Corky

So things ended up not working out at my job after a year. Life goes on. In some ways it's a blessing in disguise, because I will now be employed by a former co-worker's company. I actually turned down an offer from another area company to take this position... I feel it was the right choice.

In my spare time (re: boredom) I've picked up interest in my Sony PSP again and modded it to the latest "open firmware" so that it can play NES/SNES/Genesis/PS1 and a slew of other ROMS on it. When I'm not mashing away at Mike Tyson's Punchout on the PSP, I've taken a liking to watching The Sopranos. However, after A&E jacked up their scheduling of the reruns, I've taken to ganking all the episodes off of tvtorrents.com. I love that freaking site. It's like having Tivo... without having Tivo. Any episode of most any show past or present can be downloaded on a whim. I've gone back and caught Southpark or Family Guy episodes that I missed on air. As Tony the Tiger would say... they're greeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeat!

I'm broke and idiots are funny

Continuing from the last post, it turns out that my leaky garage roof shorted out my door opener. $350 for a new opener installed and $750 to get a new roof put on next week *holds breath for the roofer to actually show up*. Man being broke makes life really boring.

Watch as this idiot messes with a pissed off cat live on the air and gets what's coming:

I nearly died of laughter when I saw it live on my TV, then found out it was on YouTube and just HAD to link to it for posterity.

It's pouring

So wow. Holy crap. Here's a recap of the last two weeks for me:

• Grandfather died
• Close family member rushed to ER at 2AM (they're fine now)
• Cut off on I-480, hit pothole, ~$1800 in damage to right front wheel components
• Sick with the flu for four days
• Furnace died. Had to buy a new one AND bring the vents up to code. ~$3300
• Garage door opener ceased to work. I'm up to $55 in service fees and so far it still doesn't work.
• Memory card reader on my PC died (just as I needed to take pictures of something I sold on Ebay)

The only way the last two weeks could've been worse is if a safe, piano, or anvil dropped on my head Looney Toons style... and then my body was eaten by rats like Kenny on Southpark. When it rains, it pours.

YouTube

I was bored today so I decided to see how YouTube worked as far as uploading a video, length and content limitations, embedding in other sites, and the like. So far, I uploaded a 14MB MPEG and an 8MB MPEG. The upload went as fast as my wussy cable modem could muster. Once up there, it took something like ten minutes for YouTube to convert to Flash format and post it live. Sorry, the content is nothing impressive (water fountain in the lobby of the Niagara Falls Casino).

UPDATE: I don't know what the deal is, but after the above video worked fine for an hour for some reason I keep getting "This video is no longer available" errors on it now. WTF is the deal with that? If I logon to my personal account and look at the settings, the video seems to work again for another ten minutes, then breaks again.

Wiitard

Today started off pretty weird. I woke up and decided to go get breakfast this morning around 9am. While I was out, I thought I'd swing by the Best Buy and Circuit City and laugh at all the nutjobs camped out for a new shipment of Nintendo Wii's. When I got by Circuit City, I noticed there was barely anyone waiting out front. So I asked if they were waiting for the Wii. Yes? Really?! So. Yah. I became a nutjob waiting for a Wii. My ass frozen and an hour later I went in and bought one using a "you froze your ass off, here's a voucher" coupon.

Five to six hours of play later with three other people, this thing is fun as hell! This is by far the most unique and fun video game system ever made. I will not be Ebaying it as I had thought I might end up doing (if I decided I didn't like it).

Yay for time off

I'm enjoying my first day(s) off of work since Christmas. I've been working on a presidential campaign site that had me working both last weekend and New Year's weekend (yes, that sucked big time). Now that I'm off, what do I have to do? Work on two desktop PCs, one laptop, and one Xbox (I mod Xboxes to run SNES/NES/N64 emulators). It seems like I have either no personal work, or a ton.

After I finished working last Sunday, for some brilliant reason I decided to trash my back/legs... er, I mean tear the roof off my garage. It took me five hours to tear off three layers of shingles using my hands and a foot long pry bar. I then spread two 29x19 tarps and nailed down four foot sections of strips to hold it all in place. Did I mention it started raining halfway through the process? Fun! I called a roofing company on 1/8 and am still waiting for them to put on a new roof (they refuse to give a date, and other asshat roofing companies won't even bother to return calls for quotes. Nice eh?).

It's that time of year!

I went on my annual excursion to Canada the 20th through 22nd. Woohoo! It was probably one of the best trips I've taken there; for many reasons. For starters, an hour before leaving I received a generous Christmas bonus that pretty much covered the trip. As if that wasn't enough, I also received a 6% salary increase. My job rocks ;) I was also there with my favorite person in the whole world (girlfriend dummy). I took some pictures, but they're nothing most people haven't seen before. All the really good memories I keep up in my noodle ;)

The only thing that almost put a damper on the trip was some asshat hotel valet decided to finish off a loose door sill cover on my car (read: he broke off a piece of my damn car). Thanks to the raise/bonus, I broke down and drove straight back to Cleveland and ordered a new sill cover from the dealership. If you're wondering why I didn't make the hotel pay for it, the answer is simple: it was somewhat broken to begin with. They'd just waste my time and argue that it's my fault and I should have warned them about it. While that may be true, just handing my car back to me with the piece completely busted off like nothing happened is not cool. What's done is done.