Joe & Sameer's Pong Adventure at White Castle.

While copying over some episodes of The Daily Show to VCR (I have to save the good ones from Tivo because it's pretty clear the DVDs are never coming--The Man Show already has a few DVDs, has been on the air less time, and when was it nominated for an Emmy?) I saw one of those commercials that made me question my own mind. No, it wasn't the dead rat commercial for Quiznos--that was actually pretty funny.

What I'm taking about is Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. First of all, what's with that title? Unless Harold and Kumar are somehow famous literary beings that I wasn't aware of, then it lacks a little punch and virtue. I mean, Nikki and I had a momentous fried chicken lunch yesterday and yet no one has approached me about the Mike and Nikki's Journey to KFC script yet...

Not helping was the fact that the 30-second commercial showed about three seconds of the movie and 27 seconds of Harold and Kumar talking to (scripted) people in a theater. Instead of showing the movie, they show you people talking about the movie. This is nature's way of saying "steer clear." When you see a rattlesnake coil up and start shaking its namesake, you don't come over to pet it, do you?

What remaining grip on sanity I originally had was obliterated when, later in the day, our conversation got off onto a different tangent and Nikki checked a fanfiction site and found 50 different Pong fanfics. You heard right, at least fifty different times has someone sat down to write and said "I think the classic tale of a ball being bounced back and forth between two paddles will make for a gripping tale of the triumph of human spirit" or some crap.

Now I am a complete looney and will go to work to review banking documents, only now I will declare them okay based not on verbage and signatures but on whether they had coffee spilled on them or were run over with the forklift after falling out of a bag onto the mailroom floor.

Vendetta

It's not just a beat-em-up by Konami anymore.

I received a spam e-mail this morning, one of the many fraudulent US Bank personal info update scams. They link to a fake, but real-looking page designed to get you to enter your US Bank info, which is then e-mailed to the person running the show, who uses your info for ill gain.

This one went to this site.

I'm really tired of getting these sorts of e-mails. The last one I got I forwarded to US Bank's fraud department, but they can't even seem to send us bank account debit cards in time before the old ones expire (which is in 3 days), so my faith in them isn't exactly rock-solid.

I traced the directories back down the line to akhlesh.com and ended up with the info of the person running the website. It appears to be a one-man show, which means that unless someone secretly snuck in and set up shop on this guy's server, the culprit is Agawar Akhlesh, an employee of NIIT. To be safe, I forwarded the e-mail to NIIT, since they're mentioned on his webpage, and to delhinet.com, the people responsible for hosting the site. I was trying to find out the e-mail address that all the info gets sent to so I could sign it up for a lot of spam, but it's stored in a file called verify.php (under the same directory listed above) and it's notoriously difficult to steal php code.

I don't think I'm in the kind of mood to be messed with today. Woe be to careless coworkers...

Update 8/6/04: The webpage listed is no longer valid, although the domain itself is still up. It will remain a mystery whether Agawar was behind this, whether he was brought to justice, lost his job, or just took it down after amassing millions in stolen money...

On popcorn and how I'm hating it.

Earlier today at work as I was busily attempting to fill in for some slacker on vacation, a person sits down a few feet from me to eat her freshly popped popcorn. I'm guessing that my issues with popcorn are indemic to workplaces everywhere, but I feel like I should be special today, so I'm going to gripe like it's only happening here.

First of all, she had the popcorn in one of those coffee filters. Get a freaking bowl, you loser. You'll throw down several bucks to buy a bag of unpopped corn from a vending machine, but you can't get a bowl or plate to eat it in? Eat it out of the bag! Is there some secret allure in using the coffee filter, knowing you're exactly the kind of person that Dilbert mocks on a daily basis?

Next, there was the buttery smell. I'll grant that popcorn companies probably go a bit heavy on the flavoring for a reason--it's to cover up the fact that they're charging you, what, ten times the price for dried, otherwise inedible kernels of corn? (Note: the figure of "ten times" is subjective and not verified. Your mileage may vary.) But good lord, rinse that stuff off or something. If I wanted the loving aroma of butter to crawl inside of my nose and play kung fu with my senses, I could go churn some in the basement--if I had a basement or butter churn, that is.

Finally, there's the issue of burning. Clearly, people either can't read instructions on a bag of popcorn or are too stupid to realize that when they're microwaving popcorn and they detect the odor of burning popcorn, it's not the person behind them spontaneously combusting after putting on half a bottle of Orville Redenbacher No. 9 cologne, it's your own popcorn in the microwave. This has been discussed before at our workplace, and the offenders leap up to declare their rights. I don't see anywhere in our worker's manual, much less the constitution, where it says you have the right to permeate the air with burnt popcorn smell. I don't think the founding fathers of our country had in mind your stank charred  bits of corn when they were talking about the pursuit of happiness. But I guess this will have to go to the Supreme Court so they can interpret the constitution. I wonder if shoving the unpopped kernels of corn up the cooker's nose could count as freedom of speech. Bah.

Fall of the Mighty Albertson's Empire.

Ways back, I used to work at Albertson's, shortly after I moved to Louisiana. I worked there for something like 6 years before a dispute over scheduling forced me to leave and seek employment elsewhere. But that bitterness is best saved for another time.

The other day I had to go into Albertson's to buy some things for a potluck. The transformation from bold grocery giant to sniveling pathetic loser-company is pretty apparent, at least in my area. There were only two other customers in the store--both up front trying to get checked out. There was one cashier on duty, who was tending the cash register as well as the customer service booth and the cigarette and video sections. Bear in mind that this was 3pm in the afternoon.

I blame the idiocy of the "Albertson's Preferred" card for this. Whoever came up with that idea needs to be smacked in the head with a side of beef. Around here, the personnel in the store don't even ask for it anymore, probably based on negative customer reactions. But why would customers react so? Who wouldn't want to be tracked by their every purchase for marketing purposes, with the side benefit of  getting prices comparable with those down the road at Fred Meyer with no such card? Meanwhile, the bright tags on the shelves adivising people of the prices for items "With Preferred Member Card" just scare off people without the cards, because the prices are pretty ridiculous.

Used to be said around the office that grocery was rock-solid employment because, hey, everyone needs food, but that doesn't appear to be the case anymore. I'm glad I got out when I did.

Brought to you by the Anti-Marriage Council

Sitemeter is the tool I use to track visits to my webpage. They display ads whenever I go to check stats (who doesn't these days?) but they've recently started running a series of ads from a company called True. Apparently, it's some sort of matchmaking thing. Far from taking the normal tack, this group preys upon the insecurities of people who worry that their first matchup will result in a psychopath who intends to skin them and use them as a rug or something. With ads that show people on couches next to lightning-spewing magnets labeled "Freak" and the like, the target audience is clear.

But a few of their little blurbs have taken a new route altogether, that of warning you against the possibilities of the evil married person. Check, for example, these two pictures: Scene 1 and Scene 2.

The message here is very clear: married people = bad for you to date. But when I look at these images, I see this message instead: married people = unhappy. Just look at those faces. What does marriage look like? Cornered, scared, afraid or miserable, apparently.

Because I feel sorry for the people at True regarding their inevitable demise as a company, I have a suggested improvement to their ads, designed to push those hesitant few people the final step further to actually pay someone to check out their dates before they'll consider meeting. Anyone have statistics on how many successful relationships are founded on a beginning of mutual distrust between the two people involved?

Weird Dreams.

Had a strange dream last night... I was wandering around a school (not unusual for my dreams) in shorts, which I hardly ever wear, so I felt a bit conspicuous. I was carrying our nice large green plates that we use for dinner, and they were dirty. As a bell rang and people started coming out of classes, I stepped aside and set the plate down next to a fountain to take a drink, then moved on.

A couple hallways later, I realized I'd left the plates behind, so I went back to get them. Not long after, I came to an impasse, a section of hallway where I just couldn't proceed... An invisible force that was just too strong for me to go through with my current traction on the floor. An unfamiliar girl was in the middle of what I perceived to be the field, and a middle-aged man (presumably a teacher) was on the other side. He confirmed that he couldn't come over, either. At the other end where he was, a few steps of stairs were starting to go down, and the railing continued up and into the hall. I grabbed the railing and managed to slowly pull myself through the resistance to the other side, bending down to use the rigid edge of the stairs when they became available.

After I was all the way through, nothing special happened, but my left hand was different; it had several scribbles and scrawled words on it in blue and black ink--I can't remember what any of it said but it wasn't there before. I also had a scar in the form of a nonelaborate pair of symbols, as if I'd been cut a couple years ago and they'd healed since.

At this point, I was woken up by someone cutting grass outside. I got up, closed the window, and went back to sleep, only to dream of Nikki driving us around in a car while people pursued us and I destroyed their vehicles with an unlimited-ammunition machinegun mounted in the top of the dashboard. I like those kind of dreams much better.

Old = Evil.

Nikki and I were recently remarking on the cover of the classic Asimov novel, Foundation. For those of you not familiar with the book, well, I can't blame you since I only recently picked it up, but here's a look-see. Amazon currently has the same cover on theirs as I have on mine:
Foundation at Amazon.

Nikki took a look at the cover. What follows is the conversation as best I can remember it.

Nikki: He's got that Emperor Palpatine look.
Mike: Because he's old and sitting in a chair?
Nikki: He's clearly evil.
Mike: And he's dead, actually.
Nikki: That's just what he wants you to think. Old people are crafty.
Mike: So, because he's old that makes him evil?
Nikki: When you get old, you become evil.
Mike: So, what's the magical number where you suddenly get evil? 80? 90? 100?
Nikki: If I knew that, I'd be able to stop them!

From there, it degenerated into sillier things, but I just felt the need to share this. Oh and yes, this is the sort of thing you'll see here. ;)

Save Points

Save Points

Thanks to the tireless work of my loving wife, I am now one of the happy millions of people sharing the details of their lives with complete strangers. It's a liberating feeling. You can look forward to my views on anything and everything here, not the least of which will be video games.

As for the link above, it's just a bit of self-referential joy as well as me testing out the ability to just zap any page straight into a blog entry. Ah, technology...