Looks like Fey is going to nail us in North Tampa, as well as hammering up I-4 and hitting Orlando. Yes Disney this means you. So I go today to grab some food and other supplies. The number of deaths associated with this storm is a little disconcerting. I think mabye people are underestimating it. I will try to give it respect...

Could be a hurricane, mabye just a class 1, or it could stay a tropical storm. I am going to have to brave the grocery stores tomorrow for supplies, but I expect a mild time to be honest.

I have been through several big ones, and Hurricane Fey's path looks pretty evil (a strike right up through Tampa would flood and reak havok), but I usually come out none the worse for wear.

Check out the latest path:

A massive hurricane, The Mexican Army, a shelter, and Digg.com.

"People are starting to get sick. Some of the elderly people are becoming ill. There is water but they are telling us to conserve it," said American Doug Ruby

abc news link

The shelter was packed with dazed tourists from all parts of the globe. We were securing our place in the school, taking our mats and possessions and finding a flop area in the classroom. Outside the police had taken to the streets, and people were nailing up plywood over the windows, slowly blocking out the light. My wife and I had found a slightly elevated area and staked it out for ourselves. Nervous people from the middle of America chatted with us about the power and veracity of a hurricane, what was it going to be like? How long would it last? I told them what I knew about my experience growing up and living in Florida. Usually it lasts about 12 hours, the whole thing. It gets really bad towards the middle, closer to the eye. The next day it's usually sunny and we go out side to clean up all the damage. I have been through many a hurricane so I tried my best to feign boredom about the situation, giving them no reason to be upset. Little did I know that this hurricane would be the fastest forming, largest storm Mexico had ever seen. It would be relentless, hovering directly over us and pounding for 3 days. Cancun would become a war-zone, and we would be right in the middle.

We were staying in a 5 star hotel right on the beach, The Riu Palace Las Americanas. The first two nights were the picture perfect honeymoon. When we checked in, I took the Bellhop aside, gave him a twenty and told him we were just married. I didn't realize that most everyone in the hotel was “just married” until I watched two other guys do the same thing right after me. It was funny, and gave me a sense of fellowship. The gathering areas in the hotels were huge. You could meet couples and talk to them, we made some friendships pretty fast. The first day or so went quick so we rarely watched the news or television. We had caught glimpses of the hurricane forming, but its exact path was unknown. The hotel tried to be forthright and provide the guest with information as to the path, but every story was different, the path became unpredictable. Overnight the force of the storm grew from a two, to a five, and began it's path towards us. It was big, really big. I began to have second thoughts about being this far away from home and trapped in another country. I remembered vividly from the air our approach to Cancun, the really distinct topology of the land. A huge never ending jungle, one road, then a city carved out of the edge of the ocean. There would be no way out.

The Airports closed at noon that day, a few hours later the buses arrived. We had thought that they were going to take us to another hotel further inland. This was my hope anyway. The information we were getting was less then accurate. When they took us into downtown Cancun, I knew immediately that we were being taken to a shelter. My heart sank. I remembered images from the news and television about people being trapped in government shelters. I had served a tour in the military, I could be uncomfortable for a while, but I did not want my wife in a government shelter. It was bad news. We were two miles inland, in a government shelter ,during one of the fastest forming and most powerful storms in history.

I was disappointed by my helplessness on my current and future situation. Something snapped in my brain and when we arrived I came up with a plan. We would wait long enough for the storm to do its thing, then we would jump ship and find our own way home. Letting the officials run the show, that time was over. It was time to take control, and make the best of a bad situation. I watched as the staff from the hotel piled into the school kitchen. They brought food and water for us. I began to realize that initially this wasn't a bad place to be. When your in a storm, the best thing to have is supplies. We had plenty of that, a bunch of propane for cooking, and crates of bottled water and juice. As luck would have it we had been positioned right by the kitchen so I was taking stock of what was going on. We also had one bathroom per floor, but that wouldn't last as the water stopped working. I knew that we could be here for a few days, until it got bad. I had no idea how bad it was going to get.

The first day the storm was slowed down by a front coming the opposite direction. It dragged on, and the wind began to pick up the next evening. By the time it was dark we were being pounded. We were getting regular information from the hotel staff that spoke english, they left before the storm began. Only the kitchen staff was left, and they spoke no english. The wind was making a noise like a 747 about 300 feet, you had to yell to talk to the person beside you. The bathrooms were on the opposite ends of the hall, the hall was open to the outside. To go to the bathroom we would cling to the wall as winds in excess of 150mph whipped various pieces of Cancun in our direction. I looked out the door of our classroom at the entrance to the gymnasium. The sides of the gym were glass, they had shattered. The flourescent lighting fixtures on the celling were dropping and smashing, the gym was filling up with water. This water was running down the stairs into the hallway and beginning to flood our floor. We gathered the troops, and began to find makeshift water pushers to force the water down the stair well and away from the sleeping area. These shifts lasted for a few hours at a time, and gave us something to do while we watched the absolute destruction. The school, made of concrete, began to disintegrate. I watched as cement light posts snapped in two and huge walls surrounding the school came down. Shattering glass was heard all night long. Then finally silence.

I thought that was it, the sky outside was red and a little strange, small black clouds floated by. We looked around, it was a mess. We all began talking of leaving, and assumed the bus would be around to pick us up, we had made it. I asked one of the hotel crew in broken spanish if they new what was going on. I was a little confused as to what he was saying, until he pointed to his eye. I was dumbfounded. It wasn't over, we were sitting in the eye! I guess I was the expert, being the person in our room that had been through more hurricanes then I could count. I told them that we were in the same position at this point. This storm was something new, something bigger then any I had ever been through, and it had made it to land faster then anything I had seen. Why was it moving so slowly? It was that same front that stalled it right before it hit land. It was holding the storm directly on top of us. We were in the eye, and the storm had not dissipated in the least. That night, the winds started again, then the rain, and the school crumbled a little more. We began our shifts of pushing water, and watching the rain move horizontally across what little we could see of the outside. I began to question how long our boards on those windows were going to hold up, we were hearing screams from floors below as their boards blew off into the night. It was chaos. The water was out so the bathrooms were overflowing. The steady diet of fruit and bread had wreaked havoc on the western digestive system. I had escorted my wife to the bathroom, we watched a women crying as she left holding hands with a hollow eyed little girl. The little girl looked at me and said, “It's horrible, horrible” , in almost a whisper. I nodded.

The next day the rain stopped. It was day four in the shelter. The food and water had began to run out, rationing was in effect. The range of meals had dwindled to bread and fruit alone.I caught the eye of another guy across the room from us. He had helped us outside to divert the water. I went over and introduced myself and we began to talk. He was a webmaster from the mid-west and we discussed our favorite sites, I mentioned slash-dot. He asked if I had ever been on Digg.com, I replied that I had not, so he explained the concept and what it was all about. We were both beat and hadn't showered in three days. Still, Digg made an impression on me, it was the first I had heard about it. I would log in when I got the chance, I probably needed to think about food at the moment. It was time to bust out of our shelter and find some other place to go.

The day the storm ended the looting began. Massive looting, stores comparable to Sams club, and huge grocery stores gutted. The army was in the streets but they did little to stop the looters, it was panic everywhere. We made our way out of the school and began to walk around the town, checking out what had happened. Cancun was flooded, the whole city. Every sign was down, every light post blown over. The storm had ripped through the area, everything was decimated. A guy approached me on the street with a tape recorder, he was from AP newswire, and wanted to ask me some questions. I gave him the story and probably was a little nervous at the time. I was part of a startup called Advsec Advanced Security, and was developing security implementations for IP cameras. Somehow, they got security programmer as my profession. Is there such a thing?. The part about “people getting sick”, was sensational, thats why it spread across major newspapers. I had some sort of infection on my leg, it looked like a thousand pimples, and it was spreading. Other people had told us of the seniors in the shelter that were getting even more of these opportunistic infections. Infants in the shelter were not fairing well either, no more diapers or formula. Almost everyone had diarrhea, so everyone was dehydrated. Now they were beginning to ration water, it was not good.. I asked the reporter how he got in, he explained he had come before the storm. He was covering a story to the west, and drove here in a rented 4x4. I asked if he knew a way to leave, he looked at me and shook his head. The only road leading out of Cancun was washed away, nothing could get through. No one could get out. The stores with the food, they were empty. There would be no more food. I looked at my wife and said “We are leaving, let's go pack”. “Where will we go?”, she asked me perplexed. This was a foreign country with some pretty bad places. You could get hurt in Mexico. That's probably why they wanted to keep all the tourists together in one place. They were not wanting us to leave their control and get hurt, bad publicity. I didn't know where, but I knew that there were people out there in that city that were smart. I knew that those people were prepared long in advance, they probably had generators and a place to shower. I also knew that I had cash. So we packed our bags, waited for the guards to walk away, and we jumped through a hole in the concrete fence and out into the city.

We walked for a bit into the heart of the city, diverted by some good local people who let us know not to go to certain areas. If they were bad before the storm, we did not want to see them now. I was a reserved person, but that mentality will get you no where fast, so I became aggressive. I approached people on the street and began talking. Everyone was in the same mindset we were, looking for some symbol of normalcy. We sat down on the sidewalk with our feet in the flooded street looking at the map. I was trying to find a decent neighborhood, some place where I could walk down the street and hear a generator. I would simply knock, tell my plight, and offer some money. An inside to this city would help us greatly, I merely thought it, and he showed up. His name was Oscar, he walked up to us and asked if we needed someplace to go in perfect english. Yes, I said. Then asked if they had electricity, he said they did. I asked if they had running water, oh yes they had that to. Food, what about food? “Yes”, Oscar said, they had plenty of food. I sized him up, looked him in the eye, and decided to trust him. We followed Oscar into the neighborhoods of Cancun.

Oscar was a “host of the city”. His job was to bring travelers to the the business he frequented, they would give him things for free in return. He lived at the hostel he took us to the Kancun Hostel. It wasn't pretty, but we had found the oasis. They had a kitchen, and in the kitchen was 5,000 cans or more of soup. On the roof was a cistern to collect water, and on the ground purring was the generator. They rented us an entire floor of the hostel for $5 bucks a night. It had no glass in the windows, no bed linings, no pillows. We used some old chair cushions. We met a Slovakian couple, the man was a pilot for the Russian air force, and they traveled the world. They had also brought several bottles of really good vodka. Civilization.

In the days that followed we learned that everyone was trapped just like us. The airport fuel supply had been contaminated with sea water. I had made a plea to the US consulate, but they told me there was a US senator trapped right along with us, and he couldn't get out either, we had little hope. My brother began to do what he could to rent an aircraft with the fuel capacity to make it from Florida then back without fueling. It was going to cost $12000. It was worth it if we could find a bunch of people willing to chip in. We kept it in mind, but it was moot as there was currently no place to land. We went back and forth to the Airports, only to be turned away at the gate by the military. We found the Delta office in the square downtown, and got up at 4:30 am for days wrangling through the red-tape trying to get our tickets. Our tickets of course were on line, printed at the gate, hard to do without a computer. Lucky for us some phones were working, the Mexican government was smart enough to run a lot of their phone lines underground. We skipped across the city finding those phones, and making arrangements with our family in the states to solve these bureaucratic problems. After cementing the paperwork, we would go and stand in line, hopping we could leave.

In the meantime, we tried to enjoy the city. We ate at outdoor stands that were running just a day after the storm. We bought groceries and other necessities, and stood in line for government supplies. We showered regularly, played card games, and learned about life in real Mexico. A couple that worked in the city met us in line waiting for food and invited us to eat with them in their home. We played UNO, they were awesome. That's one thing I will not forget about the experience, the people of Mexico were most hospitable people, they tried to help us at every avenue. At night the city would go dark, and the army would patrol with huge spotlights shinning the on the roofs of the buildings. I noticed that people were placing broken glass into fresh concrete on their sills to prevent burglars from climbing on their roof and doing god only knows what in the cover of darkness. The center of our hostel was an open area, we had a huge metal door that was locked at night. I slept with one eye open and a board I had found in the street..

We went back to our shelter to check on our friends there after a few days. We were clean, and well fed, they were not. They looked pretty bad, and still had no word on anything about their situation. We felt bad telling them about our new digs, but at the same time you wanted to tell somebody about how lucky you were. It sucked. We left after a family kept asking us to take them with us. I won't forget how that felt anytime soon. Thinking about how important your water is for 15 minutes twice a day, rushing from whatever you were doing to get that shower. Then thinking about somebody else taking some of what is yours, your food and shelter, then guarding it. I still feel pretty rotten about it to this day. The people in the shelter did have some good news, they left before us. They came and loaded them all into a bus, drove them to the airport, and off they went. I am glad they did, they went through enough. I learned much more then I could ever convey in a short essay, too many strange experiences. I can tell you that if you are involved in a situation like this, take control of your own destiny, nobody gives a crap about you when the world is in chaos. 8 days in a shelter is not good.

A year later and I write my story about where and when I was when I first learned of Digg.com, from a webmaster somewhere in middle America, in a shelter in Cancun Mexico. If you reading this now buddy, I can't remember your name, but I remember you. Thanks for telling me about Digg, even with all I went through, I never forgot it. A year later and I post my story. It's almost like it was meant to happen.

Doug

Thoughts, first impressions: 2142 Demo

It's out! I played it last night, one map, 3am, wife pissed off. Here is what I thought.

In game server browser: Works! Much better guys. Your server selection code actually doesn't lock my machine up solid. Sweet.

Load times: They still suck ass. After the start of the game, the shaders had to update. Yawn. After about 7 minutes the game started. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Individual map loads, I'll check it out when I get the full version.

Game Play: If you are familiar with BF2, then initially you will think you know what the heck is going on. You won't. Thats where it begins to dawn on you that nobody else does either. It is also telling that the tactics that you would expect to work actually do. If there is somebody after me, I duck behind a building, miracle of miracles, they can't see me. Probably because the cheaters haven't got up to speed, but it's coming. Weird world when you don't have rampant cheating. Play itself is fast, and the graphics seem to hold up, but the net-code is a little flaky. Lots of skips, jumps and pops of air vehicles. I will need a little more time to assess. The hover tanks remind me of drifting. Maybe we can put some rims and an N02 tank on that sucker, neon glow on the the bottom, right on!

Overall: Blue flashes for bullets? No machine gun on the tank? EMP grenades? I guess I'm just not used to to whole thing yet. I will break this into a couple of parts. My first impression, it's like sitting on a fence post. Fun for a bit, but gets uncomfortable. I need to devote Sunday to the task. It's got me wanting to play it a bit more, so thats a good sign. Hopefully EA will give me a reach around. Stay tuned.....

ed note: I did see a cheat for the beta, so I know you guys are out there. I wish you could see the rude gesture I am making in your direction.

SEOblackhat and you. How easy money adds are screwing our information connection.

In order to facilitate the coming together of two separate worlds, I decided to let the Black Hat, and the White Hat sides of my brain have a little dialog for you on this subject. Enjoy.

WHITE HAT: For crying out loud, enough is enough. I know you shoemoney-holics are salivating every time you take a gander at his fat check. It's tempting, hell, even I have discussed the possibility, but I have been shutdown by my own morality. Oh and my wife. Same thing. For those of you reading this confused, well let me break it down, it's a diagram of a scam..

It's not quite a pyramid scheme, but it's damn close. Add one part lazy ass, one part greed, and a dash of envy, and you have the business model for the next millennium.

Grab a bunch of keywords that you know people are looking for. Post them on a site, then deep-link those pages together. Register multiple domains and link those sites together to fool the search engines a little more. Hell, write a redirect for apache that gives the search engine a special page just for that spider that will boost your rank. Everybody's doing it. Make sure your site is completely devoid of content and exists just for Google Adsense and other such services. Did I mention that some mental giants have wrote software to generate content that fools the search engines? That's right, entire blogs of garbage, pages of code generated nonsense. Muck up the internet with spam, just to confuse and confound those that do not know any better. Great. Good job. Oh I almost forgot, post nonsense on blogs and other sites that allow you to link back to your url. Better yet, do it deceitfully, make it look like you really care. Something like “Great post, right on target”, or “I really agree, here's my site”. Fantastic! If your good at it, you could create thousands of fake pages, hell maybe millions, and boost your Cialis and Viagra to the top baby. How much could you make? Millions, I would assume. Easy money that is screwing everyone else .

BLACK HAT: Your Rich Bitch!

WH: That's the whole point. You might think that what you are doing is not hurting anybody, your just taking advantage of the situation. You are a new breed Internet entrepreneur, a marketer for the next generation. Your no different from any other flim-flam charlatan. Your the evil guy with the cape and the black pointy mustache that's tying the fair maiden to the train tracks. Your screwing every single person that clicks on your garbage, and at the same time, significantly dumbing down the Internet.

BH: I sound like a jealous whinny little girl. Yes, yes I am.

WH: Oh, and what your doing will eventually be considered illegal. That too is only a matter of time. Although I dread legislation of any form, it will be nice to see a damper put on this flow of sewage that is now a torrent. Too bad Google is making so much money, or this crap would have ended long ago.

BH: Booo hoo, where's my money, where's *my* money?

WH: I wouldn't mind so much if I wasn't deleting six to ten spam attacks on my blog a day. Now I even have to install a VVC on my forum to prevent these !@#$@#$ bots from posting their spam.

BH: Wow, it takes so much to delete a post, der.

Christ I whine a lot. Maybe I should just move to the Cayman Islands, set up shop, and spam the hell out of you chuckle heads. You would like that wouldn't you? When I roll past you at 110 in my new Bugatti Veyron doing some mystery powder off a playmate, high five'n Bob Guccione, blabbing on the phone to my accountant, well then you will know what decision I have made. Until then it's back to the beer money I make at my day job. GPL my business, what was I thinking.

What were we thinking? Crazy forgotten body mods.

I stumbled across this little gem about weird body modifications in the past couple hundred years or so.

Actually it was a few, here is the quote:

-- UTERUS AILMENT: The word hysteria is derived from Greek, meaning "wandering of the uterus." In the 19th century, many people thought a malfunctioning uterus led to any number of symptoms, including pain, paralysis or amnesia. Sigmund Freud and other early psychologists considered these symptoms psychological.

-- TEETH: At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a vogue for pulling out all of one's teeth, "on the grounds that you could be suffering from autointoxication, from infected root canals."

-- COLON: Around the time of the first World War, there was a trend of removing much of the large colon "on the grounds that your feces were leaking out of your colon and poisoning the rest of your body."

link

But it gets a little weirder. During the time of our founding fathers, there was a process called corseting. This body-mod is very extreme, and involved bounding the young men in such a fashion that their bones would develop into a certain posture, and a sloping figure. Sounds sexy. The article I got it from was Scientific American, so I decided to dig a little deeper.

Here is a little blurb about it from the article about GW:

“He was tough and sinewy, but not bulked out. His legs were thinner,

his ribs more pronounced,” says Schwartz. In addition, the fashion

of the time involved corseting young boys to produce sloping

shoulders and an arched back. Washington was corseted until the age

of five,and his body needs to reflect that.”

link

Wow, wacky. I though I was a student of history, but this is something I have never heard of.

I put this in there for all the people reading this 200 years from now. Yeah injections of swine flu are pretty weird. So are plastic boobs. But we like em. Notice we are not doing anything to young boys. When I say “we” I am not including congress. Keep digging people of the future, I am sure you'll be more freaked out by us very soon.

Video game addiction and you: or did you ever suck !@#$ for World Of Warcraft?

South Park, yes I have been watching. After 10 years Trey and Matt have begun their slide into the throes of adulthood, that mainstream hole that most of us will eventually slink. The problem arises with how amusing I find them, especially the last few episodes I have seen. Man I am old.

The Dog whisper episode from last season was probably the best south park I have seen to date. If anyone is wondering what the correct way to raise their children is, well watch this episode. Even as I typed that sentence I was thinking about how ludicrous it sounded, getting parental advice from a cartoon. But let's face it, good advice is good advice. Not letting your children rule you, just like not letting your dogs rule the pack, will stop almost every behavior problem that most parents face. If you have an aggressive child, or dog, watch it and learn. And before I get a bunch of emails about how thier children are not like dogs, ask Ceaser, not me. That man is a genius.

I digress, I came to talk about the World Of Warcraft episode and video game addiction, so lets dig in. I have been playing video games my entire life, at 35 I have played games that I felt were addictive. I have also found alcohol and drugs to be addictive, and sex, and pretty much anything else that I thought was fun. Let's just break it down here. There is no difference between cocaine and wow. None. There is no difference between Budweiser and pot. There is no difference between a Twinkie and heroine. It's all the person, and society's acceptance of the diversion, that places these actions into deviant or acceptable. That being said I have to quote Bob Sagat in Half-Baked when he stood up at a NA meeting and asked the question “Did you ever suck dick for coke?”, as Dave Chapel looked on and reassessed his “addiction” to weed. What is addictive and acceptable and what is not is all about who is addicted.

I have read the forums, and I don't want to sound mean, but lets face it, it's a game. By the forums I mean the ones set up to deal with WOW addiction. I am beginning realize why our social order is organized in the fashion it is, why everything that is considered vice is placed away from the general public to a certain degree. Most people can handle it, most people will walk away. If your stressed out and need an escape however, and that escape is considered acceptable, then overindulgence is the result of your minds need to deal with stress. What is an addiction? It's anything that you do to much. We all know what BS our society comes up with to justify individuals short comings. You can blame World Of Warcraft, you can blame your lousy childhood, you can blame your race, or your sex, or preference there of . The bottom line is, if your life is screwed up, if you avoid your wife and your children, or your school and your job to play a game, well then it's you. I will even take it a step further and say that maybe those individuals that are given the chance will become addicted to anything, not just video games. If your life is screwed up, if your spouse or child is playing WOW for 16 hours a day, guess who's fault that is? I'll give you a hint, it's not the games. “But little Timmy was such a good boy before he became a level 60 fury warrior”! Guess what, little Timmy would probably be hip deep in hookers if you let him. You need to watch that boy and watch him close.

My advice for people addicted to WOW. Turn off the damn game. Seriously. Put down the Doritos reach up with your stubby greasy finger and try to fumble the powerswitch to off. I play World Of Warcraft. I have been playing for probably 6 months on and off. What level am I? 24. That's right, 24. No apologizes here. I cannot do what it takes to level as fast as these guys, which is basically shutdown 1/3 of my life for a game that I think can be boring. World of Warcraft to me is a lot of waiting around. And not just waiting around, but disappointment and waiting around. Imagine you going to the mall and before you can go in a store you need to get 5 people together and all agree to go in at the same time. You'll have a couple people that are lagging, that don't care. Maybe one who just flakes out on you and zones out, where the heck did he go, I don't know, I just want to go in this damn store. Then when you finally get everybody together to run in, you have to take a crap. It wouldn't be do bad if you could just take that crap, but you then need to justify taking that crap to all your party members. “Hey guys, sorry about this, one sec, I have to crap”. If you get a big enough group somebody always has to crap , or take out the garbage, or talk to their wife, come on! After an hour you have probably run ¼ through the dungeon then you need to go do something in your real life, guess what you can't. Your stuck with these brainiacs you've brought together to do this task you have been over for the last 30 minutes. If you leave them now, their asses are grass and because you are about the same level on the same server, you will see them again. Oh yes, you can't just leave, because next time you want to play these mental giants will remember the “ My Dad's having a heart attack “ excuse from last time and refuse to bring you on their group. You are expect to do your part, even when the game ceases to be fun. I have not even scratched the surface of the weenies that form these guilds that expect you to devote 2 hours a night, or up to 30 hours a week to the cause. No, I am not exaggerating or insane, 30 hours. If you spent 30 hours a week drinking Natural Ice, where the hell do you think your life would go. How about 30 hours at the strip bar. What the hell are these people thinking. “Hey I have to go cure cancer....” , “What?!? were almost to the boss, just 5 more minutes!!”. This game is boring and tedious, find something else to do, seriously. Go to the strip bar, you can get a lap dance on tuesday for $15 bucks.

My advice for people in relationships that are being ruined by World of Warcraft, let me put it to you like this: Wife “agro” was one of the get out of jail free phrases my brother taught me early in the game, telling. You are not alone. But, hey, a lot of people have screwed up relationships, World of Warcraft is the catalyst that showed the problem, like that dye dentists use to see your cavities, or a black light for body juice on a hotel comforter. First thing you need to realize, when you share a diversion it makes life easier. If you were spending the day together at the zoo, or Disney world, would you be bitching about how much you were addicted to being outside, or holding hands? So the root problem here is not the addiction to the game, but rather the addiction to not being with you as much as you want.

Solution: start playing World of Warcraft. You want to spend more time with your family or friends? Your more then willing to go online and look for solutions to connect with that person in your life that you feel you have lost, and cry to other people with the same problem. Try doing what they are doing for a while, instead of what you feel is the *right* thing to do, like showering, and getting up to go to the bathroom instead of using that Gatorade bottle. I am sure they don't stand over you harping about why you should be playing World of Warcraft with them for 3 or 4 hours a day. In fact, they probably don't talk to you at all. So the world changes, people evolve, we do different things. Just because your loved one is doing something you don't know squat about, your first reaction is to get them to stop doing it. Bad idea. Start doing it, and interfering with their play time. Cry about how no one will run the instance with you, or how you keep getting ganked, you need help. As soon as you become just as needy online as in the real world, they will listen. Play obsessively, level, and convince them to go on a pvp server. You can go in as the opposition and wax them while they are questing. They will probably make a new character and try to get away, but keep it up, they will eventually stop playing and try to find some other way to avoid you. When this happens, you have won! Your family member is now playing another game, or working, or some such nonsense. They are doing whatever it takes to stay away from you. Of course, by this time you won't care because your guild wants you to do end game runs and your playing for 30 hours a week.

I hope my nonsensical rant has helped absolutely no one, it's not meant to. It's meant to be a diversion from the real world for a few minutes while you rest from your real life.What are you doing reading a blog for this long? You should be playing WOW, your guild needs you! /4 LFG

For those of you that do not know, Georgia came into this world a bit early. That being said, she has had a few problems.

The last word is they have had to reinsert the feeding tube and have begun stimulation with caffine to regulate a shalow breathing problem.

This does concern me, but I have hope for her and the future.

More information as it becomes available.

Yup, I sure am. My little niece was born Thursday morning. Now all I have to do is live up to being a crazy uncle.

1,000,000 channels and nothing on?

Browsing google video is kind of like trying to get a splinter out with mittens on. Only by pure accident did I discover how to find something to watch besides 'lonely girl' or 'angry cats', pfffft.

I can't remember what the original search was, but the result turned out to be “Kiss meets the Phantom of The Park”. Wowza, I haven't seen that in a while, and the kicker as to why it's on video.google, well it's Public Domain.

So that led me to try something, why not just search for public domain? Muhahaha.

Seems my search paid off, so far I have found:

Night of the Living Dead -need I say more.

The Last Man on Earth – I have been looking for this for quite some time. Its based on Richard Matherson's classic that was later remade with Heston as The Omega Man, but this version stars Vincent Price, scary to be sure. It was made in Italy, so it's a Spaghetti-horror I would assume, making it more obscure and almost impossible to rent or purchase.

Hercules – Staring Steve Reves, Dr Frankenfurter would be proud. The cool part about this is there is another link that costs $1.99, doh!

Godzilla – the original 1954 atomic age freak out by the Japanese, can you blame them?

And a ton of old cartoons, shorts, and more movies then you could watch in a weekend.

Still I can't find Metropolis – fantastic film, and the basis for my cartoon Gerold and Robot Girl, so if you know where it is, drop me a line.

Bon Appétit!