They need to make it legal to kill your cow-orkers if a majority of your surviving cow-orkers agree that the ones you killed needed killing.

Belgium!

If you're turning, god dammit, get in the goddamn turn lane. Don't leave the goddamn corner of your goddamn car sticking out into the goddamn lane you're pulling out of just because you're a goddamn pussy and you're afraid of hitting the goddamn curb. I swear, one day I'll be in just the wrong mood and I'll hit one of those motherfuckers. And I know right where it will happen, at the right turn lane off Southpark Blvd. into Sam's Club.


Have you ever suddenly started eating something with some regularity for no apparent reason and then just as suddenly stopped eating it regularly? For me it's cashews. And beef jerky. Sometimes I'll eat practically nothing but Mountain Dew or Sprite and cashews or Mountain Dew or Sprite and beef jerky for days on end. If it weren't for the fact that my grandfather cooks dinner every night, it wouldn't be practically nothing else, it would be nothing else at all.

Sprite is good. Yes, it has no caffeine. But I speak disdainfully of Diet Caffeine Free Mountain Dew because there's no reason to drink it without sugar or caffeine. Sprite is good on its own. If they'd just put caffeine in Sprite, it would be so excellent there wouldn't be a word for its excellentness.

A fairly large market segment has been open for the past few years, but it has been neglected by all the major retailers: Shiny things for people on drugs.

I believe that any business that aggressively capitalizes on this new area will make trillions. Hell, they could even make BILLIONS.

Canada sucks.
Just thought I should remind everyone.

Dammit, we need to lower the legal age for EVERYTHING to 16. And then make it illegal to sell sexy clothes to girls under the legal age. I'm tired of having to wonder whether a hot chick is legal.

Goddamn those stupid railroad tracks. They're fun to drive over, but it sucks ass when your tailpipe comes loose.

Everyone in my family has at least one thing they're very good at. I'm the computer guy, my mom is the natural born leader, my sister is the energetic and motivated one, my stepmom is the one with the aesthetic sense. My Dad is the mechanic. Not me. I am such a non-mechanic, it's not even funny.
(Actually, it is very funny sometimes. Like the time Shreve and I tried to replace his spark plugs, and he had to go somewhere, and I tried to finish on my own, and I got frustrated because I couldn't reach across his truck's huge engine compartment, and I went home with the job unfinished and left a note that was less than polite.) Anyway...
So I'm going to have to re-attach the tailpipe myself. And I'm going to have to do it that half-assed way everyone else does it, with a wire hanger.

But, by God, I'm gonna do the best damn half-assed job anyone has ever done.

Midget basketball.
That is all.

This Surrealism Update™ brought to you by Whatsbetter?

Yes!
See, that's how it works.

Caffeine-free Diet Mountain Dew is for preschoolers and homosexuals. Why do they even make it?

Well, they found Chandra Levy's body. There goes both my New-World-Order Alien Conspiracy theory and my Gary Condit Cannibalism theory.

The company responsible for designing the Pocahontas Parkway is in the same building as my company's district office.

"So if we blow them up, we can kill two birds with one stone." says a cow-orker who shall remain nameless. "And if we make the explosion big enough, we can take ECPI and Alltel too."
"That would probably require something nuclear," says The Kip casually.
He merely chuckled.
"I suppose that's not an obstacle then," says The Kip.
Again, quiet laughter as he walks away.

Do all early-twenty-somethings think like this? Yep, we're all going to hell. In a dirty burlap sack, not even in a nice plush handbasket.

This also leads me to wonder, if one committed a terrorist act, could one use the "I didn't mean to do THAT much damage" defense?

Everything is good.
My car is running well, no unpleasant noises, no excessive smoke (just the usual amount of smoke), radio sounds good, I even got the front seats cleaned out so I can have a passenger. And since there's no garbage in the back anymore, just various stuff, I could move that to the trunk and have 2 short-legged people in the back.
My nose is working surprisingly well since I found some cough drops that taste decent.
I managed to get through 2 weeks on my smallest paycheck ever, without having to beg, borrow, or steal.
My computer is quick and stable. I've got all my passwords straightened out for once. I figured out Blog archiving.

Clearly, it's time for the end of the world.

Today I cleaned my car, checked all its fluids, re-re-re-wired my stereo, adjusted my windshield washer sprayers, and replaced my car's cigarette lighter.
Don't drink 3 liters of Mountain Dew by yourself over the course of the day if you plan to get any sleep. Do drink 3 liters of Mountain Dew by yourself if you enjoy peeing a lot and being jittery.

Baby wipes are neat. I like cookies.

<set geek=on>
Lord help us all, the Kip's getting nostalgic again.

I wish I could go back to 1995, and lift myself up by my collar, and smack myself squarely across the face, and say "do something productive, you damned fool!"
Then I would say "All your base are belong to us. Never forget that."

Yep, those were the days. Installing a pirated Release Candidate of Windows 95 on my 486DX2/50 (overclocked to 66, of course)... Marveling at the GUI surrounding Solitaire (seeing as there were no Windows 95 games at the time)...
Taking those tentative first steps down a slippery slope. A slope with no guardrails or warning signs, of course. Such is the nature of these slippery slopes.

This rant brought to you by DirectSound. I was playing a music file, clicking on a folder, and getting an IM all at the same time, and all the sounds played, and I suddenly realized, "I remember when soundcards couldn't do that..."


On a radically different and not even tangentially related topic, I get kind of annoyed when a web service says "we broke this, now you need to do this to fix it." Not pointing fingers, just in general.

The most valuable skill I have is my basic hatred for my customers.

Why can't I get the damned archives to work?
That's better, I think.

I'm going to have to work at a video store. I just found out from a cow-orker whose wife works at a video store that employees get free rentals. And the store she works at has a porn section. Mmm... free porno DVDs...
Plus, they DO keep rental histories on customers. Only the recent rentals though, you couldn't go back and say "N rented X on May 1, 2000." You could, however, say "N rented X on April 1, 2002." Even so, info like that could be devastating to, say, a political campaign.
Although, if I worked at a video store and got free porn rentals, I don't know what my cow-orkers there would think of me when they saw MY viewing habits.

No, I'm not going to detail them for you.

I'm going to have to install a hit counter. It's anathema to the way I like to web-surf (you should see my ad-blocking setup) but I'd like to know who's viewing this page other than my 2 or 3 regular readers. I mean, I didn't set this as an anonymous blog, so it gets listed on blogger.com whenever it's updated, it's not FTP accessible so I can't upload a robots.txt file, and I list it in my AIM profile. And others (ahem...) have listed it in their AIM profiles. So unless this page just somehow prevents people from casually accessing it (which wouldn't surprise me given the fact that the entire universe has been aligning itself for 15 billion years to culminate in a conspiracy specifically against me), there must be people viewing this who I don't know.

Episode 2 rocked.

Hence, I must post a review that tears it apart. That's just my way.

Spoilers this WILL contain. Warned you have been.

You will probably not understand or care about much of this if you aren't as much of a geek as I am. If you don't know the name of the band leader in Jabba's palace or the species name of Lando's co-pilot, you're not geeky enough.

The Bad:

Spider-Man was a good movie. Not a great movie, mind you. Not on par with an Empire Strikes Back or a Matrix, but definitely on the same level as Phantom Menace or maybe a little better.

However, I'm the type who can't NOT pick things apart. So here's what was wrong:

I want to have a movie made about me just so it can have a trailer. And Movie Trailer Voiceover Man can narrate it. And I can write the trailer with a simple Perl script or Basic program.
"In a world... where there are no heroes... Only one man... playing a deadly game... can stop the evil...
When there's no-one you can trust... And time is running out... Where can you turn..."

See how easy that is?

OK, it has something to do with Milton Berle, umbrellas, and a nuclear reactor.

I just realized that my web log has the second most complicated password of all my passwords. It would be easier to get into my email, or my dial-up account, or my Slashdot account, or nearly any of my other passworded accounts. Why? Because I'm a freak. But more specifically, because this log is the distilled essence of The Kip. Because between this living document and my list of personal quotes, one can assemble a fairly accurate representation of my personality. From my meticulous writing style, to my unique medley of hatreds and prejudices. And when the world is consumed in fire and the only people who remember us are the alien archaeologists who will land here 7,406 years from now, they will read this and say "GREEEEEEE OOOO VAAAAG!" "VAAAA OEOEOE GROOO!" Which, when translated into our dead language, will mean "We were right to limit our contact to the occasional anal probe." "Yes, now let us go have sex using our many and varied organs."

Don't ask me how I know this. I just do.

Did you ever notice the complete lack of warning signs in the Star Wars universe? Both in the games and the movies? You'd think that even if they're too cheap to put in safety systems they'd at least have signs up like "Warning: Unexplained Bottomless Pit" or "Warning: Elevator has no safety devices" or "Warning: Huge amounts of unshielded energy" or "Warning: Gratuitous special effects."

And why in the hell are these dangerous things so readily accessible anyway? Like why was the Naboo reactor room right next to the hangar? And why was there a bottomless pit in the Emperor's throne room on the second Death Star?

There are two possible explanations.
1. Stupidity. Rampant galactic stupidity.
2. The Star Wars universe has an equivalent to the Scorched Earth party.

I think it's obvious which is correct.

Dammit, why did Harrison Ford have to go and get all old? It was time for another Tom Clancy movie, I think that's a law. But Ford's too old to play the young Jack Ryan, and the later Jack Ryan novels are unrealistic because the American public isn't smart enough to elect a guy like Jack Ryan president.

And Alec Baldwin is an incredible pussy now, so he can never be allowed to play Jack Ryan again. In fact, he SHOULD be killed. But not allowing him to play Jack Ryan is all we can do for now.

But Ben Affleck? Ben fucking Affleck?!?!!?!!!

So the logical solution is to either invent practical time travel or reverse the human aging process so Harrison Ford can make more good movies.

The most general version of my job description is to help people solve their problems.

I can solve ALL their problems by killing them. I bet it would solve a lot of other peoples' problems too.

We need to pass laws to control old people. Once you pass 60, either you live with relatives and are accompanied by one at all times any time you leave your house, or you take a quarterly test to certify your ability to function independently, or you live in a home. Period.

I went to KFC the other day. Felt like getting some hideously unhealthy food. You know, chicken is unique in that when it's prepared properly it's healthier than any beef or pork dish, but when it's prepared by KFC it's like a slow-acting poison. Anyway, back on topic.
I went to KFC, and I went to the drive-thru. And there was someone ahead of me. And he just sat there for 2 or 3 minutes. Didn't say anything to the drive thru clerk, didn't do anything odd, just sat there. Then he glanced back at me. So I stared at him. He looked away. A minute or so later he glances at me again. I stare at him. He looks away. A minute or so later he glances back at me. I'm reclined, reading a book. He drives away.
I don't know why he was just sitting there, but I do know that whatever bizarre kind of contest that was, I won.

I do stuff like that all the time. Just yesterday I called up another store to get them to check if they had something in stock. I got put on hold. So I put the phone on speaker and hit mute, and I just went about my business. 20 minutes later I hear the person who put me on hold trying to hang up his phone. Clickety-clickety-click over and over until he finally says "hello? Hello??"
THEN I hung up.

In Genesis 9:11, God said "And I will establish my covenant with you, neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth."

He did not, however, rule out slightly less devastating floods. He could easily flood everywhere on earth except, say, Rhode Island. Then he could say "Hey, I didn't flood the WHOLE earth. So there! Nyah nyah, nyah nyah nyah."

I'm certain God would say "nyah nyah." And He would stick out His tongue too. I bet He has a BIG tongue.

There are few reasons to love Enterprise, but one of them has to be the fact that Jonathan Archer is the first Trek captain who has ever watched a sporting event while having a beer. On camera, that is. I figure Kirk for a beer drinker too. But not on screen.

I finally cracked the Chandra Levy case. Gary Condit not only killed her, he ate her. That's why there's no trace.