The Great Geek To Do List

Wake Up.

Check E-mail.

Dawn your favorite geeky t-shirt.

Organize box of spare cables that you never use.

Consider that since you no longer have dial-up and no one ever calls, why is it you are still paying for phone service?

Check E-mail.

Walk the isles of the local computer retailer, critiquing other customers purchases. "You know, no one stops to consider the real benefit of L2 cache anymore. Let me explain..."

Save some time to drool over the newest Nvidia chipset you can't afford.

Write down all the inflammatory Mac slurs you can think of on a 3'x5' card for easy reference.

Dust off your keyboard. No one likes a messy keyboard.

Check E-mail.

Spend three hours writing a script that organizes all your desktop icons by priority and saves you 24 seconds every morning.

Spend 40 minutes troubleshooting said script that just deleted all your desktop icons.

Break up the day with some Sci-Fi. TRON, Star Wars, Planet Of The Apes...or whatever.

Check E-mail.

Verify WiFi signal strength.

Spend 2 hours building a homemade WiFi antenna booster from cardboard and aluminum foil.

Check E-mail.

Check E-Mail from your mobile device.

Send test E-Mail to verify E-mail is still working.

Put the finishing touches on your one eighth scale trebuchet.

Lay siege to stormtrooper stronghold, with aforementioned trebuchet.

Check E-mail.

Enter 10 hour gaming coma with breaks only for the restroom and Mt Dew.

Post a to do list to your blog.

Ode To A Nose Picker

Beside me sitting in your car
Both stopped at the light we are
But unlike me you seem distracted
As your brains you have extracted

How far up there can you go?
While watching this most vulgar show.
You keeping digging deeper still
Until you get your sticky fill

You seem not to notice us
As we gag and make a fuss
With your finger in your nose
Up to your knuckle now it goes

Now with your filthy quest complete
You turn to me and our eyes meet
Does my face betray the truth
That I just watched you finger sleuth?

You speed by me as on you drive
To forget your deep nose dive
I laugh and think with impish zeal
Will your hands stick to the wheel?

This ode to a nose picker
Oh nasty digging slicker
If more tales you would eschew
I would suggest using tissue

-Peter P. Brown 2008

20 Things I Learned On Vacation

Work isn't anywhere near as much fun as vacation.

Spending three hours in bumper to bumper traffic to get to some place to 'relax' has a strange taste of irony.

This flavor is stronger if it also happens to be monsoon season.

Gilroy Ca. Is the garlic capital of California. Even without freeway signs, you know when you're nearby.

Eating candy is not recommend when passing through said city.

If your are stupid enough to vacation in the rain, you will find that the ice-cream shops have very short lines.

If you forgot to pack a sweatshirt, the tourist town of Monterey has many priced just under $52.96 for your convenience.

Nothing really good is cheap, save love, and more than likely that will be expensive too.

It is fun to watch others work while you are on vacation.

If two people pay $50 to look at fish in boxes of water, you can bet they are on vacation.

Someone should tell the fish how much they cost. Their showmanship was at times sadly lacking.

Getting lost on vacation is like overpaying for souvenirs. Its both expected and unavoidable.

People rarely loose weight on vacation.

When on vacation, try eating someplace new.

That way you have something to argue about when you're lost.

What you shouldn't do on vacation is work.

If you wanted to work, then why did you drive three hours in pouring rain to get here and relax!

On vacation you do things you wouldn't do normally.

Spending $60 to sleep on a plywood board shaped like a mattress is one of them.

Nothing says the end of vacation like and entire day of laundry.

Pushing Medications

It seems that I have become a medication pusher. I am helping to promote the use of chemicals though the traffic that I generate on my blog. Now don't look down on me, because of many of you are too! The Journey of JCrew has become the Den of Iniquity!

It seems that JCrew has gone and deleted his blog. In doing so he left a gap wide open. A gap that about 10 other blogs link to. What dirty spammer couldn't resist such a lure? So they took the name, and started their blog. Which means for with no promoting at all this new blog was 10 instant links.

As a result I'm now peddling Cialis and Nexium to complete strangers. In addition I found myself reading this bizarre page. "Accidental falls are common in people who have slow CYPD activity, there is therefore a slightly bitter taste." It defies logic!

The only other alternative is the clergy isn't paying well enough and our very own expositor is now nothing better than a dirty pill pusher. I find this hard to believe, but you know what they say, it's always the nice quiet ones that do the unexpected...

Sticky Buns

There are a few phrases in the English language that are funny with out any context. 'Sticky buns' is one of those. There are jokes that need a lot of setup to be funny. You have to sit everyone down, spin this elaborate yarn and only then, once the pump is primed will the laughter flow.

Not so with Sticky Buns. I would wager that I could walk into any room in the English speaking world, shout 'STICKY BUNS', run out and someone would start laughing. With the possible exception being mini-mart night hours attendees this is a gimme! But what are the odds an entire room would be filled with them?

Really, that would be kinda odd. It's not like there is a society for mini-mart night hours attendees. So unless there was some kind of Twinkie trade show I think my sticky bun experiment would still be viable.

Mini-mart night hours attendees are, in my opinion, required to get a frontal lobotomy in order to sign up for the job. I can not remember the last time I walked into a convenience store at night to anything other than a sigh.

"sigh..."

"I'm sorry, did I interrupt you starting off down the chewing gum isle?"

"sigh..."

"STICKY BUNS!"

"Over there. By the HoHo's"

And with a disinterested wave of the hand they go back to propping up their head with their fists.

I suppose it hard to get excited about selling ten dollar cans of tuna to desperate people in their pajamas, but you would think they could pretend to care.

Now that I say that, I don't like the fakers either. (Apparently it takes a lot to truly make me happy.) Generally these faker people are managers. They believe that by pretending to be cheery, it will in someway inspire others. There is a certain person at a certain mini-mart that drives me nuts.

"Is that all?!?"

"Yes. Thank you."

"Okay. Have a sparkling day!"

What? Have a sparkling day? Did I just get dunked in a vat of pink glittering insincerity? AHH...It's all over me! Hanging on like some vile yet cutesy sludge. I feel like a preschooler begging for a gold star.

"uhmm... Okay. Thanks...STICKY BUNS!"

So regardless of the bizarre path this post ended up on, the truth remains. Some things are just funny naturally, and some things are better left unsaid. I'll let you be the judge of which items go in which slots.

Vacation Expectation

Next week I will be going on vacation. I'm not even sure I believe it. I cannot recall the last time I took vacation hours with the intention of doing something relaxing.

The last few times, have all centered around my daughters. I took off time for both of their births and then for my eldest heart surgery. As you can imagine this was not what I would call, 'vacation' time.

In addition we used to go camping every year. It's no family secret that I'm not the big outdoors man type. I picked sitting inside, staring at a computer for 40 hours a week as my vocation. Clearly I'm a fan of electricity, regulated temperatures, comfortable seating and indoor plumbing. These items are hard to find in the wilds of "Mt. Lot-a-dust Mosquito" campgrounds.

The other point is simply, that I never stay in one place long enough to take vacation time. I have been employed here now for 2 and 1/2 years. For me, that is a new record. The longest I had ever stayed in one job before was about 2 years, and the shortest was under 6 weeks.

Food service I didn't get along:

"Peter, as a waiter, you need to make the customers happy."

"But I hate the customers!. They never know what they want, they ask me for things that aren't on the menu, and then leave me a rotten tip because the kitchen is out of fresh fruit!"

"That what happens when you work with people for a living. They aren't like computers, you know."

Hummmm...

"An excellent point."

"Thanks-"

"I quit!"

So imagine my surprise when I looked at my last time sheet and I had over a hundred hours of vacation time in the hopper. I decided it was time to use it!

So next week Patricia and I will be vacationing it up. Following through on whatever bizarre notion occurs to us.

"Want to drive to Mountain View and have lunch?"

"Deal!"

Living it up for a week. For no other reason then the best one of all. Because we can!