Lee.org

I got a cell phone.

Sony Ericsson T610 with a T-mobile 300 minute plan & bluetooth headset….

I ordered it on Amazon.com… it should arrive late next week.

Tal, a friend is going to work for the Dean campaign. He’s putting his job on hold and moving to Vermont for a year. That’s fine and well. But if he were REALLY comitted, he’d do this:

(Yea, I’m guessing it’s real, but I don’t know for sure.)

credits: 1, 2

Everyone holds tension in their body in different and subtle ways. This often comes out during times of heightened stress. I heard about some famous Las Vegas performer… maybe Sammy Davis Jr? Sinatra? no, … but this person is just as famous… well, he said that before -every- show he was so nervous that he threw up. That’s twice a day, 5 or 6 days a week every work day for years! It was a fact of his life.

In the past, I held a lot of my tension in my throat. When I’d get more nervous, my throat would get sore and scratchy pretty quick… which was doubly bad if I was nervous because I was speaking in front of a group. For a while, I held my tension in the back of my shoulders. That was bad for managing my chronic typing Repetitive Strain Injury. I try not to hold my tension there for fear of not being able to type. I’ve also felt that sometimes I hold my tension in my blood pressure. It’s a subtle feeling but I can sense it when I’m looking out for it. That’s obviously not a healthy thing to do.

My parents left today just two hours ago and I’ve already defecated three times. I hadn’t noticed for the past couple weeks but I apparently hold some of my tension in my bowels. There you have it; I talked about poop in my public journal.

I saw it Saturday night in the city with M&M Sprague & PPG.

What an amazing movie.
– They actually built Minas Tirith! Well, of course they didn’t physically build the whole thing… some parts only exist in a computer. But they still designed every inch of the place!
– I felt Tolkien’s “alternate psychology” so much more intensely when seeing it than when reading. (IE: Gollum and Sam are physical representations of different aspects of Frodo. Denethor represents a Tolkienian archetype)
– I’ll go so far as to say that ROTK (and the other 2 movies… especially combined) is a solid contender to replace the original Star Wars as the Zeus in the pantheon of movie greats.

My folks just got a new computer running XP Home. I’m installing stuff on it and happily noticed that the Messenger Service is turned off by default. This is the service that allows Messenger Spam. :-)

I tried doing an upgrade install on a client’s computer from XP Home to XP Pro. The Upgrade install failed miserably. Midway through, the upgrade got stuck, churning over one point and restarting. I had to install Pro from scratch. Hurumph! A few months ago, I tried doing an upgrade from 2000 Pro and had a similarly crappy experience :-(

I was at Planned Parenthood recently. I was sitting around in the waiting room reading all the literature on the walls and I came across a weirdly shaped pamphlet. Turns out, it’s a pamphlet for the Mircette birth control pill. It was oddly shaped because it had a pocket inside it with a map-looking thing in it. I idly opened the map-looking thing… and kept opening it… and kept opening it… into an 11″ x 25″ paper with itty bitty print on both sides. Yow.

I saw a pretty picture of the Mircette molecule. Some pretty charts on “Circulatory Disease Mortality Rates per 100,000 Woman-Years by Age…” You know, the usual. I was keeping it light so I kept to the charts and graphs. I came across one that… well, it’s heavy. Here it is, lifted from the Mircette page:

Do you remember your statistics? Take a look at line about male condoms. This says that if a couple uses condoms regularly as their only birth control method, they have a 14% chance of becoming parents after a year. Compare that to if they didn’t use anything at all; they’d have an 85% chance of conceiving. Said another way, you are about 1/6th as likely to conceive when using condoms. If, on the other hand, you’re on the pill, you’re somewhere between 1/170 and 1/850 times as likely to conceive.

Of course, condoms are good at preventing the spread at disease. And they are good as a “multiplier” when you use multiple birth control methods. But if all you use are condoms for birth control, then you’re playing Russian Roulette with your future.

This photo is from an CNN News report.

The caption reads: Soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division found a large cache of weapons and ammunition as well as photos that showed Tikrit residents with Saddam.

—————-

Wow, he was really packin’.
Hmm.
My sister tells me, “…but he was all alone so that means it is not him organizing the attacks on troops…”

Hmm, maybe it’s a public uprising and the people never wanted to be “liberated” after all.

Nah. That would mean that the US forces in Iraq were “invaders”, not “liberators”. That would make every American a murderer by proxy. And that can’t be true. I mean, I didn’t kill anybody, right?

I’m trying to run an FTP server off my home computer and I ran into a weird snag. Win XP’s Internet Connection Firewall doesn’t work as advertised. I’m -supposed- to be able to just check the “FTP Server” button and it’s supposed to let server traffic through. But it doesn’t. Hurumph. I don’t want to diagnose this crap so I’m going to get a little crazy and turn it off. I’m not too too worried b/c that brings me from a quadruple firewall down to a triple firewall.

This story is from a while ago but I’m just getting around to putting it in my journal.

The weirdest thing happened to me when I was installing XP on my home machine. The install CD had just copied all it’s files to my computer and it was getting ready to boot itself into XP for the first time. When it shuts down for the reboot, my UPS started beeping as if the power had gone out and it was running on battery! Well, I hadn’t touched the computer… I wasn’t even sitting at the desk when it happened. I climbed underneath and verified that all the wires were ok…. I unplugged and replugged the UPS… all the while, XP is starting up for the first time on the computer.

There was nothing I could do! The UPS believed itself to be unplugged! I’ve got about 20 minutes of power on the batteries so I took the very first opportunity to power off the computer and then power cycle the UPS. The UPS was fine after that. Totally weird.

Now consider what happened…. The UPS was connected to the computer only by a power cord… no serial cord… no USB. So how did the UPS know that XP was coming? Did XP do something horrible to the power supply? No, that’s impossible, isn’t it? Bear in mind that this has never happened in the 6 years I’ve owned the UPS and hasn’t happened since. And that it happened at the exact moment I was switching over from 2000 to XP.

Weird.

I subbed today.

I was a bad boy.

I flooded the boys room!

Yeah!

The real story isn’t nearly so anti-establishment… I was subbing at the Hackettstown Middle School (my first time this year). I went into the boys bathroom and saw that one of the toilets had some “material” in the bottom of the bowl. It looked like it had been flushed once but didn’t go all the way down. So I flushed it again. I noticed that it wasn’t going down. I saw the bowl filling up pretty quick and frowned. I think it’s totally weird how when a toilet bowl is just about to overfill, it gets closer and closer to the rim and then pauses…. like it’s deciding whether to ruin your day or not. Sometimes it proceeds, and sometimes it hovers there, just threatening you. Well, in this case, it proceeded like Niagara Falls. Woosh! The little flood took over half of the bathroom before finding its way to the urinal drains 15 feet away. This thing was cranking out like 10 gallons a minute. I banged on the mechanism and fiddled with it to try and make it stop but my efforts did nothing but get my shoes wet.

I ran into the hallway with my wet shoes, ran across the hall into a classroom and fessed up to a teacher. She told me to call the custodian on the phone. He was up in a minute to turn off the water.

I flooded the boys room.