Rant - Lack of Eloquence

First and foremost, I will warn you that this post is not well written. Well, as always, I will do my best to spell everything correctly and toss in the appropriate punctuation, but don't expect fine reasoning or a well-spoken wag of the finger.
Bing. You've heard of it probably. Microsoft's new search engine. They're really trying to push this out to everyone. I'm not sure if it's working for them or not, but boy are they trying. The first time it bothered me was when I saw their TV ad. A real person speaks a search query. Then they mimic the "other search engine" by rattling off a ridiculous string of nouns or phrases which are seemingly linked through poor logic. I'm sorry, but my Google searches don't resemble my click-trail on Wikipedia. When I search for "candle dipping" I don't receive "Pierce Brosnan" as one of the results (I just made that up. Clever, huh? - Please, please, please someone prove the existence of that chain in Wikipedia; 25 clicks or less preferably).
The other thing is MSN's news page.
Sorry. No.
It's not news. I don't know why I get sucked into it. It's horrible writing. Sometimes it's a catchy picture or maybe a title that I think somehow relates to my life. But I find myself reading MSN articles. Not news. Junk. Mindless, time-wasting garbage. But I find myself on that page everytime I log out of Hotmail. Sometimes I wish Hotmail was still privately owned. It was. Learned it on Wikipedia.
So they get me to read these articles and regardless of what it is, they have links pointing me to Bing. One type of article might be a series of interesting stories or facts, only half told. The other half posed as a question with a link to Bing where the question is supposedly answered. WHY NOT JUST TELL ME? I know the authors of the articles must know the answer, but why waste my time? And why does this work for Microsoft? It just sounds lazy. Imagine it in a school setting: "...then Washington began crossing the Delaware. To find out if he reached the other side and what happened if he did, please see what happened next. Actually, I might have to check that out. I'm not too clear on all the details.
That's all I got tonight. Looking back, that actually wasn't such a bad rant. We should do it again sometime.

VBlog 1 - Get to know your handhelds

Good luck, Chum

On Wednesday my friend Chum - that is, Sara - will be taking her GRE test in Iowa City. Since I live much closer to the City than she, I will be playing host to her tomorrow evening so that she won't have to drive nearly so far come Wednesday morning.
I'm really excited to have a guest. Even though in all reality this is probably how the entire evening will go:

"Wanna play cribbage?"
"Sure!"




"Well, I'm bushed. Call it a night?"
"Yep. See you in the morning."

So good luck on your test on Wednesday Chum!
Aside from that, I bought a kitchen cabinet which I will place under the piece of countertop in my kitchen that conspicuously tops nothing. I just realized that a couple of in-progress photos would have been nice right here, but I'll have to get a shot or two of the finished product. Especially once it's in place. No promises though.

Woot! I'm on Woot!

If you've never been to woot.com, I would recommend it. I go there nearly everyday because they sell one thing on their website until it sells out or until midnight. After midnight, they put another item up for sale and the cycle repeats itself.
They also have a discussion board for each item and certain notable posts get marked as quality posts and they are highlighted on the main page. In essence, that sums up what you see in the picture I posted above.
I saw the item being sold, recognized it as something I already owned, and thought that I could share my experience with the product, which I thought was worthy of a quality post, albeit in poor literary form. No more than 30 seconds after submitting my post, I see that it was indeed selected as a quality post. Wow, those Woot guys must watch their discussion boards like hawks!

Building Up to Greatness

*The following events did not take place in a single day.

So today I totally built up to awesomeness (as if I wasn't already 110% there). Check it:

I blew a tire. It didn't lose air. It lost ALL it's air. I ripped such a gaping chasm into that wocker, it was like....like... Man, it's really hard to come up with a good simile when you're rocking out to Journey.

The donut isn't anything terribly impressive, but check out the roadside assistance! I completely dig the vibes I was giving off that day.

Now this I actually saw today. Not sure if you can make it out... Any idea what that car is ahead of me?

Holy heck! That's a Viper!!!! A genuine Dodge Viper!!!!! I've never seen one in person before and here is one on the road in front of me as I'm leaving work! I wanted to pass it so I could get a nice side shot of it as I passed, but what self-respecting Viper owner allows himself to get passed by an Olds Intrigue?

To bring my day to a close, you can try to rock harder than this, but you will fail.

Yardwork? I totally didn't see this coming

I swear all I was going to do was take a picture of my rose. That's right. I'm growning a rose in front of my house. And by growing, I mean not touching it and letting it do its thing. I didn't even plant it. Came with the house.
Before I got so far as getting out the camera, all of a sudden I found myself behind my garage tearing up my large brush pile. After about half an hour of that, I checked on my rose. Still there. Then I got ambitious and started tearing off some of the dead stems on the bush. Then I got really ambitious and started doing the same on another (non-rose) bush. Long story short, I got my picture.

It smells great too!

I also have a massive hosta (funkia). Just how big is it? I took a picture with me next to it for comparison, but I didn't like how it looked, so you'll have to take my word on its size. I can assure you that the sprouts reach over my head, which peaks at about 6'1" with shoes on.

I particularly like the blooms on the hosta (funkia). I used a better camera than my Blackberry. Happy?

Meteor-ocre Shower

Wow. That was a really lame pun. Seriously. I tried coming up with better. I sat down and told myself I couldn't leave until I developed a decent joke, anecdote, or play on words. I gave up. Turns out I wasn't that cometted.
Last night I went meteor shower viewing with Kim. It was a lot of fun. The night started out great because neither of us knew where the park was where we had originally planned to meet. We gave up and met up at a park whose location we did know.
The showers are known as the Perseid Meteor Showers and occur each August. Aside from that, all I know about them is that they were apparently more spectacular on the 11th this year. Honestly, the display was kind of a letdown. I would say we were lucky if we saw a dozen shooting stars the whole night.
There were a couple of satellites in the eastern sky that reflected the sun's light from the other side of the planet just right so it looked like a burning ball of something. I took binoculars with me so I was able to track the satellites for a little while even after it was too dim to see with the naked eye. Taking those with me was a good call. For an interesting rundown of the brightness of celestial bodies, have a look at this article on Apparent Magnitude.
Despite the comets' dismal turnout, I had a great time. It was probably a good thing that more clouds rolled in and covered the sky when they did. Otherwise, we probably would have stayed much later and I would be running off of even less sleep than I am now. (Which isn't much.)