This is why I had kids.

KIDZOOKIE: I can't wait to go to school today.

TACO: How come?

KIDZOOKIE: Yesterday my teacher said we'd get a special reward today if we were good, and we were.

TACO: Cool. What kind of reward?

KIDZOOKIE: I don't know. I hope it's awesome.

TACO: Maybe she won't spank you. That would be a pretty great reward.

KIDZOOKIE: Teachers don't spank you.

TACO: WHAT?

KIDZOOKIE: They don't spank you.

TACO: Back when I was a kid, they spanked us all the time.

KIDZOOKIE: Nuh uh.

TACO: Oh yeah, big time. They'd beat us with this big old paddle if they just felt like it. God help you if you did something bad.

KIDZOOKIE: Like what?

TACO: Well, like this one time, my teacher asked a kid to spell "run." But he spelled it "R-O-N."

KIDZOOKIE: What happened?

TACO: I don't know. We never saw him again.

KIDZOOKIE: ...

TACO: Yeah.

KIDZOOKIE: Please don't ever take me to that school.

It's my aura of chaos & confusion.

We stopped to fill the car up on the way into the office this morning. It was my turn to do the honors, so I hopped out of the car as soon as we pulled up to the pump... to find that someone had prepaid $20 and left without pumping any gas.

It's like Robin Hood. Only, you know. Stupid.

Being the responsible (and highly paranoid) person I am, I checked around for hidden cameras and then went inside to let them know. The clerk couldn't figure out what in the hell to do with the situation. It was glorious.

Sometimes, the stuff on the Shit That Only Happens To Me list is awesome. I love being the center of other people's chaos and confusion.

The New Math

I referred to one of my cousins as "coz" today. It's Shakespearean. It's totally straight. For all extremely gay values of "straight."

Yeah.

Rebel Yell

Managed to find a copy of Christopher Moore's latest today. Yay!

How They Find Me: February 2009 Edition

I haven't done one of these since September, so I figured I'm due. So, without (any, really) ado, how do they find me lately? Survey says:

1. "nogginvomit." Still far and away the most popular search string for my site. And by far and away, I mean it happened 4 times, vs. the 1 time for each of the remaining search strings. I can't imagine any of my friends who read this googling for "nogginvomit" instead of simply coming directly to the site. Unless they were fucking with me on purpose, in which case, there'd be at least several dozen hits on it. Which leaves me being amused and disturbed that someone out there is legitimately googling it.
   
2. "fuck eclipse." I guess I must've been angry at Eclipse at some point in time and ranted about it. I actually really like Eclipse, though, so this one is pretty funny to me, too. I'm also really glad to see that there's someone else out there besides me who's willing to give in and really let themselves rage over a piece of software. Welcome to the support group, whoever you are. We meet on Tuesdays. We have cold beer. You bring the chips.
   
3. "don't let your babies grow up to be accountants." Yeah. Damn accountants. Always... crunching numbers and shit. Fuck you, accountants.
4. "all the jeniahs." I don't know what a jeniah is, but somebody out there wants them all. I'm sure he was heartbroken when he found out that all I had to offer him were jenas. Maybe he actually wanted all the Jennas, but I hope not. They're mostly haggard and leathery these days.
   
5. "dear life fuck you." Perhaps the most legitimate hit my blog has ever gotten. Yay google!
   
6. "does tequila smell." No, my dear. You smell. Tequila stinks.
   
7. "eclipse 'stack view'." Yes, Eclipse is stacked, and the view is marvellous.
   
8. "mistress vomit." There we go. The scary queries. Who the fuck?
   
9. "richard lewis looks like shit." Okay, I take it back... perhaps this is the most legitimate hit my blog has ever gotten.
   
10. "vomir mistress." Creepy typo. You have to admire the guy's persistence, though. He eventually got it right.
    
11. "what does tequila smell like." The height of geekery: rather than buying some tequila and finding out, they googled it instead. Which one of you is this, because I'm damn sure I'm friends with whoever did this.
    

Wherein Taco fakes a real blog post

For the past week or so, I've been fighting off some sort of nasty bug. I'm slowly losing the war to congestion, sore throat, and general malaise. Spent the whole weekend hopped up on Nyquil. That stuff is evil. Whee.

My home network has gone to shit again. The bad behavior started on Friday. At first glance, it looked like the network would just periodically up and quit. After a weekend of playing World of Warcraft with TitanPanel's performance widget turned on, though, it looks like my latency just slowly degrades until my VoIP router can't handle it and craps out. I reorganized the network a few times to isolate the problem, and eventually got it down to my laptop directly connected to the cablemodem, which still exhibited the problem. Said cablemodem is an ancient piece of hardware, and the only piece of network equipment that hasn't been replaced since the Big Lightning Strike of Last Summer, so I reckon that's the culprit. That means I'll have to deal with Time Warner's customer support, though, so that'll be fun.

Blue suggests just calling and asking if I can swap out the old hardware for new. I guess I'll try that first.

Ran into a really old friend recently. We talked a while, and he's so pompous and full of shit that it boggles the mind. I find this absolutely hysterical, because I myself am incredibly pompous and full to overflowing with bullshit.

I went to Barnes & Noble this weekend to pick up the new Chris Moore and the new Dan Simmons. They had neither. Le sad. I picked up a new copy of Watchmen instead. Haven't read it in ages... last time was late high school or early college, I think. It's better than I remember, and that's pretty crazy, because I remember it being goddamned awesome.

While I was at Barnes & Noble, I found a nice leatherbound notebook and pen set tossed into the 50% off table, so I picked that up. A couple of years ago, I started carrying a note pad everywhere I went so that I could jot down ideas I had, and that worked wonders. Lately, I've found that I come up with lines, paragraphs, and even whole passages that I like for stories that I want to write, but can't remember them when I sit down to put them on paper, so maybe this will work as well as the tiny notebooks. It seems to help so far. I've managed to pen a few paragraphs of a short story I've been tossing around my noggin for a while.

I guess that means I'm done sulking about all my friends writing better stuff than I do. I still reserve the right to sulk at any point of my choosing in the future, so neener.

You heard me. Neener.

Blue made some eyeball jewelry. I immediately purchased the awesomeness and gave it to wifezilla for Valentine's Day. Wifezilla is thrilled with it. I wonder sometimes if it should bother me that I do shit like give my wife a necklace of eyeballs for Valentine's Day. Then I space out because of the Nyquil and the next thing I know, it's Monday, I'm at work, and wondering how the hell I got here and where my pants are.

Target, for all your jenas needs.

Gentlemen, she's called you out.

TACO: Nobody should wear head to toe velour.

WIFEZILLA: Oh yeah, that woman? Yeah. Nobody that heavy should ever wear velour.

TACO: Nobody should. Nobody. Ever.

WIFEZILLA: I dunno, those Juicy Couture track suits are pretty cute if you're thin.

TACO: Are they velour?

WIFEZILLA: Yeah.

TACO: See the rule. Not nobody, not no how.

WIFEZILLA: You're crazy. They're really cute. Of course, you'd hate them because they have text written across the butt.

TACO: Why do people buy that shit? Words written across your ass are bad.

WIFEZILLA: Well, I have those sweat pants with the tiger paws on the butt.

TACO: Yes. They're horrible.

WIFEZILLA: They're not that bad.

TACO: I don't think I'm overstating things when I say that after civilization ends, and an alien species sends archaeologists here thousands of years later and they study the remnants of our once great civilization, they'll find that those pants played a role in the destruction of life as we know it.

WIFEZILLA: You're just bitchy. Everybody else likes them.

TACO: Everybody else is dumb.

WIFEZILLA: Go ahead, ask anyone. They'll say they look good.

TACO: ...

WIFEZILLA: Not Steve or Tim or whoever. They're as weird as you.

Sometimes it's like looking into a tiny little mirror.

Tonight was guy's night at our house. I took my son out for dinner on the way to his gymnastics class. We had a really great time, and he was unusually talkative about school.

So we're sitting there over hamburgers, talking about his friends, talking about his classes, talking about the games they play at recess. A lot of it is very similar to what we did. They play a lot of the same games, even the ones I thought were obscure. Comparing my school experience to his was a lot of fun.

I was shocked to find that the public school system has completely failed to teach him to play kickball, but that's another story.

We started talking about the more artsy things like their music classes, and he told me he doesn't like music. I asked why, and he told me that he hates to sing because he's a boy. Only girls like to sing, apparently.

I quickly corrected this by pointing out that there are lots of men who sing, at which point he brightened and said, "Oh yeah, like that guy from Kiss!" (I filled in a few gaps in his rock education a bit at this point. God, I'm proud of that kid.)

Even thus informed, he maintained his staunch anti-singing position, telling me, "It's okay. Everybody else sings pretty loud, and the teacher can't hear who's making noise and who's not. I just move my mouth. Nobody can tell." He followed this statement up with a demonstration of his fakery skills, with the caveat that "you'll be able to tell 'cause there's not a bunch of other kids singing."

The parent in me was dying to have a little chat about correcting that behavior... but he had pretty much described exactly how I got through more or less every class I ever took where they expected me to sing, too.

I called my mom to tell her the story while kidzookie was in his class. She and dad had a long laugh at my expense.

Click Yes or No

I'm not sure why bad error messages bother me so much. Maybe it's because I write software. I dunno. Ran into this beauty in the installer for one of our products today:


So... what should I click again? Thank God I only have to click yes or no if I encouter something. I don't know what encoutering is, but it sounds scary.

This is the kind of thing that happens when you send work to wherever you can get it for the lowest possible price. Sigh.