I had an amazing birthday this year!

This birthday I’m giving myself a present: I’m quitting smoking.

Today is my second day being smoke free.

It may not sound like much, but if you are a smoker, I’m sure you can sympathize. Wish me luck.

For all you Tampa folks out there, the Royal Palace on S. Howard will be open every Monday this month and 100 percent of their sales will be donated to the Tsunami Relief Fund. I went for the first time this past Monday and the Royal Palace is by far one of the best authentic Thai food restaurants in the bay area. Not to mention the service is fantastic. If Thai doesn’t float your boat you can always go a couple of streets down to Sally O’Neals for lunch, ask for Danielle, and tell her Jessica (whoneedsoxygen.net) sent you ;).

Last month Tampa had some sort of odd wind storm in the middle of the night and our power went out three times in less than 5 minutes. The next morning I discovered my router got shorted as a result of the strong winds. As always I couldn’t find the warranty for my power strip and had to work on a replacement.

Several months ago I sold a brand new 4-port Linksys for $40, d’oh. I had my neighbor retest my SMC router hoping I had a faulty wire connection somewhere on the network. Considering the fact that it would light up as normal. Nah, it was dead. I wanted to replace this router with the same kind, but didn’t realize that it retailed for $80 and up. For that price, I’d rather go completely wireless.

I decided that I would try out the new modem/4-port switch/wireless router that I got for free from Verizon, the Westell Versalink. To make a long story short with this lovely paper weight, I know why it’s free. Good luck configuring its “highly advanced port forwarding features” that is all preconfigured. Even after overriding and tossing one PC into DMZ, nada.

Then it was time to just go buy a new replacement. I was so annoyed with everything I just went and picked up a simple 4-port Belkin router. OMFG. If you ever feel like paying for a pile a shit, choose Belkin. Aside from the fact that it uses port 80 to configure the router via web, after overriding this setting it still wouldn’t let me use this port. After fully reconfiguring I get: Lag, Lag, Steady, Lag, reset.

At this point, I assume, TEST THE WIRES. After testing and replacing these I give my neighbor the new Belkin and an hour later he returns and says, “It lags, goes steady, and then resets itself”. Boo on you Belkin.

After a few days, I return the Belkin get a 4-port Linksys and all is beautiful. Until after my tenth day of being able to return the Linksys, their Wireless-G with 4-port switch goes on sale for the same price. Go figure.

Of course, this is the reason why my webpage was down for weeks. Now everything is finally stable.

When it comes to networking, I will never, ever, ever stray from SMC or Linksys.

Things have finally started to wind down between all the holidays and other devastating things that have risen over the past few months. It was a long December and there is reason to believe that this year will be better than the last. [Counting Crows? How original of me.] Now that all of that is over with, commence posting!

WIDGETS! One thing I missed when I abandoned Debian/KDE were widgets. You know, useless and useful desktop apps that can do pretty much anything from to-do lists, clocks, wifi signals, alarms, weather, the lists go on and on.

Now there is Konfabulator, which runs on Windows and Macs. They already have a large gallery that keeps growing. So go give it a try.

Let me know what widgets everyone’s using.

Between bad events and the plethora of bad news that’s been surfacing lately I haven’t had the time nor the will to bother with ye ole blog. Now that it’s Sunday and I’m trying to enjoy my solitude, I thought I’d kick things off with some lofty attempts to laugh.

Hanzi Smatter?? This site is awesome because it exploits my favorite pet peeve of people who get tattoos of Chinese characters but neither know a lick about China, its culture, or its language. Their tattoo is picked straight off the wall with a very rough translation of the character and as a result they are permanently inked with words that aren’t exactly what the artist in the shop told them it was. The translation for the picture shown above is: “Exile Husband Retrievable Arrow with a String Attached to It”. Haha.

Scariest Costumes from 2004 - A little belated but damn hilarious. Pictures include. A snippet from the site: “Transform Daddy’s little girl into America’s NEW favorite bad girl, Private First Class Lyndie England. For the costume, simply add an invisible-dog leash from a novelty shop to a pair of camouflage pants and a khaki-colored shirt from your local Army/Navy surplus store. (Candy cigarette optional.)”

21 Rationales for War There’s really more than 21 but here’s the short version of what they said and who said them. Hm, maybe this isn’t really funny at all.

JFK Reloaded -Believe in the Single (magic) Bullet Theory? Aside from being a game, if you can match and identical shot Warren Commission style you can win $100,000. Of course, you have to pay to play. Considering the conditions, I think the site owner will get $100,000 before any one comes close to a match.

BugMeNot.com - “Bypass Compulsory Web Registration”. Instead of having to register to read certain websites (i.e. New York Times), pick up a public login for virtually everysite from BugMeNot. Which currently holds logins for 35,036 sites.

If that doesn’t help you and you absolutely must sign up for something but don’t want to be bombarded with spam, try the Mailinator. You don’t have to sign up, you just make up any e-mail address @ Mailinator.com, go visit the site, login under the address you made up, and check the mail.

I’m not very current in the pop culture loop, so this might be old news to most of you. I just watched Eminem’s video for his song Mosh. I doubt they’ve played this on MTV as I’m sure they consider it highly controversial, but if you haven’t seen it yet, check it out.

Another artist to check out is Paris of Sonic Jihad, What Would You Do? [mp3] is one of my personal favorites.

Smart Room - “Your home should be a place where you feel safe and protected. With heightened concerns about bio terrorism and other security threats, more and more Americans feel vulnerable.”

Not only can you have them build one for you but you can order plans to build one yourself!

Today, I ventured into the booming downtown Tampa Bay area to open up a checking account.

However, it turns out that my “three forms of I.D. were not sufficient enough to establish an account, PER THE PATRIOT ACT.”

Three hours of wasted time thanks to the Patriot Act.

But wait! There is more:

Now, I can only assume that The Patriot Act, in this element, is to help deter TERRORISTS from establishing an account. [give me a fucking break]

Okay, so you need all these forms to prove you are who you are to begin the process of opening an account, right? Okay, so I obviously wasn’t able to provide this to them, even though they’re looking at my pictures, looking at me, looking at my address and matching it to the others, this is not enough, and thus the Patriot Act is enforced. [thanks you fucking republicans!]

No! My HUGE plan of FUNNELLING money to terrorist organizations [ebay] online is foiled! [oh Allah, why?]

So, I figure, now I have to go get a passport or whatthefuckever else I need to give these people my money.

Too much of a hassle, so what do I do?

I go home and I call the 1-800 number and OPENED THE ACCOUNT OVER THE PHONE WITH JUST MY SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER. WTF?!

Does this make ANY sense to ANYBODY?