Sara over at Life is a Journey is sponsoring a team relay for one of her co-workers who has been diagnosed with stomach cancer thru the American Cancer Society. You can check out the site; Gary’s Condors that I helped set up for news and information on the event to be held in Utah on May 4th and 5th. You can make your donation thru Paypal, a Paypal account isn’t necessary, most debit and credit cards are accepted. Please give to a worthy cause, even if it’s just a few bucks or whatever you can afford!

Cancer is a subject that hits close to home with me, my wife died from breast cancer over 10 years ago and it was a very painful experience that I’ll never forget. Early diagnosis is the key to survival!

When Newbie Vampires Strike!

I took my final chemo injection last week, so I went in for some blood tests this morning to get the final results of how well the treatments have worked and I ended up getting a newbie phlebotomist to draw my blood. And now I feel like this guy!

I had a bad feeling right off when she didn’t seem to know her way around the computer interface as she looked up what tests I needed. I definitely knew something was wrong when she only had 3 vials to be filled. On a normal visit, they usually fill about 5 and today they were supposed to be doing several extra tests, but she insisted that was all. After she finished drawing the blood, I kept insisting that something wasn’t right. She had to pull the needle out to go look at her computer again and finally realized her mistake. So she had to stick me again to get the rest of the necessary samples. I ended up getting needle stuck twice! In the same arm! grrrrrrr!!

At least she hit the vein on the first try each time. She wound up taking about 9 vials all together, and I think she left me with just a few drops. I don’t really mind getting blood drawn, It’s become a routine thing with me the past few years but having to do it twice in one sitting is not so nice, dammit!

Ahh well, it’s almost all over and I’m actually starting to feel a bit better now that the chemo is done. It will take a few weeks to start feeling completely normal again, that shit stays in your system for a long time and it will take a while just to recover from the severe anemia. I’m just so happy it’s finally all done and I can resume a real life.

I’ll be looking for full time work at an actual job soon, damn, I haven’t had a “real” job in almost 5 years! I’m looking forward to it! Back in the rat race!

Have a happy hump day and don’t forget to donate!!!

I don’t know why Islamic Muslims think they will be rewarded with a harem of virgins at their disposal when they die and personally I really don’t care, but this photo made me laugh out loud.

If you think your “god” will reward you for being an evil, murderous, son of a bitch, it’s time to go “god shopping” is all I can say. And have your brain removed for forensic study…

Local Council Woman May Be Delusional
Sometimes an idiot comes along that really grabs my attention, and seriously pisses me off. There’s a story in the local New Orleans newspaper today about a city council woman named Cynthia Hedge-Morrell that was stopped by a Louisiana State Trooper for traveling over 100 mph on the shoulder of the road and weaving in her city owned SUV while she had a “blue light” flashing. When he stopped her she yelled at him “Do you know who I am? . . . What the hell are you stopping me for?” Apparently this isn’t the first time she’s been stopped under similar circumstances. This womans main claim to “fame” is that she was once a school principal and is the wife of La. State Representative Arthur Morrell. It’s good to see that we have such “quality” people with “god complexes” and who think they’re above the law running this city. Her “excuse” was that she was late for a meeting. Now there’s a good reason to risk the lives of everyone else on the highway. Link to the article

Yeah, like New Orleans doesn’t have enough problems, the state police have to deal with morons like this. I’m disappointed that the police didn’t haul her sorry ass in to give her a DWI or blood sample test to see if she was drunk or on drugs! Feel free to email her here: CHMorrell@cityofno.com if you want to give her a piece of your mind.

Here’s a nice parting shot for Papa Johns, I got this in my email the other day advertising their “Easter Special” and since we all know how I feel about their lousy ass service, I thought I would put it up. Apparently they think we should associate eating pizza with the resurrection of Jesus, LOL How frikkin lame is that! “Light the candles, say the prayers and pass the pizza!”

Have a fun weekend!

Anyone else sick of seeing Will Ferrell’s movie commercials every 5 minutes on seemingly every single fukkin’ channel on TV? I swear I just wanna throw something at the tube every time I see that goofy looking mug. I was practically driven insane with the Talladega Nights commercials and now it’s for the Blades of Glory movie. If I had a frikkin’ nickle for every one of those commercials I watched I would be a rich man! I think he’s only mildly funny in his movies and I actually hated him when he was on Saturday Night Live, does he really deserve so much damn promotion? Maybe they think if you’re told often enough that he’s funny, you’ll actually start believing it, like subliminal advertising or sumshit. Die bastard DIE! …or at least get off my damn TV.

Anyway, on to something that pisses me off even more! LOL I just had lunch at the local Wendy’s hamburger joint and I decided to “dine in” because I know it’s air conditioned (it’s hot as hell here) and I felt like relaxing for a few. I sit down to eat and I hear what I thought was a talk radio show on the speaker system, I know they usually play music. After a few minutes I realized I was being bombarded by a continuous loop advertisement for Direct TV.

That’s right, a continuous talk show espousing all the “wonderful” benefits of signing up for Direct TV and not only that, but how to trouble shoot your system if it ever stops working, how to use the remote, plug it in to the wall, how to clean the dish, who to call to upgrade existing service and on and on and fukkin’ ON till I wanted to kill someone. Too bad they didn’t tell me who I needed to go “postal” on to make it STOP!! BASTARDS! I started to complain to the manager but decided that it would be more fun to write about it on my blog and of course make up my own Wendys logo! Take that, bitches! Yeah, I know, griping about how lousy fast food restaurants are and how much they SUCK ASS has been a recurring theme around here. But, dammit, fast food ain’t cheap, it’s just convenient, does the service and the experience have to be so shitty?

This same Wendys had their “dining room” completely remodeled lately with all new fixtures, carpet and seating. It’s nice, but what cracks me up is they have a sign next to the building bragging about the new interior and that you should “See It Inside!” Well, DUH you stupid dumbasses, where else would we freekin’ see it, out in the damn street, …on the roof maybe? Whatever…

Now for something good! My friend Joe over at East Coast Gourmet liked his new blog that I designed for him so much that he sent me an awesome dinner of lobster tails, lobster bisque, clam chowder and crackers and even threw in a couple of desserts as a bonus! He Fedex overnighted it to me and everything was ‘tres delicious! He uses his blog to put up recipes for all kinds of tasty sounding New England delicacies, you should check it out. And of course you can order just about anything delivered from the website. Thanks Joe, it was much appreciated!

Now for something even better!! Lisa has been cracking me up for the past few weeks with a little song she sings to me, to remind me that I only have X number of chemo injections left, how cool is that! Tomorrow I take my very last injection out of a weekly series that I started last JUNE!! Yeah, this shit’s been going on forever! I guess I was whining a bit about how shitty it made me feel a few weeks ago and she started singing that I only had three more injections to try to cheer me up. Then last week it was two more, then this week it was one more. You get the picture. Tomorrow she said she’ll be singing “No More Injections” LOL Very cute! Thanks sweetheart!!

That’s all I got! Hope you guys have a killer-diller weekend!~!

Taco Bell is very good at making up “new” products from the ingredients that they already have on hand in their stores, but sometimes I have to wonder how the hell did they come up with the names and the combination of ingredients? I don’t speak spanish so I have no idea if there are actual words like enchirito, chalupa, gordita and many others that they use. I thought it would be fun to make up a few of my own that I’m pretty sure would get rejected. So here we go with a list of most likely to be rejected Taco Bell products:

• Zesty Diarito
• Cheesy Douchealada
• Runny Crapalupa
• Crusty Pusadilla
• Spicy Ratarito Supreme
• Grilled Beef and Lice Burrito
• Baja Lizard Crunchwrap
• Bean, Beans, Beans and More Beans and Spam Taco

Can you think up more?

To be fair though I actually like Taco Bell and I eat there when I can. Those new steak taquitos are very good! I stopped by their website to try to win a $1000 dollar survey drawing (I didn’t win) from my register receipt and came across this thing where you can make your own little comedy bit. It asks you a question and you try to type in a funny reply and then it plays it back “on stage”.

I tried it several times and it seems like no matter what you reply, the audience is silent and thinks your joke sucks. The other lion always gets all the laughs, bastard! Maybe you guys can check it out and see if you can coax a laugh out of it. You can find it here at The Carne Asada Improv. You can even embed it on your blog like I did below. I thought surely my joke would get a ton of laughs but it fell on it’s face. Check it out below and see what you think. Make sure your sound is up!
 

Hope you enjoyed the show!

I generally like Papa Johns pizza and have ordered deliveries from them in the past, there’s one just about a half mile from here. I tried to order one last week using their online service and after waiting patiently for an hour thinking it would arrive any minute, I received an email stating my order had been canceled. No explanation why, just that the order couldn’t be “processed”. I ended up getting take out from someplace else.

Last night I got a craving for pizza again after seeing a Papa Johns TV ad for some new “special” I decided to order again, this time I would call the store directly to make sure it went through. I looked up the number, called and the girl answers “Hello?” like as though it wasn’t even a business, maybe a residence. After asking “Is this Papa Johns?” She replied it was but then I got disconnected so I called right back. This time she answers “Papa Johns, can you hold?” I reply “No I got disconnected just a minute ago” at which point I get disconnected AGAIN!

By now frustration is setting in so I take a few breaths and call back, this time she asks for my order. I explain that I want that special and she tells me I’m wrong, there was no such special, the pizza I was trying to order was a few dollars more and it’s all spoken in ridiculously bad “ghetto speak” to the point where I have to repeatedly ask her what she said. She ends up arguing with me over the whole thing like I don’t know what I’m talking about. My argument got me no where.

I say, “Fine, forget it, I’ll just order something else instead” , but the moment I say the words “forget it” this stupid asshole slams the phone down on me and hangs up! WTF??? Now I was furious and I drove down there to confront someone in person, I walk in and ask for the manager. I explained to him what happened and he acted like it was no big deal! He did apologize and that he would have a “talk” with her but his tone of voice gave me the impression that he really didn’t give a shit. I was pretty angry by now, I figured at this point he would at least make some kind of attempt to please me but i got no satisfaction whatsoever.

When I got back home I decided to look if there was some way to complain online about their truly shitty services and there was a web form. A ridiculously loooong form that asked me just about everything about myself except for my frikkin’ shoe size. But what really got me was the extremely tiny space they give you to write in the actual complaint, barely room for 4 or 5 words!

Here’s my take on their stupid web form. After these 2 experiences, I seriously doubt if I’ll ever order from them again!

On the good news front, I now have only 3 more weekly chemo injections left to endure. How cool is that? I’ll finally be able to get my life back to some form of “normalcy”, whatever the hell that means. LOL After 4 years of illness I’m having a difficult time remembering what my life used to be like! I’m just happy the end is in sight and I’ll be able to move on without having so many health issues on my back! I’m not going to know how to act! Woohoo!

Here’s another one in my series on wacky statues from around the world.

Got Milk?

Have a good weekend!

Yeah, it’s a house blog warming party and you’re all invited! I haven’t had a chance to finish the decorating though, this is another one of my freebie blog templates, it’s ported to work with both Blogger and Wordpress. I’ll get around to it soon though! I’m amazed that I was able to import not only all my Blogger posts, but I was able to import all 6,000 or so Haloscan comments from the past 2.5 years as well. The amazing part is that all the comments know which post they originally went to!

I’m not happy that the weather here has been so fair that I’m already having to cut the frikkin’ grass. I can’t think of much that I loathe doing more than lawn and garden work. What’s really got me pissed off though, is that the 1.5 year old riding mower became crippled yesterday thanks to the chintzy assed, shoddy construction of a SEARS Craftsman machine that cost $1200!!! The front wheel rims are made of PLASTIC! This thing weighs 350 pounds and then you put a rider on it that is likely to average 200 pounds or even more and you can see why plastic wheels just MIGHT be a fukkin’ problem… duh, you think?

 
The center hubs on both front wheels are so badly damaged the wheels are just about to fall off, Sears is really gonna hear about this!

Here’s another wacky bronze statue that really cracked me up, it looks like a guy juggling babies! I don’t think I really wanna know where the right foot is going…

That’s just wrong! Hey you big oaf, why don’t you pick on somebody your own size!

Thanks for dropping by and I hope you guys have a great weekend! Weeeee!!

I’ve been playing around with a web surfing program that’s highly addicting called Stumble Upon. Weird name, but fun to use. You have to install a small tool bar to your browser that allows you to click “next” and it will send you randomly to different websites in categories of your choosing. Sounds kind of dumb I know and I was very skeptical but I’ve come across tons of cool websites out there, stuff you never knew existed. Once you start it’s hard to stop!

Users get to add their favorite sites and everyone that stumbles on that site behind them gets to vote thumbs up or thumbs down, right from your browser. You can even choose different channels as you surf. They have communities and you get your own pages that list all your own favorited sites and you can mark people as friends or contacts based on your personal interests. I found out that it works much better with Firefox, I found several issues using it with IE 7. Give it a try, you’ll like it!

Here’s a couple of photos of a bronze statue that I stumbled on recently, that made me go WTF??? That’s just crazy! I think it’s in Denmark.

You would never see anything like that in the USA! I could just imagine an artist proposing something like that to the local city council. “You’ll be able to see WHAT??? And you want us to pay for it??? Get out the tar and feathers!!!! LOL

I’m thinking about my moving my blog again and finally going over to Wordpress with my own domain. Hell, I might as well, I’ve got 6 different Wordpress installations running right now but half of them are used for designing templates for customers. I’ve been on Blogger now for about 2.5 years and I’ll miss it, it’s been a pretty decent home for the most part and I’ve made a lot of great friends here as well. It does have it’s aggravations and annoyances though. I’ve even bought a name that I like and it’s already hosted, in fact I now own 8 different domain names for my various web endeavors. The only problem is finding the time to get it set up and build a new design. Eventually!

Hope you guys are having a good weekender!

I know most of you probably won’t find this very interesting but I thought I would share a few tricks that I use in my Blogger and Wordpress layouts. I believe that most people think that the vertical and horizontal lines on the background of the pages that I draw actually “hold” the text areas in place. Well, that’s completely untrue in a CSS (cascading style sheets) layout, I can put the text anywhere on the page. It is true however when using a table based layout. With CSS you can place the text virtually anywhere you want on the page, the images are just there as a background decoration.

This is a Blogger template I’m working on today for my friend Desy over at Afro Nerd. He liked the first one so much he wants me to build another and set him up with a theme switcher, so visitors can switch the themes back and forth.

The first image is the original comic book cover he wanted used, but it needed a lot of Photoshop editing to make it useable. Once I was done editing the text and cropping out the unwanted sections, I drew up the entire page layout around the image, which you can see in this second image.

That image is the entire page including the heading text but it isn’t quite ready for use yet, it has to be sliced up into 3 pieces to make up the different sections of the page. There’s the header (top section), the content (middle section that can expand up and down as the page gets longer) and the footer to dress out the bottom of the page.

In the next 3 images you can see what each piece looks like after it’s all chopped up and ready for use.
This is the header below:

The very narrow strip that makes up the center or content section actually “tiles” in all the way down the page as far as it needs to to fill out the page. Anything thicker would just be a waste of bandwidth and take longer to load.

This is the center section below:

This is the footer below:

And the footer image just caps off the ends of the columns to give the page a cleaner, finished appearance. A lot of designers leave that out and just let the columns run right off the page. That’s personal preference though, most people probably never scroll all the way to the bottom anyway. Sometimes, I insert small “surprise” images in the footer to go with the theme.

There are several tricks involved in using this method to do page layouts and not too many people do it this way. I like it because it allows me to use subtle shadows and glows and complex borders and I can simulate a more 3 dimensional aspect to the layout. This helps achieve a more dynamic affect with higher visual impact. And you’ll notice that it easily allows me to put the action figures in this example, in poses that makes it look like they’re stepping out of the frames and overlapping into sections that you wouldn’t normally see. However, a very attractive blog or web page can be built without using any images at all. Background colors and borders can all be written into the code to set the overall appearance.

If you’ll notice, the sidebar will have to come way up and over the right hand side of the heading image so that it ends up just under the red title “Afro Nerd”. I’ll use negative top margin numbers to pull that text up to precisely where I want it within a single pixel of accuracy.

Personally, I just enjoy manipulating images in Photoshop and bringing them to life on the web, It’s a lot of fun. The very first thing I do to start a design is draw up the entire page background before I write any of the code. That’s just the way I do it! Hope I didn’t bore you guys too much!

I’m all over the map today and I’m so busy with blog orders I can’t hardly see straight. My buddy Johnny Dain has a very funny take on Britney Spears shaving her head. He thinks she’s a Klingon and I think he might be right, he has pictures to prove it! He’s got quite a warped sense of humor, kinda like me. LOL I did the design for his website a while back. I just wish he would post more often.

A while back Wal-Mart stole nearly $300 from my bank account by using a Mastercard debit card number that I had once used for a legitimate purchase. The billing didn’t list any items purchased, just money “removed” very weird! I knew immediately it had to be someone on the store end that got into my account info because that card has never been out of my possession and to use it even online you have to have the card in hand for the 3 digit security number on the back. That means the only way they could have gotten that number was through the Wal-Mart records. I disputed it and the money was returned about a week later. My bank told me that Wal-Mart had 45 days to dispute the charge back. I kept worrying that they would give me trouble over it but I finally got notice that the grace period was passed. So I guess I get to keep MY frikkin’ money, how nice of the bastards! It was a relief though, I just wish I could press charges for the theft. Can I send Wal-Mart to jail? Now that would be cool!

It’s Mardi Gras here, ho-hum… LOL I have yet to go to a parade, maybe I will this weekend. I’ve been enjoying the King Cakes though, damn those things are so good! Chewy and gooey and delicious, just what I need for my expanding waist line. Don’t swallow the plastic baby inside!

I was going thru some of my photos and came across a few that I took in New York on one of my visits to see Lisa. I don’t think I ever posted them. One night we went out to watch Deni of Last Girl on Earth blog play at a gay bar near downtown New York City. They were having some kind of gay, wacky costume contest and not only was Deni playing violin but she was one of the judges of the contest. That contest was strange! The bar was strange, everything was strange! I just stayed real close to Lisa and luckily no one hit on me LOL Now that I think back about it, should I be insulted? Hmmm. We actually had quite a good time, but I don’t think I would go back. hehehe

That was pretty much one of the coolest violins I’ve ever seen and she really can play it too! I’m looking forward to my next trip to visit Lisa and Deni and hopefully Julie too, I hope to go sometime soon.

See ya’ll!! =)

UPDATE: We had a tornado blow through the New Orleans area last night that did a lot of damage but I’m fine, it didn’t hit us directly. It passed about 5 miles away, the sound of the winds woke me up about 3am, very spooky! We now return you to the regularly scheduled post…

I’ve noticed a lot of people complaining about the deep freeze going on around most of the country, but not here! It has been so warm here lately that more often than not I’m running the A/C just to stay cool. Being that It’s January and February, that sucks! Big ones! I hope that doesn’t mean we’re going to have a hotter than usual spring and summer ahead. I would rather be cool than hot, given the choice.

The old microwave oven, not really that old, unless you consider 5 yrs as “old” took a dump last week and refused to work. It was a pretty nice model, but it got replaced with a new one that had a burning problem, and I don’t mean the food. It smelled like the innards were smoldering, like an electrical fire was going to break out at any minute. I’m not going to mention the brand name (Panasonic) but after a few days, it went back to the store for a different brand after it was realized that the acrid burning smell was getting worse. I hate having to stand by with a fire extinguisher when ever I nuke something, don’t you?

The new one features some cool whiz-bang controls and does a great job, you can start this stainless-steel clad beauty up with one button push, as opposed to two on the old one. Yeah, I can just imagine the lectures… “When I was a kid, we used to have to push TWO buttons on our microwaves to heat things up. You kids today only have to push ONE. You don’t know what hard work is!!”

I had a pretty nice, older Kenwood home stereo system for sale in the local paper last week. It was a receiver, 5 disc CD player and a double cassette recorder, yeah that’s how old it was, freakin’ cassettes. But it had remote control and it was all in awesome condition, and looked beautiful, sold the whole lot for $70. I was shocked when I learned that the girl that bought it didn’t give a rats ass whether it worked or not. Just so long as it had a handsome face. It was going to become part of a movie set and wasn’t even going to be plugged in. Yeah, maybe my old stereo system is gonna be famous! Maybe win an Oscar for best movie prop or sumshit, who knows? At least it can’t give a long winded speech… I’ll keep you guys posted…

This is one of the funniest things I’ve seen lately, a carbon-monoxide detector with a snooze button…

Like the new template? It’s one of my creations called “Harley Grafitti” and it’s a free download over at my “Free Blogger Skins” web site, yeah I give this shite away. The site has become pretty popular, get’s thousands of hits daily which is pretty cool. I just thought it would be different to use one of my own freebies. LOL

The Scientific Blogging community web site is doing pretty good. It’s still in beta phase but it already has some world class, famous scientific “egg head” types writing articles. Good stuff too, these guy are frikkin’ schmart! I’m the official “design manager” and an admin over there. Yeah, I get to lord over a bunch of scientists. Hey! I don’t like that article… “delete” LOL No, not really. I did the entire site design and layout. Cool huh? Got a hankering for some killer science, articles about global warming? Get over there and “bone” up. You can also create a personal account and get your own free science blog on the site as a columnist. How cool is that? The articles must be about science, although there is a “humor” category under “Culture”.

Hope you guys are havin’ a butt-kickin’ weekend! =) Stay warm, or cool, or whatever…