Shyzer.com

I got nothing. Seriously, I can’t think of a damn thing to post. So I’ll just give you a few links to a few cool sites.

Transparent Screens - These are by far the coolest looking desktops ever. What people did was take a picture of the wall or whatever that is behind their monitor, then set that as their desktop. Then if you get all the angles correct, it looks as if you are looking through your computer. My two favorites are this one and this one.

Fly Guy - I just like the music on this, but it’s fun to play around with for 10 minutes or so. You can pretty much interact with anything, some producing good results, some bad.

Freecycle - This site is awesome. It’s kinda like craigslist, but everything here is for free. Just pick your state and then find your city and join the corresponding Yahoo group and then check it every day or so to see if anybody is giving away anything you can use. 50% of it is junk, but after using it for a few months, I’ve gotten a brand new printer and speakers for my computer that a lady didn’t want. They came with her Dell computer and she already had a set that she liked. I’ve also gotten a few others things for around the house, so it’s actually worth it.

The Random Vin Diesel Fact has provided me with a near total of 40 total hours of laughter. It’s just so damn random it’s funny.

And finally, I’ll leave you with two of the best commericals I’ve seen in 2005. Two guys painting a house and two guys killing some bees. Enjoy.

Ever since I started Hey, It’s Free, I’ve been trying to find all the legit sites out there that offer free products and money and such. I’ve probably lost $50 or so on crappy sites and earned the same amount, if not a few bucks more, on legit ones. It’s cost me much more in time than money, but I’ve been doing it for the knowledge. Well, last week I finally ran out of such sites to investigate and decided it was time to ante up and try out the casino offers.

I had held off on doing so for a while. Back in April when I first started testing sites, I thought that if by the time I was finished and the casino offers were still around, I’d try them then. I didn’t want to lose heaps of money just to learn if it was worth it or not, but come last week, I had no choice. The casino offers were still prevalent as hell in the freebie world and since so many people swore by them, I figured why not. I was skeptical, but I created an account with Neteller (a rival of paypal), synced it up with my bank account, and put $20 in it. Then I picked a casino site, deposited the money into it, and crossed my fingers.

Boy was I ever surprised. After a few hours of playing, the guy I signed up under sent me $50 via paypal. As soon as I had the money, I looked at my earnings and realized I was up to $32 after only playing the nickel and dime poker tables for a few hours. I cashed out, realized I had just made $62 in about two hours, and thought there might actually be sometime worthwhile here.

Even had I gambled my $20 away, I still would have been up $30 after being paid by the guy I signed up under. The reason he could afford to pay me money is because he’s an affiliate of the casino sites. They pay him over $100 for every person he sends to their site that deposits a minimum of $XX amount. He then in turn keeps half, sends me my half, and I can either gamble the money away or just pull it out. The reason the casino companies pay him so much is because they are banking on the fact that I’ll decide to gamble my initial investment, lose it, get hooked, deposit more money, lose it, deposit more money, lose it……

So the key is simple. Don’t let yourself deposit more money. Go into it knowing that you are simply going to be satisfied with your $50 or $75 profit and don’t go looking for more. Don’t be greedy. Some sites require you to play so many times or wager so much before you can withdraw your money, but that’s easy if you just play the nickel and dime poker tables or blackjack. I gotta say, after this experience, I am a converted skeptic. I’ve only encountered two casino sites that weren’t worth it and that I lost money on ($10 at both of them), but the rest have made it more than worth my while. I’m still amazed that you can even make money in the casino world, just as long as you don’t get greedy.

And with that said, I’m off to play 10 more games of bingo so I can cashout!

The steroids I was put on are truly amazing. In 24 hours, my body stopped swelling and doubling in size exponentially. My eyes finally cleared up enough to where I can put contacts in them again and see well enough to drive and my arms are peeling as if I was sunburned, which is always fun to peel and scratch away. The blisters and open soars all healed by Tuesday and in fact, it’s just now that I’m finally breaking out in a classic poison ivy rash all over my body and honestly, that’s perfectly fine. My torso and legs are all red and itchy, but that doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the crap I had going on last week. So, just to reiterate, drugs = good.

I’ve been spending my free time recently working on things around the house, getting Hey, It’s Free ready for the big advertising campaign I’m about to start, and watching all the playoff baseball I can get. Other than that, life has been pretty dull in the world of Goob.

Actually, I got a shot in the butt today, but it doesn’t really feel any different from being shot in the butt.

When the doctor walked in, she looked down at my arms, looked up at my face, then looked down at my arms again. After 10 seconds of not-so-surprising silence, she finally looked back up at me and asked, “What in the world took you so long? You should have been in here days ago.” After looking over my body, making the obligatory concealed marks on my chart, and scolding me again for waiting so long, she gave me some anti-itch pills and steroids. Just in time for baseball playoffs. How kind of her.

So yeah, I’m all loopy on meds right now. Some people will swear by NyQuil, but that stuff fucks me up. Each and every time I’ve taken it in the past, I’ve spent the entire night in one of those semi-dream, semi-conscious states where you feel as if you’re hallucinating and in the morning, you feel as if you got no sleep. But Benadryl…oh, sweet, sweet, Benadryl. Two pills, 15 minutes, and WHAM, I’m lights out. And I just took two pills about ten minutes ago

Growing up, my siblings and I used to wait and perfect games before lending a permanent name it. One such game we eventually came up with was a variation of tag, which we dubbed Manhunt. I’ll add it to the list of homemade games later on today, but basically it’s a little bit of tag, capture the flag, and jail-break…in the dark.

Last Friday, Clay had a few friends spending the night and Jules was down the road playing with some of her mates. I knew the question was going to be proposed sooner or later and sure enough, around 2200, Clay came up to me with the brilliant idea of playing Manhunt. I mulled it over for a minute, called Jules, and told Clay I was game.

The only time during the night I was hiding alone was during the first round. In all the subsequent rounds, I had Jules with me wherever I hid. Well, logically, since I am covered in poison ivy rashes and blisters and neither she, nor Clay, nor any other of the hooligans we played with that night have old socks with holes cut into them to make gloves on their arms, it’s safe to say that my hiding spot during that first round was right in the bed of my favorite plant.

According to WebMD (I know, huge mistake. There’s nothing worse than trying to diagnose yourself via a search engine. I once had a little bump on my arm and after spending an hour on WebMD, I’d convinced myself I either had Lyme Disease or Hepatitis. Turned out it was only a mosquito bite.), the rashes and blisters last for 10-25 days. This = Not Good. I’m supposed to be somewhere in 8 days. I’m supposed to be somewhere else in 14 days. My first rash cropped up four days ago and they’re still coming in. Within the past few hours, my neck has finally succumbed to the evil bastards and I’m literally watching it spread on my chest from no blisters this morning to seven right now. I can’t wait to see how many I have when I wake up. But seriously, what the hell am I supposed to do in 8 days? I can’t go outside the house looking like this!

Luckily, it’s not made its way down to…you know…and I’m praying that it doesn’t. They say you can only get it from actual contact with the oil from the plant, but I find that to be utter bullshit. I can guarantee you I didn’t take my shirt or sweatshirt off while playing Manhunt and yet it’s all over my chest now. How do you answer that WebMD? Although, to be fair, it’s extremely bad in the spots where my shirts didn’t cover me (hands, wrists, neck, face, waist, possibly scalp)…let’s just hope the three layers I had covering Private Goob were protective enough or I’ll go absolutely nuts here, no pun intended.

During the last 48 hours, I’ve developed a massive outbreak of poison ivy. I can hardly move without itching like crazy and I know damn well where I contracted it too, which means tomorrow I’m going outside with a blowtorch and taking down half an acre of woodland and woodland creatures if necessary.

Of course, photos of the cool looking blisters and the story on how I managed to brush my entire body up against a poison ivy branch will be forthcoming. But for now, the true miracle is happening. I’m going to bed at only 0300 in order to try and get away from the itching sensation that has enveloped my body.

Not much has changed or been going on in the Life of Goob. After finally completing this new layout, I took a day off, ignored all responsibilities, and basked in the glory that was “That bloody layout is finally complete.” Since then, I’ve gone to reworking Hey, It’s Free so that there’s some actual, you know, content on that site. I’ve also been testing out all sorts of new freebie offers out there with mixed success, but hey, I do it so you don’t have to. Hopefully I’ll have a review of it all up on HIF by the end of the week.

I still have some tweaking left to do around here, such as fix all the sublinks, change some of the colors, etc. Nothing major thankfully. I’m also back on track working on Shlyrics, which Stan didn’t know about until last week. Sucker. And finally, go ahead and silently curse me for wasting your time, because I am not going to go to bed. Which means this post will have no real substance and therefore was probably a waste of your time. Sorry bout that.

Thank God that’s over with…

As you can see, I’ve made some changes here at Shyzer Industries. During my final few days in Australia, I decided that when I got home, I wanted to give Shyzer a new layout. A few weeks later, I decided that I wanted to switch from MovableType over to Wordpress. Then last week, I decided I wanted to switch hosts. So, I figured why not do it all at once and kill three birds with forty-eight stones, because in all honesty the number of problems I ran into trying to do three major things like that at once made it such a bloody hassle.

But now it’s done and frankly, I enjoyed the challenge. Along the way, I learned quite a bit about MySQL databases, I picked up some php coding skills, and I became dangerously competent in Photoshop. I know, it’s frightening. And to think, it only took me staying up until 0900 every morning for the better part of a week to accomplish everything!

First off, this theme is centered around the images about. I use the plural version of image, because if you haven’t discovered this yet, it changes. Every time you reload or go to a new page on Shyzer, the image above will randomly change to any of the ones I have in a certain folder. At last count, there were 46 of them, but I’ll be adding to it as I come across more images that I find reflect the mood I’m looking for. And of course, I’m sure I’ll grow tiresome of some and delete them.

Basically, the inspiration came from this photo, which I fell in love with the moment I laid my bleary eyes upon it. The green on white struck me as beautiful at first, but then I began to love the idea of what was happening in the photo. In my mind, the guy in that picture up and decided to just pack a bag and take off. Hop on a train, let it carry you to an unexplored land, get off in the middle of the night, and just go where your feet carry you. I had that feeling when I was on the plane going to Australia almost eight months ago and it’s such a wonderful rush. It’s where I see myself right now too; poised to take yet another leap into the unknown and knowing absolutely nothing in the future is certain. I just can’t wait until I get to experience that new domain just over the horizon.

All of the photos I’ve used convey that feeling to me in one way or another. Some are of people actually traveling into the unknown. Others are of people dreaming about it. Or at least that’s what I like to fool myself into believing.

Not everything is fully functional on the site right now and Lord knows I have plenty of tweaking to do, but all the interactive stuff should be running. The search function should work, the tag board should work, the comments should work, all the link in the right column should work other than “Sub Pages.” But with that said, if you find anything screwy with the new layout, by all means let me know so that I can fix it. I’m 99% sure this layout works in Internet Explorer too, but dear God was that a battle. Seriously folks, you’d be doing me and yourself a huge favor if you’d just switch over to Firefox. But I digress.

[edit] I just found two things that don’t show up in IE, the horizontal bars separating the sections in the right column and . Damn you Microsoft, I hate your shitty products! [/edit]

Anyways, hope you enjoy the new look. Now I’m off to go catch some z’s before the rest of my family wakes up.

Shyzer will go offline sometime around Monday night - Tuesday morning and will be down for up to 24 hours. During that time, you may find that your life is empty without your favorite website, so I suggest you do one of the following Goob approved activities:

Go visit another site. There’s plenty to pick from down there on the lower left hand side of Shyzer.

Go have a rum & coke. They’re quite delicious.

Watch some baseball. There’s only a week left to go and even though my team is buried in the standings (Hello high draft pick for the second year in a row!), I am captivated by the playoff races. 10 teams are on the brink. Too bad there are only 6 ladies looking to dance. I love this time of year.

Make up a song. Sing it aloud. Loudly. While naked! Trust me, the naked part makes it fun.

If you’re not gonna drink that rum & coke, at least send it my way. Chances are I’m sitting here sweating bullets, trying to get Shyzer back on-line and configured correctly.

And if all else fails, get the fuck outside. It’s gorgeous here in Virginia right now and I’ve been happily spending my days outdoors doing manual labor. Fresh air is good for ya, you know?

See ya Tuesday evening folks.

The gallery is down until further notice. The tech support for my host is dismal at best and therefore, I’m thinking about changing host to a more reliable and customer friendly company. I already have one in mind, I just have to talk to the owner and see what’s up. So, if Shyzer goes down early next week for 24 hours or so, fear not. It will be for the better in the end.

Now for some good news. Remember the post I made a year ago about a little flash animation called Magical Trevor? And remember the post I made last February about the sequal, Magical Trevor 2? Well if you haven’t guessed it by now, Magical Trevor 3 was recently released and I’m in love all over again.

Also, I updated the radioblog with a singer named Marc Broussard. I absolutely love his song titled “Hope For Me Yet,” but he’s got some other great stuff in there. Check it out.