It be Talk Like A Pirate Day, me maties.

This be arrrrguably, th’ most important date on me calendarrrr. ‘Side me weddin’ t’ me lovely lass, o’course. An’ th’ birth o me darlin’ baby girlie. An’ p’raps th’ time aye found me a shiny new silver pence just lyin’ thar in th’ middle of th’ street jus’ when me ole stomach were grumblin’ fer a bit o Miss O’Shaney’s tasty arrrrrtichoke salad. But never ye mind all that bilge, jus’ ‘member th’ bit that be important. This here be Talk Like A Pirate Day, so when yer at yer office or in yer class or out with yer friends, throw three sheets to th’ wind and talk like a pirate! Yer maties will laugh and join in th’ fun, fer that’s what maties do. And those which don’t give a hearty what for when ye squint one eye, strike a sword-fightin’ pose and go “Arrrr!” in th’ middle o’ th’ comp’ny meeting?

Keelhaul them and plunder their cubicals! ARRRRR!

I got me a new toy.

I’ve been playing with my new Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 for a few hours now and I’ve got to say, it’s pretty darn cool. I’m amazed at how well it works in low-level lighting situations and the built-in microphone is nearly as good as having a handheld microphone. I originally got a pair of them for the sole purpose of making video calls home to see HoBiscuit and the Mighty Baby whenever I was away for work, but now I’m thinking I might do a few video webcast-type posts. What do the kids call it these days? Podcasting? Vlogging? Idiots with webcams and nothing better to do? Well, whatever it’s called look out interwebbing.

GeekManCam is coming!

I hate telemarketers.

I especially hate when a telemarketer manages to somehow take me by surprise and elicit a response from me that allows them to launch into their sales pitch before I can diffuse the situation by blowing my ever-present air-horn into the phone and then hang up as the blood shoots out of their now burst eardrums.

Sometimes, I even laugh evilly as I hang up.

However, this morning I received a call from a telemarketer that caught me by surprise and before I realized what was happening, this person had launched into their well-rehearsed spiel. Luckily, I am almost always prepared for just such an emergency, but this time I decided to use a different tactic. This time, instead of playing their game, I decided to make up some new rules and completely confuse the living daylights out of them.

I pretended to speak in tongues.

Oh, I started simply enough, responding to his questions with seemingly innocent answers, but by the time he was asking if I was interested in hearing more about the available plan choices I was replacing every fourth word with a random word I spied in one of the magazines on my desk. So, instead of saying, “I’d love to hear some more about this but I’m a little busy right now.” I actually said, “I’d love to museum some more about jelly but I’m a little kettle right now.”

Of course, the guy just plowed on so I got more inventive.

My response to, “Are you interested in hearing some more about our platinum level membership rewards?” was a rather confusing, “Some dust bunnies ignore the traffic lights when speeding.” This caused him to stutter for a moment before he tried to continue with, “Ma’am,” (I really HATE that people think I sound like a woman on the phone!) “Becoming a platinum level member costs just $59 a year, would you like to sign up now?” So I hit him with, “Rain makes my animal cracker shoes soggy.” About then, he realized he wouldn’t get anywhere with me, but I give him credit for trying one last time with, “If you’ll just give me your credit card number I can sign you up right now.” To which I replied, “Avast! Tall timber falls for which witches falsetto timbre?”

Silence, followed by the disconnection click of victory.

I hate cable.

I’m in the process of researching my next big purchase, a giant flatscreen TV and a home theater PC for my living room, and I’ve run into a wall. A big, stupid, content protection scheme wall and it’s harshing my buzz. All I want to be able to do is connect my HD cable box to the HTPC so the HTPC can control/record anything I want AND let me surf the web or play video games on the big screen TV.

But the cable company doesn’t like that.

Apparently, I’m allowed to connect NON-digital cable to a PC without a problem, but trying to connect cable’s digital signal or HD content to a PC is evil! There are only two methods I’ve been able to discover for getting HD content on a PC, and they both suck donkey tail.

1. Use a consumer-level OTA HD video card which will give me any local HD channels that are available over the air but I won’t get any of the channels I actually care about getting, like Discovery HD or HBO HD.
2. Spend an extra $1,000 or so and get an HTPC with a cablecard connection, which would allow me to do everything I want to do, but only after paying heavily for the privilege! To make it even more infuriating, so far I’ve only found three PC makers who make HTPCs with cablecards; CannonPC, S1 Digital & Velocity Micro.

Sometimes life is so very, very cruel.

I used to love going to Atlantic City.

The last time I went to AC for the sole purpose of entertainment was sometime in 2002 when I took a Chinatown bus with my grandparents. I had a lot of fun on that trip because gambling with grandpa was always a good for my comedic writing, especially when he nearly comes to blows with a pit boss because he thought he deserved more than a “measly $20 voucher for the buffet” for playing craps for four hours. But even back then I could feel that AC wasn’t the kind of place I would want to visit on my own, because everything about it feels wrong to me. Whenever I’m there I felt sad and apologetic, as if I’m watching some desperate social outcast trying to make friends by standing in the middle of the street screaming, “Love me! I’m smart and good looking!”. It embarrasses everyone. However, I went there on Saturday primarily to see Mr. Hentai, and only secondarily to gamble, so I figured my old feelings of distaste for the place wouldn’t matter so much.

OMG, how wrong I was.

First, there was the bus ride there, where I was forced to sit next to a woman who had the most atrocious case of flatulence it has ever been my displeasure to smell. The first time I caught a whiff of her gas I seriously believed the bus’ bathroom had somehow caught on fire. The second inhalation made me revise that belief into wondering if my seat could possibly be made out of the freshly removed flesh of dead leper. By the third assault on my nostrils I came to the understanding that the woman next to me, who not once looked in my direction or apologized, was letting loose rippers that should by all rights have melted the seat out from under her. I am not exaggerating in the least when I say I spent the entire two and a half hour trip doing my absolute best to hold my breath long enough to make myself pass out just so I could stop smelling whatever animal carcass she had decomposing up her rectum.

My eyes are tearing up just remembering it.

Then there was the casinos themselves, which have always felt like poor imitations of their Vegas counterparts, all seemed a bit run down around the edges. And the food, which wasn’t bad really, but cost more than similar food in NYC. And we all know that a frickin pretzel, no matter who’s aunt baked it, shouldn’t cost $4, right? Then could someone out there tell me why my pretzel and drink snack combo cost me $6?

I mean, there wasn’t even a cheap plastic toy to go with it.

At least I got to have fun hanging out with Mr. Hentai. We spent a good 6 hours wandering the Boardwalk, going to each and every hotel-casino there. We played craps in every casino, too. And if you’re at all interested in my opinion, the best two casinos were the Tropicana and the Taj Mahal. That’s where we won the most money and no matter how hard the other casinos tried, they couldn’t break our winning streak and by the time I left Mr. Hentai and I had made quite a bit of cash. But don’t tell HoBiscuit I won anything, because she’d want to spend it on something stupid, like baby clothes or a spa treatment. And that just won’t do.

Because this money has Wii written all over it. Booyah!

Tomorrow my life gets crappy… and that’s a good thing.

I know what you’re thinking, crappy = bad. However, when you take into account that I’m going to Atlantic City to meet up with Mr. H to play a certain game of chance involving dice, you might come to the realization that I’ll be having fun tomorrow. All of which is my way of saying that I’m going to be having a great time losing money gambling tomorrow, and I even have HoBiscuit’s blessing to do it! Shocking, isn’t it? Truthfully, I think it’s her way of thanking me for being so good in Arizona, but I honestly don’t care about the reason. All I know is, I’m getting to hang out and blow through money like a 1940’s movie gangster trying to impress his bosses moll.

Hot diggity dog, this is gonna be fun.

Does not the title of this post give away it’s content?

Poor, poor Mighty Baby. When I took her to the bathroom mid-flight to change her diaper yesterday, she took that opportunity to tell me that her tummy hurt. But since she can’t talk yet she lodged her complaint by projectile vomiting. Now, I don’t know how familiar you are with airplane lavatories, but let me state her for the record that they are small. So small, in fact, that there is absolutely no possibility of dodging when something wet, stinky and full of raisin chunks comes hurling at you no matter how fast your reflexes might have become thanks to hours and hours of playing Wii Shooting Range games. Once it all came up she felt better, of course, so I cleaned her and the bathroom up as best I could and headed back to our seats so HoBiscuit could hold her and tell her everything would be all right. Of course, the way I smelled no one was willing to hold me and tell me everything was alright until I got home and washed the stink off of me.

And we still had two hours before we landed. Phew!

The Geeks are flying home today.

We can only hope HoBiscuit and GeekMan survive with their dignity and sanity intact after 10 hours in the air and one airplane switch in Dallas when traveling with The Mighty Cranky Baby. Cross your fingers for us, folks. We’ll need it.

And so will our fellow travelers.