3/27/2002 ben this is rigodamndiculous. first off, i finished winter's heart last night, and this is the ninth book... and they're all about six or seven hundred pages, and the damn story's still not done. secondly none of our internal systems are working today. the buttons on my phone don't work, the email server's down, as are our development servers. also, i was listening to bon jovi's dead or alive on the radio, and the lyrics are a lot dumber than i remember. they used to be cool when i was a kid. i mean: I walk these streets, a loaded six string on my back
I play for keeps, 'cause I might not make it back
what the hell is that? anywho, i'm off tomorrow and friday, but i might be wired, we'll see. don't miss me too much if i'm not here though... there's always muhgcee and satchel and lileks, hehe.

muhgcee Well, the boy may have lost a foot, but . . .

"I remember I tried to open the mouth and tried to get it off of me. That didn't work either," he said. "I just grabbed the shark's eye and ripped it out and then it let me go."

3/26/2002 ben one for you, one for me. i spent the day mixing between fast forward and off. i'd have several things to do at once then there would be nothing going on. then i'd have lunch. i did that a lot today. the lunch part, that is. my days at work have become this kind of routine. hopefully i can get a new one soon. they're opening up a new routine store down the street, so maybe they'll have a good sale. i noticed i kind of leave the more political aspect to muhgcee over there... i think that has to do with something, i just can't be bothered, what with all of this hilarity ensuing. oh, and i realized i think i stole the name ass tractor (cheering) from partygirl over on adam's site (look to the left...sheesh). she's very pretty though, huh? i thought so, and said so, and then my attention was diverted again before i could say anything else. oh well. i'm going to go play quake.

muhgcee OK so here goes - You should check out my site because I just put a lot more pictures on there. I am having a LAN party this Friday - You should come. e-mail me for more info.

Makes you wonder about your neighbors sometimes, doesn't it?

Who would have ever thought that having nothing to do at work would be so bad? I have had so little to do that I updated all three sites of mine (OK so two aren't mine but I post on them, so I guess they are more mine than yours? Unless, of course, you are Ben or Chris, in which case they are more yours than mine. Not collectively, on an individual site basis). It has been so slow that one of my co-workers has watched a movie at work two days straight. One of my superiors is playing a video game right now. I love this job.

You all should watch The Naked Chef tonight. That guy is amazing.

Ahhh!!! My stream of consciousness is running dry!! Must refill the stream!! I think my stream of consciousness is more of a man-made stream rather than a natural one . . . I don't know why, it just seems that way.

3/25/2002 ben ok so it's been so long since we've both posted on one day that i forgot the format. but things are moving along i bought damnthatscool.com today, and as soon as i have an ip to plug it into, i'll move all this crap over. neo is doing the design for the new site too... maybe. if it doesn't involve too much work. i spent all morning looking at Kekkkuli.com and wishing i had put that much effort into here as these two guys did into their site. but soon enough, yes my precious? soon enough.
and i'm all out of spaghettios. that's a bad omen in the book... if you run out of spaghettios at the beginning of the week, a murder of crows are going to peck out your fingernails. or is it a parliament of ravens? or is it a rookery or ravens? or a parliament of rooks? there's a mental image... ahh! the little chess pieces are coming for me! now how am i going to open my pill bottles?
sorry about that... i just ran with it, i'll give it back now. never could be trusted with those sorts of things. anywho, someone called me hilarious and funny on friday. i know, i know... what the hell was he on? when i asked, he said just guiness, and he was sober. so i think he's just been dropped on his head or got shaken violently as a child or something. imagine that... someone thought i was funny. i kept expecting to wake up in a cold sweat (i've been doing that a lot lately, maybe it was that third down comforter) or something. meh i've talked to you all instantlike today... more later.

ok, now i'm waiting on the redesign like... maybe we'll have a contest... 50 bucks or something to the best design for our little site here? look at how lazy i am, heheh. also, i made the february archive and fixed some nav problems. i'll work on the future of damnthatscool (from now until eternity to be referred to as dtc by me) then, while i wait for work to give me work. and still my boss yells at me. whee.

muhgcee Are you ever walking through a public place, or driving along the road, and think "What a bunch of damn morons. I wish they would shut the hell up and go home. Well, to look on the bright side, I don't have to deal with them in a private situation." Well, I got the joy of actually being in a private situation with a bunch of these people. It was actually quite an interesting situation. I looked at it as a research opportunity. I should have brought a notebook with me to take notes. Here, right in front of me, was the American "ruling class". Yes, these were the people that cause such shows as "Survivor" to do well on TV. These are the people that cause jerk-offs like Bush to get into office. These people don't use turn signals. They leave bad tips. They don't know who Matt Drudge is. They don't run Linux. They raise other people just like them. They don't appreciate Tool.

None of them knew me, and none of them know me now. I didn't get asked a single question past "What was your name again?" Maybe this experience will do me good if I ever run for public office. I can convince them to vote for me with such lines as, "If you vote for me, I will work to restore all constitutional freedoms. LINKIN PARK!" I have penetrated the inner-workings of these people's minds in a matter of hours. Hopefully those hours are the only "research" hours I will have to experience for a long time.

3/22/2002 ben so it's official... i started ordering coding books online. i guess i'm really doing this now? heheh. might make a mud in c#, would that be cool? ok... anywho, so i noticed over the years that among a lot of my friends, e.g. person a, the significant others of persons b - n are never good enough for those persons. person a doesn't like persons b₁ through b_x for some reason. it's only been a few of my friends though that fall into this person a mode. they don't have any secret love, or underlying homosexual (if person a and b are of the same sex) tendancies, they just don't like anyone you're seeing...
onto whatever... i wonder if anyone in baltimore wants to go to the movies with me? everyone i talk to doesn't, and i haven't been in so long that i'm not sure they still serve popcorn. i don't know, maybe it's a good thing i don't go to the movies. i don't know why it would be a good thing, but that thinking keeps me just lazy enough to not go by myself. lastly i guess... there's no good sized bowls at work. we have the little stoneware cereal bowls, but nothing a good size for ramen. the next size up is a nice plastic tub that would be good for andre the giant maybe. so i made my ramen in that. it looked so sad, like one of those pictures you see of islands, taken from space. next time i'm sticking to spaghettios.
fine... more... i'm listening to deftones and jimmy eat world at work now... not really at the same time. but sequentially at least. the deftones seem kind of sad. and jimmy eat world is cool, kind of like a more bass driven pixies...

3/21/2002 muhgcee I just had an idea - Ben's name in Counterstrike should be "I'm_in_chemo_and_I_am_still_kicking_your_ass". In related news, with a link whored off of Drudge, a 90 year old woman beat a 21-year old man trying to rob her house.

3/21/2002 ben ok, I'm really apologetic that it's been... um... two weeks since i've been here... but I've been really busy, I promise... yeah that's it. i just read some really good articles by a phd student at cornell. he observed that young (read college age) women are unpaid whores, basically out looking for sex all the time, dressing that way, forgetting their values etc. etc. he takes a religious right stance, which i would if i wanted to be sarcastic about it, but at least, empirically, he's right. women are being much more obvious about promiscuity these days, which is, i think, simply a flock reaction. they're not having much more sex... i don't think. they're just being more blatent about advertising it. if i recall correctly, there was just as much fornication going on in puritan times, in elizabethan times, in the 50's, but it wasn't on display as much. nor were there so many venues for it to be displayed. (the article, by the way, for those of you waiting with bated breath, is at: the cornell review. check out the latest one too... really good.
ok, now on to some other thoughts. i'm going to be coaching soon... it's not quite diving, but at least i'm near the water, hehe. fear me as a role model, i know. hell, i can't even imagine that... snicker. but, once a week, i'm in charge... better take my assertive pill now, eh? chemo's going well, they said it's like, 75 to 90% dead. what that means long-term i don't know, but i can just run with that, ehh? sounds good, right? now i'm still a little fl0gged by all the side effects, but after one more in house treatment we do the radiation and the surgery, and then chemo levels go way down for a while... yah. so i got counterstrike installed and working... gonna go play with that for a while, yippee... more... tomorrow?

3/7/2002 muhgcee I've got a great story for you all from this morning. A very strange thing happened at work this morning. I was working at the print dispatch counter for a couple of hours when a girl walked up to pick up her printout. I gave her the printout, and then for some reason she rang the bell . . . *annoying* First of all, this girl reminded me so much of "that girl from band camp" in the American Pie movies. Same hair, same annoyingness, same smile . . . And then she said, "Do you want to hear my poem?" So I said "No! Now get out of my school! You lose college!" Actually I didn't say that because I don't think I am allowed to. Stupid rules . . . I actually said, "Yeah, sure." So she started reading. Loudly. A page and a half long. I tried to act like I was interested. I was actually formulating in my head what I was going to say to her to end the potential conversation before it started. Her poem was quite strange. It sounded like a horror film. Blood, gore, death . . . all at 9am. That's what I need at 9 in the morning. My carefully prepared statement followed: "That's a good poem. Its gory." And the conversation was over. What a relief . . . My job is so stressful, I don't know how I deal with it. Yeah, right. If that little episode is one of the worst things I have had to deal with so far at that job, I think I am doing pretty good.

3/5/2002 ben this is my first update from my laptop... i'm still at work with my computer next to me... so logically i should have used that... but i wanted to get all of this set up and try it out before i went in to the hospital. ok, that was enough with the ellipses, we'll switch to commas from now on. anywho, i was so excited to start posting from here that i almost started using capital letters, could you imagine that? then again, i wonder how many people have noticed... not that it's a big deal or anything. so i realized some things, again which aren't big deals, just small epiphanies. first, i have a larger number of female friends than male friends that i hang out with. there's robin, and sasha, and colleen, and adrienne, you all have probably heard me blather on about one or the the other... then i only regularly hang out with one or two or three guys. and i complain about the women a lot, because they have this or that hang up, or weird drug induced quirk that we shan't go into now... heheh. but they're definitely hot, i'll give them that, snicker. that was the other thing. i go out with them, and i have noticed that almost invariably, the woman on my arm is the best looking one in the whole place. if you believe in the subconscious, explain that one. personally, i think i just have good taste, hehe. anywho, this is probably long enough for now, i'm going to see if i can post tomorrow, whee.

3/3/2002 ben so i don't know, there's a lot that seems to be going on... i'm officially home with the parents again through the whole chemo thing. i brought my bed and my books and my clothes and my puppet doggy and all my shoes, so i have them, and most importantly the rest of my cds and dvds... they're going to come in handy now that i have a brand new dell inspiron 8000 laptop (insert cheer here) to take to the hospital and entertain myself with. so i had a conversation with my friend, and i'm still not convinced that i need to go out and chase women. how come it's the "guy" that's supposed to go out and do the initiating? i honestly can't be bothered most of the time. shrug... more later, have to go help a friend pick out a dress. and hey, it's a girl this time! hahaha.