Much like in televisions, a wider blarg is a better blarg! I finally went through and edited my stylesheet to something I prefer a little better. Overal the area for content is about 100 pixels wider. It should still fit fine on 800×600 screens, but it will be tight. Only 15% of my visitors have this old and outdated resolution anyway.

On a side note, the small blog circle of friends we have is way boring right now. All the others have gone off and are hugging a tree in the forest somewhere. I’m going to go find some new blog friends now.

Got this today in my email, thought I’d share. We’ve used them before, and they work pretty good. Drop your address and they’ll send you a coupon.

$5 Off Crest Whitestrips

A Feast for Crows is almost here. After placing my order back on May 31st, the book is only a day or two away. It was originally slated to come out in July, but was pushed back until a few days ago. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for USPS to move the darned the thing to my house.

I started the Song of Fire and Ice series back in January, at which point the first 3 books had been released. I really feel for the people that have been with this series from the beginning. I only had to wait since May for book 4, but some people have been waiting FIVE years. I’ve seen mixed reviews of book 4, but I think it’s understandable. The book was creeping over 1300 pages, so Martin decided to split the book into two volumes. This means half the characters are not even addressed in Crows. The good news is that book 5 should be out in a much more timely manner, since it is mostly written.

Now if only I had enough time to read it when it finally gets here.

Our society revolves around a time = money mindset. In order to be productive we need to effectively manage our time, which in turn leads to success (and possibly money). We spend a lot of resources becoming more effecient, but I see a glaring problem. Why are we wasting so much time sleeping?!

The average person sleeps about 7 hours a night. (Oh look, I just used real data, all the stuff I’m about to make up now has authority!) That’s almost a third of a day! That’s the equivalent of working two days, and then sleeping for a whole day. That’s like lopping 4 months off of the calendar! In my opinion this is a complete waste of time.

The only thing that happens during sleep is your brain makes serotonin and norepinephrine, whatever the heck those are (oh, more data, I almost sound like a scientist). Then there is a bunch of other dumb stuff like REM sleep and dreams, what a joke. I predict that scientists will start producing serotonin and that other junk in pill form. People will be able to take the pills instead of stupid sleeping. And who needs dreams, go watch a movie.

I think this will have a vast impact on our world. Now it won’t be special if a drug store is open 24 hours anymore, because everyone will be awake 24 hours a day. People will get made fun of for falling asleep like "haha, what an idiot, he fell asleep." Since people will be awake longer and use more energy, we will have to introduce a 4th meal to our day. I propose we call that meal "blarg." People will say things like "Timmy, that candy bar is going to ruin your blarg!"

**This is the first post in a recurring series entitled "The Blarg Predicts." You can find more information about this and other columns to the right.

I drove through a Carl’s Jr. yesterday and noticed a sign I see all too frequently: "No Walk-Ups Allowed." Usually I take my food and continue with my daily life, never stopping to consider the plight of those to whom this sign is directed. Could it be there is more than meets the eye behind a sign of this nature?

Consider the man on a motorcycle who is famished. After a long day at work driving on the highway all day like bikers do, stopping at random bars in the middle of nowhere with lots of other bikers, he finally returns home. On his way he decides to stop at a fast food restaurant for a quick bite. He pulls up, orders, gets his food, and is on his merry way. But here is the point: With a quick swing of his leg, wouldn’t he be "walking"?

I can only come to one conclusion: Fast food restaurants are predjudiced against people that walk. "Hey, if you were sitting on something that had wheels on it, we would give you food, but you’re not, you are walking." Sometimes they cover this up by claiming it is for your safety, but I see through that lie. What about the man on a moped, I bet they would serve him, yet he is no safer than a walker, is he? This is not about safety at all, but about mode of transportation. Fast food chains are out to discriminate against the transportationally challenged. "If you use your legs to get around, do not come down this funny alley on the side, you must go inside."

**This is the first post in a recurring series entitled "That Doesn’t Make Sense." You can find more information about this and other columns to the right.

While John seemed to be the only one interested last time (and he’s on the internet fast) I thought I’d bring this to people’s attention.

The local media loves to report when gas prices go up, but when they go down it’s not a big story. Like I’m sure you’ve noticed, gas prices are going down, and that’s because oil prices are going down. Now I’m not an oil industry expert, but it would seem that gas prices at the pump are directly related to oil trading prices! All sarcasm aside, I am very curious about the oil to gas pricing process. To me it appears that the evil oil companies are somewhat at the will of the oil stock market. People pump oil, it sells on an oil stock market (whatever the heck that is), it gets refined, and then evil oil companies sell it. I need to research it, but I think that’s the process.

So what’s the point? Last week the senate decided to look into the evil oil companies to make sure they’re not ripping us off. Is it any surprise that as oil traded higher, gas prices were higher? And now as oil trades lower, gas prices are going down. That doesn’t sound like evil oil ripping anyone off. To me it sounds like politicians saying "oooooh look at me!!! The oil guys are more evil than me!!! Don’t forget to vote for me in 2006!"

Today we took Boo to get a haircut, which you might have gathered from the previous post. She came out extra cute, and more girlish. We don’t think her hair has ever been this short before. My scruffy dog now looks like a little princess, which hurts my manliness a little, but I’ll live.

I’m also trying out a new wordpress plugin to post the images called IImage Browser. Creates thumbnails and uploads everything. I’m using that in combination with ChenPress. There is one small problem that can be fixed easily. IImage Browser creates a button in the quicktags, but ChenPress removes quicktags. Simply go into the ChenPress plugin and remove the whole section about "nuke quicktags." It doesn’t work perfectly, but it’s easier than uploading via ftp. I don’t want to put fullsize images on the server, so I have to resize in Picasa first. If there is anything I’m missing from blogger it’s the integration with Picasa.

The dog needs a haircut and her nails trimmed, bad. Even if you do not care for dogs, or my dog inparticular, I think you will still find this story amusing, so keep reading.

A while back I found out that my mom’s best friend since junior high has been taking their dog to a place on Woodruff to get its haircut. We had been going to Petco, but I found them impersonal and not very good. Yesterday I decided to obtain my Aunt’s phone number (remember, they were best friends, so we call them Aunt and Uncle even though they’re not). I asked my brother online if he could find it, which he did. I proceeded to call the number, and what ensued could not have been planned if I tried.

The phone rang and a man picked up with a quick "Hello?" Seeing how I rarely call them, I asked "Danny?" to which the man replied he was in fact Danny. Skipping any sort of chit-chat I began to ask him about the dog haircutting place my Mom had told me about. The person on the other end of the phone began rattling off all he knew about this particular business. At this point it struck me that it didn’t really sound like Danny, but he was telling me what I needed to know, and he said he was in fact Danny, so I continued to listen.

After a couple questions we neared the end of our conversation. The man’s voice still struck me as odd though, so before I hung up I asked again "This is Danny, right?" The man then replied "No, this is Dave." Turns out I transposed the last two digits of the phone number and called the wrong person. The funny part though is that not only did this man’s name sound similar to Danny, causing him to mishear me in the beginning and continue speaking, but he also knew all about the dog place I was trying to find out about. Odds have to be a million-to-one.

I then proceeded to call the correct phone number and tell Danny the funny story I have just told you. And yes, we are taking the dog there tomorrow.