Skip to the epilogue, as the following will just make you hate computers and people or bore you.

One of my external hard drives, or a portion of it to be more precise, decided to disappear two days ago. How’s that? No it didn’t walk away, just vanished from my desktop. The other partition, on the same drive, just sat there whistling like he knew nothing of his cohort’s whereabouts.
Well, if one partitions is there, the other must be out there, I’ll just grab my recovery program for just such an occassion and try to revive…Hey, you know where that program is, ON THE PARTITION THAT HAS VANISHED!

Fast forward past the geekery, I recover everything, but the files I was trying to copy when the drive made with the invisibility act. Well, my itunes library seems to be a bit of a mess, and possibly incomplete. Sad, but at least I didn’t lose everything. However, the partition that I saved is acting up, misbehaving and freaking me out, now. To be safe, I believe I should format it and start over tomorrow. I borrow a drive to move everything onto while I format mine. I scheduled some time in an editing suite at work, set the drives up, started the transfer, locked the door and headed off to teach my class.

Upon returning, the computer has been powered down. WTF! Someone at work let another person use the suite(during my scheduled time!) AND the idiot failed to notice that it was actually in use!

Now, my drive has a new folder on it, created when I start the computer, called “lost + found.” A nifty folder full of 40 or more numbered folders containing a file here a file there, important stuff all mixed up to hell. Color me pissed.

Epilogue

I have the Cheers theme song in my head, as I finish my rant. You see, on the day my troubles started, I had recovered most of my data and came up with a plan to reformat the drive. My day was ruined, and I was still in a panic/shock about the whole situation. Then, I played PacMan on my old PS One. As I plotted my way through the maze dodging Blinkey, the problems of my hard drive, my carrer and my finances faded away. My mission was to avoid being eaten, and if I was pushed, well, I would strike back with a power-pellet fueled vengence.
My life is complicated enough, I don’t need to play a game with an elaborate universe of characters and items. I don’t want to decipher a code, or complete a puzzle, understanding the opposite sex provides me with enough of that in the real world. No, I need to focus my energy. I need to eat dots. I need to eat them all. Maybe I’ll have some fruit too. They can’t catch me, for I am the Pac-Man.
I lost track of time, and I think I might be a year older. Avoiding the ghosts is like crack to me. I will try to eat every dot on the screen before I eat a power-pellet. I force myself to stop and go to bed. The next morning, I remember that there’s something wrong with my drive, but I don’t know what.

Oh well, what I really need to do is stay positive. I need to play Pac-man. Better yet, I need to share the love. Pac-man for everyone. Click here for a much needed distraction. Become one with the chomper. Be the power-pellet. You think you know Pac? Bring it, there’s a highscore board, prove it. Notice on the right, there is a new page called Arcade, that is where you’ll find my yellow friend in the future, until I offend someone and lose my site.

By the way, getting the highscores to work provided me with a bit of a challenge, but two beers later with the deletion of some code, it seems to work. Huh. Comment here and let me know if you have problems with it, but like I said it seems to work fine right now.

This weekend I went to the Cost Plus World Market. It’s a Pier 1 type of a store with some interesting foods and drinks from around the world, along with the furniture and knick-knacks.

The store had a stack of papasan chairs & cushions that practically reached the ceiling. It made my blood curdle, because I have never desired to build a freaking nest. Seriously, if you have one of these chairs I will not shun you and put your address on a mailing list for information on bed-wetting or scientology. That is your choice, you can like them if you want, just don’t put the thing in your living room. The chair works great in a bedroom, to pile crap in, or as cozy nest for your cat or dog. Hell, it’s a comfortable chair to sit in, relax and read a book.

However, you can’t have it in a social situation, you can’t expect someone to sit in it and have a conversation. The chair sucks them into their own world, outside the room, space and time. To have a conversation, I need to be sitting up and participating, not in the crab walk position. Once you are in the chair, you can’t talk to or hear anyone, all you see is the side of the cushion. You can try to ball yourself up in it and contort your body to try and participate, but the deep, cushiony hell folds you up into the land of papasan. I mean the chair is better suited for a gynecologist’s exam, lose the stirrups and just put some hydraulics on a papasan and cut a hole in the cushion. You probably wouldn’t feel so strange having someone examine your cave of wonder because you couldn’t see Aladdin underneath you, and you’d be off in the magical cushion land of papasan.

Truly, if I want to be social, I can’t even pull the lever and recline in a lazy-boy. Once the chair reclines, all most people can do is mumble yes, no, or huh as the lazy-boy carries you to sleepy land. Of course, I also don’t like the papasan because it is made of wicker, which no matter what, looks like it is from the seventies. Wicker is so low rent, it is the poor man’s bamboo. If you want your furniture to say, “I just went on a safari and I got bored hunting wild game, so I made myself a chair,” get some bamboo. I am not truly advocating the use of bamboo, but if I have to sit in it, I trust the bamboo.

The bamboo furniture that I have sat in is courteous enough not to announce to the room, “Hey, I think this guy swallowed an A-1 tank, somebody please switch chairs with Jumbo before he kills me!” Wicker is all about the creaking and the other terrifying noises that make even an average build person blush as they turn their head while sitting in the chair. Which made me think of the comedian, Ralphie May. I’ll let him finish this papasan rant out on a funny note.

Remember kids, wicker is evil.

Kuteykat dropped this link in my box, and I found it quite entertaining. The illustrations by Ian Murphy, like the one of Hillary, are interesting too.
A little taste:

48. Carson Daly

Charges: Otherwise too banal for derision, Daly, who cut his shmuck-teeth warming musical Similac for tweens on MTV, acted as Writer’s Guild strike breaker by returning to air without them.
Exhibit A: We didn’t know his show employed writers.
Sentence: Forced to appear nightly on The Carson Daly Show.

Many months ago, I got into a discussion about procrastination. My friends and I thought it curious that when we have something in front of us with a due date, we often ignore that thing by doing something else that isn’t time imperative. In other words, if you have to fill out your self-assessment for work, you find yourself painting the living room instead. Of course, the living room has needed some paint for months.

So, you are procrastinating when it comes to filling out the assessment, however, it’s not like you
were just sitting there watching the TV. My friends and I justify not working on the time imperative goal by doing something else productive. How can that be procrastination? We are still being productive with our time. We decided that we needed a word for this. After failing to come up with anything terribly creative, we came up with procrasturbation. One of my friends finds out that the Urban Dictionary has an entry for this word, but not our meaning. No matter, at this point, it was time to get back to work and stop procrastubating.

Procrasturbation: Avoiding a task that must be done soon by doing something else that is productive, though its finishing is not as imperative at this time.

Yesterday, I found a site that has a new word that also come close to what we were trying to explain. Procrastineering. Okay, the guy is working on his PhD, so he’s one up on us. He’s experimenting with different ways to use the Wii technology. So, I assume that he is procrastinating when it comes to time imperative goals and instead, writing programs for his Wii. The following video from the site, is very interesting and mind-boggling. Yet, I must warn you, it is nerdy. (Also, the video is using the Wii, a pathetic, cheesy Nintendo* gaming system.)

*Nintendos are used to play Mario World, Mario Brothers, Mario eats a taco, Mario takes a bubble bath, Mario the Eskimo, Mario! 22, Mario gets a job, Mario the Marionator, Mario sells shoes, Planet Mario, Mario University, Mario Universe, Mario Galaxy, Mario house, Mario bathtub, Mario sitcom, Mario Reality, Mario, Mario, Mario, Mario, Mario, Mario.

To make up for my blasphemies, I decided to post this music video. Music, is well, so-so. The animations in the background are fun, along with the lyrics.

Sure, pitting bible characters against each other is fun, after all the text is full of people mistreating each other. Yet, sometimes you want to stick it to a non-believer, and the best way to do that? Take the fight straight to their deity. Faith Fighter may lack the elegance of Bible Fight but it is terribly politically incorrect, which is right up my alley.

If you’re not into the games, no worries, I got a short video for you to watch. Prayers are answered, but as the saying goes, “be careful what you wish for.” Check the video below.

Too soon? But seriously folks…Jerry O’Connell is making fun of that Tom Cruise video that was leaked from the “You Know Who.” I don’t even want to type the name of the church because they’ll send someone to my house to kill me and take my stuffed panda. That video of Cruise has been pulled from more sites by the church than spamming fembots pulled from Myspace by Tom. O’Connell and Funny or Die have humongous balls to do this.