Does Anybody Read This?

Now here is something that fascinates me. I always thought that the electric cars put out by automakers were pretty cool, but since they have all been discontinued that leaves only shade tree project electric cars, all of which seem like novel efforts in futility. The cars themselves are too heavy and the proper batteries and electronics to do a good job are way beyond the financial reach of your average Joe.

Lately, however, I have been seeing more and more electric motorcycles popping up on the internet and those seem to work. For a few thousand dollars you can build a bike that can run 60ish miles per hour for 60ish miles per charge. Considering I, and probably most people as well, drive less than 50 miles in a day this would be an awesome alternative form of transportation. Would it replace my biodiesel powered Volkswagen? No, never. I would keep that around for rainy days and situations where driving in excess of 50 miles would be necessary.

One of the naysayers' biggest arguments against electric transportation is always the limited range and excessive charge times. For sure, being limited to a range of less than 100 miles an having to dedicate several hours to recharging would be a pain on long trips. Fortunately, that is not what electric cars are meant for. The average American does not drive 100 miles per day but rather drives for a week or so on a tank of gas and then fills it up to go another week. With an electric vehicle, you charge it up every night and start every morning with what is essentially a full tank. The range is still a problem for those weekend trips to Gramma's house with the kids, but fortunately most houses and apartment complexes have parking for more than one car.

I think that electric motorcycles help to prove this point. Few people who ride motorcycles do so without some other form of transportation. It helps to drive it in to people's heads that nobody is saying ALL of your vehicles have to be electric. Americans are still stuck in the mentality of a single fuel economy. While I am aware that you can buy diesel from a few gas stations, the lack of small diesel cars has us all thinking gasoline is the only practical fuel choice. In other nations, it is not uncommon to see gas, diesel, ethanol, and CNG all at one station. For a short while in California, you could stop by a quick recharge station for electric cars at roadside stations and even airports. It would be incredibly easy for a 2-car family to have a gas-powered minivan and an electric weekday commuter car at the same time. With an electric motorcycle, it is hard to escape that mentality.

Do I think that every home should have an electric motorcycle and use it for trips to the office? No. Quite frankly motorcycles, as a form of daily transportation, aren't practical for most people's day-to-day needs. There is no room for luggage and it would be a bit awkward to show up for a meeting with road grime slung up the pants leg of my suit. What it is practical for is proving the point that electric power is a suitable secondary form of transportation and suits the day-to-day transportation needs of 99% of our population.

What really grabs my interest is just how easy the home brew projects look. There are several folks online who have taken golf-cart motors bought off Craigslist, old motorcycle frames, and car batteries and built suitable road worthy bikes for very little dime. Honestly, I could build one of these. Just watch the video of these guys throwing together a cheap hack-job:



How hard could it be? I'm not even a motorcycle fan and I am drooling at the thought of building and driving one of these things. There are even more instructions to be found on the internet. Treehugger recently had an article on another guy who bought ALL of his parts online and estimates a cost equivalent of about 300mpg. Instructables even has a howto. What seems to be limiting the range of these bikes is the batteries, as both projects are using lead-acid batteries meant for car starters. What I want is a Lithium Ion battery which can triple the range and Voilà here they are! Granted it would be easier to buy one of their already built models which cost less than an economy car and are capable of 70miles at 70mph, but where is the fun in that? I don't want an electric motorcycle, I want to build one.

Well this is an interesting development. Ford has been trying to drop their "Premier Auto Group" on some other willing company for a couple of years now, and it appears they have found a buyer. Tata, an Indian company most famous for manufacturing the cheapest car in the world, has just agreed to buy Jaguar and Land Rover from ford for 2.3 Billion dollars. While I imagine this does great things for Tata's image as a manufacturer of small, scrappy cars and 3-wheelers it cannot be helping Jaguar's image as a manufacturer of premium vehicles. Their image took enough of a blow when Ford bought them, despite saving them from the clutches of the inept, but purebread British company, British Leyland.
I, personally, look forward to buying a Jaguar Nano.

I now have an RSS feed!

rss.xml

I would add this to the sidebar, but as I've said, I don't really care for blogger anymore and probably wont put any effort into this template.

I have hot water now, as you can see by my redneck water heater setup. Being that I already had a spare hose for a propane grill, I hooked it up to the water heater and lit the pilot and now I can take warm showers.

I'll call the propane company to come fill up the tank, but at least now I don't have to pay their $100 "emergency" fillup fee. Plus, I can take hot showers until they finally decide to come fill me up.

Well, my first post in the new "content-based" Willerblog has nothing contenty about it. Mississippi is getting brushed by a cold snap at precisely the time that my Propane tank mysteriously goes dry. So, I have no heat, no hot water, and no fireplace. Its odd, though, because I just added $200 to the tank in February when the tank wasn't even empty and I haven't been running the heat because of the mild weather. So how is my tank bone dry? No fricking idea.

Labels: Cold, figidbutt, propane

I created this blog to air my anxieties and humorous musings a few years ago. Since then my post have largely dropped off. I am not sure whether this is because I no longer find myself as funny as I used to or maybe it has something to do with maturity (though I kind of doubt that.) Perhaps one of the greatest reasons for the dropoff in blogpostings is that, since the changeover to gmail account logins, I can no longer remember my username or password.

So tonight, during my long 30 minute drive home from school, I was thinking about what to do with this blog. I don't want to keep it around as-is, being a testament to my angsty early college years, but I also don't feel that I have that much of my own material to contribute anymore. Other people manage to keep their blogs going with at least one post a week, why does it take me three months to post an acknowledgment that I'm not posting anything?

So maybe I should try something new and Web 2.0 style. Maybe this blog could be more content oriented. Granted, it would largely just be me reposting stuff from other blogs and newssites and linking to them for the full story, but isn't that the exact same thing those very blogs and newssites do themselves?

Every day I see YouTube videos that make me laugh. I read about new vehicles hitting the market that either repulse me or send me into seizures of ecstasy. All of this stuff interests me, and thus would probably interest the people who are interested in me.

It couldn't be a better time to go content based. The web has evolved a lot since I started this blog, and now it is easier than ever to post videos, audio, and pictures on a even a tiny little blog such as this. There really is nothing to stop me from making this transition, other than that whole forgotten password thing (I just logged in 5 minutes ago and already I've forgotten it, again.)

Will the blog change? Maybe. I might transition it over to Moveable Type or Wordpress or some other open-source platform to make posting easier. I seriously doubt I'd go through all that trouble just to update the Template for this Blogger site since i genuinely dislike the UI of blogger now.

Anyway, I hope to start posting here more often in the near future. A lot of business is going down right now, so I should have no trouble finding material.

Labels: Blog, change, me

Not much is really going on. I graduate this spring, but only if I get caught up on my backlog of projects. I have a biodiesel class taking place at my farm on November 2-4. I really need to get to work on cleaning the place up to be ready for it.

A few things have happened since my last post:
A laundry water hose burst in the bonus room of my house last month, and went undetected for hours spraying the room and its contents with thousands of gallons of water. I replaced the hoses with stainless steel hoses, but while I was pushing the washing machine back I damaged the drain pipe that sticks up from the floor. Next time i started a load of laundry, the pipe fell through the floor and the washer drained a few hundred more gallons of soapy water onto the floor. I fixed the pipe, but the crappy "Universal" glue the Lowes guy recommended didn't hold, so the hose fell AGAIN, flooding the room AGAIN. So, in the space of a week, my bonus room was flooded three times.

My biodiesel making has ground to a halt because of lack of Methanol. The racing fuel store has been calling their supply guy for more, but he isn't returning their calls. That is no way to do business, Mister Southeast VP Racing Fuel supply guy.

MSBiofuels.com is still attracting attention, though the publicity from the class is definitely helping. I enjoy watching the stats pages fill up with links from external sites and google searches. Unfortunately, most of the people who end up here do so accidentally by searching for pr0n. You dirty little enviro-hippies!

My RV sold on eBay. I didn't get as much as I wanted for it, and I turned down a much larger offer in favor of riding out the auction, so I estimate I lost close to $2,500 on that deal.

Well, the winning bidder contacted me and wondered if I would consider meeting him halfway to Nashville from Hattiesburg, somewhere about Birmingham. I replied that with my return expenses (plane, hotel) being so high that it would probably be equally economical for me to deliver the thing the whole way. He agreed and I pulled what seemed like a reasonable price off the top of my head, $600, to cover the whole trip. Well, the day of the trip came up and I realized that I had not gotten him to agree to a liability agreement in case something went wrong. "No matter," I thought, "I'm feeling lucky" and I set out on my trip.

I get about 2.5 hours down the road and a squealing noise comes up from the hood and the AC stops blowing cold. "Oh no" I thought, "the AC clutch has gone out" and it had. This did not bode well for me as the auction had specifically stated that the AC worked and due to our lack of a liability statement, the auction winner was expecting the RV to be delivered in the same condition as it was in the auction. I was on the phone with a friend to see if there was a cheap way to get this fixed on the road when BAM the entire front of the rig lifted off the ground, lunged to the left, and I found myself driving down the road in the left lane and being passed by an idiot in a SUV, yacking on the phone, in the lane which I had formerly been traversing. The tread had separated and I was now riding on an innertube. The tread did not go quietly, either, as it left huge black streaks all over the passenger side, several dents, and ripped up the wheel well liner and chrome trim. "*&^%$#@!" said I.

I limped the RV to a gas station where I put on the dry-rotted old spare and slowly made my way into Tuscaloosa looking for a tire store. Wal-Mart had my size but refused to service an RV. Another tire store had my size but required that I put the tire back on the truck. While I waited I pushed out as many of the dents as I could and bent the trim back, all while cussing myself for not doing the liability agreement. I borrowed some tools from an auto parts store to put the well liner back in and re-mounted the new tire. I spoke to the auction winner, who agreed that the RV was no longer in the condition which he had purchased it, but he wouldn't back out of the sale if given a discount. Owch.

I made it the rest of the way without any more incidents, partly out of luck and partly out of prayer. I met the owner at the hotel where I was staying the night and walked him through all of the doo-dads and gizmos that make up a minimalist RV. He thought that $600 was a reasonable discount considering the since-deteriorated condition of the rig. Dang, that was my profit there. I basically gave away my RV like Daimler gave away Chrysler. I went to bed and prepared for my flight home.

I woke up on Thursday at 4am to catch my 7am flight. A quick jump onto the hotel shuttle had me at the airport by 5. Jumped onto the plane and thought to myself "at least I'm on my way home." Not so fast. I had booked a flight through Expedia that connected in Chicago before turning back down to Jackson. Well, apparently that got changed as my itinerary had me connecting in Houston. During Tropical Storm Erin, no less.

My flight arrived 30 minutes late and at the wrong terminal so I had to bolt across E terminal to the opposite side to catch my flight boarding in 5 minutes. I actually made it but was informed at the desk that my flight home to Jackson, MS was canceled due to weather. This I was told as a flight to Jacksonville, FL took off on schedule at the gate next to me. I was put on standby for another flight in 3.5hrs which was also canceled, as a flight to Birmingham, AL took off on time. Why these flights to Jackson were canceled due to weather I may never fully understand as flights to nearby airports were going just fine and the only bad weather in the southeast was there in Houston. If any flight could go out, Jackson could. My friend at Orlando International Airport tells me that Continental is having serious staffing issues right now.

I was told by the Continental staff that I had two options, wait three days on my dollar for the next open flight to Jackson, or take a seat on a plane to New Orleans and go the rest of the way on my own. I was offered no option of a refund, accommodations, discounts, or apologies. Just take it or leave it.

I flew into New Orleans and split car rental with some other disgruntled passengers and made our way home. Somehow our checked luggage managed to make it to Jackson though no passenger flights did. All in all it took 13 extra hours for me to get to my house. I was tired, broken, and broke. I never do any of that again. Least of all will I ever, EVER, fly Continental Airlines for the rest of my life.

Are you even reading this?



I rarely hit on a space related subject before any of my more NASA oriented friends, but I hope some of you managed to get outside for a view of the northern sky to view the Perseid Meteor Shower. It is approaching its peak as I type this, probably at its highest around 2amish Its amazing. Thats all. Simply amazing. But you missed it. Probably got distracted by your new iPhone. Shame on you.

This summer was bust. I didn't get much accomplished but nevertheless managed to keep my butt busier than ever.

I moved out of the RV. It did what it was supposed to do just fine but when the farm house opened up I figured it would be better to have more space. Whether that was a good idea or not remains to be seen. The RV is for sale on eBay now and doing quite well, considering I couldn't give it away when I tried to sell it on the side of the Highway. You can watch its progress here: Will's tiny RV auction

The house is a bit of a mess. It was built in 1949 by my Grandfather and my dad, uncle, and two aunts were raised in it. I think it is really cool that they've kept it around. Trouble is, Gradpop died in '72 and the house has been occupied by various renters since then. Each of them left behind their own legacy in the house, which I have been trying frantically to remove. My walls are pink with white trim. The floors (antique oak hardwoods that were salvaged from schoolhouses) are worn, stained, warped, and speckled with paint from amateur efforts at painting. Both of the bathrooms need to be redone, but I can't figure out which one to do first because they are both just so bad (also pink, but with blue linoleum.) The plumbing leaks, the electrical is finicky and outdated, and the lighting just plain sucks. There are hole in the walls, words carved into windowsills, and an awful stench in some of the closets. I wish renters cared enough to take care of the place, but know that the renters mindset causes people to be rougher on things they don't own, even if they don't mean to be.

I've already painted the living room and foyer, from pink to a dark tan with vanilla trim, and ripped the shower surround out of the hallway bathroom to get to the shower plumbing. I've got to finish that bathroom, the hallway, and repaint bedrooms and then I can rent out rooms for the extra money to do more repairs. Maybe I can get this place nice again. I'm thinking I'll upload pictures as it progresses.

In this decade of sequels, one-offs, and re-dos everyone seems to be getting something back. Many have argued that it just shows that Hollywood has run out of ideas but I think that people are looking for a bit of nostalgia mixed with a new spark to give an old franchise new energy. I watched the Spiderman, X-Men, Ninja Turtles, and Superman movies all with enthusiasm and remarked at how well I thought the actors displayed their take on their classic characters. I enjoyed them all (though slightly less so with Superman.) The only trouble is that up until this point none of these movies hit that nostalgia nerve. I never really got into the super-hero thing when I was a child growing up in the 80s. The only exception was the early Transformers series.

I've always been a car head. I counted the days until I would receive my driver's license since I learned to count. Transformers always really got me and I wondered how long it would take before they would make a movie out of that. Of course the CG would be expensive, but two years ago when a commercial for the Citroen C4 showed up on the Internet:



I instantly fell in love with the commercial and KNEW that a Transformers movie would have to be made. Just a year and a half later, Transformers the Movie was announced.

I knew that Hollywood would find its ways to botch the movie, and the casting of Shia Lebouf did not impress me, but I went to see it anyway and I came away impressed. It struck that nostalgic nerve in a way that hasn't been done for as long as I can remember. I was not put off by the changing of Bumblebee from a Beetle to a Camaro (its hard to think of a New Beetle fighting bad-guys off with his built-in Daisy vase.) I was incredibly impressed with the voice casting of Optimus Primes original voice, Peter Cullen. I was put off by the writers complete lack of any knowledge pertaining to radio technology (the Secretary of Defense recommending CB as a backup to a downed communications network) but the movie was about the cars. And there was plenty of them.

I got in my car and on the way home I begged it to transform into a giant robot. I would have been just as impressed if the car had turned out to be a pacifist hippie that preferred gardening to fighting Deceptacons (hey, it'd be my fault for running the thing on all that "natural" biofuel anyways.) Despite the fact that my car did not transform into anything, I remain energised. I hope Transformers sees the same 3-part sequels that X-Men and Spiderman did. It was, in my opinion, a better movie anyways ;)

Labels: 80s, movie, nostalgia, transformers

My second Blackberry in four months has died. These things are supposed to be better than that. I had no idea it had gone out until I tried to make a call and it wouldn't connect. I can still recieve emails but cannot send and cannot connect to the internet. Much like my last couple of broken phones they will give me a "new to me" refurbished replacement. Not Cool. I paid bookoos of money for a new phone and after one month i was given a refurb that only lasted four months.

I just want a phone that can survive one year until my contract runs out!

I find it hard to imagine that so much can happen in a month and none of it blog worthy. I have become really lazy with this. Maybe it is because I'm lazy, maybe blogging isn't as easy as it used to be, and maybe the newness of the idea has worn off taking with it my interest.

The internet occupies much of my time. I remember a broadband commercial in which the person at the computer was browsing so fast that he received a message saying "you have reached the end of the internet." On days that I can't find anything worth my interest out there I get frustrated, walk away from the computer and struggle to think of something to do that would involve real life.

ugh. Just as I start writing this I realize I have to go. Even though there isn't anything of substance here I'm posting this just to have something here. If you read all the way to this end, I apologize - perhaps I will have a revelation later and conclude this thought.

This week all of my MIS professors have been talking about how we will have to be competitive just to find basic work in the IT field. More and more it seems that jobs in my field are being outsourced overseas. I wonder if I ought to go ahead and learn Hindi. The strong adapt, right?

The fact that my grades are nothing to brag about has left me thinking that I am going to have to get more on my resume to make me stand out. The Disney College Program was fine, but even that probably won't help me get a job for $30K a year when someone in India is willing to do it for $10K. So I'm wondering if I should talk to a manager at the program and see if I can get an interview for a management internship at Disney.

My mother has already stated that I need to forget Disney and graduate. What is the point of graduating if I won't have any prospects for a job when I do? If I have a completed management internship under my belt, especially at a top 500 company, then that tells employers that I have leadership skills. Maybe with that little gem on my resume I could actually get a decent payrate, maybe even in America.

I hate signing up for classes. Southern Miss has an evil fetish involving day students and night classes. The horrid horrid evil.

I finished another short stint at you-know-where and I have a bit of a rant about it. When I am ringing up the items on the register, and people hand me money, I enter the amount of money that I am handed into the register and it tells me how much to hand you back. I could do it in my head, but I choose not to. The register is much more reliable and quicker than I am. In addition, when I am working you-know-where, I ring up literally thousands of people's transactions a day - and sometimes over a hundred an hour. This leaves me somewhere around 30-45 seconds per transaction. When you're moving this fast, you get to be very tunnel-visioned and tend to focus very intently on what you are doing that second. Once I have started to count your change back to you from the register, and you decide to hand me 23 cents to round things out so that you get 3 quarters instead of 2, do not be surprised if I have to stop, think a second, and do a little math on my fingers. No, I am not dumb. I got a B in my College Calculus course and would have had an A if the professor had been proficient in English. What you have done is broken my very hurried train of thought and caused me to have to stop what I am doing to do a little bit of math.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind it if you give me a little change to even things out for you. As the guy at the register it is my job. However, when you break my train of thought and it takes a couple of seconds to recover, DO NOT think that it is necessary for you to get a smart-allek grin on you face and act like you are teaching me basic addition. I KNOW HOW TO FREAKING ADD! You are probably the 2 thousandth guest I've served today and I try to work fast to keep your wait in line a brief one, so give me a daggum break!

One of the hardest things you can do is to interview a person whom you thought you knew very well. Something about a formal interview opens people up and they tell stories that you've never heard before. I grew up around my grandmother. She was my babysitter, my storyteller, my maid, and my friend. Over the time that I've known her, I've taken her for granted. I thought of her as this rather boring person whom I loved very much but didn't have much to contribute. Granny has always had a weird hair to her. She often makes boneheaded mistakes and is easily confused by technology. This combined with her blindness sometimes leads her family to doubt her intelligence. While, admittedly, my grandmother is getting old, she can still make observations as sharp as a tack.

In my interview, I asked her about several points in history that she had no interest in discussing. The Era around WWII, however, was a time about which she had much to tell. Granny was enrolled in college in Columbus, Mississippi, and it was there, a few miles away from the Columbus Air Force Base that she met her first love. First Lieutenant Robert J. Oleson. He was training to go off to war and Granny was an attractive young girl. Lieutenant Oleson courted my grandmother for three months before he was transferred to another training facility, but before he left, he told Granny that when he returned from war, he wanted to marry her. Granny, in shock, and not wanting to say “maybe” agreed, and they began their long distance relationship. They exchanged letters and, every time that the Lieutenant was transferred, Granny would meet him at the train station and make the journey with him. The week before he was shipped out to war from Florida, Granny and Mrs. Oleson (his mother) met him at the base, and they said their goodbyes. Lieutenant Oleson was shipped to South Italy where he was scheduled to run 26 bombing missions over Germany. During this time he and my grandmother wrote letters and looked forward to seeing each other again. On his 17th bombing mission, his plane was shot down and he was reported missing in action. It wasn't until three years later that the report came in that he had died in the plane crash, but had managed to steady the plane long enough that six of the eleven passengers were able to escape.

Six years later, after Granny had married my Grandfather, First Lieutenant Robert Oleson was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. My grandfather, though he never treated her poorly, did not stick around for long, and eventually left granny to raise four children on her own. Granny told me that she often wondered, if Lieutenant Oleson had not died, what her life would have been like after his return.
While my grandmother spoke of her “Bob,” she couldn't help but tear up a few times. At the time I was shocked. I had never imagined my Grandmother to be “passionate” at all. She still loves Bob. I asked her why we had never talked about this. She told me “The last time that Bob and I ever saw each other, he started to say, 'Ruth, if I don't make it back,' and I stopped him and said 'I know.' He just wanted me to be happy. When he didn't come back, I made up my mind to do as he wanted and got on with my live” She just moved on.

"... and we slept in the same bed that whole time. Nobody ever called us lesbians, i don't think we even knew what lesbians were."
- Granny

So some friends and I are planning to go see the Trans-Siberian Orchestra play in Birmingham on the 20th. This is an open invitation to everyone reading. So far we have Erin and her BF Justin, probably Nick, and myself. Tickets come in at just under $50.

My msbiofuels inbox has been flooded with investment emails over the last week. I was annoyed when I recieved three emails in one day, but was extremely irritated when I recieved 23 invesment emails on the 10th. 23! On that day, SPAM accounted for more of my bandwidth useage than everything else put together.

Out of anger I have begun reporting the emails to the ISPs, but 23 is more than I can handle. I was so angry that I even spent $10 on a SpamCop subscription so I could report them more easily.

In addition, I added mailbot poison links to discourage spammers Fight Spam!

No, I am not interested in CANA Petrolium! GO AWAY!

So, Emily drove the Lebaron down to Seminary last night and I changed the oil. Well, i drained off the last quart from the lebaron and added 6 more. I don't know wether she just doesn't know how to take care of a leaky car, or wether it has sprung bigger and badder leaks. Probably both. Trouble is, since it was once my car, Em seems to think that it is my responsibility to get it fixed. I don't think she knows that she thinks that, but it definitely keeps coming up. I'm happy to help her get it fixed completely, but it is a bit beyond my skill level.

While I was fiddling with the Lebaron, I wasn't studying for my Finance math test. I bombed it. Bad. It still hurts. This is the second worst test that i haven't been prepared for.

I had a second test for which I wasn't prepared for, but I got notes from a classmate 10 minutes before the test, and in that amount of time I accumulated enough knowlege to pass the test with no problems. Essay tests are easy. Just take a teensy bit of knowlege and stretch it into a page with lots of filler.

Tonight at Southern Wesley I kept smelling Pizza. Trouble is, there was no pizza there. None in the apartments, none in the kitchen, none anywhere. I want pizza.

I've had to start specifying Wesleys. It gets really confusing when I start trying to talk to people about Wesleys and don't differentiate. "I was on the phone with Gail, the Wesley minister, who is the sister of Hugh the Wesley guy, and she told me I should stop by the Wesley while I was here" says I to the Wesley minister at Southern.

How White and Nerdy Are You?

YES! I'm not as white and nerdy as Deedee!

My new phone broke. I've use 4 different phones in 6 weeks. I was REALLY careful with this one too. Blackberrys are supposed to be tough. I don't know what happened to it. One day it worked great and the next day half of the buttons on the keyboard didn't work. So I sent it in and they sent back a refurbished phone, or I guess they refurbished it because the old owners phone number was still in it. I like the Blackberry but Cellular South really seems a lot more like a rinkydink operation now. Maybe they'll get bought out soon.

Living in the RV hasn't driven me insane yet. I don't really hate it, but it does have a few issues. I finally got rid of the ants, only to have mice move in (consequently, one died under my couch.) Fortunately, mice hate roadtrips. I can just picture them jumping ship while I'm driving down Highway 49, them bouncing down the pavement. Now all I have to deal with is the squirrels. I guess it is more my fault than theirs that I parked the RV under a pecan tree, but I really suspect that the squirrels are hitting the RV with pecans ON PURPOSE. Maybe they get their jollies cracking the fiberglass and denting the hood of the RV. We'll see how much longer this lasts when I get a BB gun.


I want to post a picture, but I haven't taken any in awhile.

For those of ye uneducated folk, today be "International Talk Like a Pirate Day." For the entire day today you are to speak only in Pirate tongue, ya land lubber.

Last year I rode "Pirates of the Carribean" at Magic Kingdom, but apparently I was overdoing it a bit so I ended up weirding out the folks that were supposed to go with me, so I ended up riding alone - talking like a pirate - to myself.

Dag that sucked.

So have a Shiver-Me-Timbers day.

::Edit - Due to server issues, this post is late - very late::

So, to cap off a day of feeling lost and inadequate, yesterday my phone gave up the ghost. I've had phones that went through the washer last longer than that one. I made it to the CellularSouth store 30 minutes before it closed and gave it to their service technician. They must have been in a hurry to get out of their because 5 minutes later they brought me a new, identical, phone.
"Where are my numbers?"
"oh, they wouldn't transfer."
"Well can I at least have my old phone so I can copy them down?"
"I guess so."
So she hands me a little slip of paper.
"Im gonna need a bigger sheet."
I spent 45 minutes copying down all 300 of my irreplacable contact numbers and email addresses onto a sheet of paper. I still haven't put them in the new phone yet.

If you've tried to call in the last day or so, I didn't ignore the call just because I don't like you. Its because I didn't have a way to answer the phone and not like you more.

----------

I saw my first pair of liberal arts professors today. One was wearing tattered jeans and flipflops with his button-down shirt and Suit Jacket. The other was wearing what could only be described as "Business Goth." They were cracking jokes in an Intellectual type language that I can't describe. Thats what I get for sitting in the Liberal Arts building, Im not Liberal, and Im not Artsy.

Got class, Will post laters.