Need.a.life

This is post 400.

Such a sad little swirling vortex of lost productivity!

Shorties

I was raised catholic and went to catholic school (with real live NUNS to boot) If anything will make you reject Catholicism when you grow up its nuns!


However I was watching a thing on the papacy on the history channel this weekend and as I watched it I had to rethink my whole position on the catholic faith. You get up in the morning and put on a really weird hat, slam down some wine, molest some kids, go to heaven! What a gig!

It's strangely like being a TSA agent

*************

Have you ever noticed that the people who will tell you ever so seriously about how the American Indian used every part of the animal and how fantastic it was that they wasted nothing are the exact same people who when offered a a hot dog (or bolgna) Will go into pratical hysterics "My God do you know what parts of the animal they use in that? Ewwwwwww"

Tall Tales

I have ALWAYS loved telling stories!

That is why my friends encouraged me to start blogging... so they would not have to actually listen to my stories anymore!

Switching to written storytelling from oral you lose a lot of the tools of good story telling, tone of voice, body language maybe even some accents thrown in here and there.

Friday night I had a chance to get all oral again and it was GREAT.

A buddy of mine wants to go to this party but I don't know anyone there. As a nerd I HATE going to a party period but to a party where I don't know anyone? Oh the horror! 

(Also bear in mind from my last post that I wrenched my knee pushing a boat and am using a cane for 10 days. )

So we walked into the front room and right off there is a weird situation, there were 3 people comparing scars, and one of them was a pretty hot blond. I have seen guys doing "scar competitions" before but outside of the movie Lethal Weapon 4(?) I have never seen women play the game. But here it was in living color!

So I said Ooooo- can I play?

Sure.

So I lifted my shirt and showed them my stomach surgery scars, I was wearing shorts and I have a nice double scar above my knee where the propeller of a radio control plane got me and then I have several good misc hand scars from farming and mechanizing.

Now I am telling YOU where the scars came but that is not what I told them.... for them I just pointed them all out. The Surgery scars are the best of course but the others made nice "accessories"

So they asked where did you get all those scars...

Well during the first Persian gulf war I had to eject from my crippled F-15 fighter deep over enemy territory!

"Oh man! What happened to you!?"

Well, there I was deep over Saddam's stronghold, flying high cover on a moonless night, moving nearly as fast as a bullet 10 miles above the earth. At that altitude, on a moonless night, the stars looked like diamonds scattered on black velvet. So crisp, so close, you can easily convince yourself you have in fact left the planet and are in space. It was gorgeous! It was so ironic to experience such beauty deep in a war zone!

Suddenly my reverie was shattered by a flashing master caution alarm!

With no warning at all a fan belt had broken! You want to talk about fear! Fear that grabs you deep in your gut and won't let go!

Still, I tried to salvage the situation but when the fan belt on #1 broke apparently it flew off into #2 engine and took out its fan belt too. I was hosed! I had no hydraulics! (Power steering) You simply can not fly an F-15 without hydraulics! I had no choice but to eject!

It was during the ejection sequence when I snagged jagged pieces of the canopy and got the belly and leg scars I showed you.

More people are gathering around now, it's getting quiet at this party.

So I went on about how hard it is while drifting down in your parachute to judge when you going to contact the ground in the dark desert and I misjudged the landing and to this day I have this cane to remind me of it.

I managed to evade capture for a few days but they finally got me. The scars on my hands are from the interrogations...

Finally, one guy, challenged me, "What? Those scars are not from torture!"

With a grin I said, "Dude! You mean you bought the fan belts breaking but you are NOT buying the interrogation scars?"

People are looking a each other and the blond with her own scars asked me if any part of this story is true?

With my grin growing wider I answered "Helllllll no! But its a good story huh?"

Everyone laughed and suddenly I was not at a party of strangers anymore.

High tech

Two weekends ago I hurt my knee very badly. (well to ME) I went to the doc and a couple of blogworthy notes came out of it.

The doctor had an x-ray machine in his office and one of his nurses was unsure of the settings so the doctor come in and was helping her.

I don't know about you but when someone is pointing a radation gun at me and is not quite sure what all the doohickeys are for I get nervous and when I get nervous I make jokes

So when they finally shot the front view of the knee I cupped my balls and yelped "OW! MY SPERM!  Oh the looks on their faces was soooo precious!

(a thousand nerd points to whoever can name the show that came from. Googling disqualifies you! )

When they shot the side view I said, "Thats funny! My sperm did not hurt that time!"

So in the end he writes me a script for some muscle relaxers and a cane. A cane? In this day and age? With all the high tech goodies at our disposal he gave me a fucking STICK!

Well yes he did and it worked GREAT!

I asked for one with flames on but apparantly they don't watch "House"

A tale of nerdy vengence!

Ok, as I have discussed before my son did not directly inherit my nerdmanity. All through school he was the jock, the football star.

We had satellite TV then which carried the BBC and more than once I tried to get him to watch reruns of Monty Pythons Flying Circus with me but he HATED it. "This is so stupid Dad!"
Oh my- the squirting sound as my heart was crushed could be heard in the next room but you have to accept that while he is your son he has his own tastes.

At my Dallas house his bedroom is next to my home office. It was a Saturday and he had several members of his football team over but the weather was shitty and there was nothing on TV. I could hear them complaining about how bored they were. After about a half hour of listening to them whine I went to my room and got my Holy Grail DVD.

I knocked on his door and told the group, "I been hearing you guys say how bored you are so I want just 5 minutes of your time, just watch this DVD for 5 minutes and if you don't like it I will just pop it out and not say a word more about it."

I could see them trying to figure out what the catch was so I added, "You are already bored to tears, what do you have to loose?" So they agreed.

As  I pulled the DVD from behind my back my son was like "Oh no Dad! Not that!" I just replied, 5 minutes, what do you have to loose?

So I went to scene selection and chose "The tale of Sir Lancelot"

This is the scene where the kings gay son is being forced to marry against his will and is locked in the tallest tower to await the marriage. So he sent a tale of woe out on an arrow arrow telling of his plight and asking for some brave knight to rescue me.

Of Course sir Lancelot assumes someone being held in a tower, forced to marry and looking for a knight is a DAMSEL. So lancelot rips into this little fiefdom peacefully preparing for a wedding and commenced to hack and slay his way through men and women who have no idea at all they are being attacked.
"Oh aren't these flowers lovely-  Ung!!"

The boys, (being teen age boys) were howling with laughter. Its a 7 minute scene and at the 5 minute mark I pulled the DVD.

"They were all like "whoa wait a minute we want to see that!"
"OH I know how stupid Monty Python is. Sorry I made you watch it. Sorry Brian for boring your friends with this stupid stuff!"

Oh I was so mean, I made them BEG for it! BWUH HA HA HA HA!

A nerd's revenge on the football team 20 years delayed but fulfilled!

I still owe the those cheerleaders though! Some day, some day my nerdy vengence quest will be complete!

Another Military Story (sorta)

So one day I was working on the rudder (foot) pedals of a fighter. The ejection seat was out so I was laying on the floor where the seat would be with my head up under the "dash"

Climbing into a fighter is much like mounting a horse, you swing a leg up over the canopy sill and step down into the cockpit. So the crew chief, a rather portly fellow, decides to climb in. He did not check to see if *I* was there first though so he swings a leg up and over the canopy rail and plants a boot right into in my groinal arena!

Oh my descendants!

I set up fast and wanged my head on something under the 'dash'.  Then I laid back down and moaned for a minute. We all had a good laugh at my expense and went back to work. You know, both heads were injured in one accident ha ha ha ha! I was moving slower than before though.

About 15 minutes later I had to use the restroom. When I peed it was pretty dark. Blood in the urine, uh oh.

Long story short some blood vessels were ruptured in the sackal region and one side flooded with blood and distended.

Oddly enough, I came to learn this is a VERY common condition in the Air Force but its generally happens to pilots under high g loads.

After a few more follow ups it was confirmed that I was, in the words of my doctor,  rendered sterile.
 
So fast forward about 7 years. My wife gives me the supposedly happy news that she is pregnant. She is confused that I am not happy. "I'm sterile ya know. So who got you pregnant?"

Well needless to say this set off a marital crises. So it turns out sterile is a relative term. I am technically sterile but I still have some squigglers so a better term than 'sterile' would be "low probability". Of all people you would think doctors would use more descriptive language, right?

So when "the boy" turned up, there was no doubt what so ever that I was the father. He is my clone. The only thing he really got from his mother was his full thick facial hair. Wish I could grow a beard like that!

Vegans

I was reading an article about vegans this morning. Interesting stuff. As you all know I *love* word origins and it turns out vegan is an old American Indian word meaning "Very shitty hunter".

 I just love how some languages can say so much with one word!

You know, it makes me wonder though if vegans have sex? I mean there is the whole aspect of do they have the stamina for it but I mean even philosophically are they allowed to have sex? Milking a cow does not hurt the cow it a bit. In fact, they need to be milked or utter destruction could occur (ar!) Yet vegans are not allowed to drink milk. 

Rules out oral for sure!

So in the same vein, er, train of thought, are male vegans even allowed to ejaculate? that sure seems like Sperm Murder to me!

Neanderthal bastards! Somebody throw some red paint on the sperm murdering bastards!

BABY KILLERS!

My manhood lost

This story is NOT about the first thing that popped into your mind when you read that title (however that does remind me of another perhaps blog worthy Air Force story)

In this case the manhood in question is metaphorical rather than physical.

When I was 11 my grandfather (Papa? Pawpaw?) went legally blind. His vision dropped to 20/400 corrected. He had a farm to run though and his financial future was at stake. I became his eyes and hands. He would sit next to me and tell me what to do but I was the guy! I drove him where ever he needed to go, I plowed the fields, planted the crops, fertilized and cultivated mid season then finally harvested in the fall and took the grain to be sold.

Small town  Nebraska ( population < 500) was a special place, there are no secrets. Everyone knew  I was driving cars and grain trucks, even on the interstate highways, but everyone also knew that I was all that was keeping Papa from bankruptcy. I worked hard and I received something I had never really received from adults before, respect.

I remember the one night we went to town for supper at the bar and grill and I was allowed to drink a beer, in a bar. I was 12. The local motto was "Work like a man get treated like a man." Little things like that made up for not being able to do the things my tween age friends were doing.

I did that for three years while I was 11, 12 and 13 years old. I thought I was going to do it for the rest of my life but property values got very high and papa sold all his land for 3 million(!) bucks.

I moved back to the city. After 3 years of being treated like a man suddenly, I was a child again.

Oh how that chaffed my soul. I oh so desperately wanted to be a man again. It was hard to ever be satisfied again. For example, getting a drivers licence? Pfffft. I was driving huge dump trucks loaded with grain 5 years "ago"!

So all that frustration combined with several other reasons saw me joining the Air Force when I was 16.

After basic training I was a man again! Yay! For a while at least.

After advanced training I reported to my first duty station. I was getting a tour of Hanger 1. The end if the runway was 500 feet from the hanger. An F-4 phantom started its take off run with full afterburners.

The F-4 is a fighter but it's take off weight was a full 30 tons. It is a BIG airplane with BIG engines.

F-4 Phantom Engine Exhaust. Big huh?

 Then lets mention afterburners; Afterburners are simply pumping raw fuel into the exhaust stream of jet engine where it combusts, expands and adds considerable thrust. A.k.a. heat and noise. That fuel is injected from a fuel line ring around the inside of exhaust tube. Each ring is considered a stage. Working from memory here the F-4 had 32 stage afterburners (times 2 engines). If the pilot moved the throttles forward slowly you could hear (and feel) each stage kick in individually. If he moved the throttles fast it was a single sound

It was not unheard of for formation take offs with full afterburners to actually break windows on base.



F-4 with full afterburners. Can you feel the power?


So here I am first day on my new base, walking through the phase docks in hanger one when the pilot a mere 500 feet away pushed the throttles all the way forward pretty fast. I heard and felt a tremendous rippling ba-ba-ba-ba-BOOM as the stages kicked in. I thought the all the tanks on the fuel farm were going  up in a chain reaction!

Damn my cat like reflexes! I ducked!

I was immediately a laughing stock. The fighter mechanic that was afraid of fighters. All respect and therefore all manhood was lost within hours of stepping on base. {sigh}


Then, just to pile it on, later that day someone coined my new nickname that would stick with me for years to come. No, not "killer", "tiger", "Ace" or any kind of even remotely cool nickname, nope, "baby face" was my new moniker. For one who ached more than anything to be a man to be called baby (face) every day was nightmarish.

My degradation was complete. {sigh}

However, here is a picture taken of me four years after I "earned" that nickname. So I guess maybe they were on to something.

Confusing Headlines

Check this out this headline...

Apple under fire for 'gay conversion' app

When I first read the headline I thought they had an app to convert me to gay. On one hand that would be pretty kewl because then lots more women would be attracted to me.

One the other hand that app would be a silly waste of time to write because if I am male and I have an Apple then, clearly, I am already gay!

AR!

ps. Just a joke roomie. (But humor only works if there is a nugget of truth in it!)

Management Think #9

Recently I had to change my e-mail address and I do all on-line bill pay so I go to all my vendors, ya know, phone, cable, credit card, etc. and change my e-mail address.

Logically they all sent me an e-mail notifying that someone had changed my e-mail address online and if it was not me alert them to the security breach immediately.

However, two, count them TWO vendors sent that e-mail the the NEW e-mail account.   So if I had been hacked I would never know it. Since sending the e-mail to the new address defeats the entire point of even sending an e-mail you gotta wonder just what were they thinking?

Oh stupid question, hell I have been in this business long enough to "hear" the design meeting...

DBA: "Well the Idiots Guide to Website Design says to send a notification to the the old address for security"
"But how am I to be sending it to the old address when they just changed the address? I am not having the old address anymore"
DBA: Well we should have an audit table where we track changes and we can pull from there, OR in the change address screen you can hold the new address in memory, send a note to the old address THEN change the address in the database OR,...{three other ways to skin the cat}"
"I am not knowing about these things. Let me get back to you."

47 meetings and 1,487 excuses about why they just can't do it right the manager says "This is taking too much time, just send it to the new address, what the hells the difference. Gah DBA's are such a pain in the ass"

Cheapskate

I have true cheapskate tendencies. Now I am not too cheap to actually buy things but once I buy them I WILL extract every cent of value out them.

I won't spit out gum till the flavor is GONE! Etc etc.

So I tend to use the same razor blade too long. I pulled a fresh blade out of the medicine cabinet and started shaving and as I took the first stroke down my jawbone I was like WOW!! That is like shaving glass, it is sooo smooth and frictionless! Second stroke, "Man I got quit using these blades for so long. I forgot how nice a new blade feels!"

Then I noticed that where the shaving cream was gone I still had prominent whiskers sticking up? Huh?

Oh. Take the little plastic guard off the blade and lets try this again.

Manual SpamBot

"The circle is now complete Obi-Wan"

They used to pay people to spam. Then they automated the process with SpamBots. So to defeat the spam bots most sites set up some kind of test on comments/posting, weather it be a simple math problem or the skewed pass phrase.

So far that has defeated the SpamBots. I have been waiting for a while now for someone to crack the skewed pass phrase model used here on blogspot- so far so good. I am guessing it has worked this long because it is just barely human readable (at least to this human)

So now we have come full circle- they are now paying humans to post spam again. I have gotten a couple of them them in the last few weeks. I got this one on the "good news" post....

"I'm impressed with your post which i'm looking for. I have a forum which lets people to share and express their feeling. so come and join with us :) Place to share feeling

(I changed the link to prevent accidents.)

I have several observations about this spam post..

1) If you are going to pay someone to market Spam for you then you really should hire people who can speak the language you want to market in. (duh)

2) I think its HILARIOUS that my post about trying to replace Charlie Sheen on 2.5 men was "the post he was looking for" lol

3) This blog is (theoretically) about the hybrid nature of my nerd/redneck personality. There is often a lot of conflict there but one thing both nerds and rednecks agree on is that they have ZERO interest in "sharing their feelings" So a major "swing and a miss" there buddy!

4) Man, human SpamBot has GOT to be a shitty way to make a living.

Bad News Good News

Bad News - Well negotiations fell through with CBS today. They were only offering a million per episode with no back end. How can I live off that? Pffft!

Good news -  However, I  am now in negotiations with Martin Sheen to be his replacement son. The big question at this point is can I get along with Emilio Estevez or will Thanksgiving dinners at the Sheen house continue to be awwwwwwwkwaaaaard! :)

Good News!

I am in talks with CBS to replace Charlie Sheen on 2.5 men. Whoo hoo!

Failing a test and Passing a test

Ok, this story is the flip-side of yesterdays story!

I was looking for that critical first job right out of college. You know, you have the degree but you have zippo experience and employers are wary.

I went to an interview at Automated Telephone Management systems. I interviewed with one of the lead programmers there. After about 5 minutes it became painfully obvious I had nothing they were looking for. What I had studied and what they were doing were just totally different.

I knew I was not getting this job so I relaxed and with the pressure off my playful personality came out. I remember even cracking a joke about how I did not like their toilet in the lobby. It had a "booster seat" for the handicapped and said I felt like I was 5 years old with my legs dangling off the toilet like that.

The people in the surrounding cubes and the guy interviewing me all broke up laughing.

Then I delved off into Kirk VS Picard. My long standing position is that when Picard delvers a flying drop kick to someones chest then bags the blue chick, THEN we can talk!

Again laughter rippled throughout the surrounding cubes!

They made me an offer. I was SHOCKED!

Everyday I was there I was convinced they would realize their mistake and fire me so I really hit the books and studied all the new technology they used. I was given simple assignments that let me learn without overwhelming me. Still I was ready for that ax to fall any second!

In the meantime that manager at the hospital in the previous story would have LOVED this place. It was full of anti-social nerds who never said anything or talked to anybody. The monastery like silence was killing me! Once day I even stood up in my cube and yelled "What is this a library!? Somebody say something!"

So I started just going to random cubes and saying something like "It's break time lets go outside and see the sun?" Then I would get a chance to talk to that person and get to know them a little. Once the ice was broken they would talk to you in the future. One by one I pulled the monks out of their cubicles and got them talking to me. Before long I had us going to lunches together or hanging out together after work. Of course some people never joined in but most did.

I had been there about 5 months and I knew I was getting the technology down when I was assigned my first major project. It was a tough one too! In fact, It was so tough no one else wanted it and basically it got fobbed off on the new guy!

When I  pulled off that project I felt secure in that job for the first time. There was a question I had wanted to ask for 6 months but never dared ask before. Now that I no longer felt they were going to fire me at any second I finally asked it.

Mr. Manager, why did you hire me? I knew nothing you needed!

He nodded and chuckled! Well Rob, I had a personnel problem here. I had a lot of really bright gifted people working here but I did not have a team. They were not working together.  No one ever talked to each other, they never bonded. I had tried to loosen them up but as the boss they would not ease up around me. In your interview I tagged you as a team builder and even though you had NONE of the tech skills I needed I thought you would be a net gain as an actual team formed. I was right.

It's just a bonus you actually learned the skills we needed to boot.

So, after years of hard work and sacrifice to get that degree I was hired for my personality?!  Ouch!

So that is how women who get hired for thier looks feel like huh? :)