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Thursday: June 01, 2006 - Clash of the Titans Michael and I had a poker battle for the ages. With pots up to 600/300 we tried over and over again to give the other person the game but Michael finally allowed me to take the $25 prize at around 1am. I promise not to complain about luck in the near future because I sucked out on the river twice when the odds were very much against me and I was all-in as the short stack. I only managed one kill in the game and let Michael do the dirty work for me. As is always the case I will be the first one out next week--the poker gods will ensure it. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Friday: June 02, 2006 - Restful Friday I got an email from one of my handful of friends from high school, Emily. Although I thought I would never speak to anyone from there again I found it easy to get back into the gossip of things--whose bald, gay, married, ugly, whatever. I took comfort in the fact that now I know I'm not the only person from my class without 400 googley-eyed children, some sort of hipster spouse and wasting a graduate degree. After coming in early and staying late at work throughout the week I finally got to cash in my extra 90 minutes to meet with my new freelance client, The Bronzes (as I will affectionately refer to them). They're nice and liberal with an intense hatred of our president. It's a match made in heaven. In other news my plans of going to bed early before my karate test were foiled by the Cubs who insisted they play 14 full innings before beating the Cardinals. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Saturday: June 03, 2006 - Happy Birthday Mom! Not surprisingly both christine and I both passed our orange belt test. I thought it was easier than the yellow belt test but I still required a pretty hearty nap afterwards. I got some little frames to put my certificates of acheivement in. I don't have any of my tens of degrees up but I knew I'd get those--I would have never thought I would actually be able to pass karate tests so those get the key display sites on my office wall, next to the weird picture I got in Uruguay that cost something like $300 to get framed once I got back. After my nap I met up with chris for a very quick coffee before I went over to marty's house for NBA Jam Night... [Comments: 4]· permalink · · ·

Sunday: June 04, 2006 - NBA JAM (Part II) ...I got to marty's house around 8:30pm and immediately settled in playing NBA Jam. I (SEX) was paired with Ian (EEN) against tchris (CXE) and Marty (DRB). I don't think I have Marty's three-letter-SNES-name right but I'm sure he'll correct me. We played with this setup for about an hour and Ian and I kicked some serious ass. Around 9:30 or so michael showed up and took Ian's place. It was Michael's first time but he learned quickly and we were still able to stick to Theory-Marty for the most part. After a couple hours it was time for Michael to go home and for the rest of us to break out the cheat-codes. To answer one of life's most eternal questions: Could Jazzy Jeff and Will Smith beat Bill Clinton and Alonzo Morning? -- the answer is yes. In a cruel twist of fate Alonzo Morning was the odd-man out and played like it. Heavy D and Price Charles were no match for Hillary though and she was able to redeem the Clinton name. We ended the night with some Primal Rage, a game I unfortunately did not grow up with and Marty handed me my dinosaur ass numerous times.

On Sunday-day I met up with the Brinkmeyers for lunch to celebrate jamie's birthday a week early. We went to Food Glorious Food and I had the a la carte breakfast. After hitting her mom's house for a single present we ran some errands and I went home and napped. I woke up again around 8pm and worked on my freelance law firm's website before officially retiring around 2am. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Monday: June 05, 2006 - Cranky Panky Ok, maybe it's just me. I doubt it though. Everyone at work has been secretly cranky the past couple weeks--really since about the end of the first week of May. For the most part a positive front is offered but we're all pretty transparent people so I don't think there's any denying it. I can't (won't) speculate as to the reasons as my blog is sometimes glanced at as a source of news, but it feels as though everyone is just below the surface of yelling. Not that we're not getting along (I think)--we are. I'm not sure if it's personal stuff or if it's some sort of bacteria in the daily Starbucks but it's something. On a lighter note, I inherited a new client yesterday from RD. This woman owns a Stenographer-By-Proxy site. Honestly, the site is a total mess but after only one day of doing things for her I don't feel I have the rapport to tell her that it would make everyone's life a lot easier if she let me rewrite the whole thing in PHP. The site is about 30 pages yet takes up almost 200MB of space. Come on. There's not even a backend unless you count the CGI form mailer. Just FYI: if you're working in CGI most FTP programs don't upload the files as ASCII which causes them to mess up once they're uploaded and will give you a 500 Internal Server Error. Make sure you have the *.cgi in the "Do Not Send As Binary" list. I just about had a heart attack last night when my changes were crashing.

Ricky and Tami have a new blog and, get this, they're actually writing in it. Tami is the latest casualty to Alexadex. You'll notice I've stopped keeping track of my daily score. I've done this because the updates are so erratic that there's no point trying to keep up with it. The novelty is wearing off after two seasons and if I weren't in the Top Ten right now (qualifying for my T-Shirt) I'd stop playing all together. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Tuesday: June 06, 2006 - Could it be...Satan? I don't see what the big to-do is over 666. As Brian pointed out on May 6th of last year, the Devil's Number might not even be 666 but 616. It's too bad evil things don't come pre-marked with 666 (616)--that would save a lot of time throughout a day. You're at the store--why waste time with a cashier who has the 616 stamp? Or the co-worker?

Tonight was our first day of being an orange belt in karate. I've liked the first "new day" in the past because you're pretty tired of doing all the old stuff after two months and you finally get to learn something new. However, I forgot how retarded you feel making your body do new and strange things. Additionally I hate how the instructors make you feel when you screw things up--it's your first day doing it!

I must note that, for the very first time, I kicked someone in the face. "Wow" you think. What I told you that the person I kicked was christine and that she had just taken me down? And I was lying on the floor when I did it. On accident. Still impressed? [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Wednesday: June 07, 2006 - Go Panthers Last night, before leaving for trivia, I got a call from Don, a friend of mine from college. I hadn't really talked with Don since 2003 when jamie and I took a visit to Die Frauland. I didn't recognize the number and when I asked who it was he only said, "The greatest NBA Jam player of all-time". I don't know what's more sad--that he actually is or that I immediately knew who it was. It was also weird since I had just played NBA Jam a week ago after a two year pause. Apparently one of our other friends, Dave, had been trying to reach me to help out with some book they're publishing through Hal Leonard. Unfortunately my phone ran out of battery before I could get any more details so I left for trivia.

We set an all-time low in trivia finishing in 7th. We didn't do very well in the Current Events category since it was only Jamie, chris and me and none of us had enough time to pay attention to the news this week. Chris did really well in the Hanna-Barbara Cartoon Round and we did surprisingly well in the Explorers category. Alas, you can't win (finish 5th) every time. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Thursday: June 08, 2006 - Split Pot Something unusual happened last night between Janine, Ricky and jamie. Janine was all-in. Ricky and Jamie both call. They flip the cards and both Jamie and Ricky have a straight to the Ace. Janine has three of a kind. So Janine is out clearly but Ricky and Jamie have the same hand. The question is: who gets the kill? Jamie was awarded the kill based solely on the fact in a one-card game of Hi-Lo she had the higher card, despite making an enormous to-do over how her card would never ever win. On the other hand Ricky took it like a man and gave up his kill over Janine.

Tonight we learned the Crane Kenpo and I think if I can get it down it will be my attack of choice. It's made for tall, skinny people that probably have a better chance of winning a fight by keeping some distance between them and the attacker. The "Crane" comes from your two hands "flapping" (I'm not sure if my instructor actually said flapping or slapping [with a lisp]) into the midsection of the other person. As usual with learning the new attacks one of the black belts demonstrated it on each of us so we'd know how it feels. And it feels like a lightining bolt was sent through your groin, up into your shoulder and back down and out through your kidney. Awesome. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Weekend: June 11, 2006 - Irish Pub On Saturday we celebrated jamie's 23^rd birthday at the Irish Pub. I'm not sure I could rattle off the whole list but essentially everyone we knew in Tallahassee was able to come. There was...Ricky, Tami, Tami's brother _____ and his girlfriend, _____, marty, Leather Hat Man, Leather Hat Man's girlfriend, pchris, elena, Tim, chris, michael and Kevin. Is that it? Did I get everyone? Tim, Ricky and I shot pool most of the time and weren't doing too badly until all the Sluts and the Guys Who Do Sluts showed up doing their best impression of roaches swarming in my kitchen. Fortunately no fights broke out (fortunately?) and I didn't have to clean puke off my neighbor's car (see Jamie's party last year) so all and all it was pretty good.

On Sunday I kept holy the sabbath and did nothing like the bible instructed me. Late in the evening Chris came over and Michael kidnapped Jamie to go to Brothers for 80's Night. Chris was kind enough to bring The Bone Collector and some Frownie Brownies but that's a story for another time. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Monday: June 12, 2006 - Hurricane Alberto Well that was much ado about nothing. After I went through all the work of bringing my bug-laden plants inside and digging out my hurricane supply tub we got about .5" of rain. As with most hurricanes aimed directly at Tallahassee, the patented CH(mo)PS (Chompy's Hurricane Prevention System) worked again. Hurricanes are clearly too afraid of my dog to strike Tallahassee so they veer off course striking more desirable targets despite initial paths at my home. Those hurricanes are big talkers when they're out in the Atlantic. "Ooh, this will be the year we take Chompy down" they whisper to themselves. They build up some courage and plot their charts straight at Tallahassee and set out. Suddenly once they're in the Gulf of Mexico they realize how scared they are and divert to hit a place that is Chompy-free.

So yeah, we're fine. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Tuesday: June 13, 2006 - Froggy Style If you are under 18 I would strongly suggest diverting your eyes. There are about 15 frogs in the lake outside our office having a massive gangbang. They are so loud that I can easily hear them from my desk despite the pond being on the other side of the building. In case you've never heard the Generic Frog of Florida's mating call it is so obnoxious it is making me sick to my stomach. It's kind of like a bass cricket with a microphone strapped to it. Times 15.

I ditched karate last night because I wasn't in the mood to learn and I remember how much I hated it when students showed up for my class who didn't want to be there. I worked until around 2:30am on a couple new sites I'm freelancing and man, I am tired. Because Chompy doesn't like to go out in the rain I'm not sure if she peed at all yesterday although I didn't find any puddles and she was physically outside no less than a dozen times. Stupid Florida. [Comments: 2]· permalink · · ·

Wednesday: June 14, 2006 - Intelligent Design Here are some reasons I just can't believe in Intelligent Design. First of all, we can't give ourselves a backrub. Surely God would have realized if we were doing anything during the day our shoulders/neck would have the possibility of getting sore--yet we can't rub our own. Just raising your arms makes it impossible to relax the muscles you need. Secondly, why do I, along with countless other men, have nipples? Ain't no babies hanging off our teats trying to suckle any man-milk up in here. Did we ever have any use for them? I guess the counterargument for intelligent design is that our circulatory system is pretty complex and was probably not just developed out of toilet paper rolls and tape as originally hypothesized by Darwin. All I know is my neck hurts from sleeping weird last night and I can't rub it. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Thursday: June 15, 2006 - Who Needs Music That Badly? Seriously, who needs to listen to U2 or Dave Matthews Band SO badly they can't wait until they've finished taking a dump? Not me. Who the HELL would buy this? As if I'm even going to carry my iPod into my bathroom. I would guess about half the people I know have somehow dropped their cell phones into a toilet. And odds are if I was sitting there listening to music THEN dropped my black and silver device into the bowel-bowels odds are they'd have a few cellmates (if you know what I'm saying) and sure as hell am not fishing out the iPod from my toilet while having to go through a fecal obstacle course.

Although I won't update it until I have the pictures, tchris won poker again last night. It seems as though winning comes in streaks and he's hot right now so if you weren't there last night (jamie, Ricky and Kevin) you didn't miss anything except a whomping. Matt Flynn came by for a while and it was good to see him. Jamie comes back from Orlando tomorrow and it appears she is still having serious problems with her supervisor. I bet she quits! [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Weekend: June 18, 2006 - Lost This weekend jamie and I become the last two Americans to finally watch Lost. We've seen the first eight episodes and frankly I don't understand what all the fuss is about. Yes, there are a lot of unanswered questions and the show has definitely gotten better with each passing episode but the first two or three just weren't very good. They were dull. There were lots of things that were just flat-out impossible. I'm willing to give the whole first season a chance before I pass final judgment but I just don't see what all the fuss is about. Thank God they got to peoples' back stories or else I probably would have fallen asleep by the third episode.

I moved all the crap from my old computers onto my backup hard drive over the weekend so I can now get rid of them. One I had since undergrad and the other brian gave me as he was graduating. My computer will be going to some underfunded school in Quincy and Brian's computer will be going to Jamie's job so rape victims can learn Access between counseling sessions.

And one last thing--how did the dog get out of its cage? [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Monday: June 19, 2006 - Alexadex Cheating I am so pissed with Alexadex. It's been down, essentially, for over a week. And while in that time I made $5m everyone around me made about $40m-$80m. I got absolutely killed on stocks that I couldn't log in to sell in time and now I'm in serious danger of falling out of the top ten. Adding insult to injury yesterday was the guy who is now in 7th totally cheated. I've railed against people calling others cheaters so I guess I'm a hypocrite but still. If you trade during the updates you're the worst kind of scum. If I find him I'll totally beat his foreign ass. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Wednesday: June 21, 2006 - Quotes Revealed I hope everyone enjoyed the Quote Game yesterday. The answers are all at the bottom of this post so you can go "oooh, how did I miss that one" or "he would never say that". jamie and I cranked out six episodes of Lost last night. We now only have six left in Season 1. Last night we were introduced to the "magic" number. Being OCD about things I looked up to see what other people have said about the set of numbers online and man, people are retarded. One site lists all the references to those numbers: They have 4 guns on the island. We have seen them eat 16 mangos, etc. Retarded stuff. So I figured I would take a look at my own life and see how those numbers relate to me:
4: I need corrective lenses and until I was eighteen people could have called me Four-Eyes.
8: There are Eight tropical fish in the aquarium in my bedroom.
15: There are Fifteen pre-black belt self-defenses in kenpo.
16: These numbers are found in the last four digits of my cell phone number ***-***-0162.
23: The number on the jersey I wore when I played on the Theory/Comp basketball team was 23.
42: I am on a path to win poker 42 times this year.

Weirdy!! It's like these numbers have some great significance in my life and *I* should be on Season 3! Ladies and gentlemen, consider this my first "tag". I hereby tag: brian, jamie, Ricky and Tami, christine and pchris to do an entry on how those numbers relate to their personal lives!

Answers:
1) marty
2) elena
3) Ricky and Tami
4) chris
5) brian
6) mark
7) tchris
8) jamie
9) pchris
10) sunshine
[Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Thursday: June 22, 2006 - Dog Chop Last night I dealt my first real crippling blow in karate. It was to this guy on the local high school football team. In honor of Matt Flynn we simply call him "Chach". He's the kind of guy that is I'm sure extremely popular and all the little high school girls are begging for his seed. If I were ten years younger I'm not sure if he would beat me up or not even notice me. Last night we were practicing our knife defenses "full out' and the nicest way I can say it is: his wrist had an unfortunate meeting with my "block bone". He dropped the wooden knife immediately (I didn't even get to spin it around and implant it firmly in his loins) and grabbed his now-technicolor wrist. He said "it was cool" but I could clearly see it was not. The weird part is that after the intial impact of our hands smacking together I felt great. (I fought my urge to say, "Well, if it's any consolation I feel fine.") I know there should be a little part of me that's happy about what happened but really I just feel bad although it's nice to know the blocks work--I doubt I would attacked by anyone bigger/stronger than Chach so that eases my mind the block really do...well, block.

The second smack-down of the night came in poker where I gave jamie a Tiger Mouth A/Q to face and ended the longest weeknight game over poker since the days of Ricky and I sitting around by ourselves. Ian, Rene and tchris's Amy came. Ian and Rene add a hyper-aggressive element to the game and that makes me nervous. I know they (especially Rene) likes to play that way so I figured if I could lay traps for her and get a bunch of chips. It worked the first couple times and I took some massive early pots but she kept it up and eventually got them back. Keeping with poker tradition the back-to-back winner (T-Chris) was the first out followed by Rene, Ian and Jamie. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Weekend: June 25, 2006 - Lostathon Ok, I'm addicted to Lost. jamie and I watched probably a dozen episodes over the weekend and we are now comfortably in the middle of Season 2. We have now met all of the plane's survivors (we think) and amongst them is someone from one of my favorite shows of all-time--Oz. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje is Mr. Eko (and was Adebisi on Oz) and is even more crazy on Lost than he was on Oz. Man, those cats from Oz are everywhere although most of them have migrated to SVU: Everynight. Anyway, that was my weekend.

I gave both dogs a bath. That was awesome. Let's see...what else...we have Lost Numbers Tag Replies from brian, pchris and Christine but we're still waiting on Ricky and Tami and jamie. I feel like something exciting happened over the weekend that I need to write about but no, not a whole heck of a lot. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Monday: June 26, 2006 - Landlording I'd hate to be a landlord. The only good thing about it is the name--Land Lord. It's kind of like Web Master but even more powerful. You would think the term landlord would have been replaced by something a little more PC but no, we're still stuck with it. The reason I don't think I'd make a good landlord is because I don't like surprises and you're guaranteed to get surpised as a landlord. Every time someone moves out...Surprise! 14 sets of kittens were birthed in your oven! Surprise! Someone tried to perform surgery on himself in the walk-in closet. Surprise! Someone left their kid shackled to the fence in the backyard for a few months and now there are fence-climbing wolves tearing at her arms. I guess the upside is that given enough time you can single handedly own anything without having to make real payments on it. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Tuesday: June 27, 2006 - The Party is Over Alexadex ended Season 4 today and I finished in the worst possible place--11th. That means I wasted the most time out of anyone who didn't get a T-Shirt. jamie finished #18 so naturally I will blame her for taking millions of dollars from me in stocks I normally would have bought. I'm just kidding honey! I don't think I'll play next season because I can't control my OCD enough to play just a little each day. I'll tell you this though--next season I'm cheating. I played 100% by the book the season keeping my programming prowess in check. However if other people are going to write scripts to find and buy sites I will do the same. I don't think the vast majority of peole are cheating. In fact I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who outright cheats (buys stocks automatically) but surely there are people running databases and scraping sites. I think it's fine. I can't help but notice the only people that were ever vocal about cheating were ones who never had any money and were ranked in the 1000s. Who cares? I can tell you with full honesty I made $80m without cheating AND that the people who were "cheating" had very, very little impact on my buying. I wish people would just shut up. Yeah, shove it bitches. [Comments: 0]· permalink · · ·

Wednesday: June 28, 2006 - Oil Can Boyd What a beating. Despite having a pretty stellar group of chris, tchris, jamie, Kevin and Nina we were still pummeled in trivia last night, finishing an All-Time worst--12th. Yes, that was last place. It didn't help that the first category was Put Movies In Order Of Their Release and of those I'd only seen one--not that anyone was counting on me in any way to know anything about movies. Baseball trivia was another matter though. Both T-Chris and I are really big baseball fans and Jamie can certainly hold her own in most discussions. Unfortunately the questions were not as straightforward as I think we were hoping although we did get the nickname of Dennis ____ Boyd right. Amy's team spanked us (along with every other group but it's more humiliating when you know the other team)--even on the baseball. It DOUBLY didn't help the last two categories were famous dates and Stephen King trivia. How about David Sedaris trivia? [Comments: 63]· permalink · · ·