Shyzer.com

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been taking full advantage of my free time to do one of three things. Either writing posts for Shyzer, redesigning HIF (still in the works) / the forums (done save for some small tweaks) / Shyzer Network (pretty much done), and working on a mystery project that must be completed within one month. Thus, the majority of my time this month has been staring bleary eyed at one of my many computer monitors while my sanity slowly slides away.

As I sit here and look around my new living quarters, I can’t help but feel they’ve changed in some small way. For instance, see if you can tell the difference between from how it looked before…

And how it looks now…

That’s actually not such a bad picture, as I’d cleaned up a little beforehand. However, there’s clearly a bunch of crap I didn’t bother removing either out of necessity or the feeling of futility since I knew a carbon copy of the item would soon replicate in it’s place. Take the many coffee mugs, for instance. At this point, there’s no real reason to move them until I’ve actually run out of coffee mugs. What’s the point of taking them upstairs and washing them out when I know that in a sort few hours more will seemingly magically reappear.

In fact, let’s look at the second picture a little more closely. I’ve never really been a fan of flickr before, but the ability to tag certain areas of photos with notes is pretty nifty and thus, I’ve uploaded and tagged the hell out of that photo. Go check it out and move your mouse over the photo, there’s a guaranteed chuckle or two in there. I’ll wait.

Back so soon? Sweet. That gave me time to slide my gloves and slippers on. It reached a cozy 10 degrees a while back, but it’s since dipped below zero again. If I die soon, please make sure the mortician checks for hypothermia. In fact, the only thing keeping me alive is the trace amounts of adrenaline pumping through my body as I try and anticipate what song will be on channel 415 next.

You see, all this time in front of my computer hasn’t just allowed me to de-evolve into a subspecies who lives in his own filth, but it’s given me ample time to discover some new music. With our cable plan, we get somewhere around 10,000 channels, give or take. I think 50 are devoted to Mexican soccer leagues and there are another few dozen showing travel guides to Nigeria (hint, bring lots of rice and hand soap). But if you’re able to get the channel shifted to the low 400s, you’ll find streaming, commercial free radio stations targeting every genre imaginable. In fact, I think the Mexican soccer leagues have a station up there too, where the announcer just sits around screaming “goooooooal” all day long.

As for me, I stick it on 415 or 417 or whatever else is playing decent music I’ve never heard of and by days end, have a new batch of awesomeness to upload to my iPod. Technology can be a bitch at times, but as long as I can tap my foot along with it, I’m all good.

Thank God The Daily Show is coming back with new episodes tonight, because as I watched the Oscars two nights ago, I was baffled. Jon Stewart and his writers took the prior week off for that? I didn’t laugh once. I didn’t even smile once. It wasn’t funny! His writers have been out of work for three freaking months and after a full week of free time, the best they could come up with was a Nintendo Wii joke and a few flat political jabs? Talk about losing your edge.

You know, maybe I’ll just skip straight to The Colbert Report tonight.

There are only a small handful of things in this world that I haven’t been able to locate via Google. An old childhood friend, an actual cure for my back pain, and after tonight, a basic effing March Madness tournament script. For one of the biggest and most anticipated sporting events in the country, there is a surprisingly huge lack of user generated content for it. The few scripts I’ve been able to find have been by seedy gambling companies charging $300 per download, made for stupid Halo 2 tournaments, or written in the archaic code of Perl. Ugh.

I can install a trillion different sodoku or Vegas poker scripts. Are you telling me there isn’t one nerd out there who also enjoys college basketball? Everybody just waits until ESPN posts their blank file on-line and then prints it out? Nobody has come up with the idea before to hold a similar tournament on-line before and thought to themselves, “gee, this would be a lot easier if I could have a program on-line do this for me!” I find that hard to believe.

In other Goob related news, I can’t find the cord that connects my digital camera to my computer. Anybody know where it is?

EDIT: Looks like I wasn’t the only person who felt this way.

We all know I love beards. They’re awesome, easy to grow for real men, and . There are plenty of examples out there of men who have sported the beard at one time or another and they all look better with a little scruff. Brett Favre, President Baltar, Goob – You name it, most guys who rock out with the stubble are light years ahead of their non-stubbled peers.

But there are a few people who shouldn’t ever grow a beard. It makes them look like a hobo, a bum, or at the very worst, a hobum.

David Letterman is one such man.

Yeouch. Buddy, it ain’t working. Kudos for the effort and I wish more guys would follow your lead, but I’ll personally send you a razor if need be.

Let’s see, what’s on the agenda for today? Ah yes, I see I have a full schedule ahead of me. First was getting up at 8 this morning, quickly followed by finishing my rereading of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Check and check.

I have the afternoon and evening blocked off for basking in the glow of my excessive nerdiness and then I wrap things up by punching my way through a crowd of 9 year olds at Barnes & Nobles at 12:01am.

Yep, sounds like a full day to me.

The first of the Duck Armada I wrote about last month has landed on the British coast.

From the looks of it, they’ve already begun with the chemical warfare! You’ll end up spending that $100 prize on medical bills in an effort to cure yourself of whatever disease(s) you contract from touching them.

Dear Aspiring Failed Authors,

Look, let’s just get this out of the way. Tolkien is great and all and I throughly love the land of Middle Earth, but the tradition of creating songs and inserting their words into a book is not only annoying, it’s retarded. Stop copying him. If I don’t know the tune the words should be sung to, then it’s just a poem. And I think it’s an established fact that poems suck. They’re like riddles, but with less fun and more desire to stab yourself with a spoon. He was only able to pull it off because you knew that if you just grunted through it, the next page might have some goblins or trolls or talking trees. Your story most likely has a romantic love triangle and/or a possible clue to who committed the murder in the first chapter. Chances are people are only reading your book because they’re trying to fill the time before the next Harry Potter book comes out. You could have flying space aliens bring back Abraham Lincoln in your story and nobody would really care. They’re just thinking to themselves how in the world is Harry going to get Snape. So please, for the love of all that is Holy, just stop.

And with that, enjoy your 4th of July tomorrow everybody.

While sitting in a Chinese government office this week, I found myself distracted by the Chinese version of CNN being blared at around 900 decibels throughout the building. My BOSE noise canceling headphones work great on jet airplanes at 30,000 feet, but they couldn’t shake the Asian Soledad O’Brien. After conceding defeat, I figured I’d just stare at the screen a while and see what I could learn and the only thing I discovered is that China has a huge hobby for ripping off American commercials. For instance, remember this commercial below?

Click To Play

Yeah, the official Beijing 2008 Olympics Committee totally ripped that off, except they found a way to make an even cheesier and longer version with worse actors and more absurd scenarios, like a little Chinese boy running through the streets chasing his soccer ball only to be saved by an aware driver who slams on the brakes at the last minute. Quick cut to another guy standing on the curb and staring at this little Kodak moment with eyes aglow. Now, call me old fashion, but isn’t that just called being a good driver? Is it common practice in China for drivers to mow down any pedestrian in the street at will? Because otherwise, that little act of kindness was probably executed out of the driver’s desires not to end up like Jack Bauer instead of helping his fellow man.

It got better though, as one of the good deeds was done by a man walking down a crowded street and picking up a recently dropped apple by the woman in front of him, who promptly thanked the good Samaritan and chomped right into the tasty snack. Oh, I left out the part where the apple was dropped IN A PUDDLE ON THE STREET. But hey, China only has 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world. I’m sure it was perfectly healthy.

Halfway through the commercial (it was honestly about 90 seconds long), I asked the guy next to me if he noticed it as well and we spent the next hour dissecting every ad we saw as there were plenty. McDonalds has a campaign that basically rips off The King from Burger King, except it’s not nearly as funny and his face will most certainly haunt my dreams. And even though I have no idea what they were saying, Chinese car commercials looked to be just as annoying as their American counterparts. Glad to see that crappy ads screaming at you to buy a new truck is a global experience.

Eat it, New York Times. You can have your fancy crossword puzzle. I’ll take this weird game that is the bastard child of what I believe to be Sudoku and Saki.

This “game” goes from Super Easy to I Need A Drink in about 5 minutes, so just stick with it.

So what’s the proper solution to knee pains that crop up for absolutely no reason and continue to linger for weeks on end despite no rigorous activity on my part? Because if the answer is to drink heavily every night until the pain subsides, I am all over that.