They can get their *own* damn brains to eat!

What pisses you off?

Created by ptocheia

Today, I actually accomplished two things.

Not much in the grand scheme of things, to be sure, but two things nevertheless.

There have been, for quite some time now, two glaring problems with this site.

1. You couldn't select text when using the Internet Explorer browser.
2. If you made your browser very wide the text just kept on getting wider with it.

Neither of these is a problem anymore.

The first problem was quite aggravating for me. It ended up being caused by a bug in Internet Explorer that only came up when "position:absolute" was used for layer positioning. I removed all such declarations from my stylesheets and html files and the problem went away.

While I was messing with my stylesheets anyway, I assigned a maximum width to the "body" element so that there's essentially a maximum width for the site - no matter how wide you want to make your browser window. This has been something that's annoyed me for a long time, but it obviously wasn't as serious as the text selection bug.

Oh yeah, I also moved the side panel to the right side of the screen. Looks pretty different over there, doesn't it?

Backwoods Brown Ale

(bottle) Given to me by a homebrewing friend. No description or name given, it was all up to me. Pours a nice amber/honey color with lots of foam. The aroma is very sweet - almost too sweet - and that sweetness is quite evident in the taste as well. A good brown ale, but perhaps a little too cloying for me to ever spend an evening drinking it. Much better, of course, than anything I've ever made.

Okay, here's the latest from Free Will Astrology:

I've known more than a few people who have slept with things they consider power objects: a teenager who liked to cuddle with the trophy he won for bowling a perfect game, for example, and a macho dude who was never without his stuffed turtle from childhood, and a woman who worshiped a special rock she had been sitting next to when she had the revelation that changed her life. I mention these precedents, Pisces, in the hope that it will help you feel utterly uninhibited about going to bed with a certain good luck charm or mojo-drenched fetish. I assure you there will be some magic in doing so.

So, if I understand this correctly, I'm supposed to (a) pick a favorite object, then (b) sleep with it.

Since my favorite object would probably have to be my pool cue, I'm more than a little hesitant to follow this advice.

The mechanics of me taking a long and hard object to bed just don't seem very appealing to me.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just not for me.

Got a couple more trips coming up for work.

In early August I'll be going to Chicago for a few days, then the next week I'll be in Boston for two nights.

Looking forward to the Boston trip much more than the Chicago one. Nothing against Chicago though - it just doesn't seem like it'll be as much fun. I could be wrong though. I guess we'll be taking in a White Sox game. That'll be cool.

In Boston we'll be going to a Red Sox game. Going to Fenway Park is something I've wanted to do for a long time.

And sometime this Summer there's the possibility of a short trip to Philadelphia.

My insomnia is coming back. Yippie!

Inspiration is a funny thing. When I look for it, it's nowhere to be found.

Inspiration? Let's see, inspiration. Nope, don't think I've seen anything like that 'round these parts for quite a spell.

When I'm not looking for it, it sets up camp inside my skull, just behind my slowly expanding forehead, and begins pounding on drums while its companions, creativity and imagination, dance furiously to the jungle beat.

Right now, for example, inspiration is nothing but a faint memory.

I want to write something about something.

I want to write about natives living on a volcanic island.

When that volcano starts to rumble, and they know that they're going to die, do you suppose that some of them just wish it'd hurry up and erupt already?

Not because they're anxious to die, but because they just want to get it the fuck over with. So they can stop trembling with every belch of smoke or vibration of the earth. So they can stop wondering Is this it? Is this the end?

Living in fear is no way to live.

I've known for several weeks now that something horrible is going to happen to me.

Somewhere in the depths of space, a chunk of rock has been diverted from its orbit. It's begun a long slow spiral inward that will eventually cause it to land right on top of me.

There's no escape for me. I know that even if I should somehow survive the impact, I won't be the same. I'll have to rebuild myself. Again.

I don't know when this is going to happen. I'm certainly not looking forward to it. But a part of me, realizing the inevitability of it all, a part of me really wants to just get it the fuck over with.

Got this in my email today:

Hello, this is Ticketmaster Customer Service with an important alert for your upcoming event. Kelly Clarkson, scheduled at The Louisville Gardens on Wednesday, August 24th, 2005 at 8:00pm, has been cancelled.

Your credit card will automatically be credited the ticket price and convenience charges, and should post to your account within 7 to 10 days. Please note, the $4.35 per order processing fee and any TicketFast or UPS delivery charges are non-refundable.

I don't know why this event was cancelled, but I bet it has something to do with all of the women being pissed at me on Friday.

That THUD THUD THUD sound everyone keeps hearing is the sound of my readers dropping dead from boredom.

There's not a lot that I seem to be able to do about it, except apologize. Again.

I do have a question though.

Why is it, do you suppose, that I keep returning to the scene of the crime even though I know that it's certainly haunted?

There is nothing there for me except uneasiness and fear, yet I still return every chance I get. The place manages to attract and repel me at the same time. It's almost like I can't really believe what happened there. What I did there. Maybe, I seem to think, if I pretend that it didn't happen then it will somehow magically become undone.

It's like I expect that, one of these days, I'll go back and see that everything is back to normal. That the ghost of my victim doesn't lurk behind every corner, crouch in every dark shadow. That it's all been in my head - some feverish nightmare, easily countered with a couple of aspirin.

In the movies, the people that stay in the haunted castle usually end up being victims themselves.

I are so smart!

It turns out that I had two problems that were causing water to get all over my basement floor.

The first problem I already wrote about. That seems to have been taken care of by a simple filter cleaning.

The second problem was much more sneaky. And when I say that it was sneaky what I really mean is that I'm retarded.

Even though I had no more water around my air handler, the water in the restroom seemed, if anything, to be getting worse.

In the closet off the restroom is where my water heater and water softener are located. It's also where the drain is for the entire basement. It's one of those little holey things in the floor that I guess ties in with some pipe that goes to the septic tank or something. I'd take a picture but it's kind of gross.

Well to make an incredibly boring story mercifully short I have drain lines from my air handler and from my water softener that I keep crammed into these holes.

The lines from the water softener had somehow been pulled loose, and were just laying on the floor.

So I've reinserted these lines into their holes and now hopefully my wetness problem is cured.

Saturday was pretty boring. I didn't know anyone at Rich O's so I just sat at the bar all night.

I had a pint of the Bells Cherry Ale that I'd discovered last night, then I ordered a Mad Bitch. The bartender screwed up and accidentally poured me something I hadn't had before:

Poperings Hommelbier

(draft) I see all these descriptions about sharp and hoppy and peppery - I got none of that. What I got was a pale beer with a huge head that didn't have much of anything in the way of aroma or flavor. What there was, however, was quite good. At 7.5%, this beer is a lot stronger than it tastes or smells.

Once that was gone I had a Mad Bitch for real. Yummy as always.

I also had a pretty good idea - one that I should have thought of months ago.

I deleted her number from my cell phone's memory.

I did this for two reasons:

1. Every time I scrolled past her name it made me a little sad.
2. Without that number stored in the phone I no longer have to rely on my own fleeting willpower to keep me from making a bad situation worse.