Russell & Kimmy

So happy birthday, http://www.russ-n-kimmy.net is officially 3 years old today. It is hard to believe that 3 years ago today I was graduating, I had just gotten married, and the world is full of bright possibility. Now it is hard to believe that I graduated and somehow managed to get laid off twice in that time period; life has a funny way of knocking you down and then repeatedly kicking you. But luckily after 3 years both Kimmy and I have our health, our wits and no new puncture wounds; and no new puncture wounds is a good reason to celebrate in my book. If you are really interested in celebrating the unfortunate continued existence of this wretched website you should come to our Website Party. What you didn’t get invited? Well if you didn’t get an invite you probably haven’t compensated me for the pain of being a webmaster of a rinky-dinky site. I recommend that you buy me a nice new Maxtor hard drive to help ease my pain and maybe get you invited to the next birthday party.

Speaking of pain, I had the pleasure (is pleasure the right word?) of going to a federal disaster area; although I don’t think that a lack of cable constitutes a disaster.  My good friend Corey, who will now be referred to as the Jerk, graduated from Oklahoma State University Law School last weekend. I, Kimmy, Nick, and Lesli drove the 504 miles to Tulsa to discover one very important thing, Tulsa sucks. The Jerk (aka Corey) led us to believe that a jaunt to Tulsa would be a pleasant little weekend trip. The weather was miserable, the drive was boring as hell, and there is not a lot to do in Tulsa while it is busy being a disaster area …. although the Thai restaurant on Harvard and 51st is pretty good. Even worse the Jerk wanted to get the hell out of Dodge Tulsa so he had us work in his acid mines help load his U-Haul with a massive amount of stuff so he could leave quickly. He even whipped me a few times. Luckily the Jerk will be able to earn buy my affection back once he passes the Texas Bar Exam and begins making a 6 figure salary. But seriously, I am not sure why I bother leaving the state. Texas may suck but as demonstrated by my trip last weekend, Oklahoma sucks more. In fact I am reasonably sure that all the states above Texas probably blow.

Segueing from the crappiness of other states let us talk about my job. The one good thing about my job is that I really don’t have to work that hard, I get to play with expensive equipment and it is less sucky than other people’s jobs.  Plus I have free internet which is nice, now if only I could convince my boss that I actually need a 640 MB video card for one of the servers to test things.  All I had to give up was health insurance and vacation.  Luckily I have health insurance, although buying the health insurance made me feel bad.  Evidently I am what the insurance industry politely calls fat.  They are more than happy to sell me insurance, because I am still young and health, but it costs me an extra 10%.  Ouch!

And lastly because I thought this was funny and it wasted 20 minutes of my life: the web’s funniest flowcharts.

It never fails, any morning that I am running late I always end up waxing philosophical in the shower. Over the course of my adult life I have solved every conceivable problem facing the human race in the shower. Unfortunately the solutions evaporate from my mind as I towel off and prepare to face the day. Tragic is the only word for it. In an effort to save the human race from itself I have decided that I must preserve my shower knowledge; to do this I began a regimented regime of repeating my mad musings and then reminding myself that I am in fact awesome. It doesn’t seem to work and I have sadly lost the brilliant reconciliation that I had for Intelligent Design and Darwinism. I think it involved some un-holy union of science and madness but I can’t be sure. While we are on the topic of intelligent design I would like to take the time to insult all the idiots evangelicals out there who view evolution as the tool of the devil. Stop being Morons!! Every time I hear some one start yapping about intelligent design it really chaps my hide. Being Catholic I find comfort in the concept of intelligent design but, like every good thing, stupid people have to ruin the concept. I could explain how evolution and intelligent design compliment each other (intelligent design implies the universe is rational and evolution relies on a rational universe) but I would rather curse people for being idiots and then ponder why I am at work …. why am I at work?

Hmm, I really don’t want to think about that so back to Intelligent Design. The problem with Intelligent Design is that it revolves around the concept of the Omniscient Perfect Being (i.e. God), referred to as the OPB. Philosophers for centuries have tried to wrap their feeble minds around the problems introduced by the OPB, mainly free will and good/evil. Let us skip all that crap and jump to evolution. If you have an OPB who created this reality and everything in it why do you need evolution; couldn’t the OPB just create people instead of having them evolve from monkeys? Well yes the OPB could create people instead of letting them evolve from monkeys but where is the fun in that? Instead of asking why would the OPB create evolution? Which leads us to the next question is the OPB rational? The answer would of course be yes, the OPB is perfectly rational; what a horrible pun. Being perfectly rational the OPB would not create an irrational universe (arguably the OPB couldn’t create an irrational universe); ergo we can infer that the universe is rational and in being rational is governed by rules, i.e. the laws of evolution. So if you believe in the OPB you must believe in evolution. Since Intelligent Design is faith in the OPB and not a scientific theory we take it out of the lab, give it back to the theologians and philosophers and everyone is happy.  And if  you don’t agree with me, I really don’t care.

Wow Russell solves another social ill while at work, I should be getting paid for this; oh wait I am.

You have to love that first apartment you share with your significant other. It is usually small and cramped, with love (plus lots of other crap) bursting out the seams. It is so small you can stretch out and have your feet hit one wall, your head hit the back wall and your hand can reach into your neighbor’s fridge for that nice ice cold bud … who am I kidding I don’t drink that crap it would be a Guinness or maybe a coke. The last thing our miniscule apartment needs are un-invited guest especially a few thousand of them. With the weather taking a shift toward something more preferable to the asphalt melting summers, the ants outside have decided to invade and conquer our little love nest. Normally I would call the office up and have the little bastards die a horrible chemical death but a little bit of contraband that I like to call C A T (as well as fuzz bucket, hey you, damn it, and all other sort of colorful four letter names) prevents normal maintenance work and wholesale application of insecticide. Normally I would just suck it up and pay the pet deposit but according to our lease the pet deposit is $400.00 with $200.00 non refundable; I like to refer to it as highway robbery. Since we have been here for three years and for those of you who can do math that is $600.00 down the crapper. So Kimmy and I cope with the ants (usually by lighting them on fire while singing the Pink Panther song) and I cry a few tears every now and then after taking a swig of coke and getting a mouth full of ants; they really don’t taste that great.

Once Kimmy and I get out of this over priced dump (at $1.19 per month per square foot) and into our own hopefully incredibly cheap house (here is to hoping the housing market tanks) I plan on having the place bug bombed once a month. That should keep away all the pesky critters; i.e. hobos, insects, lawyers, and children. I am also trying to convince her that I need a secret door that leads to a secret room. Unfortunately what I think is necessary in the house and what Kimmy thinks is necessary in the house usually are not mutually exclusive, and in the event of a disagreement it seems like it is I who loses even when I am right. I haven’t quite figured that one out yet. It is one of the great philosophical questions, if a man is alone in the forest and says anything and there is no woman around is he still wrong? Kimmy says the woman must be observable to the man before he is wrong (hmm a lot like Schrödinger’s Cat), so sneaky ninja women don’t count. Evidently a house does not require a flat panel TV; a recliner and a secret room to be habitable; it needs silly things like plumbing, and a good foundation and crap like that. In retrospect it is probably a good thing that I turned all responsibility over to Kimmy when we got married; it is written on the back of our marriage contract in invisible ink.

Links of things I found on the Internet when I probably should have been working:

A neat secret door

A company that makes secret doors

Let economics help you to figure out what to get that special lady for Christmas.

 I try not to rant about politics too much but sometimes those fat cats in Washington just really piss me off.  Unfortunatly it was the Republicans again;  what a surprise.

<Political Rant> 

I often am amused when I find out that someone hates me. Usually when such information buzzes in my ear I go out of my way to deliberately antagonize that individual; their wailing and gnashing of teeth is a sweet symphony to me. However, when someone claims to be my friend and stabs me in the back it makes me angry and when they twist the knife I get down right livid. Luckily we live in a day and age where partisan politics reign supreme and what the Republicans give the Democrats take away. Unfortunately this time around it was the Republicans who were stabbing me and twenty three million of other middle class citizens in the back and it was sadly the Democrats who dug the knife out; you can read about it here and here.

What am I whining about you ask, well let me inform you of a delicious little piece of legislation called the Alternative Minimum Tax or A.M.T. for short. Evidently back in the 1970s the government decided to modify the tax code to snare people who were way to creative in dodging their taxes; well call these people American-Haters. The American-Haters were rich people who found all sorts of holes in the tax code and were able to weasel their way out of taxes. The A.M.T. was designed to force the American-Haters to pay some taxes like the rest of us. However the idiots in the government forgot to index the A.M.T. for inflation and now it is going to hit roughly 23 million tax payers in April of 2008. The Democrats being fiscally responsible decided to do away with the A.M.T. and replace the loss of fifty billion dollars with higher taxes on things like hedge funds, private equity firms, and such which make billions of dollars yearly but pay a lower tax rate than the middle class.

The Republicans cried foul claiming that the government was never intended to make that much money in taxes and shouldn’t be taxing hedge funds, private equity firms, and such because they were engines of the economy (i.e. they gave a lot of money to the Republican party); ignoring the fact they don’t pay their fair share in taxes and America is bleeding out the eyes with debt. So logically you can infer that the Republicans were willing to screw the middle class in favor of a select rich few; who aren’t paying their fair share in taxes to begin with. So the Republicans sided with the American-Haters.

The Democrats caved today and added fifty billion more in debt to the 2008 budget to spare the middle class from the A.M.T.; the Republicans cheered about their victory. Personally as a fiscally conservative person and a Catholic the Republicans disgust me. Their crass worship of Mammon churns my gut and makes me scream with rage. If you live in Texas I urge you to call our two Republican Senators and ask them why they are siding with the American-Haters and forsaking the middle class.

John Cornyn – Chase Tower 221 West 6th Street, Suite 1530 Austin, Tx (512) 469-6034

Kay Bailey Hutchison - 961 Federal Building 300 East 8th Street Austin, TX (512) 916-5834

</Political Rant>

Most people worry about our growing trade imbalance and monetary policy toward certain countries in Asia; I just wish that people in said countries would stop spamming my blog …. especially 58.65.238.26. 213 comments in the last week alone and most of them for various male enhancements and other such pharmacology phun, although there was the one for the king sized bed; I thought that was pretty funny and almost allowed it. You think the spammers would give up after their first 100 messages didn’t make it through but evidently Spammers are a tenacious lot. I just wished I had 213 people who would read this blog on a daily basis; then maybe I would blog more.  If they did, they would know that I had bought Bender’s Big Score, and had watched it Wednesday night. The movie was funny and strangely enough about spammers and the evil they do. I especially like the mocking that they gave FOX; there needs to be more mocking of FOX. While the movie was funny it lacks some of that charm that makes the episodes hilarious. At 88 minutes long it was roughly 3 episodes crammed into one (and it felt like an overly long episode); while not Oscar material it is worth the rental and possibly even the $19 I spent to purchase it. While it does lack some of that concise charm of the canceled Futurama shows it is much better than most of the crap FOX has produced so I do encourage you to see it; Russell gives it 7 out of 10 fingers up. I would compare it to the Simpson’s movie but strangely enough (I blame worm holes) neither Kimmy or I have seen it yet. If you are too cheap to rent/buy Bender’s Big Score then I encourage you to once again go visit Girl Genius; its free and is worth the read; it is one of the best web comics out there.

So this week was a doozy. The misses had a project due, and between Tuesday morning at 6:30 AM and Thursday night at 9:30 PM she got approximately 7 hours of sleep. Strangely enough she went sailing by the incredibly angry phase and dove headlong into the deliriously happy phase; it was a bit scary. I haven’t seen the pictures of it yet but evidently her and Jen (her partner) banged out a beautiful (or at least an A worthy) model of downtown Martindale in 1/32 scale. Right now she is hibernating like a grizzly and will stay that way because I know that I am not dumb enough to wake her. Thankfully she has one class next Wednesday and then she is finished for the semester. Only one more semester to go and then I can be a kept man; am really looking forward to that.

More importantly (and more urgently) the holiday season is crashing down around us like a girder falling from the 156th floor of the Burj Dubai. Embarrassingly Kimmy and I don’t even have our tree up yet. More embarrassingly, I don’t have a clue what I am going to get Kimmy for Christmas and I have been assured that Anatomically Correct Bone Socks are probably not the way to go.  That is the trouble with buying wonderful gifts in Christmases past; you have to keep competing with yourself and in the end someone has to loose.  I on the other hand have no problem picking out gifts that I want;  forget the teeth all I want for Christmas is a SATA hard drive and more memory, you can never have too much memory.