Woulda, coulda, shoulda...

I should be happy, but I'm depressed.

I'll never get to drive again.

I might as well go walk in front of a bus.
But we don't have buses here.
Which is why I need to drive.
But I can't.

One of these days I'm going to completely lose it, and start writing bad poetry.
Then you're all in trouble.

I really could not care less.

I've just realized something. I honestly couldn't care less about my customers.

I know I've said it before, but I've never really thought about it in depth.

I could not care less. Even if I tried.

They're bugs.
Less than bugs. Dirt.
Less than dirt. Dust.

If I was reading a book while listening to a CD and taking a dump all at the same time, then maybe I could care a little less about customers.

But not much.

From the desk of Ilko Skevüld...

"Yeah, man. I'll gnaw your face off." -- The Cheat.

If it actually turned out that there is such a thing as reincarnation, then I'd want to be reincarnated as myself. Fully grown, and at least ten years younger than when I died.
That would really blow everybody's mind.

Star Trek: Nemesis is the second worst Trek movie on the basis of plot and dialogue quality, but it has a damn good soundtrack. And the coolest space battle ever. Well, second coolest after the Battle of Endor. Nothing will ever top the overall coolness of the Battle of Endor. ("It's a trap!") But Nemesis definitely has the best space battle visual effects ever.

Chinese food is appropriate for any occasion. Christmas, birthdays, bar mitzvahs, funerals, anything.

I think it's insanely funny when people misspell words like "idiot," "stupid," "moron," or "imbecile."
You laugh, but the internet is killing the ancient art of proofreading.
"And I don't care how they spell things on the internet
When you E-mail me, you spell the whole word out.
And I don't care that your cell phone has a camera in it..." -- Strong Bad

If 59 specific Englishpeople died, the king of Norway would also be the king of England.
This fact is probably useful only to a megalomaniacal evil genius.

It's made from guano.

And now for another installment of "Fun with grammar." Or, "Fun? With grammar?" I actually said this the other day: "If I were you, then I-you wouldn't loan you-me my-your car either."

The laws regarding motorist and motor vehicle licensing in this state are almost enough to turn a God-fearing neocon into an anarchist.
I wouldn't ever set fire to the city courthouse, but if it ever happened I'd laugh.

Helium is possibly the most amusing element. Oxygen is great too, but we take it for granted. Unless we're drowning. But it doesn't take such a disaster to make us appreciate helium. It's just cool.
And 1,1,1,2-Tetrafluoroethane is an amusing molecule. Really, it is. An incredibly diverse group of people use it, but unless you work with it you probably won't recognize that name. In fact, I'd wager only a tiny number of people whose very livelihood depends on it would recognize the name.

I'm in one of the oddest moods I've ever been in. Probably because I had a healthy breakfast of Mountain Dew and Sudafed and cake, and I took a brisk walk to pump it through my system. And now it's just starting to wear off. So I feel sort of like my mind is floating six inches above my actual brain.

I walk a lot more than one would expect of someone who weighs as much as 2.8 to 3.4 average American males. The math is fuzzy, but my point is sound. Whatever my point is. Which I'm not really sure about.

I have decided that vacuuming is evil. A perfect vacuum does not exist in nature, even in space, therefore it is wrong for man to try to create one.
This is now one of the rules of Kipism. You can't make me vacuum because it's against my religion.

Tomorrow is my birthday. Again. Big whoop. It feels just like it did in 2003 and 2004. After you turn legal, birthdays are just about getting older.

But I have the day off, so I plan to be in bed until around, oh, 4 PM. Actually, that's not because it's my birthday, I do that every time I have a day off. I have garbage bags over my windows so I can choose my own light cycles.

Actually, if I slap a little more duct tape on them, the Department of Homeland Security would approve.

When I think of "light cycles" I don't think of sunrise-sunset cycles, I think of those bikes from Tron.

Did you know we're on the verge of a helium shortage? I'm not kidding. The ACS says so. (The American Chemical Society. Not the other ACS. Although I wouldn't be remotely surprised if helium caused cancer.)

My hands are cold. I'm going to stop typing now.

Evil? Maybe.

Blogger seems to have decided that I am The Devil. Or at least A devil. My post count is stuck at 666.
I'm serious. It was 667 a while back, but then it inexplicably went down one and stuck for a month and counting.
It still has all my posts stored, it still shows the last update time, but it won't increment the post count.
Which I find quite odd. The most evil thing I do right now is pirate DVDs.

Which, by the way, is enormous fun.

How to pirate DVDs, by The Kip:

Ingredients required:
(1) Computer. You should already have this.
(1) DVD Burner. The one I use is the CyberDrive DX162D-A. Decent quality, very inexpensive, and with a Best Buy PSP you're guaranteed to have a working burner for 3 years, which is 2 years longer than my last CD burner lasted.
A supply of blank DVDs. If you want the best possible quality, nothing beats the Verbatim 16x DVD+Rs. If you want decent quality at a good price, get a spool of Memorex DVD-Rs (media code FUJIFILM03 on the spool I got, which is supposedly very good) at RadioShack. $12.99 for 25, or $27.28 for 75 if you take advantage of the "30% off accessories" promotion.
Some software. I recommend DVD Decrypter to rip and burn, DVD Shrink to re-author and recompress.
A source of DVDs to rip. Once you finish ripping your own collection, which may take a while depending on how many discs you have, you can get a Netflix subscription. Based on my experience to date, you can get 3 movies every 5 days.

And that's pretty much it. Way, WAY easier than copying VHS tapes. And faster. And more cost- and space- efficient.

Deep Thoughts

The universe contains, by the best guesstimates, roughly 10^85 fundamental particles. The name for this number is ten septemvigintillion.

This is still less than a googol, which is 10^100. And there are names for other insanely large numbers, like a novenonagintanongentillion, which is 10^3000. And even these are far less than a googolplex, which is 10^googol.

There cannot POSSIBLY be anything that would require a number with a googol of digits to define. The number itself could not be depicted even if all the matter and energy in the universe were converted into a single storage medium, and the universe would either collapse back to a singularity or disperse into total entropy (depending on which theory of the fate of the universe is true) before you could count up to it.

Yet the number has a name.

My point is this: Mathematicians obviously get the best drugs.


This fits right in with my theory about great educational conspiracies. I still want to study Egyptology so they'll let me in on the gag. Every "discovery" in ancient Egyptian history since 1820 has been fake. The French started the joke, the British ran with it, and now it's the most stunning example of global cooperation ever. Unfortunately nobody outside of the clique has any proof.