The Irish Thug

Lilly, I expect your revenge to be swift and vicious.

PRESENTS!!! I LOVE GETTING THINGS!!!!

Hands down best present is the complete Twilight Zone series on DVD. A total of 28 discs featuring 156 episodes that would take just over 3 1/2 days to watch without interruption.

In addition I got the following DVDs:
Futurama Season 3 (completing my set)
Bender’s Big Score
SNL Season 1
Simpsons Movie

The surprise out of the group was SNL Season 1. I’m not sure I’ve even seen a full SNL skit that was made before 1985. But it should be really fun to watch all the old classic comedians perform.

And since watching DVDs isn’t enough, I go some games for my Nintendo DS. Most notably Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass. Plays like a visually spruced up version of the first Zelda games. The touch-screen stylus interface works very well for clicking on items and moving around the map.

The strangest gift was two books featuring pictures of my hometown. At first glance this seems like a generic gift that would get flipped through once or twice before it is placed on a shelf. What makes it interesting is the fact that two other members of my family received the same books.

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A few years ago I noticed that my cousins had very limited access to good music. Since they live in a town that is somewhere between rural and suburban, they are essentially limited to what MTV decides to show. Based on this I decided to give them CDs as Christmas presents to “help” them on their way to good music.

This Christmas it became extremely apparent that one of my cousins has terrible taste in movies. The two movies he received this year were Deck the Halls and 1408. I unfortunately saw 1408 in theaters and watched Deck the Halls Christmas afternoon.

I’ve got a lot of work to do.

… eight to go. It’s official, I broke my right pinky finger. For future reference, if you are going to try and stop a lacrosse check with just one finger, don’t use the pinky. It doesn’t work.

In keeping with my habit of not actually posting about something when it happened, I waited about 2 weeks to get this up. I had a big splint on it over the weekend when it happened, which was pretty awkward. But now it now just keeping the last joint from bending (where the fracture is). Going back sometime next week to see how it is coming along. On the whole it could be worse. I can’t write, but I can do most other things with my right hand. Common task that is surprisingly hard with your weak hand: wiping your butt. Non-common task that I am surprisingly good at with my weak hand: Wii Sports.

I am alive. I have just been very busy lately with school. All my classes are good and interesting, with the exception of Technical Writing. It’s not very interesting and thus the homework takes lots of time to do. The light at the end of the tunnel is it is my last writing class. Then I will be free to do just programing and engineering work.

There are a few ideas for posts that I’ve had, but pushed off. I’m going to force myself to go threw with the latest one, I just don’t have time now. But I think it will turn out well.

The lacrosse website is going through the process of being published. It will be nice to see it up and running after all the time I spent this summer putting it together.

That’s it for now. I promise to be back soon.

This was the message I was met with when I went to Dell to see what I could do about my laptop. But I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s start from the beginning.

Thursday morning I was reading some blogs while I should have been getting ready for class. And then, black. The LCD of my laptop had become completely unusable. Faint outlines of where windows should have been could be seen, but even the simple task of following where the mouse was on the screen required much concentration.

Within a few minutes I had told my computer to restart. (Well, actually, I thought I had told it to shutdown. I ended up clicking the wrong button.) As Windows was booting up, the screen worked as it should. Within a minute, the screen had returned to it’s darkened state. Another minute passes as I try again to locate the shutdown option and this time succeed. I head to class considering the fact that I might be the owner of a new computer in a few days and the joys that would come with Vista. (Laptop screens cost around $400+, so it is often not worth it when that money could be used for a newer, better machine.)

The saving grace here is the fact that I have a second monitor attached to my laptop. This meant I could still use my computer, I just had less area to work with. Without the extra screen I would have been out of luck as working around the problem would have been much harder.

I get back from class and start searching for anything that could find that might let me resolve the issue of the broken screen. After scanning some “If you send us your machine and your first born son, we can fix it” websites and one “Ok, these are the steps you want to take to completely dissemble your laptop and do stuff to it” website, I went to Dell’s website.

Nosing around the My Account section I see those magical words listed above. My laptop is just a month away from the end of it’s three year warranty. I hopped on Dell’s instant messaging support service, had a relatively short conversation explaining my situation. They told me they would be shipping a replacement screen to their Boston office and to expect a call in 1-2 business days to schedule an in-house replacement. The call never came on Friday, which is fine, it came promptly Monday morning. We agreed that 3-4 on Tuesday would be a good time for both of us. Four o’clock that afternoon I get a call from the Dell service guy. “I’m sorry, I’m running a little late. I will be there in an hour.” I explained the misunderstanding and moved on as this was the worst thing done by Dell throughout the whole ordeal.

Tuesday comes and the technician arrives with my new screen in hand. I then watch, like a worried mother, as he begins to do surgery on my computer (which would be the one thing I’d grab from my room if the building was on fire). The procedure was fairly simply, lots of tiny screws and some cracking sounds as the plastic case popped apart as it was designed to.

The new screen has been working fine as I count down the next 23 days hoping that if something else is going to break, that it happen sometime before the 17th of August.

A gem I was introduced to by my Film and Lit teacher.

Select Points of The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930

• No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.
• Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.
• Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.
• Revenge in modern times shall not be justified.
• The use of firearms should be restricted to the essentials.
• Excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces, suggestive postures and gestures, are not to be shown.
• In general passion should so be treated that these scenes do not stimulate the lower and baser element.
• White slavery shall not be treated.
• Miscegenation (sex relationships between the white and black races) is forbidden.
• Pointed profanity (this includes the words, God, Lord, Jesus, Christ – unless used reverently – Hell, S.O.B., damn, Gawd), or every other profane or vulgar expression however used, is forbidden.
• Undressing scenes should be avoided, and never used save where essential to the plot.
• Dances suggesting or representing sexual actions or indecent passions are forbidden.
• Ministers of religion in their character as ministers of religion should not be used as comic characters or as villains.
• The treatment of bedrooms must be governed by good taste and delicacy.
• The use of the Flag shall be consistently respectful.

The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 was written to be “A Code to Govern the Making of Talking, Synchronized and Silent Motion Pictures. Formulated and formally adopted by The Association of Motion Picture Producers, Inc. and The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. in March 1930.” Read the full text.

I spent all of Sunday flying back from Dallas to Boston. With all that time, I ended up with two new lists.

Things that Measure at (or about) 100 Feet

• One third of a football field.
• Length of Boeing 737-500.
• A 9 story building.
• 33 paces.
• The distance you are told to leave between your car and a fire truck or school bus.

Excerpts from a Two Page Ad in SkyMall for Gravity Defer Dress Shoes

• You will find a renewed enjoyment in walking places. You’ll park farther away at the grocery store, shopping mall, and the office just to get extra time walking in your Gravity Defer Shoes.
• It’s almost as if Aeolus, the Greek god of wind, himself has taken his powerful wind out of his bottles and put it into each of the Gravity Defer Shoes.
• The show is so much fun that the energy reciprocating shock of the Gravity Defer Shoes will actually give you the feeling of wanting to dance and be active. You might just find yourself joining a dance class soon!
• These ethereal shoes will transport you through life with such vigor that your friends and family will hardly recognize who you are.
• The shoes that world famous Secret Agents would wear the to black tie party where they end up doing reconnaissance before they are chased around a European city by evil henchmen … You will feel like you can keep up with the best of the World Famous Secrete Agents when you are wearing the Gravity Defer Shoes.

It all started over a year ago. My computer’s desktop was cluttered and I was repeatedly clicking the same four icons start my poker session. So I made PokerSelector. It was simple, it was good, it worked.

That was until I wanted to change something. Adding new things to the window was not hard, but it wasn’t clean and easy. I dealt with that fact for about a year. Then I said enough is enough.

I began work on The Opener. I set out to completely re-write PokerSelector so that it would be a dynamic window and fully customizable within the program itself. Two months of on again off again programing, sprinkled in during a great lacrosse season and a not so good run at poker, finally produced a result.

Today, I invite you to try out and use The Opener.

My friend Elsa is doing her coop at home in Tennessee. Because of this I missed her birthday and never actually got her a present. On her blog, she recently mention that she had just upgraded her car[link]. To make up for waiting so long, I decided that I would take the time to add a few alteration to her car so that she could enjoy it more.

For those that are lazy, here is what her car looks like now. It is a Toyota Corolla.

Here is the new and improved Elsa-mobile.
For those that are lazy, here is what her car looks like now.

This is something that has bugged me since was first made aware of the phenomena. The item in question is a segment of a Dave Cheppelle sketch in which Snoop Dogg recites an essay he wrote while high when posed the following question. What America Means to You? This was part of a larger sketch entitled “The Weed Olympics”. It involved amateur and professional stoners were pitted against one another to perform specified tasks. The amateurs were college students and the professionals were rappers, Snoop Dogg and one other whom I can not remember.

The phenomena in question is not that the sketch existed, but the fact that there is close to no record of it’s existence.

Searching the internet using various combinations of snoop dogg, dave chappelle, america, and means to you, no transcripts or video footage has been found. In my most recent attempts to find the full text of Snoop Dogg’s essay, I found two page to do acknowledge it’s existence.

Within Opentopia’s encyclopedia, there is an article on Chappelle’s Show. In the article’s comments on the DVD Releases, it mentions that:

“Some material from the show, such as What America Means to You did not make either DVD set and is as of yet unreleased.”

The Wikimedia article on Chappelle’s Show makes no mention of the sketch, but does mention that Snoop Dogg was a “Frequent or notable guest stars.”

From there we move to the biggest find to date. On a personal webpage (listed as belonging to the user “gilgamesh”), we have an actual excerpt from the essay. I will leave you with the words of this great lyricist in hope that his words will inspire others to dig deeper in to this mystery and see what else can be uncovered.

“…Chuuch, tabanacle, titty 1, titty 2, the prophet Eli. My mental gymnastics will flip you like an Aunt Jemima flapjack. Now, how ’bout that?”