SHOCKING CELEBRITY FOOTAGE

GHOSTROACH 2008-2008 KILLED BY THE SPRINKLER SYSTEM

REST IN PEACE LIL’ HOMEY

EXCLUSiVE CELEBRiTY pHOTOS!

GHOSTROACH KNOWS FASHION. GHOSTROACH KNOWS LIVING THE HIGH LIFE BUT ALSO ENJOYS A RELAXING SOAK IN THE HOTTUB. GHOSTROACH DRINKS THE FINEST OF WINES AND EATS THE FINEST OF CAVIARS. GHOSTROACH!!!

:]]

It’s crazy. I can’t believe it’s been two weeks since I last wrote on here. Life’s obviously been pretty busy, stressful, rewarding, and melancholy. It always is.

I got a new car. A new used car. Finally, after weeks of hustling, lining up loans, staying up til all hours of the afternoon, calling sellers punks, smashing my fist into doors and meeting people at Panera breads. It’s a 2000 Nissan Maxima. Average mileage. Luxurious air conditioning, leather seats, moonroof aka “bird window” and a blown subwoofer. The price was right, and the loan is manageable and will further build my credit. This is all good stuff. We already put 600 miles on it. That’s a bit extreme, but happy times call for long drives and cool night air. Baby baby.

Other things I’m trying to build: my apartment’s furniture. Status: standstill. I’m having a really hard justifying dropping a couple grand on a nice living room set from a major retailer. On the other hand finding a truck, searching Craigslist, and arranging pick-up with my schedule is near impossible. If it wasn’t so perplexing to not have furniture to relax in this wouldn’t be that important. I’m sitting in folding beach chairs. Something obviously needs to be done, but when? And what?

I’ve been trying to find good information online about haggling for furniture. I particularly enjoy haggling, especially on things that I feel I should be getting for about a fourth of the retail price. I.e. Furniture. Too expensive really. But there seems to be a dearth of information about this lost art, and all the google searches I’ve done for local furniture stores (supposedly better to deal with!) have yielded nothing but high-end furniture boutiques. That’s not to rule those out but… I think I’d rather have an actual house before magnificent furniture.

I found a futon in the dumpster at my apartment complex. It’s really ironic. I kept it and will be getting the mattress dry-cleaned (hopefully!) before use. There’s approximately 800 dollars saved on an office couch. Karma++

In related “finding stuff in the dumpster news” (wait for it…) my new computer build has gone critical. At this point I assume it’s a failed motherboard. That is a bitch and a half. I’ve spent the last three weeks trying to stabilize the system, port my applications – which there are a lot! – over to 64bit Vista, downgrading to 32bit Vista, messing with my laptop, blah blah, everything. It’s been a nightmare. On top of that I have a friend’s PC to fix, this PC I found in the dumpster that I have to password crack, an idling server, my old network storage box, my out of work HTPC, my laptop, and my old PC to take care of. Hahaha. Jesus. That’s a lot of spicy computers!!!

Three servers died tonight at work. Cause of death failed redundancy at the UPS level. We can save them.

It’s, been :]]~ crazy on the streets. ^_^

Da Dirty 30

Listening

I just turned 30. I thought my birthday was tomorrow, but it’s today. Subconciously I was probably trying to put it off until forever. I sort of feel like a failure, and I’m probably already past the halfway point of my life. My mom turned 30 when I was 7. I remember her surprise party vividly. That makes me sort of sad.

When I got to work, I was greeted by the following scene:

 

There’s more pictures, but I’m too lazy to post them. Do these people work? I guess it’s kind of cool, but it was a huge mess. I appreciate the thought. What I don’t appreciate was that the weekend guy left me with close to ten broken databases, and two broken ftp servers. Happy Birthday!

I went to the coffee shop, the girls gave me a free brownie and said it was because I was hot. I didn’t mention my birthday. Becoming a 30 year old dirty old man has it’s advantages. Run from Daddy, into my arms, but bring me some brownies.

Flixster: Everyone Loves Shrek

Here’s some listening material while you put your pants on

There was a time, not so long ago, when I was on top of Internet Trends. Some of this was just because I was young, angry and full of energy to expend on completely pointless tasks. (Like this blog? Asshole.) But another reason was that I’d mine this log of URLs vomited by the zeitgeist for ideas to write about for this magazine I used to work at. Back then there wasn’t any Digg or similar sites to spread viral activity like the bathrooms at the Paradise Garage. You could actually get paid for finding stupid, marginally interesting internet memes and writing about them in a print magazine. Maybe you still can, but back then it didn’t seem like you were TOTALLY stealing money by just copying and pasting your browser history into a textfile and throwing your byline on it.

Since then, the internet has (d)evolved. Anyone under 25 with a passing interest in remaining “connected” is guaranteed to know what’s the hottest YouTube video of the moment. In fact, me even believing YouTube is still cutting edge shows how completely lame I’ve become. I’m sure there are dozens of more in-your-face, bleeding edge sites for people to get their LOLs on. When I visit 4chan or similar web forums, I’m literally lost. Clicking on links trying to find my way around makes me nauseous. Helen Keller thinks I’m a herb. Do people still even use the term “herb”? For reference it means “sucker duck”.

So it’s with equal parts excitement, interest and confusion that I joined Flixster. Flixster is a “social networking site”, you know, like Friendster or Orkut, oriented around movies. It’s IMDB with herpes, and I’m kinda digging it.

There’s some problems with it:

Everyone on the site is 13 years old and/or mentally handicapped. This means everything is either rated 5 out of 5 stars, or 1 out of 5 stars. There is no middle ground in their ratings. Luckily, these ratings tend to balance out, so you’re stuck with Citizen Kane and Batman: Ice Dude’s Revenge staring each other down at 3 stars. This is common on ratings based systems. People, in general, are horribly retarded and it’s a great thing that the most power we give them in life is the right to vote in elections and on internet movie sites. For now, voting requires leaving the house, this ensures politicians can sometimes build roads that just don’t go The Mall. But I digress.

You know what? I’m already bored with writing this. I was bored with the concept of Flixster two days ago, which was about 10 hours after I joined. Hahaha. Unfortunately I can’t continue this farce of a blog post. The end.

Here’s my profile.

Hidden Gemz: Ascii From Tha Vault #001

I had completely forgotten about this ascii. Found it while randomly surfing the interweb. Thanks to Lord Scarlet for his 16 colors site, where this was hosted.

This is what I’ll call a “Mega-Joint”. Strangely, the time stamp on 16 Colors points this towards being drawn in 2001, which makes sense with some of the imagery in the ascii (WTC Towers, terrorists, burning flags – Canadian ascii sceners were a notoriously jealous bunch). At this time, the ascii scene was already bemoaning the fact that it was “dead”. Yet here we see the output of five artists as we drew simultaneously in Pablodraw. Try getting something like that going these days.

For the record, and to answer the questions posed in the impromptu “chat area” at the bottom of the canvas, i drew the dicks. You’re welcome.

This is how we chill

Wired: Renewed

Cleaning out my email, I stumbled across a renewal notice for Wired magazine. That’s kind of ironic. I guess I’ve had this subscription for a year already, and I only just started digging into these back issues. It’s good toilet reading for sure. It also goes well with cigarettes smoked on the porch. So yeah, I renewed. 7 bucks. Cheap!

Wired, as a reading endeavour, challenges the procrastinator within me. Each issue is a huge, daunting slab of text, graphics, and slick glossy pages. Until the past two weeks or so, I’d been scared to open an issue. It felt like trying to find my true love by randomly locating her name in the phone book. Before I got married of course.

Anyway, it’s mostly advertisements, and reviews of technology that’ll either ultimately fail to catch on, or at least be out of my price range until it’s obsolete. There’s also a surprising amount of information about ascii art. Apparently it’s big in Japan. More often than not, there’s also a couple of fun, breezy articles too. There’s like sun showers. Quickly passed, but got me wet when they were there.

Np: Random compilation of Z-Ro’s music. Posted awhile ago on CocaineBlunts.

Ch33rz!

Internet consolidation

This wild Web 2.0 experience is out of control. Information seems like it piles up, overreaching my limits and spilling on me like nuclear stockpiles. Bookmarks and files and emails and lists, sometimes it’s too much. Actually, it’s been too much for awhile.

I recently got my first “new” computer in over 7 years. This weekend I was supposed to go out of town, but that kind of fell through by necessity so I used my time to work on this new machine. It’s a beast. It’s also a much needed clean slate. Between moving files, pictures, txt files, programs, and email from my old machine to this one, I’ve finally just kind of said “fuck it”. I’ve been pretty overwhelmed lately, and generally dissatisfied because of it. Moving all of these things that grew like mold on my psyche has been sort of cathartic. I’ve purposely closed the IRC window, and I’m only running productivity apps at the moment. The “outside world” of the internet is shut off. And, right now, it feels pretty good.

Some of the highlights:

Discovering 64bit Vista is very attractive. And thus far, pretty functional. Aside from minor problems with winrar not working as it had previously, and an SSL proxy application I used not working at all, it’s been smooth sailing. Vista is just *clean*. Sure, most of the visual stuff was stolen from other operating systems, but whatever. I haven’t actually gotten into much of the OS really, but nothing appears to function wildly different than in XP. Besides the user control pop up stuff of course, which was easily disabled.

Uploading tons of text files and spreadsheets to Google docs. Liberating myself from transferring files manually to work remotely. Pretty k-rad. Also, dumping Tadalist.com for simple “Word documents” in G-Dox. Nice, easier to maintain, and centralized. Too bad tadalist and the Ruby on Rails visionaries at 37Buttholes or whatever decided Basecamp had to cost an arm and a leg for a small user. Sure, its a good solution for the small, dynamic, go get em, Biz2.0 organization. But too expensive for me. Thanks Google. You married a hot wife in gene splicing too.

Being able to reinstall vital applications in an orderly manner. This is always useful, OS upgrade need not apply. Felt good to trim the fat though.

Up next, maybe, sorting Pablodraw directory.

Priceless: Closing MiRC. Hopefully, forever? An addict can dream.

zeroday ascii 2: stolen radio!!

My car got broken into last night when I was at work. They stole my radio, and presumably some CDs. I haven’t honestly even looked inside it yet. You know, I’m a really busy, high rollin’ man. I let The Help worry about these things.

Anyway, I drew this horrible, horrible, horrrrrriiiible ascii while I was on the phone with my wife. Also, I was working at the time. So even though the timestamp says this ascii took 20 minutes (!) to complete, it was more like 2. I think the quality of the work really reflects that. L.O.L.

That’s a burgler to the left. He’s sayin’ “KEKEKE” and waiting to steal my Cookie Crisps while listening to my bOOMBOx.

Full clip

Even though I’m theoretically a student, and I guess it’s summer, and I should be wearing flip-flops, smoking weed and playing volleyball shirtless, I feel like I’ve never been busier. Last semester’s school scheduling experiment (take less classes, supposedly get better marks) was a resounding failure, and I’m actually beginning to look forward to Fall when I can immerse myself in a really full financial oriented scholarly (lol) workload. I’m horrible at relaxing, at least when sober, so I’ve filled my plate with tons of things in an attempt to mentally exhaust myself. Physically, I’m always exhausted, but hopefully that’ll improve with better diabetes management and amphetamine. Trucker’s choice.

It’s a holiday this weekend, and I’m going to Tallahassee to visit my homeboy-slash-heterosexual-life-partner-in-rhyme Adikus Inc. He incorporated his handle back in the early 2000s, paving the way for visionaries like Futura. Anyway, it’s a hell of a drive. I rented a car, but there’s a chance I’ll have a new whip before then, which would mean epic inaugural voyage. The financing is nailed down, but getting the banks to work their title transferring magic is an adventure in waiting. I’d love to save the couple hundred dollars on the rental, but you have to play your cards as dealt. It’s been exhausting though.

And an old highschool buddy, who happens to be a pretty inspirational blogstar who’s big in .CN is coming into town as well. Hopefully everything works out and we can kick it at the playground, you know (plaaaaayground). It’s been a few years since I’ve hung out with him, and another chum who shall remain nameless, but if all goes as planned I anticipate power outages at the local bookstores. Breaker Bandits style. As long as those fuckers don’t decide to driveby paintball my house (again), it’s cool.

Finally, another old friend has invited me to hit up an internet security meeting with him soon. Turns out another friend hosts this meeting. Small world! I guess I know all the movers and shakers in the local Computer Hobbyist/Enthusiast Meeting organization scene. In addition to this, there’s the normal BinRev meeting which is part failure, part excuse to hang out with my coworker and his girlfriend. It’s worth it.

Not a lot going on otherwise. Just trying to finally adapt to Web 2.0. I’m pretty sure 3.0 is about to be released, but I’m a bit behind on the times. Typically, if there’s not an IRC Terminal involved, I’m not too interested. But this del.icio.us thing is interesting, if a bit cumbersome. Tags are pretty alien to me at this point. I’m pretty sure Houston Rap is applicable though.

Aside: Didn’t del.icio.us start as someone’s vanity BNC on IRC? I swear it did… kind of like stevemmc@brokeback.mounta.in

Furthur research is not required.