Get her the nice jacket...with the long arms and tie downs....

Christmas is over, thank whatever powers that be!!! All the stores and stupid traffic should be calming down soon, which is nice because I'm tired of having to go to Walmart at 2 am just to get some darn socks.

I happily had the chance to visit with the Mobile crowd a bit on my way to the family. It was great to see most of you (though I hate one person in particular...you know who you are Ke...err...yeah, you know who you are). I was a little disappointed that I missed the P'fish staff, the McKinney's, Daryl, Irish Erin, Brian, Teddy and T-anne (hope you guys/gals had a great holiday and safe travels).

Holidays generally go on my suck list. The major reason is my family was specifically designed to "not play well" with others. As soon as I get to my dad's house, I walk in ready for a quiet little break and some food, and I notice that the spare bedroom has an occupant. My step-aunt-in-law-thingie Carol (step-mother's sister) has "moved in" for the weekend. This would be the point at which the obscenities begin.

Many people are "crazy". I've been called that quite often and am proud to be labeled in such a manner (hey, it's about attention....not good or bad ;) ). Carol is c-r-a-z-y. I'm talking wear the nice white leather jack with long arms and straps, be put in the padded room, here's your narcotics, don't let the insanity spread to the general populace kind of crazy. This lady needs to be put down for the good of humanity. I cannot express using words in this or any other language the level to which this lady has brought the very notion/concept of crazy. It has to be expressed as a subliminal guttural sound originating from the lower intestines.

So to not rant and rave, this was a very bad development. End result is that I almost had to muderate someone and my father was pissed most of the weekend because Carol wouldn't shut her shit mouth or mind her own f'n business. Add this on top of the step-mother being pissed because her neanderthal child (Rodney) is getting married to his already pregnant trailer-living no-education having "I'll be a waitress all my life" "words with more than two vowels scare me" girlfriend. Oh and yeah.....80% of the city was a wasteland of trash (thanks Hurricane Katrina). So there's a painting of the perfect holiday setting. ;)

Good news is dad and I had a chance to kind of hang out and talk about nothing important (good father-son bonding time), an eleven pound turkey was cooked specifically for me to bring home (best present ever!!!!), and dad bought me window rain guards for my truck and installed them.

So, if you've read this far, I apologize for not being overly funny this post (needed to vent a little). Hope you've had a much better holiday than mine and that Santa "pimped-your-presents". Merry Christmas and I hope to get to see you for New Years!

What are you some kind of freak....

I admit it.....I'm probably becoming a tea snob, not British, but a tea snob. I never really thought about the phenomenon of tea here in the South and how people are affected by it. Sweet tea is a staple.....accept it....it's a fact of Southern life. Now you might not drink it, but woe to ye that dareth defy it!!

I was raised along the gulf coast, and while my parents are going to win many parenting awards, there are a few things I'm glad they did. My father is to blame for my current tea addiction. I can easily remember him drinking sweet tea at meals and when we went out to eat. So as I aged (like a fine wine I might add) and occasionally dodged the "soda" craving and had a sweet tea or two. Then in college, Los Arcos, brought my inner tea-lover out by offering free sweet tea to students in HUGE glasses and the phenomenon known as "cheese dip" (which is another story). A few years later McAlister's arrived and by that point, I didn't have a chance.

Now when I moved up to B'ham, I kinda thought to myself to try to reduce my "sugar" intake just a little. Also with it being colder up here, I thought it might be nice to occasionally have a glass of hot tea (which I attribute to my mother drinking hot-tea a lot while she was fighting the cancer). So I started to do a little research on tea, try a few flavors, see what is "out there" on the tea scene. And surprisingly found tea to my liking (though I'm sure my kidney's give me the finger daily).

Ok, so the point of all that build up. For the second time in the last five days, I've been charged as being a "Yankee" (not to be confused with "yanker" or "wanker"). Last Friday night, after having several beers (well pitchers actually) at the department Christmas gathering, we hit a Buffalo Wild Wings to grab the after beer grub. And while there, I figured I'd drink some tea to help hydrate a little. The waitress brought back unsweet tea and was apologizing profusely at the fact that they didn't have any more sweet. My reaction was simple "Bah unsweet is the bomb yo, bring that shit on!". Which of course had all the females at the table immediately stop their fiddling of the boy-friends and stare at the "unsweet tea freak". One was so shocked she gasped and asked, "I thought you grew up in the South, how can you drink that?" Now I had two answers to that, the Skrubby one (which you'll have to email me to hear because I won't post that type of language on the Internet) and the one I said which was, "I find that the bitterness of tea without the suger tends to cleanse my pallet better than sweet and the no sugar is better for me".

The second occurence of "everyone stare at the unsweet tea freak" happened this morning at Panera bread. I was getting my usual (plain bagel Sliced and toasted, with a coke - if you say iced tea most of the clerks think you want the iced green tea, which is goo.....horrible) and walked my merry way to the beverage station. There I had to wait on this lady who took about 40.9576 hours to make herself a glass of tea (she bought the large). She filled her glass with ice, then unsweet tea, and finally put 3 f'n lemons (lemons are the devil's droppings) and about 69x10^45632 packets of equal in her tea. I jumped in, filled my glass with unsweet and started to drink it right there in front of all these people. The lady looks at me like I just stealthed, sapped her companion, cheap shotted her bagel, and hit her with a 5 point cold blood eviscerate. And she said, "You know you're drinking unsweet tea, right?". She came a pubic hair's breadth away from getting the Skrubby answer.......

Time for a trip to the Amazon.....

A few days ago I posted a call for help to get "Into the West" DVD's. Matt stepped up and informed me that Amazon.com had 9 in stock. So of course I pounced. I bought gift wrap, made a note, and had it shipped directly to the step-mother. That way if it was one or two days late, it'd be like a little surprise. So I finalize the order and Amazon informs me that it should arrive 2 days BEFORE Christmas. Phew.....just in time.

Well this morning I check my email and there's a note from Amazon. And I can tell, just by the way the bolded letters seem to be timid like the new kid raising his hand in class, that something about the email is gunna suck. Lo and behold, Amazon would like to inform me that they've had a little problem and would like me to approve it. Now when I ordered this stupid DVD they had 9 "In Stock", but they must have dropped them in the toilet water or something because they are all mysteriously missing. The earliest they can get the damn thing back in stock is January 14th.......now I ordered on the 12th of December.......that kinda seems like a long time to wait for a DVD that was IN F'N STOCK!!!!!!!

Now I generally am a big fan of online shopping. It can be done any time of the day, no lines, generally cheaper, access to global product lines, and I don't have to deal with the clerk that can't figure out how much change I should get back on a $4.73 when I give him a $10 (this happened to me yesterday). I don't make a habit of shopping at "unknown" or "untrusted" websites/online retailers for my own protection and piece of mind, but nothing pisses me off more than retailers telling me an item is in stock, letting me order it, damn well charging my credit card, then suddenly coming back with, "Oops....yeah we uh... have your money but uh.... your 'in stock' item happens to be in stock in Outer Mongolia and is being shipped on the back of a lesbian leper mule with three legs and only one good eye".

Yeah, the rutabega design pattern....what that's not a word?

The other day, I was involved in a conversation that I feel I must share. I was talking to someone who used the phrase "agnostic" as a descriptor for some of the code I have to deal with. My response was,"eh?? that doesn't really make sense....agnostic code, that seems um.... uncomplimentary..". So we had a quick discussion of the phrase's use, followed by a quick meriam-webster online dictionary lookup, some head scratching, then just a short laugh at how strange it was.

The originator of this phrase (who I'll name as Bob (to protect the innocent)) and the guy who I had the conversation with originally (who I'll call Goliath) apparently revisited the discussion the following day and sent me their IM chain.

Goliath says: Hey you've used the word "agnostic" in reference to code, right?
Bob says: hmm....sorta
Bob says: platform agnostic
Goliath says: yeah
Bob says: so yeah
Goliath says: that's what I told my guys yesterday
Goliath says: but now we think that doesn't make sense
Bob says: really
Goliath says: well, it makes vague sense
Goliath says: but only barely
Bob says: it should
Bob says: see - most people just like the way it sounds
Bob says: don't really think about it
Goliath says: the non-religious-related definition is "one who is doubtful or noncommittal"
Goliath says: oh yeah - I like the way it sounds
Goliath says: but then I got called out on it
Goliath says: which, you know, is what I pay my guys to do
Bob says: it's doubtful code
Bob says: surely they'd buy that
Goliath says: they would if they knew us
Bob says: we've demonstrated our ability to cause concern/doubt
Goliath says: well now it fits PERFECTLY
Goliath says: thank you for clearing it up for me
Bob says: no problem

So this made me laugh...pretty hard. Let me know if you find it funny too.

3...2...1....MS Launch.....

I should get a hat that says, "I survived being launched by Microsoft". I attended the MS Launch Best of event yesterday here in B'ham. I also attended the main launch event in Atlanta a few weeks ago. I didn't blog much or say too much about the Atlanta .... um ...... debacle ..... because, well, it really kinda sucked. There were a large number of people there and free software is nice, but most of the demo's sucked (read "didn't work") and the speakers weren't really that great. I can't say they sucked, they did the best they could when speaking to 2k people, but I wasn't impressed.

Now yesterday here in B'ham the morning started off a little bit better. While I couldn't really get into the groove for the morning session on SQL 2k5 (the speaker had a cool accent, but wasn't really "pumped Langan-style" or for those non-Southers "excited" about the talk), the afternoon session turned me totally around on MS events. The afternoon speaker was Glen Gordan (http://blogs.msdn.com/glengordon/) and he seemed a little more into Visual Studio than I expected.

He demo'd a few new cool features of VS2k5, like code snippets (common chunks of code that you write can be tagged and quickly pasted into a project, no more searching for the files and copy/paste), some cool new intellisense features, the architecture designer (for those project designers/managers), and my favorite ClickOnce deployment for Smart Clients. The smart client thing is something I wasn't familiar with (of course Mr. Porter was, freakin Doug knows everything!!!), but I'm almost inspired by it. Quick and dirty Skrubby version: a smart client is an application that is at it's heart a full-bore windows app, but is deployed and can be used like a straight web application. It's some pretty neat stuff imho. Hopefully I'll post more about them (since I don't know much at the moment) because I bought a book (or 30) on developing smart client applications in VS 2k5.

A secondary implication of the day is that I'm starting to think about certifications (curse you Porter, may you have many bouncy bubbly children!!!!!!). I took a look at the new MS certifications and I'm twirling with the idea of starting the MCAD (Applications Developer) line. Only thing that really bothers me about them these days is that they are all C# and VB based. What happened to the core language, C/C++? There are a number of books on Managed C++ (MC++) and of course compiler support isn't disappearing, but it seems that even MS is basically saying that pure OOP is the only way to go (not that a HUGE percentage of the tech industry isn't already spouting it). It might just as well be me turning into a tech dinosaur, clinging to the "old" ways, unable to cope with the newbies (they people that came 2 years later than I did, lol).

Wow....this post is turning depressing........ ok Skrubby.....think of good things....like cornbread......hmmmm.....cornbread.......goooood.....ok, I'm better.

For those of you who like a little brain exercise, I found http://planarity.net/. It's really simple in principle, yet for some reason I find it pseudo-relaxing. It may be the only game in which I can do better than my toothbrush these days........

A little help here....

I've been trying to purchase a mini-series on DVD for my step-mother as her Christmas gift, but I habeen unable to procure it either online or locally. If anyone happens to go by Best Buy, Suncoast or any other store that sells DVDs would you mind checking to see if they have "Into the West" (2005). If so please give my cell a ring and I'll gladly make arrangements with you.

My best game of bowling at the department Christmas party was a 138. Thought that was pretty good since I haven't bowled in 10+ years.


UPDATE: Thanks to a tip from Matt, Amazon changed their tune on getting me this item. Somehow they "magically" found 9 copies of this hanging around and they swear it will arrive in time for Christmas. So we'll see! Thanks again Matt!!!!

What I want to be like when I grow up....

Just found this, can't believe I didn't see it before, but its FRIGGIN AWESOME. Old Grandma Hardcore. Now, I know what you're thinking.....Skrubby's trying to get us to look at old poot pr0n......while in general you're making a safe and wise decision, in this particular case, you're wrong!

This lady is true inspiration. As I get older and suffer through the tragedies and bull of adult life I begin to wonder how my inner gamer/child will cope or will "it" be mired in responsi....responsi.....bility.......(I'm begining to hate that word). This chic paves the way, shows us how its done, and most likely would even beat your ass in a good game of Battlefront 2!

Welcome to Frustrationland...err Hapland 2...

Found this game online, thought it was pretty spiffy. Wasted many hours (at work) trying to solve it. It goes on my short list of little crappy flash games that ROCK.

http://www.addictinggames.com/hapland2.html