When I hear the term “puppy mills” this image comes to mind:

big belching smoke stacks, and a conveyor belt on one side that is just a non-stop line of puppies that gets emptied into one big puppy pile.

for some reason I think I might be a little off.

Check this article out… It made me laugh (then cry) when I noticed how many of these apply to where I work.

Friday night Aimee and I went to the “new” jordans furniture in Reading. They had pumpkin ice cream. It was good.

I think they should make pumpkin everything.

That is all.

Many many moons ago I started working on a event calendar type site where people could go to find open mic nights that were going on in their area.

Thanks to Alicia (for the web design work) and Jason (For the spiffy graphics) the site is finally up and running.

I encourage however few there are of you that look at my blog to check it out and tell me what you think.

So go check out http://openmicnight.net

Also, despite what this guy thinks. I refuse to accept calling a microphone a “mike”. My plan for the site is to eventually get picture up of many of the different venues and also add in reviews/comments and such, but I figured this was a good start. The other day,  a visitor even submitted an actual event

Friday night, Aimee, Harold, Ryan and I went to faneuil hall to a bar. We left around 1am, and were driving down congress st to pick up 93 and I had just pulled up to the light on congress st and purchase st and I look at the intersection, and see a car completely on its side with a little bit of smoke coming out of it then I see the other car, which basically no longer had a front end it looked like it had just happened, because there was no police or ambulances. So we pull over to see if anyone needs any help. Some other guy had just pulled over as well, and he was on the phone talking to 911. Harold goes over to the car and sees that there is 3 girls still in the car on its side that couldn't get out, We see that their sunroof was open a tiny bit, so I help Harold rip the sunroof off the car which came off surprisingly easy and then the 3 girls crawled out of the car.The 2 in the front were wearing their seatbelts and looked OK, and the girl in the back wasn't wearing a seatbelt and she had a bloody nose and seemed fairly out of it but they all got out with a little help and then sat down in all the glass despite the fact that the accident happened about 2 buildings down from the fire station, it took a good 5 minutes for any ambulances to come and the first one to get there wasn't from that fire station the guy and the girl in the other car seemed pretty much OK, he had to get out through his window. After things calmed down a bit, I was talking to the guy that called 911 and he said he saw the accident happen and that the girls car had flipped over 3 times before it landed on its side.

A bit of an unusual way to end the night

If I remember correctly, to get a drivers license in Massachusetts, you need to bring money, your social security card, and your birth certificate. To get a passport, which is what I am in the process of slowly applying for, you need your license and the "long form" of your birth certificate.

So I go to the Saugus town hall this morning to get mine, and they dont ask for any ID. Just my name and my birth date. According to what Bill at work told me, your birth certificate is public record, so anyone can ask for it. I am not sure I believe that, but what I am confused about is what the actual point of all these IDs are.

The social security card is useless. It is a business card sized piece of card stock printed on a regular printer, and then the social security number is typed on it. That is beyond easy to forge these days if you wanted to. People blindly tell their social security number to anyone/anything that asks.

the birth certificate is a joke. If you dig through someones trash, overhear a phone conversation, are behind them in line at the bank..anything these days, you can overhear what their birth date is.

The drivers license can easily be obtained from the RMV just by printing up a social security card and going to the town hall to get the birth certificate.

And now the passport, which is like the premier form of ID these days is then close to just as easy to get. You have the drivers license now, you have the birth certificate, the birth certificate has your parents birth place, on it. How much harder could it be to social engineer both of your parents social security numbers?

I am sure I am oversimplifying things a bunch, but what a waste of time. I don't really even need a passport, but I am fairly confident that if I dont waste the $90 or so on it now, when september comes around I will be sitting in a dirty prison cell in conzumel mexico wishing I had one.

Okay, I might be way off base here, but why is there all this fuss about google.com cooperating with the chinese government to meet their censorship laws? granted I don’t know the whole story, nor am I familiar with chinese law…mostly because I have no desire to go there, or especially live there.

Not to pick on one person, especially since this is probably the 40th post from various places that I have seen on the topic, but this just happens to be the one I just came across from kuro5hin.org

In hopes of increasing its China market share, Google has announced its eagerness to be a better Thought Policeman by enforcing the PRC’s hardline censorship rules. To that end, the company has recently established a separate China domain, google.cn, which will streamline the tricky business of violating civil rights in the totalitarian Middle Kingdom. Ironically, the announcement comes as Google does battle with the Bush Administration, which is also trying to violate civil liberties by obtaining access to Americans’ Google search-results. If Google cooperates (as Yahoo recently has) with the Chinese government to spy on its citizens, then why can’t they cooperate with the US government’s efforts to snoop on its citizens? The price of doing business with China may be that our information civil liberties will be compromised throughout the rest of the world.

I happily enjoy and believe in the foundation of the U.S government, but China is far being like the U.S. They have censorship, they have a tyrannical government. Why would a business purposefully disregard a countries laws. Sure it is a worthy cause, and sure yes, the chinese should not be oppressed, but unfortunately that is not the way their government works. If google decided to “hold its ground” and not censor anything, China would simply ban google from being seen from anyone in China. How does that help anyone? now, instead of getting a good search engine that is unfortunately censored, you would get nothing…or in googles case, you would get their biggest competitor instead. Part of my points is that why does everyone keep saying phrases like “violating civil rights” do the chinese even have civil rights? I know we do, but again, the United States is not China. Our government is quite differant, so the rules that apply here don’t apply there. So yes, Google refusing to fork over its data to the U.S government is completly differant than complying with the Chinese government. Unfortunately they don’t have the luxury of all the freedoms that the United States has.

It is simply bad business, and a bad idea in general for google to refuse to comply in China. They will just get kicked out. What incentive does the Chinese government have to not just block the whole country from ever seeing google again?

Who decided that cow boy hats arn’t socially acceptable?

I wish I was wearing a cowboy hat right now, and I wish I had one of those fake metal looking plastic deputy badges too.

I would sit at my desk…. with my six shooter and take shots at people whenever they came near me.

Better yet, I would decorate the walls of my cube “wild west” style, and have a spitoon at the entrance to my cube, along with a piano playing that wild west music.

maybe I could have my cube just look like a big covered wagon. and every once in a while I would have to poke my head out the front to fight off some angry injuns. For lunch I could kill a buffalo, but I havn’t worked out yet how I could cook the meat.

The possibilities are endless, and it all starts with having a cowboy hat. Not that crappy one I bought before, not knowing it was “Aussie style” no one cares about Australian cowboys, but I get I could have had an excuse at that point to get a digeridooo. I would belt out sick tunes all day. Then, since the middle of my department is kind of close in, I bet we could have Kangaroo fights. None of my co-workers would go along with that, and would probably shake their heads and make their “mike is at it again” face. That is why I would have the six shooter. I would say bang! bang! and according to cowboy rules, they would have to dramatically fall backwards and break a wooden table.

Ahhh….the life. Some day cowboy hats will be accepted by society and the old west will be back once again.

I think every time I really go through all the RSS feeds I subscribe to, I end up subscribing to at least a couple new ones that day, which in turn leads to spending more time reading all these web sites I would have probably completely forgotten about otherwise.

I think reading all these feeds turned into some sick addiction. I log into News Gator, usually in the morning and immediately see the the massive number of unread articles. It is usually just shy of 1000, and I think that is only because of whatever article limits some of the feeds have. At that point, it is like some OCD problem to try to get the number to 0.

The problem is, obviously as the day progresses the maintainers of all these web sites post more articles, which slowly raises the number back up. So you really can’t hit 0. It is just an illusion. So I then at some point throw in the towel and exit News Gator running. Only to come back the next day with another 1000 some odd unread articles, plus all the “saved clippings” I marked as being interesting that I slowly……very slowly go through. That number only keeps getting bigger.

My ownly hope is that all this reading will speed up my poor word reading rate. Then, maybe someday I can enjoy a book without spending 3 months reading it, even though that is partially due to “not having the time” to read, which is just a lie I use to give me an excuse to watch more tv. But now having a DVR is just as bad as the RSS feed reader. I am recording more shows than I manage to watch in a given day. On the positive side, my DVR only has 2 tuners in it, and once 6pm hits, chances are one, if not both of t hose tuners are recording some crappy show Aimee likes. Gilmore Girls, One Tree Hill, The O.C, Laguna Beach, and the likes of all similar shows should all be cancelled. However, if they are cancelled, then I will find more shows to record, which will end up being more shows I need to watch, because mentally, I cannot make myself delete a show I recorded without watching it most of the time.

That means I am not dependant on shows like Gilmore Girls to stop me from spending more time watching shows I like. Instead I sit, basking in the comforting glow of the TV, using my computer, probably reading articles in News Gator. Living the endless cycle over and over.

I got a book for christmas that I actually really do want to read, which is Secrets & Lies, by Bruce Schneier. Christmas was a month ago and the book has not been touched. Maybe if the book was split into a long series of articles it could be stuck into the middle of my daily rotation.

Maybe all this article reading is training me to only have an attention span for 3 minutes at a time, then my eyes will just glaze over, and I’ll just be crying inside.

Bruce Schneier is a smart guy. I only caught on to his existence a few months back, but I think almost everything so far of his that I have read I either completely agree with, or had never thought of.

Not like any of that matters, but he wrote an article today about how security through verifying a persons credentials means nothing if the people verifying them don’t know what the credentials look like.

Like this:

Imagine you’re on an airplane, and Man A starts attacking a flight attendant. Man B jumps out of his seat, announces that he’s a sky marshal, and that he’s taking control of the flight and the attacker. (Presumably, the rest of the plane has subdued Man A by now.) Man C then stands up and says: “Don’t believe Man B. He’s not a sky marshal. He’s one of Man A’s cohorts. I’m really the sky marshal.”

What do you do? You could ask Man B for his sky marshal identification card, but how do you know what an authentic one looks like? If sky marshals travel completely incognito, perhaps neither the pilots nor the flight attendants know what a sky marshal identification card looks like. It doesn’t matter if the identification card is hard to forge if person authenticating the credential doesn’t have any idea what a real card looks like.

The real scary part is that this whole conversation was brought up because of how there is a rise in the number of fake officers pulling people over. I have had quite my fair share of times being pulled over, and I don’t think I have even once thought to somehow verify if the officer pulling me over was even an officer.

You see some form of flashing lights, you pull over, and some guy comes to your window and yells at you for something. What if this guy is pretending to be an officer and steals your car, rapes you, mugs you, or kills you?

I think the thing that tops it off is that from my own experience, if you question an officer when they pull you over, they tend to not be happy about it. I got yelled at by a female officer once because when I pulled over, I shut my car off, turned the dome light one, and put my hands on the top of the steering wheel (in clear view). She started yelling at me saying completely insane unrelated things like “what, do you hate cops or something?”

In my mind, I was making a shaky situation a little more comfortable. If your an officer approaching an unkown person in an unknown dark car, at night none the less, and you are also on patrol by yourself, you approach the car with caution, and usually with your hand on the handle of your gun ready to pull it out on a moments notice.

I am not sure about most people, but I don’t like guns being pointed at me, just like I am sure most officers do not like that either. If I make the situation as comfortable as possible for the officer, the chances of an accident happening are much slimmer, it puts the officer at ease, and maybe, because of that you might also get a warning instead of a ticket. I did get a warning that particular time, but how do you even respond to insane comments like that from a person that can take away your license, or for that matter accidentally kill you. Sure, getting killed is a bit far fetched, but it happens. This officer was apparantly on edge that night, and for some reason me “setting the scene” in such a way set her off.

Another time I was driving home from a late night out. No drinking involved, just aimless driving around with 2 friends. It was like maybe 2am, and I missed my friends steet. I stopped in the middle of the street and debated just backing up the 20 feet or so and turning onto his street, or going around the block instead. In that few seconds I was stopped, a car came into site behind me which obviously made backing up a bad idea, so I drove away to go around the block instead.

The car behind me happened to be an officer, he decided I was acting suspiscious, pulled me over, and individually interrogated all 3 of us along with running all of our licenses and my registration to see if their where any warrants/problems. There wern’t any problems, so he hands us all our licenses back and tells me to get back in the car and leave. Me, being a bit upset about being pulled over and interrogated for 20 minutes without any reason calmly said something along the lines of “would you mind telling me why exactly you pulled me over?” the cop flipped out, snatched my license back, screamed at me and told me to get into the car, then called for backup, and they then when over the outside of my car looking for any reason to give me a ticket. Then eventually told me to leave and go home.

Yes, in both stories the officers were real officers, but what happens when someone is in a situation where the officer is a fake? The lesson I learned over my past experiences is not question anything they say, say as little as possible, take the ticket and if you feel you got it unjustly, appeal it and deal with it in court instead. If a cop starts yelling at me and tells me to get out of the car, even if he says it over the PA from inside his car, yes, I am going to get out of the car because I know what happens if you don’t. Now I have just completely exposed myself and left myself in a real vulnerable position.

Sure I kind of veered way off course from Bruce Schneiers story, but he raises a real good point, and it is a legitimate real problem. People who look and claim to have authority normally are assumed to actually have authority. If they are faking it, you’re not going to realize it until it is too late.

So how are we any safer? Either on a plane or anywhere else?

This makes me laugh because:

• Its common knowledge (or at least I knew. the history channel told me)
• No one really cares
• People like status symbols. They always have, and always will

1. You’ve Been Psychologically Conditioned To Want a Diamond
The diamond engagement ring is a 63-year-old invention of N.W.Ayer advertising agency. The De Beers diamond cartel contracted N.W.Ayer to create a demand for what are, essentially, useless hunks of rock.

2. Diamonds are Priced Well Above Their Value
The De Beers cartel has systematically held diamond prices at levels far greater than their abundance would generate under anything even remotely resembling perfect competition. All diamonds not already under its control are bought by the cartel, and then the De Beers cartel carefully managed world diamond supply in order to keep prices steadily high.

3. Diamonds Have No Resale or Investment Value
Any diamond that you buy or receive will indeed be yours forever: De Beers’ advertising deliberately brain-washed women not to sell; the steady price is a tool to prevent speculation in diamonds; and no dealer will buy a diamond from you. You can only sell it at a diamond purchasing center or a pawn shop where you will receive a tiny fraction of its original “value.”

4. Diamond Miners are Disproportionately Exposed to HIV/AIDS
Many diamond mining camps enforce all-male, no-family rules. Men contract HIV/AIDS from camp sex-workers, while women married to miners have no access to employment, no income outside of their husbands and no bargaining power for negotiating safe sex, and thus are at extremely high risk of contracting HIV.

5. Open-Pit Diamond Mines Pose Environmental Threats
Diamond mines are open pits where salts, heavy minerals, organisms, oil, and chemicals from mining equipment freely leach into ground-water, endangering people in nearby mining camps and villages, as well as downstream plants and animals.

6. Diamond Mine-Owners Violate Indigenous People’s Rights
Diamond mines in Australia, Canada, India and many countries in Africa are situated on lands traditionally associated with indigenous peoples. Many of these communities have been displaced, while others remain, often at great cost to their health, livelihoods and traditional cultures.

7. Slave Laborers Cut and Polish Diamonds
More than one-half of the world’s diamonds are processed in India where many of the cutters and polishers are bonded child laborers. Bonded children work to pay off the debts of their relatives, often unsuccessfully. When they reach adulthood their debt is passed on to their younger siblings or to their own children.

8. Conflict Diamonds Fund Civil Wars in Africa
There is no reliable way to insure that your diamond was not mined or stolen by government or rebel military forces in order to finance civil conflict. Conflict diamonds are traded either for guns or for cash to pay and feed soldiers.

9. Diamond Wars are Fought Using Child Warriors
Many diamond producing governments and rebel forces use children as soldiers, laborers in military camps, and sex slaves. Child soldiers are given drugs to overcome their fear and reluctance to participate in atrocities.

10. Small Arms Trade is Intimately Related to Diamond Smuggling
Illicit diamonds inflame the clandestine trade of small arms. There are 500 billion small arms in the world today which are used to kill 500,000 people annually, the vast majority of whom are non-combatants.

I didn’t write any of this. It was all from an article on fguide.org

Quite often I don’t wear a coat when I am outside. Most of the time it is because I am either going from a building to my car, or my car to a building. Very rarely am I randomly walking around outside.

Anyway, many people say “put a coat on! you’re going to catch a cold!” I tried saying that doesn’t make sense, but it’s not like I have any credibility behind me that would back up my statement.

Not like Yahoo! knows any better than I do, but either way, its one more drop in the ‘ol bucket.

read this little Q&A:

You’re all dirty filthy bastards

I was talking with darren the other day about how it sucks that my entire blog got erased during the server crash. Everything I wrote from like october 2004 until the crash was completely gone. It was my own fault for not keeping backups, but anyway

I figured some site somewhere had to have cached all of my stuff, because you cant get rid of anything on the internet. It is always floating around somewhere. I could have sworn I looked through google before, but after darren mentioned it to me again, I did a good search and managed to dig up 150-200 some odd blog entries I had made.

I tried automating the whole process of retrieving them from googles cache, but i was a little to aggressive and google banned my work from using google after I tried it. Then I left pretending nothing happened.

I am sure no one cares, and most of the posts were crappy and useless, but there were a bunch I liked and didn’t want to lose. So, now that I have all that I could get from google, I am going to be slowly back posting them in this blog.

Whoopty doo

Apparantly you don’t need to be old, or a veteran, or have been in a foreign war to go to the bar in the VFW, but in any event, to clear up any confusion from last night. There are 4 racial classifications for us human folks.

Mongoloid
Caucasoid
Australoid
Negroid

Apparantly Capoid “sometimes” is used, which I don’t quite understand.
But, Amanda was right. Mongoloid was/is a term used to describe people with Down Syndrome, but is considered offensive and is “no longer used that way”.

Mongoloid is mainly used to describe the majority of people in Asia. According to Wikipedia, that includes the people of North,East,Southeast,Central, and West Asia. Apparantly West Asians don’t get to be included

Thats the history lesson for today

I was in LensCrafters the other day, and the salesperson for some reason started talking endlessly about how we shouldn’t throw out any of our old or outdated glasses because the people of Appalachia have never had glasses and Lens Crafters…the good samaritans that they are, send the glasses (along with optomotrists or something) to Appalachia, and try to find someone that is close to as blind as you were, then they get your crappy scratched glasses, and get to see somewhat clearly now.

For some reason the whole story made me think of the episode of Seinfeld where Elaine is helping her old boss get rid of the muffin bottoms from the “Top of the morning to you!” store by donating them by the trash bag full to homeless shelters, and some lady from the homeless shelters comes by and yells at them for giving them muffins without the tops, and yells about who would want muffins without a top.

Either way, donating the glasses is definately a much better idea than just tossing them, but I cant help but picture some Alpacian (is that what they are called) fella getting his set of glasses…being able to see things so much clearer now…..

and then saying Fucking assholes! who sends a pair of glasses with a huge scratch in the middle!

Friday night was the big Bustonian party bus trip with John, Janelle, Cheryl, Stephanie, her boyfriend, and like 15-20 of his crazy rowdy friends.

When we got to Cheryls, we found out someone broke into the bus and stole the kick-ass stereo system it had, so…in a pinch, the driver brought like a $40 boom box to hold us over. It sucked so bad it had to be passed around the bus periodically so everyone could hear music. But, everyone in good cheer, and being WELL STOCKED with beer, we made the best of it and partied on. So while drinking it up, we headed on to the Harp, which as I may have mentioned before, is a fun place. The Zoo was playing there again, and like every time I have gone to the Harp, I ran into “Katie the bartender” again (see previous posts) and am supposed to call her (again), apparantly this time I am supposed to leave a number for her to call me back at if she doesn’t answer. What ever happened to caller ID?
I would say up until this point, I drank at least 2 beers (and 1/8 a bottle of Disarrano) on the bus, plus a beer, a jack and coke, and a shot (which Cheryl kindly bought me).

Anyway, after drinking more, we left, and drank more on the bus, and headed off to club #2…The Big Easy. This is when stuff starts to get hazy. From what I remember..
I got myself another jack and coke, gulped that down, and then decided that the coke part was trying to ruin my night and then asked for just a glass of jack. The hero of a bartender gave me basically a full glass (with ice in it) of straight jack, and then the fun really began. This was my first time in The Big Easy, and the place reminds me of a fancy southern ballroom (even though I have never been to one, or probably seen one) and there are parts along the dance floor where the floor steps up a level, like where the bar is, and the entrances and bathroom and such. By now I was quite drunk, and I would say I fell on those frigging steps a good 10 times. Right into people, I am suprised I didn’t get killed.

Then the dancing began. Apparantly Cheryl really likes to grind, and me being really drunk, figured what the hell, I know how to do that! Fun Fun times. Then later I need to go to the bathroom, and probably in a real slurred voice, told John to not only hold my drink for me, but to also “make sure noone takes it” you know how those greedy drink stealing bastards are!

He tastes it to see what the hell I was drinking, realizes its straight whisky, and decides its time to cut me off, and at least half my drink out, then hands it to me. Of course I had no clue, so I finished that off, and it was time to go.

Now things are really getting hazy.

We go outside, and are in the little Alley type thing The Big Easy is along, and we decide to get pizza from some pizza place that was apparantly there. I devoured 1 slice, then got Cheryl one since she didn’t have any money on her. From what I heard, she dropped it on the ground, we both dove for it, and proceeded to basically wrestle over it on the cold, wet, dirty, snow covered ground. It wasn’t even a whole slice, she had already almost finished it. I have a vague memory though of at least getting a bite out of it. So then Cheryl and I set out to try to find where the damn bus was. It was was like drizzling out, and was pretty damn cold, but we ventured on down the street to find it, We never did, Cheryl was freezing, and soaked, and was crying (from what I remember) so I let her wear the long sleeve dress shirt type thing I had on. Which meant I was now in just a t-shirt. I don’t remember being cold or anything, but apparantly people where saying I must be really wasted, because I looked like a happy camper.

While we were trying to find this bus, apparantly a bunch (or all) of Stephs boyfriends friends got in a big fight (with who? I don’t know. It might have been each other) and the police came, and broke it up, but apparantly noone was arrested, then we found the bus driver, who apparantly was actually in the bar (thats a scary thought) and back on the bus we go.

Now I am really drunk, which usually leads to sleepy time for Mike, and that I did. Apparantly I feel asleep with my legs way out in the aisle, and John woke me up and told me if I am going to sleep, i need to go lay down on the seat on the back of the bus, so I go back there, fall back asleep, and shortly after, apparantly the bus went over a big bump, and according to John, I flew up in the air, still laying down and asleep with my shirt as a pillow, landed on the ground, still in the same position, and continued to sleep.

The ground was soaking wet, in water, beer, and who knows what else (later on, piss too apparantly, but that was after I was awake).

By now, the bus driver hated us all, some of the people on the bus were yelling out the window, one kid pulled his pants down, shoved his dick out the window, and pissed down the street as the bus was driving. Another one tossed a glass bottle out the window at a car, which then followed us, made the bus pull over, got on the bus, and wanted to fight everyone.
These were all from Stephs boyfriends winner group of friends (not all of them sucked though)

The bus driver apparantly really wanted to make his nights worth of money, since he is payed by the hour, and basically refused to drive us home until the time was up, despite the fact that Steph kept trying to make him just bring us home.

Although I don’t remember a bit of this, this girl I met for the first time at Cheryls halloween party, who had also been on the bus, came back and was talking to us, and was all angry claiming none of us liked her, and was mad at me because I didnt remember who she was (from my halloween pictures you can see in the halloween post in october)

For the record. I thought she was one of the coolest people at the halloween party. She was drinking from a metal goblet! nothing is better than that. She is hot too, and she had been talking to me. Its a winning combination. Hell, if she didn’t have a boyfriend, I would be asking her out (another rejection is always fun).

I went up to the front of the bus to talk to her (probably because I was yelled at) and somehow ended up holding that crappy boom box. This shithead sitting across from me, one of Stephs boyfriends friends. Said something to me. I wish I remebered what the hell it was, but apparantly it was fighting words (at least in my book) I think he was starting shit and saying something about how I better not put the boom box down or something. Whatever it was, I was pissed. I walked away to the back of the bus, go over to John, and just keep saying, I was being the bigger man, I just walked away….I just walked away. John looks over to see what I am talking about, and the shithead is laughing and pointing at me to his friend. I think they were planning something. So at that point, John, being the good friend that he is. walks up to them and starts yelling at them. A fight almost breaks out, the bus pulls over again, and the bus driver tells us that if one more person stands up or does anything, he is dropping us all off right there.

So now angry Mike comes out. He hasn’t been around in a while. But he was out and pissed. I had my mothers digital camera on me, which I didn’t want to break, so I started taking out all my belongings and handing the to Janelle. I had it all planned out. The second we got off the bus, this kid is dead. I was down to my t-shirt, and my empty pants. and I sat there for a good 20 minutes (it might have been 5 for all I remember) with the look of death on my face staring at this kid. Stephs boyfriend came over a couple times to get me to chill out, and so did some other kid, but for some reason I was real unhappy. Oddly enough, I have NO IDEA at all what the kid had even said to me. Noone does. The bus finally gets to Cheryls house, and I am ready for go time. But the kids got off the bus and quickly walked away to Cheryls house, and we just headed home. Luckily John stopped drinking hours earlier, or else I would be sleeping with those kids.

All and all it was a fun time. And for those of you that just came for the pictures (too bad I got drunk too fast to keep taking pictures) I purposely put them at the end of this post so that you would have to go through all of my ramblings. Sucks to be you huh?

Here they are: The Party Bus Pictures

I used to run the Folding@home project on my computer, and I decided to start it back up again.

What is it?

What are proteins and why do they “fold”? Proteins are biology’s workhorses — its “nanomachines.” Before proteins can carry out their biochemical function, they remarkably assemble themselves, or “fold.” The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a mystery. Moreover, perhaps not surprisingly, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. “misfold”), there can be serious effects, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s disease.

in some little way you can help possibly find a cure for various diseases.
You can download the program here

and if you want, when you install the program and it asks for a
team to join, use mine, which is:
Team Name: aisle10.net
Team ID: 12749

The program runs in the background on your computer, and when your not doing anything (like at night and such) it puts your computer to work, then it sends the results to stanford where the results are used for research