Nobrainer’s Think Tank

I’ve roamed my way down through Charlotte and Clemson and landed in Athens for a brief period to catch some college baseball (go Beavers!) It’s been a trip full of crazy drivers, good baseball, and extremely good food (barbecue, brats, and filet mignon). I’ll add more on all that later.

Some of you may have noticed that the blog went through some upgrades lately. In addition to getting up to date with the latest WordPress software, I changed a lot of the underlying theme code in both this blog and the Sporting Gnomes. You probably won’t notice much difference with the Gnomes site, where I mostly cleaned up a bunch of loose ends. On here, however, I made a lot of changes with respect to CSS and how things loaded. Hopefully the important things will load a little faster and everything will look a bit less cluttered. Please let me know if you notice any issues or just find the changes to be unbearable.

As time and creativity permit, I think things will eventually morph into an entirely new theme. We’ll see how it goes. Got any ideas?

• I had to take the Girlfriend to the airport today. Charlottesville’s airport is tiny; I like that. I also have no idea what to do with the Girlfriend out of town, but drinking a lot of beer and not shaving seem like great ideas.
• Speaking of great ideas, stealing undies in Great Britain may earn you a spot on the sex offenders’ register. “The point of including theft is because offences such as stealing underwear from a washing line obviously has a sexual motive.” I think the trend of labeling sex offenders has officially gone too far. (I in no way support or approve of the theft of women’s underwear.)
• Firefox has been upsetting me lately. It was hanging up frequently. However, the problem seems to have really been with ForecastFox. (UPDATE: maybe it wasn’t ForecastFox. I hate that Firefox will get snagged while I can open any other browser and it will actually download the pages of my bidding.)
• Since I also just re-installed Google Desktop, I should be able to use that for all my weather related needs. Hooray!
• Firefox 2.0 seems ok. Upgrading is slightly annoying. I really wish it did a better job of importing settings from previous versions. Also, I hate that the quicksearch now doesn’t include “next” and “previous” buttons. IE7 is taking a little while to get used to, but it is definitely leaps and bounds better than IE6.
• OnRebate.com is excessively close to pissing me off. I decided to pay a 10% fee on a $55 rebate so that I could have a check mailed within 3-5 days of rebate approval. It’s been a solid week since approval and their “guarantee” looks disgustingly meaningless.
• Gawker published a list of bad blog-media clichés. If I avoid those phrases entirely, don’t expect much blogging from me for the upcoming year.
• My online Christmas shopping ground to a halt after 3 different retailers were sold out of the items I wanted from them. Gift cards for everybody this year!
• Froogle gets worse with each use. I love the wishlist feature, as it makes it easy to point my favorite gift-buyers in the right direction. It’s getting worse primarily because it too often lists a bunch of vendors I’ve never heard of and don’t want to deal with.

Well that’s enough I guess.

Oh yeah, one more:

• I found out that Steven Tyler (you know, the Aerosmith guy) has more than one daughter. One’s hot. The other looks the same except 100 pounds heavier and goth.

• UP: I went to the career fair, spoke with several interesting companies. And in the “it’s a small world category” one of the frat brothers was recruiting.
• DOWN: Frat brother could get me a plant manager/engineer job, but he warned I would be severely underpaid.
• UP: I scheduled an interview with the US patent office.
• DOWN: They prefer candidates with lower grades and low ambition.
• UP: I can be paid well enough to become ambitionless.
• DOWN: I saw a string of about 8 cars make illegal left turns and I didn’t get to hit any of them.
• UP: I sold a used book for $75.
• DOWN: On the way to the post office to ship the book, my pen leaked all over my nice shirt. I have to spend $35 on a new shirt.
• UP: I will still have $40 leftover for beer.

This weekend’s football mandated road trip will kick off in a few hours if I am so lucky. So I’ll share some random thoughts, news, and observations before I leave.

• On the downside of things, my indestructible pet fish, Boris “the Bullet Dodger” passed away over night. I guess he wasn’t so tough after all. His funeral flush was held this morning.
• I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but how’s this one: George Bush is not-only quite bright and shrewd, but is also in fact the puppet-master of the Iranian government. By helping via Iran Hezbollah, he provides a lot of extra work for American defense contractors. By playing the nuclear weapons charade, he keeps the price of oil high, which keeps him, his buddies, and a lot of other countries really happy. It also means that we’re not really in danger at all and that the global political situation is really a lot more win/win for nearly everyone.

  Or maybe not.

• Where the hell did summer go? The highs have dropped to the 60′s here and the skies have dropped I don’t even know how many inches of rain, with little expectation of an immediate slowdown. Get me out of here!
• Well I guess I am leaving in a few hours and heading southwest, so I will be getting myself out of here.
• South Carolina didn’t look impressive last night whatsoever. Their win seemed to be more related to Mississippi State losing than anything else. The Ol’ Ball Coach managed to pull out another SEC road victory, but having to rely on trick plays to get past a basement-dweller does not inspire confidence. If Clemson-USCe played today, I’d pick Clemson by 30 points.
• I talked a little football last night at my help session with a professor and some other TAs. The prof was shocked that the UVA/Pittsburgh spread was only 3 or 4 points in Pitt’s favor. I’m betting on Pitt winning big.
• Still in college football mode, bottom dwellers Temple and Buffalo played themselves to a 3-3 tie at the end of regulation. Somebody had to win and neither team seemed to know how to do it. Buffalo finally figured it out in overtime.

That is all.

Combine a slow news cycle, school work and research, with a week-long visit from TGON and there just isn’t much time left or interest for me to hate and attempt to lay waste to the shallow minds of the world.

What good have the traditional media been over, say, the last month? Not a bit really. Cheney, Plame, Katrina, rinse, repeat.

Similarly, the blogosphere is suffering a power-hangover. It has generated an over-inflated sense of self-importance. Now, when it can’t find any documents from Dan Rather to debunk, it’s left blogging just to blog, much the same way journalists will report, just to report. While during times like these the amount of spewing idiocy is at its peak, the topics of interest don’t make even make for a good discussion.

The internet has also proven to be horrible for discussion. It is little better than than a room full of people yelling “rabble rabble rabble.” To have a good discussion to you need a small group of people… but not too small. I must wonder if the ‘net is helping to equalize things, or just making it easier to find and affiliate with only those of like-mind, thus making things worse.

Soon I’m also hoping to revisit the elasticity-of-truth/truth-overshoot idea I wrote about in September. Also I want to get into a bit about Hubbert’s Peak, the peak oil theory. I’ve had some thoughts on the state of education in this country — at this point no one is making any sense. How do I address beliefs of mine that seem directly contradictory, do they actually contradict? How do you expose a person or group’s unforgivable ignorance without giving to them the attention they desire?

Either way, I’ve got some ideas that may make for interesting reading if I am able to articulate them. I suppose I’ll have to come up with something since there probably won’t be drunken adventures.

Casting call for the movie “Evan Almighty”:

On February 25 & 26, from 10am-1pm/2pm-6pm they’ll be looking for adults who can play the simple townsfolk of Crozet better than the actual simple townsfolk of Crozet. If you play your cards right, you might be “discovered,” leading to riches, fame, dissatisfaction, depression, and, ultimately, an early death fueled by a mixture of drugs and alcohol.

That line and my increasing disdain for my TV, expensive cars, and all kinds of shit made me think of this from Fight Club:

Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.

Of course the value of that line is greatly diminished since it was delivered by Brad Pitt.

Now for some real no-brainer advice:

Now, let’s take the really hard case: Even excluding debt payments, reducing your committed expenses to 60% still seems like an impossible goal. If that describes your situation, the odds are good that you’re facing one of the following problems:

# You have a more expensive home than you can afford.

# You’ve committed to car or boat payments that are larger than you can afford.

# Your children are in a private school that you can’t really afford.

# There’s just a big, ugly gap between your income and your lifestyle.

Thank you General Awareness!

Signed, Professor Chaos