Baby Rattles

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When I was in grade school, my teacher started us on a fun craft project. We made baby rattles! How do you make a baby rattle? It’s easy! Take a normal incandescent light bulb and paper-mache the entire thing. Then you paint it bright, happy colors. After the paint dries, you smash it against your desk so that the glass inside shatters into a hundreds of tiny glass shards. And that makes it rattle!

Yes, in the early 70’s / late 80’s, it was completely acceptable for your teacher to suggest that you give babies GLASS to play with. Of course, it was completely safe, being wrapped up in PAPER. What could possibly go wrong?

How To Make A Monitor Stand

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After months of having my 23″ flatscreen computer monitor sit on a couple boxes of envelopes, I’ve finally gotten around to making a proper mount for it. And by proper, I mean by using old gas pipes and scratched up plexiglass because I’m too cheap to shell out nearly $100 for a real mount on eBay. About 7 years ago, I made a laptop mount for my car to use for cross-country trips. But these days, we all have little GPS screens in our car or on our phones, so mounting my laptop in the front seat is kind of pointless. This is why I disassembled my laptop mount and turned it into a monitor stand for my desk.

Monitor Stand

So that I wouldn’t have to spend any extra money on a single piece of pipe of perfect length, I bought a coupling and joined two of my old pieces together. I think those are 10″ and 4″ pieces. I also had to buy the 90 degree coupling. Fourteen inches is pretty high for a monitor, but I wanted it to be high enough so that my laptop could sit in front of it. I drilled 4 holes into my desk and tightly secured the pipes.

Monitor Stand

The plexiglass is looking pretty beat up and I didn’t even bother taking the piece of metal from the top of it. It’s all behind the monitor, so who cares. I had to drill 4 new holes into the plexiglass to mount the monitor on. Most monitors have mounting holes in the back.

Here are a couple shots of the completed project…

Monitor StandMonitor Stand

It’s the perfect height to have my laptop in front of now, and I have a ton of extra space on my desk. Using a “T” connector for the pipes, it would be easy to add a second monitor on top of the first or beside it. The pipe is strong enough to hold two monitors and I think my pressboard desk would be strong enough to support them both. I could have saved even more space by buying a 4′ or 5′ pipe and mounting it to a stand on the floor. This way is better for me, though, and now I can’t knock over my monitor in drunken accidents. I lose so many monitors that way.

The monitor easily swivels back and forth and I could even turn it vertical if I wanted to. The only downside is that it doesn’t swivel up and down. This isn’t a problem, though, since it’s nearly eye-level for me. If I do add a second monitor on top of it someday, I will probably use a 45 degree connector so that it’s facing down at me.

UPDATE! A few months after building this monitor stand, I added another one next to it. Instead of attaching a 2nd monitor onto a single stand, I just built a second stand next to it, mounted on the desk. Since I’m stupid, the new stand is about an inch lower than the first. It’ll be easy to fix that, someday when I decide not to be lazy anymore.

Monitor Stand

Taxi!

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Okay, here’s what we need – a taxi/bus service that is run by every driver on the road. You leave your house, open up this amazing new taxi service app on your smart phone and you click the “PICK ME UP” button. Minutes later, a stranger in a car arrives and takes you to your destination. Drivers who run this app on their smartphone are alerted when they’re approaching a person who needs a ride so that they can pull over. GPS-equipped smartphones make all this happen, of course.

There’s a rating system, similar to eBay, so you can rate both drivers and passengers with things like “10 STARS, he took me directly to my destination!” or “1 STAR, he drove me into a back alley and molested me!” You’ll be able to set up your account so that you’re only picked up by people who have “x” amount of stars. On a normal day you could stick with 8+ star drivers, but when you’re desperate, you make an exception for any driver available. Same thing with passengers, you can set it up so you’re only alerted to 8+ star passengers so that you don’t get mugged or driven into the middle of a drug deal.

There would be minimal cost to passengers since drivers would already be out on the road, doing whatever it is they do. Maybe drivers could even set their own prices, but ideally this could all be based on some kind of credits system, where you earn credits for picking up passengers and you spend credits for getting rides. That way if you’re both a regular driver and a regular passenger, you might be able to get away with never having to spend any money. For those that only take rides, they could buy credits. Credits could be exchanged with other members of the service, so you could barter credits for goods or services. People would start listing their stuff on Craigslist or eBay with things like, “Dining table for sale. Price: 50 ride credits, or best offer.” Kind of like those existing online bartering services, where you trade stuff/services for stuff/services.

Since this would rely on existing smart phones that everyone already has, there would be no new infrastructure to build. All it would take would be an app on your iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc. And I’m sure we’d work out a system for non-smart phones so that it could all be done via texting or by regular phone calls, like, “Press 1 if your GPS location is ________…”

This could become huge without government approval if an app were made for it for all the major smart phones. By the time government got around to whining that they’re not making any money from it, it would already be such a popular service that they’d have to accommodate the people who use it. Maybe they’d enforce some kind of tax on it, but it’d still be an awesomely cheap way to travel and run errands. Smaller cities would probably love an excuse to ditch their city buses since nobody ever uses them. Enterprising individuals could buy their own vans and make a living from going around and picking people up. Taxi companies would hate all of this and lobby for an end to it, but they would still have a few decades of life left from senior citizens that don’t know how to operate a cell phone.

If something like this existed, I would be both a driver and a rider. I like picking up hitchhikers anyway, and it’d be fun to have random strangers in my car as I drive to the grocery store or up to Salem. And I’d definitely use the service for my regular trips to Portland. That’s a 90 minute drive for me and at current gas prices, it costs me $15 – $20 just to drive to Portland and back. I usually park my car as soon as I get there so I can take the train everywhere. If I could “pay” half of that in credits, that would be awesome. And it would basically be free if I was giving people rides around town all the time. Eventually I would ditch my car if a service like this really took off.

And imagine having the ability to electronically hitch a ride with someone to take you across the country. The app would find people who’ve scheduled a trip to Florida and you could contact them to drop you off in Texas along the way. You wouldn’t have to worry about their car breaking down halfway there, because you’d just use your app to find a ride the rest of the way there from Arizona. You could also ditch that person halfway through the trip because they were annoying or listened to country music. I know people do this already on Craigslist, but this would even better.

In the end, a fairly large chunk of any given city’s population would ditch their cars because the service is so reliable. Even if a tiny percentage of the drivers on the road offered the service from their cars, that would still be a faster way to travel than by bus. Albany’s population is about 50,000 people. What if just 1% of the people offered the service? That’d be 500 rides available throughout the day. Compare that to the half dozen buses we’ve got in Albany, if we even have that many. Even 1/4th of a percent would be huge, compared to current public transportation. And the service could become so popular that we’d end up with a lot more than just 500 cars a day on the road. The government might end up loving the idea so much that they’d offer some kind of incentive for people to utilize the service.

It could go the other way too, though. The government might hate that people suddenly aren’t buying as much gas or paying taxes on their costly car repairs and they’d ban the service. Insurance companies might have issues with people using their cars “commercially.” Taxi companies would surely hate the entire idea and bus companies in big cities would too. But screw all of them! Somebody steal this idea ASAP and make it happen. And when you become rich from the idea, fly to Oregon and buy me a steak dinner.

I’ve posted before about how much I hate being such a slave to my car. Car payments, car repairs, oil changes, GAS, insurance, having to trade in for a new car every 5 – 10 years. That stuff really adds up. I would love having the option to ditch my car forever, and I probably will once my kids are grown up. Ditching your car isn’t an easy thing to do in a medium-sized town like this, though. Maybe by the time I’m ready to do that, someone will steal this idea of mine and we’ll have freelance bus drivers all over the road. Or maybe something like this already exists and I’ve just never heard of it. Hrmmmm, time to go look at my phone’s app store…

Memories of Sub7

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Back in 1998, Cult of the Dead Cow released this revolutionary hacker tool called Back Orifice. Despite its dumb interface, it was fun to play with and I used it to jump into random home computers all over the world, mostly just exploring a users files. About a year after that is when I found a similar program called Sub7.

Sub7 was amazing. Not only did it have a nice, clean interface, it allowed me to do amazing things to random computer users, like see whatever their webcam could see, listen to their room through their microphone, watch their screen, control their mouse, type on their keyboard, change their Windows themes, open and close their CD tray, make official-looking alert boxes pop up on their screens, play sounds for them to hear, flip their screen upside down, reboot their computer, and so much more. I had a blast with this program for a year or two. I never infected a computer with the server software myself – I just scanned IP ranges that I found from users on IRC and from email headers. Nearly every IP range I scanned would find at least 1 computer to “hack” into.

I was surprised one day when my redneck neighbor Tom told me that he had been doing the exact same thing, finding infected computers and spying on them with Sub7. We became pretty good friends after that and regularly exchanged lists of infected computers with each other. I taught Tom to do more than just spy on users by actually having some FUN with them.

At the time, everyone used either Windows 95 or Windows 98. I created several kinds of “theme” packs for each system and uploaded files whenever I got into a new system. It would change a few of their key system sounds to silly things like farts or other annoying noises. It also changed their startup screen and their shutdown screen. Instead of seeing only the words “Windows 95” on bootup, they would see added text which made it say something like, “A hacker has infected your Windows 95 machine and has complete control over everything you do! Have a nice day!” The shutdown screen displayed something similar. I had other screens that were a little more subtle, but I can’t remember what many of them said. I made at least one set of them that advertised phonelosers.org, thinking it would be great if people started emailing me because phonelosers.org hacked their computer. Surprisingly, these systems wouldn’t usually disappear from my list of infected machines immediately after I uploaded these images. Either they didn’t care or they just didn’t know what to do about it.

I built my collection of mp3 music with Sub7. I think at the time the only way to get pirated music was from Usenet. We didn’t have Napster or Limewire or torrents back then. There were FTP sites and IRC channels to get music from, but I just wasn’t into piracy enough to bother with all that. But when I started finding mp3 files of popular music on peoples’ computers, I began slowly downloading them on my speedy 56k modem. This, of course, slowed down their internet connection to unbearable speeds. Sometimes they would log off in the middle of my download and I would end up with an incomplete song, something I wouldn’t notice until I was listening to music and it would stop playing before the song finished. It was a fun way to build up a music collection though. And it was a really sad thing when I’d find a computer full of mp3 tunes that I really wanted, but they would log off before I could take it all and I’d never find them again.

I won’t even get into all of the personal data I found on peoples computers, but there was a ton of it. I read financial documents, letters to friends and family, diaries and telephone books. I remember reading this incredibly long journal that a guy was writing in Microsoft Word, detailing his sadness and feelings over the divorce he was going through. I popped up a window on his screen one night that looked like a standard Windows alert box, telling him to hang in there and it would all get better soon. I bet he was confused to have his computer try and console him.

I did something to about 10 users in Bend, Oregon that I’m not too proud of. I deleted all of their files. At the time I was involved in a battle with Tannest and she worked at her brother’s Internet Service Provider in Bend. So I would regularly scan the IP ranges for her ISP (BendNet) and when I found an infected one, I would log in and delete pretty much the entire hard drive. I would leave most of the Windows directory intact so that their system wouldn’t actually crash. Then I would pop up an alert box titled BendNet Services. It would read, “You are currently more than 30 days past due on your internet bill. We have removed all of your computer files and will not return them until your bill is paid in full. Thank you for using BendNet internet. -Tannest.” I used her real name, of course. I’m sure she had a tough time convincing the angry users that stormed into her office that they weren’t the ones responsible for deleting all of their files. I seriously felt bad about doing this to people, but the hilarity of pissing off Tannest outweighed the guilt so I kept doing it. After awhile I could never find infected BendNet users anymore, so I always wondered if Tannest started scanning for them herself so she could contact them and fix their machines before I got to them.

I also helped a lot of infected people in my local area. After going through their files and figuring out what their ICQ member number was (Remember when we all used ICQ? Ugh, past, I don’t miss you at all.) I would send them a message on ICQ, using my real account, and explain to them that their machine was infected. I’d direct them to a website that contained a program that would remove Sub7 from their computer so that nobody else could hack them. I made a few local friends by doing this, people that I kept in touch with for years afterward and even met some of them in real life.

I could make a user’s modem dial phone numbers by adding standard modem commands to certain files. A few times I would want to know the identity of a computer that I had access to, but I couldn’t figure it out from their files, so I’d command their modem to hang up from their internet connection and call my home. A look on my caller ID box would give me their identity. Once they logged back on, I would remove my phone number. I could set up their systems to automatically dial any phone number I wanted each time they turned on their computer. It sure was tempting to buy a 1-900 number and make computers all over the country dial my number.

It was fun era of pretending to be a hax0r in the late 90’s and early 00’s and I doubt it’ll ever be so easy again. It’s just too bad that I never used Sub7 to pull any truly epic pranks on anyone. I saw other people post webcam shots of computer users looking thoroughly confused at the weird messages popping up on their computer, but I rarely found computers with webcams attached to them. That’d sure be a fun thing to do today with everyone owning laptops that have built-in webcams and microphones in them.

Middle of the night pranking at Circle K

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When I worked the graveyard shift at one Circle K in Galveston, I passed the night by reading all of the magazines that were sold in the store. I rarely had more than a couple of customers per hour, so I did a ton of reading. I started reading the gruesome stories in the few detective magazines we sold and for some reason or another, I decided to start calling people in the stories in the middle of the night from Circle K’s pay phones. It was partially curiosity, to see if the stories were made up or if the magazines changed the names to protect the innocent. They didn’t.

I brought magazines outside to the pay phone and called directory assistance in the appropriate cities, using my red box to avoid the long distance charges. I took notes in the magazines, writing phone numbers of people related to the case next to their names in the magazine. I bet the people who purchased the magazines were surprised to find their home phone numbers written in there.

I can’t remember exactly what I said to people, but I’m sure I wasn’t entirely creepy about my calls. I mean, I wasn’t all “This is the ghost of ________ _______, and I’m going to haunt you with phone calls!” I’m sure it was still bizarre to get phone calls in the middle of the night about murder and fraud cases. I think I mostly just asked questions about the case to see if I really had the right people, probably posing as a reporter or something.

I still remember this one story about a teenager named Kenneth Glenn Milner, who attempted to murder a bunch of people in his small Texan town. The story was filled with tons of fail, because I don’t think he managed to actually kill anyone. I came across someone with the same last name as him today and suddenly remembered the whole thing, so I Googled his name and found this interview with him.

The end of my job at that particular Circle K ended my hobby of interviewing crime victims in the middle of the night. That is, until 2002 when I started interviewing random people in stories that I saw on Fark. I doubt any of those sound clips on that page still work.

I’m sure Richard Cardo will be noting this entry in his file on me. “Oh, so he has a FASCINATION and a HISTORY with murder!”

The Big Beef Bueno Podcast Episode 007 – Rappy McRapperson Interview

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I discovered a lot of awesome new music last year, but one artist has really stood out among my favorites and the more I listen to his music the more I like him. That artist is Rappy McRapperson. I think my love for Rappy has gone far beyond just a passing phase at this point. I originally found just 2 tracks of his on some compilation torrent – the Lick Your Own Butthole Party Dance and I’m A Gangster.

Months after being thoroughly amused by those two songs and giving them plenty of airplay on Cacti Radio, I began to crave more. I listened to all of the clips of his music on Amazon, but I was too cheap to pay for them. More months passed, and I eventually found a download link for 8 of his albums. This is when discovered the true brilliance of Rappy McRapperson.

Sure, his songs are funny and they make me laugh, but his music goes way beyond that. His musical style is truly unique and some of the lyrics are amazing. His latest album, For The Kids In Juvenile Detention is a masterpiece from beginning to end and it’s easily my favorite album by Rappy. (That’s his latest solo work, but he’s done an album since then with the frontman for Emergency Pizza Party.) That’s another great thing about Rappy – he’s good friends with all the members of Emergency Pizza Party, which is another band that I happen to really like and I’d discovered them completely separate from Rappy.

Last week I suckered Rappy into giving me his phone number, and after he realized what a huge mistake that was, we made a deal that if he did an interview with me, I would stop screwing with his Sprint wireless account. So here it is! After a 3.5 year hiatus, the Big Beef Bueno podcast is back! And to make up for those 3.5 years that I abandoned my listeners, I’ve made this episode 3 times as long as any of the previous episodes! And as an extra added bonus, the entire episode is filled with Rappy McRapperson’s music and our interview! You can’t go wrong, listening to this…

Click here to listen to BBB Episode 007

Eight of his previous albums are available to download for free by clicking on this link. If you like them, you should send no less than $300 to Rappy’s PayPal at mcrapperson AT gmail.com. If you’re not into paying for music, though, consider this amazing investment opportunity… Rappy will draw you blueprints for a spaceship for a mere $10!

Click the Buy Now button to take advantage of that amazing offer!





Rappy writes regularly in his blog at mcrapperson.blogspot.com and occasionally updates his website at rappymcrapperson.com. He also has a YouTube page with lots of homemade videos to his songs and a Facebook. If you’ve ever watched Captain Underpants, you might recognize Rappy’s voice in the theme song:

And here’s one more video of Rappy’s. Go to his YouTube page and watch them all, though.

I’m done with this post for now, but I’m sure I’ll come back and add a little more to it soon. If you want to subscribe to Big Beef Bueno on iTunes, the RSS feed is still notla.com/rss.xml. Subscribe!

Click here to listen to BBB Episode 007

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Flamoot / Snee

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About 10 years ago I met this guy from Canada who sometimes called himself Flamoot and sometimes Snee. I think we emailed each other a few times before actually meeting at a hacker convention in Detroit called Rubicon. His way of saying hello was tricking the front desk into giving him my room key so he could sneak into my room. (There’s an old post somewhere about this.) I can’t remember if he was at Rubicon the following year or not.

We’ve emailed each other occasionally over the past 10 years. He used to call into The Phone Show and it always seemed to be under bizarre circumstances, like he’d be calling from pay phones but connected through weird PBX systems or something like that. Anyway, back in the early 2000’s, the thing I really loved about flamoot was his journaling. He wrote some really incredible stuff on his web site. Very lengthy posts. And of course he couldn’t write down his thoughts on LiveJournal like a normal person. He had to put them on his own weird system where the URL ended in cgi-bin/index.pl because that’s how real hackers do it.

I’m not even going to try and describe how much I loved the stuff he wrote on his page, but there was a ton of it and I read every word. I think I even went back and read a lot of it again when I was finished. It was like reading my favorite book or something. Some of it was just mundane, day-to-day stuff, but then he’d rant about random things and it was just so fascinating to me. His writing really made me admire him a lot.

Of course, his personal server disappeared eventually and all his writing went away with it. I was sort of devastated and I think I asked him about it and he told me he lost it all too. Maybe a crash or something, I don’t know. Years later I found archive.org which archived a huge portion of the internet starting back in the late 90’s. Ever wonder what Google used to look like? Yahoo? CNN? Your own homepage? It’s all on there. His page was missing from it, though. Archive.org missed a lot of sites that weren’t really popular and his didn’t make the cut. Until recently.

Click here for the Flamoot archive

Every couple years I’ll remember how awesome Flamoot was and I’ll go looking for his journal on archive.org and it’s never there. But today I was talking to a mutual friend of ours and that reminded me to try again and there it was. This is pretty exciting for me. I’ve read half of it already and I plan to try and read the rest of it tonight. It’s not all there, unfortunately, but my hope is that archive.org will someday have the rest of it up. I think he was writing at least as early as 2000 and that’s probably where all the really intense stuff is. Maybe I can click on some of these links from the 2003 archives and be taken back to then.

This post from December 3rd, 2003 where he’s pushed to awareness of something by the pattern adorning the surface of his bed’s comforter is a perfect example of what I love about his writing. (Just a short excerpt here) “It bears only a vague resemblance to the mini-spirals on my comforter. It does bear a passing resemblance to an “e”. But none of that need mean anything. In those and other numerous recent incidents, the theme of magical numbers, cosmic constants, natural geometry and how they’re all interrelated has come up again and again, unreally often. It hasn’t been ME talking about it — it’s been a series of things I’ve been subjected to which have been RELATED to each other, which are tied to each other with a web of common-sense-defying convenience. I guess my hypothesis is that this is because I’ve been thinking about this stuff lately, or maybe this was just a statistical hiccup and I started thinking about this stuff before it happened as a reaction to a future memory, or like, the backwards time-quake of solving this deep fucking fractal synchronicity period shit. But what’s a statistical hiccup? What the hell kind of weird primal shit-magic fills your life with cosmic constants? Man. So I wonder if it’s gonna stop now, with my bedsheet (which had the Pi tie-in through Graham, remember ^-^). The universe, in conclusion, is an INSANE FUCKING PLACE TO LIVE.”

I’m off now to read some more of his rants and you should too!

Thanks for all this, Snee. And thanks, archive.org, for saving it!

Sunday Update: So what is the elusive Flamoot up to now, you must certainly be asking. He’s been developing some weird game for Linux called telepathic-critterdrug that I don’t fully understand because I don’t ingest nearly enough acid, but you may want to check it out. Here’s a video of what it looks like.

PLA Book

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Around 2002ish I started working on a book for the Phone Losers of America. I’d work on it nonstop for a couple of weeks and then I’d completely forget it existed for a few years. I started up again in 2005, I think, but then I discovered podcasting and started dedicating all of my time to both listening and creating podcasts. But every once in awhile I’d open up the book file and do a little work on it, often switching between it being a 1st person book about PLA shenanigans and it being a 3rd person story not about PLA, but about PLA-type things. If that makes any sense.

This summer I started working heavily on the project and finally decided to give up the 3rd person story thing since I discovered how much I suck at actual story writing. And this time I didn’t quit until it was finally finished. Around September I started receiving proofs of the book, making corrections and continuing to add content. I used a service called CreateSpace to have the book printed, which is an excellent service for people who are too lame to get published for real. They even put your book on Amazon and make it available to order from real book stores.

At the very last minute, I managed to convince Rob T Firefly to write a foreword for the book and to do some illustrating for a couple of the chapters. Also at the very last minute, I switched from Microsoft Word to OpenOffice since I’d just switched to a Mac. Once I figured out that OpenOffice couldn’t do everything I wanted, I switched again to iWork’s Pages.

Anyway, what I’m getting at is that the book is now available. The PLA Book page has details about what can be found in the book and the PLA Store has all the links you need to buy it, in both book and e-book formats. It contains quite a bit of stuff from my homepage, like the eBay pranks, the travels and a few other things. Then it’s got a ton of stuff from the PLA web site, like call forwarding stunts, cordless phones, Dino, Fred Meyer, Boulder News Frenzy and the Richard Cardo investigation, the McDonald’s Sign Prank, Curtis Lee Jones, PLA history and a lot more. So if you’re the type that likes this kind of thing, maybe you should get a copy of it.

Now I need something new to do with my free time. I have all kinds of new projects ready to work on, but so far all I’ve been doing for the past few months is hanging out on conferences for hours at a time and video Skyping a lot.

I got gas!

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THEM: “Thank you for calling Northwest Natural Gas. Please enter your account number.”

ME: type type type type on the phone’s keypad.

THEM: “We have your account pulled up. Please say your house number.”

ME: “819”

THEM “For verification, please enter the last 4 digits of your social security number.”

ME: type type type type!

THEM: “Please tell us why you’re calling today.”

ME: “Cancel my account.”

THEM: “It sounds like you’d like to cancel your account. Is this correct? Please say yes or no.”

ME: “Yes.”

THEM: “Which month and day would you like your account canceled?”

ME: “November 18th.”

THEM: “You said November 18th. Is this correct?”

ME: “Yes.”

THEM: “Please hold for a representative…”

Then a rep. comes on the line, asks for my account number, my address, my SSN and asks why I’m calling. Don’t fall for those automated systems, people! I think they’re there just to make you not realize that you’re actually on hold. At least its not as bad as when AT&T’s system once said to me, “You said yes, is this correct? Please say yes or no.”

I moved into a new home last month. It’s awesome. The rent is super cheap, especially compared to my old place, and its got an extra bedroom. I’m just a few blocks from downtown Albany now, meaning I can walk to the post office, the bank and to lunch. I can go for days at a time without driving my car now. It’s a nice change from being way on the edge of town and having to drive miles to everything. The only downside is that there’s no washer and dryer here, so it’s back to making weekly laundromat trips for me. But I’ve got a plan for hooking up a washer and dryer in this place, if I can get the landlord to go along with it.

I’m sick today. It sucks. I haven’t figured out if I’ve given myself food poisoning with hamburger helper or if it’s just flu stuff. That’s all to report for this month. Good day…

What’s in Your Fridge?

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That’s a response video to one of r0xy’s video. I grabbed a bunch of random objects and stuck them in my fridge, just to confuse viewers. Judging by the comments so far, it worked.

A few days ago I created a weird sign and put it up on the bulletin board at McDonalds. Click here to view a post about it so I don’t have to explain it all in this post. Lisa and I were at that McDonald’s today and noticed that 3 or 4 of the tabs were torn off of it now. Some old man has called me twice about it, wanting to buy the snow plow. I didn’t think people would actually call about it when I made the sign.

A few weeks ago Jessica convinced me to watch a show called How I Met Your Mother. I hate admitting that I like a sitcom, especially when it’s got a cheesy laugh track on it and a lame title like that, but I love this show more than anything. It’s so bizarre and messed up and fun. It frequently has old cast members from the old TV show Freaks and Geeks. (Three that I’ve noticed now, one is a main character.) I’m up to season 3 now, about 4 episodes into it. Barney, played by Neil Patrick Harris, is the coolest character ever. If you’ve never seen it, give it a try. I downloaded the entire show from bittorrent, but it’s on Netflix if you want to wait for the discs in the mail.

The PLA Book is coming along great. I’m waiting on my sixth proof of it now. Jammie is doing an awesome job of copy editing for me and Rob T Firefly did a foreword for it and I’m waiting on some illustrations from him. I’m shooting for it to be all finished up by November 1st or so. I’ll be glad when this project is over so I can work on other things. Seems like all I ever do anymore is work on this book.

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