So, assuming that I’m not forgetting anything, the total Warren has cost me is approximately $1024.00. That is a LOT of money that I spent during this past two years! It comes to $42.60 per month. That’s how much I pay to live next to this guy. And there’s no doubt in my mind that he’s responsible for the issues I’ve had with theft. It’s either him or its his friends. Not to mention the peace of mind that I haven’t had because of him. I’d love to buy a new car stereo (another Warren-related cost once I finally do it) but I can’t because if I do, there’s the risk of his posse breaking into my car again. I’ve had to deal with shitty local radio stations every time I get into the car because of him. I was going to skip getting the kids bikes for Christmas this year because they’d probably just get stolen since these people are cutting the locks. I can do that now! (I guess in this case, Warren would have saved me about $100.) And vacations are a little worrisome, knowing that Warren probably realizes that I’m out of town and he might decide to break in. It’d be so easy for him to break into my place without getting caught.

So I’ve got some serious plans for Warren, which I don’t think I should rant about in my journal. But I will have at least $1024.00 of fun with him. I just hope he doesn’t die from his addiction before I finish with him. Warren, prepare for a much more interesting life.

Today I met Dale there and he showed it to me. He seemed really intent on “selling” it to me, pointing out every good feature he could come up with. He didn’t have to, though, because the place was really great. It has a completely modern kitchen, giant living room, giant bedrooms, a walk-in closet for me, 1.5 baths, a back patio, a garage, and washer and dryer hookups. I haven’t had a garage since Ohio in 1997! And it sure would be nice to do laundry at home again. I’m really excited about the whole thing. It’s on a dead-end street too. I can finally get a new car stereo without worrying about Warren’s friends busting out my car window. And I can buy a bike again!

I badmouthed the hell out of Warren to Dale. Dale was surprised that he was even living there since he wasn’t supposed to be. I told him about my car being broken into, my two bikes, the locks being cut with bolt cutters, and the attempted break-in to my back door. Dale says he’s going to kick them all out. Which he’s been saying since my very first day there so I don’t believe him. But it’s nice to know that he’s hating those people. I just hope Warren doesn’t figure out that I said anything before I move out.

I immediately drove to the rental office, filled out the paperwork and put down a deposit. They have to clean the carpets and then it’s mine. I put in my 30 days notice for this place so I guess I’ll have a few weeks to get everything cleaned up around here. I started moving everything out of Emily’s room tonight and I’m getting the screw holes all patched up in there. I’m going to try and do a lot of work on everything this weekend. Her rooms is almost completely emptied already. Guess I’ll start on Payton’s next. I need to find someone to help me move all the heavy furniture. Craigslist?

The cat is really enjoying the Christmas tree so far. He’s been climbing all over it for hours now.

Kids and I went to the movies today. Saw The Mist and then Enchanted. They say they liked The Mist better. It was a great movie, but wow, what a messed up ending. (The only part of the book they changed. The book didn’t really even have an ending.)

A couple months ago I signed up for a magazine subscription to help Emily with some school thing she was doing. I got a 24 month subscription to Wired for a good price. Today I got the magazine and read through it all. The only problem is that I’d already read almost all of the stories in it during this past month. Since I subscribe to dozens of blogs, reading a tech magazine is pretty pointless for me. It sucks wading through all those ads too. I might just transfer the subscription to someone who wants it.

This morning I fixed myself a healthy breakfast of cornflakes, covered with as much sugar as possible. I went in my room to eat and shut my door so the cat wouldn’t try to steal any. When I came back out 10 minutes later, I could hear the cat meowing frantically. I finally found him inside the fridge. Good thing he didn’t sneak in there right before I left the house for the day. That’d be such a bummer to find a dead cat in the fridge.

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…

She didn’t know that GA stood for Georgia either. I asked her what state and she says, “I dunno. It just says G A on here.”

My ripping is out of control. I’ve got DVDs ripping on my laptop and cassette tapes ripping on the big computer. Right now I’m ripping the Electric Dreams movie soundtrack. I’ve only got about 5 real audio music cassette tapes that I never converted to CD or mp3. Then I’ve got about 20 audio cassettes of various prank call groups, given to me in trade back in the days before everyone owned CD burners. And then a few dozen of my old mix tapes with things on them that its unlikely I’d ever find them on bittorrent. Plus a few tapes of friends and I doing wacky things.

Today I bought a dual cassette deck from Goodwill for $20. If I get all my ripping done within the 15 day return period, I can return it for store credit. I guess it would have made more sense to buy a $100 cassette deck from Target and just return it after 30 days for cash. I’m sure I can get these all ripped within a week, though. Then I can finally throw away the rest of my cassettes.

Been selling tons of DVDs. More than $300 on them so far. And today I finished transferring them all to my hard drives. It’s nice being rid of them all. Netflix is working out really well too.

Emily had a friend spend the night last night. Today we went Geocaching. Ended up going on a long walk that took us to a cemetery that we just happened to be looking for earlier. So we found another geocache there. Supper at Wendy’s yesterday. It’s been a pretty full weekend so far. Oh yeah, had teacher meetings yesterday and the kids haven’t had school for 2 days. I’m hoping to find some good haunted houses or maybe a maze to go to this weekend.

Listened to a couple episodes of a podcast tonight called Public Nuisance Radio which isn’t the best show ever, but it introduced me to a new song I like. It’s by a band called The Vandals and the song is called My Girlfriend’s Dead. It’s in their playlist so go listen to it. It seems like all my favorite podcasts have really slowed down or quit lately. I need to find some new ones to listen to. At least the first one I tried gave me some new music, even if I’m not crazy about the show.

Yesterday the kids and I bought a couple pumpkins and they carved them. The one on the left is Emily’s and the one on the right is Payton’s. I was surprised to hear that they’d never done this before. I don’t know why I never got them pumpkins before, I guess I just never thought of it. I think it’s been more than 10 years since I carved one. In fact, I think the last time was when Sylvia and I stole a giant one from a pumpkin stand, not realizing that carrying it 2 miles to my parents house on foot would be really hard. Part of the time we made a sling out of our jackets and carried it between us.

My cat climbs on everything. He climbed up the side of one of my shirts to get to the top of my closet in that picture. It’s annoying. I’m really torn on the issue of declawing him. But I’m starting to think it’ll have to be done soon. I thought that I wouldn’t care before since I don’t ever intend to own any nice furniture that he would scratch up. But I can’t have him destroying my shirts.

I throw him out of my office 3 or 4 times a day and shut the door to keep him out. He loves to go behind my desk and chew on wires. He’s also chewed on the plants a little and once spilled a little dirt on my laptop. It’d sure suck to have the whole plant come crashing down on the laptop keyboard. So I have to lock him out of my room when I leave. This evening he was playing behind the desk and stepped on the main power supply to everything, shutting off my desktop. Not that I was using it, but I wanted to kill him. Tonight I put my large collection of Priority Mail boxes to good use and fenced him out of the area with the wires:

The boxes were the perfect height, and I was able to use the sticky strip on the top of them to stick them to the desk so they don’t fall over. We’ll see how long this lasts. Right now he’s laying on my lap, purring. Normally I would have thrown him out of the room by now so this is looking good.

I guess his name is Charcoal since that’s what the kids are insisting on.

Right now I’m listening to Episode 7 of Haxor Radio. It’s probably one of the most informative shows I’ve ever heard, covering radio shack policies and a bunch of cell phone stuff that’s interesting to me. Plus they hax0r MY Radio Shack account info. Go listen to their shows.

With the cable companies offering more and more on demand every day, actually owning your movies is becoming pointless. Why spend $15.00 to own one when you can see it on demand? Getting an account on Netflix for $5.00/month makes owning DVDs stupid. Even McDonald’s is renting DVDs for $1.00/night now. Competition like this will force Blockbuster to keep lowering their rental prices. The networks are starting to let people watch/download their primetime TV shows online for free. Doesn’t Netflix even let you watch your rentals online now? Not to mention the ease in which anyone can download any of this stuff for free on bittorrent.

But the one thing that really sold me on ridding myself of DVDs is my Xbox 360. It lets me mp4ize my entire video collection and watch it all from the TV. I hooked a 500 gig external hard drive to it, which fits everything I own onto it. A few clicks of the remote plays any of it. And it’s easy enough for the kids to use too. I love that thing. And since Ipods also play the mpeg-4 format, I can easily transfer any of it to my Ipod for vacations. Apple TV does the same thing if you want to be more legit about buying online movies to watch on TV, even though the files are locked down and it’s a little pricey now. But the prices will come down and the DRM will disappear and/or become reasonable eventually.

Anyway, now that I’ve slammed the DVD format for 3 paragraphs, I expect everyone to visit my Amazon store page to buy the DVDs I’m selling. Here’s the link:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/shops/index.html/104-8363450-8480721?ie=UTF8&sellerID=A3EFPXZUK73XP2

There’s only 45 up right now, but by the time I finish entering the rest of them there should be over 100 of them. There’s some good stuff up there, if you’re into those old, antiquated DVD things.

Speaking of that, Amazon has a really nice system for selling things. There are no up front costs like Ebay has. And the total time to list each item is just a minute or two.

NEXT MORNING EDIT: Woo, Finding Nemo sold! That’s like $2.00 I made! I need to go buy a bunch of DVD shipping envelopes today. I put my two school books up from last year too. The one I paid about $90 for last year is going to sell for $30 and the one I paid about $40 for I’ll be lucky if I get $5.00 for it. I only kept the books because I hoped they might be used again this year for a similar class. But no. I tried to sell the $90 book back to the book store the other day and they offered me $15. I told them I’d just sell it on Amazon. I thought I’d get a little more than $30 for it though. Never buy books from the student book store again.

My desktop computer rips DVDs in about 2 hours and my laptop rips them in usually under an hour. It’ll probably take a few weeks, but I plan to rip them all. I need more computers.