costa rican coffee rules

i've been thinking i need to have an account with one of those online services to manage my daily reads.  the links list on the side of my page isn't nearly as coherent as it should be, and it's such a pain in the arse to hunt down the right section on the template and republish the changes every time i come across another link i want to add.  what's better - bloglines or blogrolling?

i'm still pissed aboot the government humping my paycheck for every tax dollar they can possibly get their grubby little hands on, thereby preventing me from buying a new bicycle.  and what's really aggravating about the whole situation is that the weather has been soooo nice this week.  five warm jacket-free days in a row yo and no new bike with which to celebrate.

i've been getting my hopes up at work lately.  i originally had the idea that all of the development tasks had been taken care of (as was implied by the "everything's been finished" type email i received), but lo and behold - it's not.  i wish i could say i was suprised.  well, i suppose if they theoretical reports, i can handle that.  i'll just make up my own rules for the data, rather than depend on it actually existing.

i'm such a whore

click the picture and buy a t-shirt from threadless and i get free stuff. like shirts from threadless. this is one of my favourites...

you gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em

one of the bizarre things about my new job is the patterns that bring work to my desk.  there will be days or weeks where there are so many assignments and so many tasks that i can barely function, trying maniacally to accomplish everything inside of an eight hour work day.  but then there are also times when that massive workload will exist only in theory.

for example, i have that theoretical workload right now.  i have a to-do list that spans three pages in my notebook over to my right.  each task on the to-do list has several sub tasks, notes aboot them and instructions for when i have approval to undertake certain tasks and complete certain items once i've received confirmation from the development team that the data structure exists to support the tasks i'm working on.  unfortunately, the data structures do not exist.  so i have to take on my task list very half-assed so that i don't overdo things by finishing all my crap and leaving myself with nothing to do.  the majority of todays tasks appear to involve me looking at the task list and slowly taking care of the few remaining items that don't require input from anyone else.

sometime in the next couple of days it's all going to jump up and bite me in the ass though.  i'm sure all of the input for which i am waiting will happen simultaneously and leave me with almost no time to accomplish everything.

but the really cool thing is that all of this makes it appear as though i'm very busy at work so there's no chance of getting laid off again.

pope benedict would issue a nut-kicking for this

today i made what was probably the worst cup of coffee that i've ever brewed since i discovered that coffee making was possible with a coffee maker.

i was in a bit of a rush this morning while getting my crap together for work i figured i would throw my little 1 cup coffee maker into the "on" position and make a cup for the trip to work (the "on" position is entirely necessary for it to work).

it wasn't until i was in the car and on the highway when i remembered about it. "thank the gods for insulated travel mugs" i thought as i reached for the still warm brew.

warm was aboot the only positive thing it had going for it, because good taste and flown out the window with the parking tag that was sitting on my dash board. it was awful. it made me gag. i've had a lot of bad coffee before, but this was right along the lines of something my grandmother made me once. she's a sweet lady and all, but i don't think she was born with taste buds. at least not the ones designed for enjoying coffee.

i'm a pimped out jedi knight - Obi-Wan meets Dolemite

so i've done my taxes. well, at least i've filled out the forms. i haven't actually submitted them. they're quite overdue (i'm doing last year's tax return as well).

the big problem is that i owe money. lots and lots of money. i'm guessing my employer was a little... ummmm... retarded i believe is the politically correct phrase i'm looking for. not nearly enough tax money deducted over the last two years and now i've got to pay it all back. no new bike for mmat, at least not for a while.

so i urge anyone who hasn't already, please buy a shirt ** text removed **. if you dig blaphemy (and i know you do), click on the picture and buy that shirt.

but enough aboot pimping out site to make money. now on to commuting. is anyone else aware of how irritating BMW drivers can be first thing in the morning? it's like somewhere in the back of their mind they think that because they spent more money on their car than i did, that they can somehow try to drive over and/or through my car.

while on their cell phones

and give me the finger for driving cautiously.

fuckers.

and now for something completely different...

first of all, anyone with a weak stomach should go read my post aboot left-handed snails.

i have a large orange fluffy cat. he's not fat or anything, just a giant cat. rather stupid too. he often finds him self lost in the hallway of my two bedroom condo. it's a pretty good sized condo, but certainly not large enough to lose oneself.

but getting lost isn't the only mentally challenged thing that happens to my orange cat. for some utterly bizarre reason whenever he uses the litterbox to go for a poop he comes running out more hyper than you could possibly imagine. it's almost as if the turds he's let build up for the day have been pressing down not only on his bowels, but also on the hyper-activity-release mechanism which my lie somewhere between his stomach and his inner ass.

the only warnings you'll get for these onsets of hyper activity disorder are the digging noise of in the litter box, two quick meows and the sound of a 20 pound cat leaping from the litter box into the curtains in the solarium.

"TRUCK!!!" i'll shout (i'm sure the neighbours can attest to that), "GET OUT OF THE GOD DAMN CURTAINS!!"

and he does - but the hyper activity doesn't end there. next on the list is the attempt to scratch the couch (about which i am already aware and can now prevent) - then the wicker basket full of my winter stuff.

"GOD DAMNIT TRUCK WILL YOU PISS OFF!!" is generally among the next string of obscenities that will stream from my mouth, which is then followed by the sound of orange fluff leaping off to attempt more ... more badder things. doubleplusungood i believe George Orwell would have said. it's almost as though pooing is the same for cats as too much caffeine is for humans. wait, not caffeiene - but cocaine.

thankfully he will usually find his spring at this point and will chase it off into the hallway, find himself lost and start to cry.

"MEOW. MEOW. MEOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW" is the sound of a lost idiot cat in a mississauga condominium.

"truck. come here" is my follow up. at this point the disturbance in the force is now over. the bowels of the orange fluffy one have been evacuated and the dark side has removed itself from his being. he is calm now, and begins to understand that something happened - but he's not sure what.

and he won't be sure until the next time he craps.

and it all begins again.

i think nuts are left handed - especially cashews

according to a recent study, scientists have recently made the uncanny discovery that left-handed snails actually have an advantage over right handed snails when defending themselves against predators.

there are two concerns about this statement which i feel should be addressed. first and foremost is that i'm a little concerned that there are people (more than one) wasting their time to try to figure out wether or not right handed snails suck more than left handed snails. my second concern is much more simple: snails do not have hands. people have hands, monkeys have hands, some people may even claim that those cats with all the extra toes have hands (polydactyl i think?).

maybe they mean left-leaning shell vs. right-leaning shell.

i'm sure, however, that once that small issue is cleared up that this study will actually show some relevance in our world when it comes to feeding starving people, solving global warming, or helping George W. Bush find nuclear nukular weapons in Iraq. or maybe the pope's been watching too many horror movies again. sometimes when he gets on one of his horror movie marathons, he starts coming up with these crazy ideas to try to prevent disaster - you know, the kind of disaster that can occur when one of these left-handed snails gets a little too close to a nuclear nukular reactor, grows to ridiculous proportions and starts consuming small cities and towns with it's slimy foot of terror.

when i was a kid we respected our parents - we didn't eat them

after a very tiring day at the toothpaste factory, i only had enough energy to watch one movie.

well, maybe i don't work at a toothpaste factory - but i DO work beside the Wrigley chewing gum factory

so last night i figure i'm not in the mood to actually watch something with a point, and to my surprise and enjoyment find that there's a zombie-flick called Undead waiting patiently on the movie network for me to watch it.  certainly not an academy award winner, but how many of those do i actually watch eh?  i was pleasantly surprised though at the fact that the Producers/Directors managed to take a Zombie picture, throw in some aliens and some violence and turn out a pretty enjoyable film.  you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll hurl.  stuff to watch out for - any scene with the aliens (they have a pretty good sense of humour), when the pregnant lady's mother gets it and the saw-blade.  lots of fun, a good no-brainer.

this morning i'm tired.  i tried sleeping in but it still didn't work, and i don't think any amount of coffee is going to keep me alive today.

on a more gooder note (for me at least) is that i'm within a few days of the bicycle purchase and have it down to a couple of choices - if anybody's reading this, please feel free to give your input.  there's the Trek 1200 - which has decent gearing, but unfortunately is Aluminum framed vs. a slightly modified Lemond Poprad (i'll be putting a bigger front chainring on it) which has a Platinum/Steel frame, but is probably about $250 more than i want to spend.  i'm thinking the Lemond is more suited to someone my size and weight, but there's always the price tag that's associated with it.  common sense tells me to go with the more expensive one, but my paycheque tells me to go with the cheaper one.  hmmmm...

now i shall go refill my coffee mug.

More human than human is our motto

somehow in my absentmindedness i managed to watch most of Blade Runner again last night.  i fully intended to watch something that i haven't seen before, but in my struggle to bake cookies.

i don't know that they were pope-quality cookies, but they're pretty decent.  there's some on a plate on the corner of my desk if you want one.  peanut butter.  the pope was always a fussy one about his cookies.  i've seen him have people executed for burning cookies.  he says it's a sin to waste food.  wasting money is okay though, so long as it's used to prevent the waste of other things - like peanut butter cookies, beer and kittens.

an Alan Smithee production

it was a weekend of superfluous movie watching.  that's one thing that I adore about the library.  i can grab a half dozen movies that i have absolutely no intention of paying for strictly for the purpose of saying that i watched those movies.

Burn Hollywood Burn was a movie that has long been on my list of movies that i need to watch at some point before i die or go blind.  why?  well, because it has Chuck D and Coolio in it.  from what they tell you in the movie and what i've read online, it's quite difficult for a director to get his name removed from a movie, no matter how bad or ridiculous the movie might be.  apparantly if the director wants to disassociate himself from a film he must apply to the Director's Guild and keep his fingers crossed, at which point if he is successful, the movie becomes " directed by Alan Smithee."  Burn Hollywood Burn is done up to look like a documentary of a director who has one of these horrible movies he's working on - but the trouble is that his real name is Alan Smithee (well played by Eric Idle).  Certainly an interesting story, but not an overly exciting picture.  it's a must-see for anyone who considers themself slightly crazy aboot watching movies (like i consider myself), but i would imagine not even remotely close to worth watching if you can't take a 90 minute running gag.

also on the list of movies watched this weekend - War of the Worlds (the 1953 version), There's Something About Mary and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  all of these movies i particularly enjoyed.  War of the Worlds reminded me that i need to go back and re-read the novel by H.G . Wells.  an especially brilliant story considering that it was written in the 1890s - long before the concept of space ships and lasers.

tonight i will be watching The City of Lost Children .  seems to be quite the amazing film from what i've heard, but i'll have to wait and see.  as for now, my coffee mug is empty and nobody seems to be filling it for me.

take only cat hair, leave only coffee

you know how sometimes when you live in an apartment, you can just tell when someone's been in your suite?  inevitably, the landlord or building maintenance dude is going to come in for some reason or another and violate your privacy but not necessarily tell you about it.

last night by some bizarre thought pattern, i decided to do some laundry.  as i opened up the dryer, something fell out.

it wasn't socks.

it wasn't underpants.

it was coffee beans.  about a dozen of them.  now, i understand someone leaving evidence of having been in your house.  the idea of them having some food, leaving the toilet seat up or down, things being moved around.

but coffee beans.

in my dryer and laundry machine.

i thought back to the last time i made coffee at home.  sunday morning.  i poured the coffee beans into the grinder, ground the beans and put the grinds in my bodum and 4 minutes later drank said coffee.  i don't have any recollection of taking a handful of beans and shoving them down my underpants and then throwing those clothes into the dryer.  i also don't have any recollection of this coffee making task taking place inside the dryer.  so how did they get there?  perhaps a very sloppy and creative break-and-enter artist?

come on down and meet some friends of mine

as i'm quite sure everyone is well aware, blasphemy is a favourite subject of mine. makes for quite possibly some of the best humour one could ask for.

and on that note, apparantly Isaac Hayes has left his role as Chef on south park citing that he's not happy with the show's take on religious humour. i could understand him making this decision and standing up for freedom of religion were it not for the fact that he's been taking part in the show for something in the area of 10 years. a show that has constantly been active in the idea that religion is there specifically to be made fun of. tell me about a single episode where either Kyle didn't get picked on for being a jew, or there wasn't some rude reference to jesus or mormons, but the instant they cover Hayes's religion scientology (which, by the way, was a very funny episode). i honestly think that if he were taking a stand against the religious humour that was on this show that maybe something would have come up before this season.

but oh well. despite his somewhat skewed vision of religious discrimination Isaac Hayes is a great singer and chef was a great character, and i'm sure whatever might replace him on the show will rule. i'd have to say that i recommend maybe Method Man or Rob Bredl. I love that show Killer Instinct. he cracks me up - and could make for some good plot to have a dude wrestling crocs in the kitchen in his bare feet.

truth, justice and the american way

<dork>

man, today has been full of some extraordinary geek shit.  hunting down ridiculous error messages and finding microsoft's lame-ass workarounds that tell you to enable some dumb shit that could possibly fuck up your whole company's database server.

and then finding out that not only have they released a bazillion hotfixes to the error, but there are also a bazillion workarounds - all equally ridiculous.  it's almost as though microsoft assumes that you can just fuck up a bunch of other shit to fix one small problem rather than fix the problem on the whole (or maybe the hole, arse hole - har har).

</dork>

i'm thinking i want to get a widescreen monitor for my home computer.  i think that would be on the right side of being awesome, but i think that i want that new bike just a little bit more.  it's getting close to time to buy it even though nobody's buying any t-shirts, thereby making the concept of getting money for nothing THAT much more difficult.  as funny as some of those t-shirts are though, i can understand why many might choose not to buy them.  i need to find a more gooder affiliate program.  maybe i should actually work for my money instead of getting other people to just give it to me.

but that's not the american way.

but i guess i'm not american - so the american way shouldn't really impact me that much eh?

roll up the rim to bite my arse

whoever came up with the bright idea to have a contest that requires you to roll up the rim on a paper coffee cup should be shot.  especially when the odds of your winning are next to nothing - and when you do win something it's something lame like a donut or a medium coffee.  the amount of my time and effort required to roll up those bastard rims (which are designed NOT to roll up easily, thereby preventing the spillage of your coffee onto your crotch [huh-huh, i said crotch]) is worth a hell of a lot more to me than the shite-ass fraction-of-a-dollar craphole prize that you MIGHT get to win.  and seriously - who wants to bring a coffee cup (or a portion of a coffee cup) back to the counter and redeem that for a prize.  just picture it - a line up of office-monkeys standing there with used, empty paper coffee cups waiting for a free donut or free cookie.  to say that the Canadian race are slaves to their coffee addiction would be an overwhelming understatement.

speaking of the coffee monopoly, i noticed on the weekend while passing through the majestic city of Trenton, Ontario that i would probably win if i were to bet that this city has more Tim Horton's locations per person than any other Canadian town or city.  i remember counting 6.  AND let it be noted that i never strayed off of highway 2.  i would guesstimate that there are probably ten in that city of fewer than 15 thousand people.  i guess the people of Trenton don't like to stand in line.

man oh man do cats love the toilet

the toilet, it's where all the cool cats hang out.

instead of ass say buns, like kiss my buns or you're a buns-hole

today the software developers are all shouting at each other and slamming things on their desks.  it really cracks me up how much these guys fight with each other while they're working.  screaming and shouting at each other, cracking rude (and insanely offensive) jokes at each other.  but oddly, as soon as they all leave the building, they're the best of pals, they drink beer with each other and get along great (though the brutally offensive jokes still come out).  this does make for the occasionally nutty work environment though.  i'm glad that i have my headphones so that i can at least drown out the shouting with loud angry music.

 

on the way to work i saw a porsche 911 broken down on the side of the road.  it was a pretty sweet sight to see, a guy in a $100,00+ sports car that won't start.  i get a sick pleasure out of seeing malfunctioning luxury cars.  i think it has something to do with the fact that my car is pretty much the complete opposite of luxury.  one could argue "hey, your car came with a Sony stereo installed," but then my response would be "yeah, but there's only two volume settings on it - loud and off."  kind of like the heater in my car.  two settings:  hot and cold.  not much in between ground - which normally isn't too bad in this particular portion of canada where most years we have -25C in the winter and 40C in the summer, but in the mediocrity that was this winter (still haven't had a snow-day yet - what's with that eh?) it would be nice to have that "just keeping the temperature nice" setting.

 

but at least there's free coffee in the office.  and somebody brought in cookies.  and that is good.

i bring nothing to the table

the last three days or so at work have been entirely bizarre. i have an enormous amount of work to do but can't get it done. the crazy part is that it has nothing to do with the timeline in which i should be doing these things, but it has everything to do with the fact that i'm waiting on aboot 4 other people to finish their projects upon which my projects depend (how's that for grammer-fying properly eh?).

so i have a massive workload, but missing database elements and an extremely ill project manager where my work should be coming from - all this boils down to me coming up with my own ideas of stuff to do.

and i have many. there's a big project (which has no deadline or management direction) that i'd like to work on, but the work i do may end up being in vain (vein?). so unless a miracle happens and the database team complete their changes, the project manager recovers from his surgery and someone other than me gets concerned with finishing things on time - i will try to sell t-shirts because i haven't reached my bicycle goal yet. so click the link and buy a shirt - because you have nothing better to do. and if i find any success in this t-shirt pimpage - maybe i'll return something back to the loyal people who bought something. perhaps a contest so-to-speak for people who buy things through my link.

force fed broken cheerios

i tend to agree with the russian clown that says you can't force a cat to do anything.  but i have noticed that you can convince a cat to be lazy.  it actually doesn't take much convincing.

 

i haven't managed to train my cats to do much.  they certainly aren't circus performers.  what have they been trained to do?  i'm glad that you asked....

• both cats have been trained to stand by the dishwasher and wait for me to open a can of wet food
• the orange cat has been trained to know that when i'm finished scooping the litter, that's his chance to run out into the hallway of my apartment building while i take the garbage out
• the white cat has trained herself to know when the toilet seat has been left in the upright position, thereby leaving the opportunity for a drink and a swim WIDE OPEN
• the white cat has also trained herself to climb up my pantleg and back and up onto my shoulders
• the orange cat can play fetch.  but only with a plastic spring.  but sometimes he forgets where he is and starts meowing out of confusion.  i'm pretty sure he's retarded.

this week, for some reason, i just can't seem to get enough cookies.  i've been trying to eat more healthy foods but DAMN.  need cookies.  need to dunk cookies in my coffee and tea.  just dump a stack of them on my desk.  and whoever came up with the idea that more fibre and protein in your diet gets rid of your snack cravings - retarded.  it doesn't work.  the cookies keep calling.  i want to answer their call.  "yes cookies.  i understand you and will consume of your kind for that is what the gods intended and set forth in their 10 commandments."

got milk? and nuts?

does it make me a rude person because i laugh when i see the label of this chocolate bar?

and apparantly, CBS is suing Howard Stern for over $400 million for all the shit that he did to disrespect CBS and it's affiliates while getting ready to move to satellite radio. i'm glad. and i hope they win. if there was a radio personality we could all do without it would be him. it's not that i'm offended by any of his shenanigans, it's that i find it boring and overdone. seriously, how many times a week do i have to hear about him masterbating to online porn and having strippers dance around in the studio. who gives a shit?

sometimes i wonder if i'm the only person who ever gets tired of those articles that say shit like "ten ways to customize your Windows installation" that periodically show up on microsoft and yahoo and the like, but when you go to read those articles they have info like how to change your background wallpaper, and switch from the blue theme to the silver or green theme. i have been quite sick of the look of Windows XP three colour schemes and wish there was a way to add more without going to the extent of installing some expensive application like Windows Blinds to cover it up. i think Microsoft got lazy when they made XP. it seems to me they just thought "hey, this one looks a little different than the last three versions of windows we made people pay for - we don't need to go too far." bastards. maybe they should have added more Nut Milk.