It's about time.

I read this somewhere, and damn it... I identify with it so insanely much.

"This is a tribute to the nice guys. The nice guys that finish last, that never become more than friends, that endure hours of whining and bitching about what assholes guys are, while disproving the very point. This is dedicated to those guys who always provide a shoulder to lean on but restrain themselves to tentative hugs, those guys who hold open doors and give reassuring pats on the back and sit patiently outside the changing room at department stores. This is in honor of the guys that obligingly reiterate how cute/beautiful/smart/funny/sexy their female friends are at the appropriate moment, because they know most girls need that litany of support. This is in honor of the guys with open minds, with laid-back attitudes, with honest concern. This is in honor of the guys who respect a girl’s every facet, from her privacy to her theology to her clothing style.

This is for the guys who escort their drunk, bewildered female friends back from parties and never take advantage once they’re at her door, for the guys who accompany girls to bars as buffers against the rest of the creepy male population, for the guys who know a girl is fishing for compliments but give them out anyway, for the guys who always play by the rules in a game where the rules favor cheaters, for the guys who are accredited as boyfriend material but somehow don’t end up being boyfriends, for all the nice guys who are overlooked, underestimated, and unappreciated, for all the nice guys who are manipulated, misled, and unjustly abandoned, this is for you.

I propose a toast to all the nice guys. You know who you are, and I know you’re sick of hearing yourself described as ubiquitously nice. But the truth of the matter is, the world needs your patience in the department store, your holding open of doors, your party escorting services, your propensity to be a sucker for a pretty smile. For all the crazy, insane, absurd things you tolerate, for all the situations where you are the faceless, nameless hero, my accolades, my acknowledgement, and my gratitude go out to you. You do have credibility in this society, and your well deserved vindication is coming."

Fatty McGee

Okay, today I began my quest to lose the weight I put back on after I lost all the weight about 7 years ago.  Holy crap, it HAS been that long.  Anyway, I am committing to it for reals this time.  I am helping myself toward making that goal by actually stating that I am doing it, thus my brain should make me stick to it since I have pride at stake here.  I also shaved off my wannabe goatee, mainly because it was giving me the false image of thinking I was thinner than I really am.  It kinda hid from a straight forward perspective some of the ungodly extra neck fat I have going on there, and if the goatee is not there, then I will have to deal with the real image of what I look like, and hopefully drive me even more to stay with my plan.  I am attempting (for the nth time) the things that worked in the past, with a few alterations.

Most that know me have heard me tell of my Healthy Choice Soup/turkey sandwich/Pepsi One diet.  Well, I am doing it again, mainly because it worked that one time, and the food was tasty enough to handle having pretty much the same thing all the time.  I am not doing the Pepsi One part of it however, it will be replaced with water, and possibly every once in awhile a Diet Sunkist (which, by the way is actually pretty darn tasty!)  I also am going to be taking Centrum supplement pills to make up for the fact that I don’t think Healthy Choice/turkey sandwiches give me the nutrients I should have in a day.  Also, I plan on eating breakfast fairly regularly, although I need to find a good cereal to go with.  I tried some Grape Nuts, and it was pretty bland… I was having trouble making it through a 1/2 cup of the stuff.  I’ll try some different ones later on.

I will also be doing excercises, starting slowly of course, with some push ups and sit ups every night and morning.  I used to be able to get about 50 of each off after I got into the habit, and plan on doing that again if possible.  Also, I hope to be able to do my standing on my head push ups again too… those were fun and made me feel good about myself at the same time.

Anyway, I weighed myself today… at the 219lbs mark, at a height of roughly 5’8”.  My BMI for that would be 33.3, which according to the scientific scale is 3.3 points over OBESE.  Yeah, I am losing this shit, for fucking real, I NEED to.  Crazily enough I am shooting for 165–160, about 10–15lbs lighter than I made it last time.  I will be updating this fairly regularly, and I wish I could hope for fast results, but I am prepared for the long haul.  I am looking at 6+ months to see any significant change, and plan on doing it as long as it takes.  I also took pictures of myself today for some before shots, which I will look at to give myself more incentive as well.  They will NOT be posted anytime soon, if nothing more than because of the graphic content they contain.  WHEN(not if) I hit my goal, I will more than likely post them side by side to compare what I look like now with what I WILL look like then.

Anyway, enough of that… just needed to throw it out there.  I know there will be naysayers, and people that think I will not do it.  But FUCK IT.  It is happening, and it is for good this time.

No one cares but me.

Okay, seriously… this is good news in my opinion.  Sprint bought out craptacular Ubiquitel!  That is the shitty affiliate that owned the Sprint network in this area and others… basically what it means though(hopefully) is that I will soon have access to unlimited roaming with my Sprint, instead of the crappy $5/mo for 50 roaming minutes!  Woot.  Anyway, I am fairly happy with this news, so I had to post about it.  Also, I like to have a readily available link somewhere easy to find.

Full Story:

http://www.cellular-news.com/story/17053.php

Sorry on a video kick...

Dear lord.

http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=1863

Oh yeah, and of course...

Garbage Day!!!

http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=600

Wow.

If you have broadband, and about 5 minutes to kill, this is one of the best ways to do it.

http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=1676

Drunken Bastard.

Okay, previously I have told most that know me, that I got drunk for the first time a little over a year ago.  This first time was when I was at Linton, and was 1 or 2 days after I had stepped down as manager of the Photo Lab there.  I was at a little get together with a couple of girls from the lab I had worked with, and some other guy who was one of their friends.  Normally, everyone who knows me understands that if it tastes like alcohol, I am not going to enjoy it.  I have tried multiple things and it always ends up being fairly nasty.  When at this get together though, they had me try some Southern Comfort.  As usual, I assumed I would hate it, and that would be the end.  However, due to wanting one of the girls to like me, and my normal “try it once” stance on drinks, I gave it a try.  I took a shot, having a Sprite handy to wash away the nasty if need be.  Surprisingly enough, it wasn’t bad, and I kind of liked it.  It burnt like all of hell going down, and my eyes watered but all in all it was okay.  Fast forward 5 shots later in about 45 minutes to an hour, and I was slightly drunk for the first time in my life.  I thought nothing of it, and was fairly surprised that I wasn’t more drunk, seeing as how I should have very little tolerance for alcohol.  Since then, Southern Comfort has been my alcohol of choice if I am going to do any drinking, and has only happened on a handful of social occasions since then.  I never did get drunk after that first night, until LAST Friday night.

While over at Evan’s house, he and Kade decided they were going to drink a bit that night so we went to Big Red Liquors in Bloomington.  Kade bought some vanilla vodka stuff, and a 4–pack of some chocolate beer crap.  Out of impulse, I decided since I wouldn’t be driving anywhere, I would get in on the fun so I bought a bottle of Southern Comfort.  Later that night, the drinking began… and I kept with the idea that 6 shots generally would get me to the drunk point.  So I took my first shot, and the usual warmth began.  About 2 minutes later, I went for my second shot and about 2 minutes later I was feeling somewhat like I did after the fourth or fifth shot when in Linton.  I got kind of intrigued at that point, but was going to do at least my 6 shot limit just out of principle.  By the sixth shot, I was well into drunkeness… but still had my mind about me, but was doing my normal laughing at nothing thing, and so on and so forth.  I kept wanting to push it further, however so I went for shot 7.  Evan and Kade kept telling me to slow down, and for the most part I listened but kept wanting to do another shot… so I kept bugging them waiting to do more.  I did my eighth shot and then my ninth in about a 15 minute span, at which point they decided that should be it for me.  I pretty much was good for being done at that point too, since I remember what happened after that, but it was definitely not normal Damien behavior.  I know I continued my laughing fits, I helped Kade get a ringtone to his phone, I was on the floor rolling around laughing for a bit, I fell over the couch onto my head and almost flipped over, and I am sure quite a few other funny things as well.  After the fact, I believe I drank about 3/4 of the Southern Comfort bottle by myself, in about the span of 2–2 1/2 hours.  I did not feel sick in the least, but was getting tired, so I decided to fall asleep on the couch.  Evan and Kade suggested I drink some water before sleep, to keep me hydrated, and to sleep on my side in case of sleep-vomiting or some such thing.  I did both of those things, and was fairly confident I would be okay in the morning.  Yeah.

Fast forward to the morning, after a fairly decent sleep (as decent as I can sleep on a couch with no cover or real pillows.)  I wake up at about 8:00am or so, and am feeling pretty good… no headache or anything, or nausea.  I do have to go the bathroom pretty bad, so I go in there and do the business, but otherwise am fine.  Kade and Amanda get up shortly after I get out of the bathroom, and we stay up for a few hours, but since Evan and his Amanda haven’t gotten up, end up falling back asleep around 10:00am or so.  I do notice during the time I am awake that I am feeling somewhat odd, but still nothing really bad.  When I lay back down around 10 to fall back asleep, I start getting a slight headache, and when I close my eyes, everything feels like it is spinning.  I remember Kade saying something about it the night before, as being a sign that you are going to throw up.  I am really hoping it isn’t going to happen, and try to fall asleep.  About 1/2 hour later, Evan gets up, and I wake up enough to realize that YES, I am going to throw up.  I tell Evan this, and go outside, but he says he would rather have me do it in the bathroom.  I rush in there, and sure enough… the little bit of White Castle, and some Diet Coke that I sipped on that morning comes up.  The rest of the day, until we ate I was feeling nauseous off and on, and even now as I am writing this, I am still feeling a LITTLE of it.

Moral of THIS story.  I don’t think I will EVER drink that much again.  The brief bit of fun being that drunk, really doesn’t seem as worth it in comparison for the HORRIBLE day I had afterwards.  If I do drink anywhere near that again, I believe I am going to stay at my 6 shot limit, and be done with it.  I seriously can’t believe that I drank that much, and had to deal with a hangover like that.  The thing that makes me wonder is that some people do this on a daily basis.  I don’t know if you just get used to the hangover crap or what, but how can it ever be worth it to get THAT drunk THAT often?  Oi.  Anyway, I just had to get this down so I can have a record of it… I am going to bed now, in my OWN bed, and I hope that I will have a good night of sleep and wake up feeling actually good in the morning.

Accepted!

Woot.  Well, I know it has been forever since an update, but I really didn’t have anything interesting enough to update with.  Anyway, the big news is that I was accepted to Indiana University!  It pretty much rules I suppose… although who knows if I can actually go back to book learnin’ again.  Kade and Amanda were also accepted, so everything is good on that front, and the move to Bloomington will happen in a few months.

On a secondary note, I built a nice new computer, which I am quite enjoying.  It is a P4 3.4ghz, 1gb ram, a HUGE 400gb SATA hard drive, and a NVIDIA GeForce 7800GTX PCI-Express 16x video card.  I salvaged the Audigy 2 and DVD +/– RW from the old computer, but it is still running in the other room.  I was fairly impressed with myself, it turned on and ran perfectly on the first boot!  Anyone who has ever built a computer will understand that everything working great the first time is a fairly rare occurence.  I did have to work around it a bit though when installing XP, being as how the pre-Service Pack 2 XP doesn’t support SATA or PCI-Express… so I had to “slipstream” the SP2 onto my XP Home disk.  It was actually pretty cool, and surprises me that Microsoft allows something like that to be done, and not force you to purchase a new XP disk or something like that… so I now have a new copy of Home with SP2 already on it.  An interesting note, this computer does not have a floppy drive at all.  I decided I never use floppies anymore, so I wouldn’t even bother this time.  More than likely though, something will come up that will require one and I will have to open my case up and slap one in there eventually.

Well, thats all I really have for now, for those that read me, I hope it tides you over till something else equally boring happens.

Woman Allegedly Tries to Buy Pot From Cops

WTF... if this is real, there is something MAJORLY wrong with the world. How freaking moronically stupid can you be!?

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Honestly, Opera... WTF

Okay, I have tried Opera many times in the past... given it so many chances to replace my browsing experience... but it has never stuck. The main reason being, is that no matter what I do, certain pages I go to will NOT work with it. My blog here for example... in Opera, the new technology preview, my flickr badge on the right hand side will not work. It is a simple flash app, and works in Firefox, and IE... but not Opera. That is a small misgiving, but quite a few other pages that I visit have problems with it too... either they display incorrectly, or they give me a message that says "Use a standard browser like Mozilla or IE." I have even tried making Opera identify itself as IE or Mozilla, but still no go. Now honestly, all I want is a browser that can truly replace IE. Firefox comes VERY close, being that it has extensions that allow IE pages to be viewed directly in Firefox if it can't display it correctly. Opera has so many cool features that I like, the full page zoom ability, and the fit to screen width ability, among others... but no matter what I do, there are always pages that can't display correctly inside it, so I have to fall back on Firefox. Why, Opera, why can't you just freaking work!?

The Joy of Free

Okay, I re-found some things I should have been using for a long while.  The first of which is a nice image manipulation program, The Gimp.  I haven’t messed with it much, but Ian always raved about it, and I think in time I will grow to love it.  I don’t know how much more powerful Photoshop is, but I don’t know if it would ever be worth the price they ask for it.  The Gimp seems to be pretty powerful, so I can do some basics at first, and maybe be all spiffy and eventually learn to create interesting things and make my blog look truly my own.

The second program(s) would be OpenOffice.  I have had versions of Microsoft Office on my computer for most of my life since college began… and I always hated how I had to have “student” editions or something, because the “real” Office cost 600 bucks or something.  OpenOffice seems to be really nice, and it has (from what I can tell) most of the features that Microsoft Office has.  It has it’s own versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, among others.  One cool thing I noticed, is most of the programs in OOo have the ability to export files to PDF so you can have perfect renditions of your documents.  Quite neat, imo.

The point of this post would simply be, if you are looking for nice alternatives to the insanely expensive programs out there, and are not Ian (who already knew of them long ago), then try out these free ones.  It is amazing what open source can do.  ^_^

Dark Tower Comics

Apparently Stephen King will be working with Marvel to produce a comic based on his Dark Tower series of books.  For those of you that don’t know what it is, Kade got me into them awhile back, and they are a GREAT series of books.  I am on the last one right now, and have enjoyed them all the way through… except for Wolves of the Calla… it was boring in parts.  Anyway, take a look at the link for more info and some artwork from it.

Stephen King and Marvel Join Forces

BTW, in response for Kade getting me to try the Dark Tower series, I got him to read Harry Potter, and he now knows how awesome THEY are… so it was a fair trade off.  ^_^

For all the old schoolers out there.

Mr. Graves sent me this picture from back in the day... seems he is in the process of making all his slides digital, and thought that I would be interested in this... which I was. Without further ado, I present... Super Scrub!

Observation.

Why is it all myspace pages look like web pages from the mid 90’s?  I mean seriously, flashing text, hard to read dark text on dark backgrounds, or bright text on bright backgrounds.  Tables everywhere, and just the UGLIEST crap I have really ever seen… for the most part.  I really am surprised there isn’t a black & yellow striped bar across the top, middle, and bottom of the page that says “Under Construction” and a banner that says “GET MOSAIC NOW” or something.  I am glad I am not someone who actually designs pages, I can only imagine how pissed off a person could get knowing that a place like that is so insanely popular even though it has to be the WORST example of HTML design ever.  BTW, I am purposely NOT linking to myspace in this post, to further show my dislike of it’s ugliness.

Nooooooooo!

Why is it always the “Nice Guy”? :(

Chris Penn is dead.

Non-useless PSP?

Holy craptacular crapstack.  My PSP might just have to come into use for the first time!  They are re-releasing Mega Man X, on it… with new graphics, and story!  O_o I don’t even know what to think… my PSP has been nothing but an ugly paperweight/emulator so far!

Mega Man X: Maverick Hunter Preview

Browse the web on almost any mobile phone: Opera Mini released worldwide!

"Opera Software today announced the worldwide release of Opera Mini, the full Web browser that runs on almost every mobile phone, including low- and mid-end handsets. Today's global launch follows the trials of Opera Mini in the Nordics and in Germany during the fall of 2005, which resulted in a user base of over one million people."

Read: Oh hell yes.

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Get Internet Explorer!

HI-Larious. Check out the link... it is worth it. ^_^

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Garfield!

This thing is pretty neat.  If you are bored and like randomness, take a look.

Garfield Strip Randomizer

For whom the Belle tolls.

Space is off limits for me for now… not because of what you said, but where I stand.  Your Chemical Smile infects me, still.  You have found your Brand New Skin, why can’t I?

Cingular to be branded as AT&T

Well its a damn good thing RadioShack just switched over to Cingular recently, because HAPPY JOY it means all new signing and colors... AGAIN. Wow is all I can say.

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Vatican says 'Intelligent Design' is Not Science and Creates Confusion!

Bwahahaha. I wonder if the Church of FSM will denounce itself as a science soon too?

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Crazy MS Paint Image

Wow, some guy made this image using just MS Paint. It's sad, yet amazing at the same time. The guy has to be some sort of insane to waste that much time with just paint.

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Get a FREE iPod Nano from TD Waterhouse

Just open a new TD Waterhouse brokerage account...


Only requirements are a $50,000 first deposit... no biggie.

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Use a Prius to power your house during a blackout

The Toyota Prius - Gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles can serve as a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) for your house. The Prius, unlike the generator, also has a battery that provides instant, UPS-like power, to your house.

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Plasma/ LCD Killer Toshiba's new SED TV's

Imagine a flat-panel TV that one-ups CRT in all-around quality. SED (Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Displayis) is here and there's no going back.

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New Network Could Compete With Cellular Phone Service

Looks like cell companies might actually have competition... eventually.

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TiVo Series 3!

Ahhhh… yes.  Time needs to speed up NOW… I need a Series 3!

Look here.

Couple of things.

Okay, nothing major, but if you look to the right, you will notice there is a nice happy TiVo link and image over there. I felt since I have a TiVo sticker on my window at home, and on the front windshield of my Prius, it was only fitting to have a nice linked one here on my blog. ^^

Secondly, I also have a Flickr account now, and my photos can be found here. Nothing exciting much there yet, nor do I promise there ever will be, BUT if you are interested in seeing ALL the photos I took of Grandma's House, feel free to take a look. I also have a few other random things in there too.

Anyway, till next time, boo yah!

Insane keyboard!

Good lord, this has got to be the coolest keyboard ever! (Yet.) I wonder if it would actually stand up to regular use well though. Meh, I might actually have to buy a non-logitech keyboard for once!

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How to pronounce GIF

Page ends the battle about how to pronounce the image format "GIF"

-I just thought this was kind of interesting.

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N o I d e a

My thoughts continue to Collide with Austin every day.  I think I am moving along, but still not to where I need to be.  The further away I go, the closer I get … strange, huh?  Why are things said in Space there one second, then gone the next?  Stranger and stranger.

Download Free CD Covers

I like to add album art to all my music now, especially since my iPod supports showing it when playing, and this site makes it pretty easy to find what you need. Google images worked pretty good too, but the images are of higher resolution in general on this site i think.

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Dreamcast Lives! Under Defeat Coming 3/23/2006

Wow... goes to show that the Dreamcast still rules, even after years of being dead... They are releasing another game for it! I just might have to get it just to have it. I knew it was a good idea to keep my DC. :)

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Indiana pushing a gaming law that's failed pretty much everywhere else

Ars has added their commentary to an Indiana state senator's attempt to push legislation that would keep children from buying violent video games. What's hilarious is that this same law has pretty much failed in every other state it's been proposed in. What's even funnier? Indiana already tried to pass similar laws in 2000 and it failed then.

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