Guess Who?

Does this group look familiar? 100 Austin points for whoever can guess who they are.

Candy-Girl

O candy-flavored girl,
I swear there's nothing so dandy,
As your free samples of
Girl-flavored candy.

*I wrote this poem when I was in Elementary school. I didn't think it was too dirty then and I don't think it needs to be dirty now. But I stumbled on this cool picture and had to post it.

Writing for Mass Media

School Days are here again!

Last night I had my first class of the new semester, Writing for Mass Media, a class I've taken before, but had the worst teacher in the world and so I failed the class. I guess he wasn't the worst teacher in the world, in China where he came from he may have been a brilliant teacher, but in America, where he didn't speak understandable English, he was not the best.

But my NEW teacher, does speak English, and she seems nice, competent, and lingual. I'm sure I'm not using lingual right, either the word itself, or it being unnecessary and redundant and used already and superfluous when I said she does speak English.

The reason I'm most excited about this class is that she seems to focus more on WRITING for Mass Media, the name of the class, than my previous teacher, who focused on Associated Press (AP) Rules, such as which Holidays to capitalize and when to use a, comma, As you, can,, ,see, I never learned.

But this NEW teacher I keep referring to wants us to write in our blog at least once a week, (!) and to read the New York Times front page every day, and to bring in a newspaper or newsmagazine every Monday. In other words, she wants us to read & write. Novel concept. I get school credit to blog! What will they think of next? (Please say paying me to blog... or sleep.)

I still have my American Civ Class and my Art History class on Saturday, but if they're half as good as this one promises to be, it may not be an awful semester after all.

My First Day at the New Job

Today is my third day, but I wanted to write about my first day on the job here at StoresOnline. After 3 weeks of intensive training, I'm finally taking calls. It feels a lot like trying to drink from a firehose. It's fun, but messy, and sometimes painful.

Originally I thought 3 weeks of training was pretty crazy, now I wish they gave me more. There is so much to know about building a website, about marketing a website, and about paying for and cancelling a website, I have to use my BRAIN for the first time in months!

We deal with customers who are having issues designing or creating their website, having issues with marketing and advertising their website, and customers having issues setting up their accounts with us or closing. So, instead of just customer service, or just tech support, or just sales, I get to do ALL of these and more.

Eventually I'm pretty sure I'll get the hang of it, and I think I'll love it, but right now, I have to Instant Message someone on my team or a supervisor any time someone has a problem, and, with this being customer service, that's a lot of people!

Stay tuned, I'll post about my first week back at school once it's over, and maybe a post or two in between.

Disrupting the Circle of Life

Tracie and I came home from shopping the other day and there was a HUGE spider on the wall next to our door. This spider was bigger than my thumb, and without exaggeration, the biggest spider I've seen that wasn't a tarantula. I think it may have been a young acromantula, like Aragog from Harry Potter. Well, after bringing in the groceries, I took my trusty can of Raid out there and sprayed the sucker til he fell from the wall into the abyss of bushes below our apartment. I shivered a couple times as I tend to do when I come face to face with the Spawn of Shelob, and went back inside, thinking my problems were over.

What a fool I was.

You see, that spider had gotten that big for a reason. Unbeknownst to me, he had been eating a lion's share of flies, gnats, mosquitoes, and other of nature's mini-jerks that fly around our outdoor lamp. This past week, with their main predator gone, the gang of insects favorite hangout is now our lamp. We have to walk through a literal wall of bugs to get in and out of our apartment. I have disrupted the circle of life.

Still, I'm glad I killed or at least crippled the spider when I did. If I hadn't, there could very well be a spider the size of a Buick on the side of our house, developing sentience, and wondering what the fleshy pink insects inside the apartment taste like...

Food for Thought

My Last Bigfoot Post

I think Bigfoot is blurry, that's the problem. It's not the photographer's fault. Bigfoot is blurry, and that's extra scary to me. There's a large out of focus monster roaming the countryside. Look out, he's fuzzy, let's get out of here.

--Mitch Hedberg

Retraction

Here they are, the legendary trackers who caught the bigfoot. And won't show him. And who supplied the DNA of a human mixed with an opossum. Or what's known in Georgia as "A good time."

I'm afraid that I will have to post a retraction that my source, CNN.com, is not as reliable as I thought, and this story, like all bigfoot stories, is nothing more than elaborate hoax set up by these two diabolical geniuses (is it geniuses? geniusii?) to dupe the masses of Bigfoot-believing public.

I constantly endeavor to post only things I find relevant, factual, and reliable, unless I find them particularly funny. And there's nothing to laugh about in a story of two redneck hunters faking a bigfoot discovery.

But maybe they're NOT faking it.

So WHAT if the DNA ( that's Deoxyribonucleic acid, not Lysergic diethylamide acid) sample they produced has human and opossum DNA? I mean, we've been told all our lives that evolution means we all come from the same ancestor anyway (some microscopic germ in a primordial soup with way too much time on his hands, to be precise) and so maybe bigfoot's DNA is just showing human blueprints and possum plans because those are his closest relatives. I know for a fact that when they look at my DNA they see a shmorgasborg of ingredients, ranging from frog, cow, pig, monkey, Italian, and velociraptor DNA. That doesn't mean the frozen Austin carcass in Alabama is a FAKE. So why question the bigfoot?

We don't WANT to believe.

What happened to the faith in this country. Two enterprising gentlemen; scholars, if you will, bravely do what no one before them has done, they shoot and capture ol' Sasquatch, and we and our DNA evidence try to DISPROVE their findings. Well that just makes me sick. Now excuse me, but I'm going to go help myself to a bowl of chicken noodle primordial soup.

Turns out Bigfoot's real after all.

Don't believe it? Me neither. But it's on CNN.com and Discovery Channel.

So true.

I'm still going to it this weekend or next week, but I don't expect much. But I owe it to my childhood and the good star wars movies to go see it.

I was on the RADIO!!

On 101.9 The End, probably the only really good morning show in Utah County, 'Chunga in the Morning,' Jimmy Chunga has a morning segment called "What's Happenin', Hot Stuff?" where people call in and just give their two cents. Well, I usually just listen, but someone said something so stupid I simply had to call and correct them. Because it's my duty to correct people I find stupid or just plain silly or wrong.

So they had a lot of people give their opinions on what to do about the gas problem, some people said "use a bike" some said "use corn" etc. But one person said "I heard that gas goes bad so we should just go to the gas station every day and fill up what we need then the gas station's gas will go bad and their prices will go down."

I'll give you a minute to pick up your brains from off the floor. Gasoline is made of a fossil fuel, folks. It's been in the ground millions of years. I don't think it's going bad anytime soon. So I just called, and it rang, so I waited and I heard
Chunga: "101.9 The End, who's this?"
Me: "This is Austin! Whoooo! This is the greatest moment of my life! This is better than when my daughter Amy Sue was born!!!"
No, not really. I said "This is Austin!"
Chunga: Austin, what's happenin', hot stuff?
Austin: I just wanted to comment on the person saying gas will go bad? Gas is a fossil fuel, it's been around for awhile. I don't think it's gonna go bad.
Chunga: Yeah, Austin. I thought so too. I didn't know what to say to that person.
Austin: Yeah. That's all I wanted to say. Love you guys!
Chunga: We love you, Austin.

Ok, so Chunga doesn't love me. And my comment wasn't too deep or coherent. But right after I got off the radio I felt a rush that Chunga must feel every day of being on the air, and I thought "I'm gonna blog about this!"

The Pirates of Madera

Tracie just posted our mini-play/sketch "The Pirates of Madera" first draft on Glass of Random. Check it out! We're pretty pleased with it, but we wrote a lot of it when we were tired and hyped up on sugar, so opinions may vary.

Austin! I remember you!

Yes, it's been awhile. Thanks for still loving me. SO, let's get right to it. What was the last thing I talked about. Let's see. The little teaser for my website, uh-huh. The random picture of George Lucas frozen in Carbonite (I don't see Carrie Fisher unfreezing him anytime soon) and the Batman review before that. So, really I haven't had an actual news post since July 28th. How do I live with myself?

Work: Last week I started working at Stores Online. They're a growing company that sells small and medium sized businesses packages, programs and training for their own website. I'll be in Customer Service, talking to the people who need help in something technical or service related. The company is DEVOTED to Customer Service, winning several big awards for their customer service, so that should be cool.

In order for me to provide excellent customer service, they've provided me with my own website so I can learn how to make one, how to market one, and (hopefully) how to profit from one. After some searching, I've decided to make a website for educational video games for the whole family, or educationalfamilygames.com This is my second of three weeks of training, and my website, though less than pretty and functional, is live, as they say. I've already updated and edited it officially 16 times since its launch on August 7, and I expect to do it about 1600 times or so more before I'm happy with it. Right now it's just barely functional enough to take your money and tell me to tell my drop shipper to send you your video games. Eventually I'd like to have reviews, forums, a blog, categories of all the games, about 5 times as many games as I have on there right now (currently around 70).
I've already had 35 unique visitors to the website, which either means I'm getting people from search engines, or everyone who reads my blog checked the link. Either way, that's more than anyone else in training. Hooray for me!

I have other ideas for websites in the future, but I'd like to work on this one and get it more the way I'd like it before moving on.

Car: Tracie talked about it in her blog, so I'll just mention it again. Yes, my car Ella died. About 4 days after I got fired. But, I've complained about that car and that job for so long now that I'm looking at it as a blessing that I don't have to stress or hate about either now. It's also been a blessing that Tracie works from home most days so I can take the car to work.

Writing: We're FINALLY ALMOST done with the Pirate Sketch we're writing for Troy & Jen's activity party thing. We'll put it on Glass of Random soon. Also, I've finally bitten the bullet and jumped the gun and mixed my metaphors and submitted a bunch (about 50) of my old poems to poetry magazines and websites (about 30) around the country. So hopefully I'll get at least ONE printed somewhere besides a High School or College poetry magazine that I also happen to be one of the editors of. I'll keep y'all posted on that too.

Special thanks to my Tracie for staying with me after ANOTHER job change and the death of a car. And to my writing partner and hilarious writer-in-her-own-right and everything she does.

That's about it, come back next time and I'll post some more!

EducationalFamilyGames.com

Coming soon!!! Educationalfamilygames.com And an explanation of what I'm talking about and what I'm up to.

Check it out, I swear I'll update this weekend!

Carbonite

Maybe there IS some justice in the world...

The very Dark Knight

Man, am I far behind. I've got lots to blog about, but first I'm gonna write about what we did last night. Tracie and I finally joined the rest of America and saw "The Dark Knight."

It was "wow." Probably one of the best movies I've ever seen. (I said one of, not the best) But let me go over just a few things I loved about it.

The movie was incredible and a good movie on so many levels. It was great as an action movie, as a superhero movie, as a psychological thriller, as a philosophical piece, and others. The acting of the entire cast was superb. When your cast includes Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman, Heath Ledger and others, it's hard not to rock.

Heath Ledger as Joker = the best villain ever. Hands down. The role Heath Ledger might have died for was certainly the greatest part of the movie, whether or not his death had an impact on my viewing of the movie, it certainly made me sad that such a genius died so prematurely. He was incredible, adding a human element to the psychotic embodiment of evil.

Well, I want to blog more, but my nephew wants to go play legos, so I better join him. :)