One would think, that the record windfall profits recorded Big Oil, they'd be willing to throw a few crumbs to the stations owners to get newer pumps. These stations are, after all, selling their gasoline.

C'mon, whaddaya say, Shell, BP, Exxon-Mobil, and Chevron? Wanna pony up .00000000001% of your enormous windfall profits and help out the people who are just barely eking out a living peddling your product? Oh, wait, I forgot: your unmitigated corporate greed dictates that you only spend money on worthless advertising campaigns paying lip-service to how you're all "going green," which we all know is a huge lie, since your lobbyists are, at this very moment, scheming new and exciting ways to coerce Congress to allow you to drill in the Alaskan wildlife zones. Theiving hypocrites.

This is insane. I'ts kind of like having to take a job at McDonalds and being forced to buy your own uniform.

I can't say Palm is innovative, but one has to admit... they are certainly persistent.

Spy photos of Palm's latest not-even-close-to-being-an-iPhone-killer, the  Treō 800w were released by Engadget.

I absolutely love my BlackBerry 8830, no question. It is without a doubt the very best phone I have ever had so far.

However, it doesn't have a camera, and I wouldn't mind ditching the bulky Canon A520 I've had to wear on my belt since I heaved my Palm Treo 700p out the window sold my Palm Treo 700p on eBay. Unfortunately, for about six months, Satan's cellular network AT&T Wireless carried the BlackBerry Curve exclusively. It didn't bother me too much; I was just so thrilled to have a smartphone that actually worked.

But now the Curve, with its 2-megapixel built-in camera, 8gb MicroSD capacity, and 3.5mm headphone jack, is finally being offered by the Verizon Wireless Bridge and Iron works.

And the price is reasonable (at $150). I'm seriously considering switching. I don't care if I have to re-up my contract for another two years. I love Verizon and would never switch anyway.

It wouldn't cost me anything--in fact, I'd probably make money on the deal; I'll have to sell my 8830 on eBay, and because a black Verizon 8830 is a very, very rare beast indeed (they're silver, unless you change the case, like I did), I'll probably get a bit more than $150 for it.

Many years ago, I went over to drskeletors place, where he showed me Rejected, a film by cartoonist Don Hertzfeldt.

I cannot remember laughing so hard in my life. I laughed so much that my ribs literally ached by the time I had to go home.

I watched Rejected again tonight on Youtube, and again nearly pissed myself laughing. I even woke up Butterfly, who yelled at me from the other room to keep it down so she could sleep (sorry, Butterfly).

Of course, almost all my memories having to do with drskeletor involve raucous laughter and warm camaraderie. I've known drskeletor about as long as I know Thyme--at last count, over 22 years.

I'll never forget the time we talked about the ribbed underwear at Mr. Subs... or "Chang's Seafood Dinery (a great place to eat... or so I've been told...)." Both of which still make me laugh out loud when I think of them today.

I wonder if he knows how much I cherish the memories of the unbelievably good times we've had together--or how much I miss him.

The Sunpass site is almost impossible to log into.

They require an account number and PIN to log onto the site, whereas just about every other site in the universe allows users to pick a username and a password. Who the hell remembers their Sunpass account number or even carries it with them?

I wanted to log in to replenish my transponder (and before you comment and say 'they can do that automatically,' thanks, I don't want them to do it automatically. I'd rather pay the bill myself when it gets low), and because I didn't have my account number, I had to call their call center at 1-888-TOLL-FLA to get it. A website should create less traffic for the call center, not more.

I already left them feedback, for what it's worth.

After the second morning in a row of being awakened at 7:00am to the sounds of T-Rex and Butterfly going at it over the Star Destroyer, I have decided that I have had enough.

bunny42 had an excellent suggestion that Butterfly and I both really dug when we read it last night, and we decided that we're going to implement it.

T-Rex has been informed that the kit is coming with me to my office, where it will be put on display as an office decoration.

Technically, I don't have to buy T-Rex anything as compensation for taking his toy--I made it very clear to him last night in no uncertain terms that I do not wish to be rudely awakened in the morning by anything having to do with that stupid toy. But because I'm a nice guy, Butterfly and I will work with him to find him a decent (yet significantly less costly) replacement.

Plus, Señior Douchebag gets a nice fat poke in the eye when T-Rex tells him what went down.

If he calls up Butterfly to bitch, I hope she blames it all on me. I don't care. I actually hope he'll be stupid enough to come over and try to do something about it, if you know what I mean.

I haven't really written a whole lot about Butterfly's ex-husband; that's because I don't have very many (read: any) nice things to say about the man--and besides, Butterfly reads my journal, and so I didn't want to talk out of school, as it were. But Butterfly recently gave me the green light to publish whatever I want about her ex in my journal, flattering or not. And rest assured, if I'm posting anything in my journal about that fucknut, you can bet your ass it won't be flattering.

I have tried--really tried--to find one redeeming quality about this asshole. He is, after all, Butterfly's kids' father, and he did take care of them--at least for a little while, anyway. But he hasn't paid but a few hundred dollars here and there in child support for the last several months, because his "business" has tanked (and I use the term "business" loosely--and I won't go into the reasons I do, at least not yet).

Nowadays, when he does manage to bring in a few bucks, he mostly uses it to buy cocaine to support his now-monster habit--and then pay whichever wolf is barking the loudest at his door. His kids, it seems, are far down on his list of payees.

Unless, of course, you count the expensive toys he lavishes upon his 5-year-old son, T-Rex.

Saturday afternoon, T-Rex comes home from his dad's house with a doozie: Lego Kit 6211, the Imperial Star Destroyer Playset.

This is $140 worth of Lego. And he's already in arrears with his child support to Butterfly to the tune of several thousand dollars. Oh, and that's not the only time he's mis-prioritized his obligations: last time he got paid, he bought T-Rex a bicycle. The time before that, a second Nintendo DS. Yes, that's right--a second one, because T-Rex he left the first one daddy bought him at home during one of his visitation weekends. Yup.

It would be nice, rather than buying T-Rex expensive toys, to maybe keep some food in the house so that when the kids go over there for visitation, they have something to eat. But no, he doesn't. And, of course, when he runs out of money, who does he come crawling around to borrow a couple of bucks for groceries and gas? You guessed it. Butterfly. What chutzpah. Of course, she says 'no.'

Meanwhile, guess who's left holding the bag with all the child-related expenses in it? You guessed it--Butterfly and I.

Y'know, Butterfly has made out in the past that her ex didn't have enough common sense or brains to fill a thimble. I beg to differ: you could take this latest toy, and the toys before it, as classic examples of passive-aggressive behavior. What person in their right mind would do such description-defying things? Someone who really wanted to get back at their ex. I'll get into the details in a bit...

Meanwhile, let me start by saying that any large-scale Lego set is not at all suitable for any child under the age of nine. Period. It even says RIGHT ON THE GODDAMN BOX: AGES 9-14.

The box was opened at the ex's house so that T-Rex could play with the minifigs. So when Butterfly got down to assembling this monstrosity, she discovered that the first half of the assembly guide (yes, it's so big that it comes in two halves) had been left at her ex's house. Fortunately, after a fashion, she found the guide online.

Butterfly thought that she would be able to spend some quality time on Mother's Day with T-Rex by building this kit with him. It didn't take very long of having to run back and forth to the computer to look at the booklet, sitting indian-style on the hard tile floor, and having to fend off a hyper-with-excitement five-year-old who kept making noise and trying to play with the partly-constructed ship before she was a picture of sheer misery.

So I stepped in and helped Butterfly assemble this kit for T-Rex, partly because I love to build Lego kits and hadn't done so in quite some time, but mostly because I knew that T-Rex was going to annoy her to death while she tried to build the gargantuan thing on her own. Butterfly had good intentions, but was inexperienced at building Lego--especially a kit this large. She started out by severely underestimating the time it took to build a 1,366-piece kit. If I hadn't helped her, she'd still be building it. We moved the kit to the table, and I loaded up the blueprints on my laptop. It made for a much easier build. I even role-played with T-Rex to help keep him at bay.

Anyway, after working on the kit all day, we finally finished it:

the finished kit (click for larger)

I must admit that it surely is an impressive kit. The picture above depicts it atop a 27" television.

The larger a Lego kit gets, the more fragile it becomes--let's face it; it's made of hundreds of little, tiny pieces and most of it is held together only by friction and wishful thinking. Now again, let me remind you that T-Rex is only five years old.

Every time he touched the thing, a piece fell off, making him more and more frustrated. Compounding his frustration is that Butterfly and I finished the kit right before he had to go to bed, irritating him further.

I woke this morning at 7:00 to the sounds of T-Rex wailing at the top of his lungs that his spaceship was broken, and demanding that Butterfly fix it while she was trying to get ready for work and the other kids ready for school and trying to feed T-Rex his breakfast.

Because I don't take the train to work anymore, I don't have to get up until 8:00. I was not happy. Of course, neither was Butterfly. And neither was anybody else who had to tolerate the screaming match that ensued.

Now herein lies my theory that Butterfly's ex is crazy like a fox.

What better way to create discord, disharmony, and chaos in a household than to introduce into it a toy that a five-year-old would positively go crazy over, but that he cannot play with because it will crumble at the slightest touch? And an expensive toy at that, so that the two teenagers who can now no longer attend private school anymore because their douchebag father snorted their tuition for next year have a visible reminder of how much of a priority their education is--and the adults in the house, who now have to scrutinize every nickel that goes out because a significant portion of household income has been taken away by the very same fucking jackass who sent that monstrosity of a toy home with T-Rex to begin with, can have tangible evidence of Butterfly's ex's unbridled douchebaggery.

I'm telling you, we may as well have fashioned the pieces in the kit into a gigantic middle finger, because that stupid toy is nothing more than a giant "fuck you" to both Butterfly and I who now have to cope without child support from him every month, and to his older kids, who must now change schools because of their father's inability to pay and have to starve when they go over for visitation.

What a fucking asshole.

Oh, he does many, many other horrendously stupid, unconscionable things too. Maybe I'll put them in a later entry. We'll see.

Meanwhile, Butterfly and I have decided that the best course of action is for her to take the now-completed kit back over to her ex's house. Let him deal with all the screaming and wailing when T-Rex breaks off a piece, because I'm sure as hell not going to be woken up again at 7:00 in the morning by a five year old throwing a temper tantrum over a stupid toy. Oh, and of course, her ex is all thumbs, mechanically speaking--according to Butterfly, he can't even change a light bulb. and she says so in all seriousness. I can only imagine him being tasked to repair a hugely complex and delicate Lego kit comprised of hundreds of tiny pieces--especially while he's high on blow.

It really is too bad--this is the very last time this kit will ever be completely assembled. I had contemplated getting this very kit myself when it first came out a few years ago--it'd look terrific in my office. But it wouldn't be fair to T-Rex to take his new toy away, even if his father is a raging douchebag and should never have bought the thing in the first place. Besides, Butterfly's asshole ex needs a taste of what the last 24 hours of our lives were like. It's better this way: T-Rex keeps his toy, Butterfly's ex gets to be harangued by a temper-tantrum-throwing five-year-old to the brink of a nervous breakdown, and Butterfly and I get sweet, sweet revenge.

Everybody wins.

I saw this little gem in Shashdot today, and a response I really like...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY



darksheik!

Jon Edwards has done the seemingly impossible: he's recovered data from a hard drive that survived the shuttle Columbia's fiery reentry and destruction.

Now that's a feat. No wonder the Department of Defense procedures warrants the total shredding of retired hard drives. Because this is really the only way to assure no data on the drive ever sees the light of day again...

The Band (click for larger)

Last night was my second rehearsal with The Band. I did vocals on three tunes: Mack the Knife, Beyond the Sea, and Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You. My co-worker and band-mate on the Baritone Sax was nice enough to do the recordings.

Fun stuff! I gotta say that it's an absolute thrill to sing with a real Big Band with real instruments! Wow!

First gig: Memorial Day, at the American Legion in Pompano.

Special note for DrumDude: The recordings were made with a Zoom H2 recorder.

I've got two keyboards up for sale on eBay:

Both are genuine IBM buckling-spring Industrial Gray Model-M keyboards. These gray ones are rare--far less common than the putty-colored ones. Rarer still are the black TrackPoint Model M-13 keyboards, made by Lexmark. I have two of those. Ain't nobody getting them, not unless I'm totally starving.

While out running errands for the office, I took a 2008 Victory Vision for a spin.

Most of the online motorcycle reviews about the Vision speak of the styling cues first--you either love them or you hate them. I gotta say that they don't exactly thrill me, nor does putting more than 50 miles a day on an oil- and air-cooled 1,700cc V-twin beast. But the bike had a bunch of features I was accustomed to--e.g. electrically-adjustable windshield (a la BMW), tank-integrated stereo controls, a huge cockpit, and loads of storage. It had one feature I was completely unaccustomed to as well: a great big, huge, bright HID headlight surrounded by super-bright halogens (the K1200LT's lighting has always been notoriously dim and very easy to out-ride).

So I figured a test ride would help me determine if this bike was worthy of my lust. Outside of BMW, Victory is the only dealership network that is set up and insured for test-rides. Go to a Honda dealership and ask to test-ride a Goldwing and they'll laugh you off the sales floor. Literally.

Sadly, it is not. While the swoopy lines grew on me after a fashion, and the lighting was really good, that monster V-twin generates far too much noise, heat and vibration for a long trip, for me. And the other big killer is that, in my opinion, a bike that tops out at 840 pounds ought to have anti-lock brakes. It's not even an option on the Vision. Heck, even Harley-Davidson--more reticent to change than a Southern Democrat--put ABS on their Ultra Classic tourer, and ABS Goldwings out-sell their non-ABS counterparts two to one. On my bike, the K1200LT, ABS has standard. In fact, one has not been able to purchase any BMW motorcycle without ABS for quite a number of years now.

Surely the lack of ABS will impact their sales and will show up on their marketing survey radar, I hope. Until they add anti-lock brakes to the Vision, it is simply not a contender.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY



aurora1116!