Time To Fly

• by GeekMan • In Family •   1

I’m off to Arizona to visit the in-laws.

From what I’ve been told, my father-in-law has gotten very… crotchety. In fact, according to my mother-in-law, he’s become downright mean. Why, just yesterday she complained to HoBiscuit that my father-in-law had made the house so cold that her very bones had frozen! Apparently, she had to escape outside during the hottest part of the Arizonian summer day just to warm up. When HoBiscuit asked her mother what temperature her evil father had set the thermostat, she expected to hear some ungodly low number, like 60 degrees Fahrenheit, or something. Imagine her shock at hearing her mother’s angry response of, “He set it to 79! It’s so cold I have to wear a sweater and socks inside!”

Ah, old people. Bless them and their blotchy, cellophane-like skin.

Why I Don’t Like Batman

• by GeekMan • In Rants •   4

He’s stupid.

Yeah, yeah, I know Batman is supposed to be the World’s Greatest Detective and all, but seriously, he’s a moron. This is a guy with nearly unlimited wealth, near-super strength, agility, speed and constitution, and the intelligence of Einstein, Sherlock Holmes and Leonardo DaVinci rolled into one good looking, debonair, suave and sophisticated package. And, instead of curing cancer, or becoming President, or becoming a judge or policeman, or inventing some life-saving new device that might have helped save his parents lives, what does he do?

He puts on a mask and fights crime with his fists.

I mean, try to imagine if Bill Gates were to do something like that. Now, I’m not saying nerdy Bill is the equivalent of hunky Bruce Wayne… Hey, stop laughing! Well, OK. I admit that was a bad example. Let’s try someone like Jet Li, instead. This is a guy who, in his early years, you’d have no trouble seeing as a kick-ass kind of guy. He’s also pretty well off, earning over $60 million in 2007. So, it’s conceivable that someone with his physical skills and wealth could have potentially become a Batman-like superhero, right? In his 20’s he could very well have dressed up as a giant bat, or snake, or panda, or something and solved crimes while kicking the crap out of criminals in Hong Kong. The Chinese equivalent of Batman, Jet Li would be a very believable, real life, Chinese vigilante.

Hey! He could be PandaMan!

Imagine it, PandaMan swinging from rooftop to rooftop in Hong Kong, his shadowy, furry figure striking fear into the hearts of criminals. The police chief’s giant panda spotlight calling him forth from his Panda Cave, the PandaMan roars out into the night in his Pandacycle to right the wrongs done to those who lacked the means to buy their own justice. Solving crimes no one else can using only his improbably ultra-clever mind, and sometimes his astonishingly super-powerful PandaComputer, the Pandarangs he throws knock the villains he’s after on their collective butts as the thankful citizenry of the People’s Republic cheer him on.

I bet you’re literally laughing at all that nonsense.

Yet, when it’s Batman in Gotham city in his Batmobile, you’re willing to believe it, right? Because he’s supposed to be fictional, not real. Now, I know what you’re thinking. How can I dislike Batman so much yet still call myself a Spider Man fan? There’s one very good reason, Spider Man has super powers, Batman doesn’t. Super powers make Spider Man, Superman, Wolverine and all the rest truly fictional. But Batman is supposed to be a “regular” guy who just happens to wear a mask to fight crime.

And to me, that makes him stupid.

OK, maybe he’s not really all that stupid, and it’s the people around him that are the true idiots, but it amounts to nearly the same thing. Batman solves crimes in the most asinine and backwards ways possible. He also always winds up having to punch someone in the face in order to stop them from doing something evil instead of figuring everything out and telling someone who could end the problem in seconds. I mean, he’s friends with all the most powerful superhero characters in the DC universe, right? Why hasn’t anyone shackled him to his Batcomputer and made him solve crimes so that the other superheroes can go stop the bad guys? Or how about having him spend his time figuring out what the truly dangerous criminals were plotting next and come up with plans to stop them before they even begin? Or how about he spends his time discovering super-villain secret identities and then tell the police so they can raid their homes and arrest them? He could change his name to AnswerMan, or The Informer, or some such nonsense and, instead of getting his butt kicked by the Joker or Mr. Freeze again, make Superman capture them and spend his time wooing the ladies instead.

Doesn’t that sound a hell of a lot smarter than what he actually does as Batman?

Plus, Batman is always getting the better of every superhero he happens to fight, yet the bad guys almost always find a way to capture him, or beat him to a bloody pulp before he ultimately triumphs. It’s so frustrating. Does anyone truly believe Superman couldn’t beat Batman in a fight? I mean, Supes has super speed, strength, invulnerability, etc., etc., etc. Sure, old Bats might have some kryptonite somewhere, but if Supes seriously needed to take Batman down he could hit him so hard and fast Bats wouldn’t ever know he was down until he woke up in the hospital missing his lower jaw. Same goes for the Flash, or Wonder Woman, or hell, even Aquaman could kick his face in without a real problem if he wanted!

And seriously, if Aquaman can beat you up, you’re pretty pathetic.

Lastly, there’s the whole secret identity thing. Batman is a regular guy who regularly and repeatedly gets his face punched in. He’s constantly bleeding all over the place, usually in the bad guy’s lair or at a crime scene and yet no police officer seems to collect that blood and try to match it up to DNA evidence to find out who it might belong to. Doesn’t that strike you as farfetched? I mean, if there’s a string of crime scenes that happen to have blood everywhere from an unknown person, don’t you think someone on the police force would take notice? His mask doesn’t hide his chin does it? So why doesn’t someone scar his chin on purpose and then figure out who he is? Or how about all his gadgets? It’s a given that those would cost a hell of a lot, right? Can’t anyone figure out that if the toys are expensive then at the very least a rich person is financing Batman?

Can’t anyone in Gotham follow the money?

And what about Bruce’s face? He’s always being beat up, right? Doesn’t anyone notice when a billionaire playboy shows up at public events, speaking engagements, dinner parties and so on with a severely beat up face? No one puts that little puzzle together? There’s no celebrity rag in Gotham hunting for a big story on The Bruce Wayne? No private detective who’s hobby is trying to figure out who Batman is? The Riddler can’t deduce who Batman is? And yes, I realize he did last year, but still, it took him for-freaking-EVER to figure that out. None of the ladies he’s been with have noticed all the scars on his body? Not one of the people from his past who found out about his secret identity ever tried to blackmail him?

See? Now you’re wondering, too.

All in all, I find Batman to be the least believable super hero out there BECAUSE he’s supposed to be the most believable. Taken one at a time, you can overlook any of these arguments, but taken together you can’t deny that he’s a horrible, horrible superhero. If they gave him a power, even a lame one like super intelligence or something, then I could suspend my disbelief and like him. As it is though, I just don’t like him because he’s… well, he’s stupid.

…

Uuuuhhhh…

Ahem.

Of course, I’m still going to go see the movie. It’s gonna ROCK!

Ta-Fricking-Da

• by GeekMan • In Announcements •   1

Well, at least it’s something new.

What you now see is a very nice free WordPress template that I discovered and thought would make a nice base for me to tweak into something more to my liking. However, I have no idea when this tweaking will actually take place. So, for the foreseeable future, all I can say is, “Welcome to the new me.”

Man, I miss my GeekMan icon.

Seeing Is Believing

• by GeekMan • In Childhood Memories, Geek Life •   2

I used to love taking a shower.

Waking up in the morning has always sucked for me, I’ve never been what you’d call a morning person. Some of my best days began when I woke up after 11am, and I can’t think of a single night of fun that ended before 2am. I was what you might call a Night Owl, able to stay up and party all night without getting tired. Mornings though, are my personal kryptonite.

Until my morning shower.

My daily shower was the one thing that made my sleep addled brain start firing neurons again. I would stumble into that glass-encased box of pure morning bliss and wash the sleep right out of me. It was really quite amazing, actually. Kind of like that old Coast soap commercials where the guy wakes up in a grumpy mood but the scent of the soap wakes him up and he’s ready for his day. Hey, some people need their caffeine, some people need the morning newspaper and I need my morning shower.

Or at least I did.

You see, last year I got laser eye surgery and although you wouldn’t think it, that one thoughtless act has ruined my mornings forever. It used to be that I couldn’t see anything clearly until after my shower, when I put on my glasses to get dressed. But now… now, it’s all different. Now I can see when I take a shower. Now I know, and seeing and knowing has completely destroyed my life. You see, one year ago, for the first time I could clearly see my pubic hair… and the white hairs hiding there that were laughing at me because I’m old. Old, and possibly stupid. Maybe even senile. But definitely old.

I can only pray for early cataracts.

One Week

• by GeekMan • In Geek Life •   7

I’ve been back one whole week… and no one cares.

Oh well, what did I expect? A party? Fireworks? A guest spot on Oprah? No, not really. But I guess I would have liked something. A delicious piece of pie, maybe. Or a happy meal prize, perhaps. I guess just being back a week isn’t enough to warrant anyone noticing, let alone caring. Maybe I should be quicker at finding the funny again? Writing more… I don’t know, humorous things? Maybe I should…

Nah, isn’t telling embarrassing stories about my childhood over with already?

Oh. Oh great. I see that begging puppydog look on your face. You want me to humiliate myself for your amusement again, don’t you? You want to hear all about that time I tried to be “punk” to impress a girl only to discover she had gone country to impress a boy. Or about the time my car actually caught on fire as I was driving a girl home. Or better yet, you want to hear about the time my college girlfriend stole my clothes and all the towels in my dorm room while I was taking a shower and late for a test.

Or how about what I did to get her back.

Well, fine. If that’s what it’ll take to make you happy, then so be it. You’ll never be able to say I didn’t give my all to my readership, will you? Next week I start poking fun at myself again and you’d better be here or I’ll be doubly embarrassed. Once because I posted it, and once because no one reads it.

Dear lord, I am so pathetic.

More Catching Up

• by GeekMan • In Geek Life •   0

So, I’ve been thinking.

And that’s about as far as it goes, actually. Thinking about things and not doing them. Which is why I’ve decided to actually DO some of the things I’ve been thinking about doing for so long that I almost convinced myself that I’ve already done them. What things, you ask? Well, for one, I’ve signed up to take a Flash course and learn how to design things in Flash and thus 1up my interactive design credz. That starts next week and I hope it’s fun because otherwise I’ll be bored out of my skull and do nothing but complain here for all of you to read.

Wait, all I EVER do is complain here…

Oh well, can’t please everyone, can we? OK, what else will I be doing? Well, Hobiscuit got me a Wacom tablet for Fathers Day which means I can finally start drawing with the computer. I’ve been playing around with it and it’s wicked cool (why I just used “wicked cool” to describe something, I’ll never know). Just the fact that it has pressure and tilt sensitivity and custom brushes that seem closer to “real” brushes is a massive step up from using the mouse. I’m hoping to use it in conjunction with my burgeoning Flash skilz to create really inspiring designs and thus once again increase my mad design credz.

And lastly, I’m writing again.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know nobody really cares anymore, but the truth of the matter is that I really, really missed writing here, even when I wasn’t funny. Which as you’re probably snarkily thinking to yourself was almost all the time. So now that I’m back and writing again, I figured I’d start off by just writing, funny or not, and work my way back into the funny. Or at least find my way back to the things that I thought were funny but that made everyone else groan and roll their eyes in pain as their funny bone was pulverized by my witless and antihumorous prose. And so, in an attempt to once again be funny, I present to you my very first limerick!

There once was a man from Nantucket
[censored]
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The Sickness

• by GeekMan • In Announcements •   1

Once again, I am sick.

I must have the constitution of a dying, plague-infested rat because lately I’ve been constantly on-the-edge-of-death sick. Right now I’ve got some sort of throat issue where talking is making me feel as if I were swallowing shards of broken glass and if I cough… oh lord, if I cough I want to just die.

The pain… sob… the horrible, horrible pain…

Miss Me?

• by GeekMan • In Geek Life •   0

So… I’m back.

And it has been one heck of a crazy time for me. I became a dad, I lost a computer to the gremlins of hard drive decay, traveled all over the world for work, worked myself into a sleep-deprived comatose and nearly lost my thumb trying to be nice.

Funny story.

I was feeling like a loving, caring husband one morning about three months ago and decided I would make pancakes for HoBiscuit. I snuck out of bed, gathered up all the ingredients in the kitchen stealthy-like, and began getting the pancake batter ready for mixing. Then, I got my KitchenAid immersion blender from the cabinet, turned it on and tried to mix the batter.

I say “tried” because the mixer’s blade refused to spin.

This concerned me for three reasons. 1) The immersion blender was nearly brand new, used only once or twice before. 2) I could hear the motor running, but the blades were just sitting there and, 3) I really, REALLY wanted to wake HoBiscuit up and feed her my special chocolate chip pancakes made with love.

Plus, I was starving.

This is where I prove that some higher power out there really hates me and finds ruining my life amusing. You see, I wanted to check to see if there was anything wrong with the immersion blender so I made sure to not touch the power switch and turned it upside down so I could look at the blades. I saw no obstruction. Wanting to make sure there wasn’t something stuck in it, I extending my left thumb towards the blades…

And the stupid thing turned itself on.

In my defense, I hadn’t touched the power button and I hadn’t even touched the blades when it magically turned itself on. I guess that’s the only reason I still have a thumb at all. As it was, the centrifugal force of the blades suddenly turning on forced them into contact with my thumb which in turn did its part by doing a great impersonation of an exploding water balloon filled with blood. My high-pitched, girly screams of pain and terror woke HoBiscuit up and she promptly went to the bathroom, washed her face, brushed her teeth, changed her clothes, grabbed The Mighty Baby and helped me dial a cab to get to the hospital. And not once did she call me a moron.

At least not out loud, though her eyes were having a field day.

The hospital emergency room was a fun time, too. Filled with people with massive head injuries, drug overdoses, gunshot wounds, broken bones and whatnot. I felt like I was in a special kind of scary hell, especially since I had to wait over 8 hours before I even got to see a doctor. And it took only another 2 hours before they could actually stitch me up. All in all, I spent over 10 hours in a crappy hospital to get four (just four, dammit) stitches in my thumb and now I have a nice little “y” shaped scar to help remind me to never, EVER touch anything as dangerous as a handheld blender again unless it has been completely unplugged no matter how safe I think it might otherwise be. The good news is a lot of pretty girls want to hold my hand and look at my scar.

The bad news is I haven’t made chocolate chip pancakes since.

Step By Step

• by GeekMan • In Breaking News, Serious •   6

Slowly I turn…

So, I’m getting closer to actually writing here again but the thing that’s really causing me to stall is the stupid design of this site. I’ve got another one of my “neat” and “cool” designs all done up but every time I try to port it over to WordPress I get stuck. I just can’t wrap my head around WordPress’ use of templates and I’m beginning to believe I never will.

It just baffles me.

Of course, if my design was something simple I think I could handle it, but unfortunately for me my designs aren’t so easy as your standard: header, left column, center column, right column and footer. Oh, no. I have to be fricking unique and design something with overlapping columns, multiple image swaps on mouseovers and icons for links instead of standard text links.

Yeah, yeah, I’m a moron.

Anywaste, like I said, I’m getting really close to having the time to once again update on a regular basis. However, after once again being thwarted in my attempts to get this site design updated by my lack of Mad WordPress Coding Skilz, I came to the conclusion that I just didn’t care to continue banging my stubborn noggin on the concrete wall that is WordPress and that maybe, just maybe, I should give up my cool design.

Then I came to my senses and decided to ask for help.

So here I am, begging for help from anyone who might be able to take my design and images and creating the proper WordPress templates for me. Most likely no one will take me up on this without a bribe of some sort, so I came up with a silly idea of a nice exchange. In return for your help in turning my design into a set of standards compliant WordPress templates I will do one of the following (your choice):

  • Design or redesign a website for you
  • Write a funny post about you and link to your site in said post
  • Be your best friend (for one day only and I chose the day)
  • A happy dance

Please, won’t someone help this poor Geek?

Getting Ready to Get Ready

• by GeekMan • In Breaking News •   6

[CREEEEAAAAKKK]

Note to self; oil front door.

Wow! This website has really fallen apart. I remember when this place used to be beautiful and busy and… what’s that word? Oh yeah, funny. Just look at this place now. All these broken links, dead pictures and other crap that’s fallen apart from disuse. And holy cow, look at all these cobwebs and dust and…

Is that a tumbleweed?! Seriously?

I have REALLY been gone too long, haven’t I? I wonder if anyone’s even around here anymore… [skitter] Hey! Hey, who’s there? Is someone there? Hello? Hello?! If someone’s there you better say something! I have a flashlight and it’s, uhhhh… heavy. And bright! I could blind you if I shine it in your eyes! Or, I could swing it real hard at you. And I’ve been working out so I bet it would really hurt. Like, lots. You’d bruise! I mean it!

…

Hello? Someone? Hello?

Creeeeeeepy…

[skitter]

AAAAuuugh!

Ohmystarsandgarters! Don’t do that! Holy Odin’s beard, you scared the poop out of me! What in Nikola Tesla’s name are you doing here, rooting around in the dark like that? Are you crazy? This site’s been shut down for months! No one should be here now, it’s not ready… yet… Hey, you haven’t been here this whole time, have you? Really? Why? And… wait. Why do you look so sad?

Oh.

Crap.

So… Ahem. Uh… it’s been a while, hasn’t it?

I know, I know. I’ve been a baaaaad boy. I disappeared, no phone call, no email, no note, not even a handshake and a “See ya when I see ya.” I understand how that would make you feel hurt or confused. Angry even. But, in my defense it was a VERY crazy few months for me, what with the no-longer-so-new baby, crazy work schedule and everything else that’s happened over the last few months. But I completely sympathize and agree with you that my complete and utter lack of updates was unwarranted, hurtful and malicious. We both know that I acted selfishly, letting this poor site rot like this. I mean, look at it! It’s deserted! Broken! Dead!

And it’s all my fault.

But hey! It’s not all bad! I mean, I’m kind of back now, right? I’m not totally back yet, but at least I’m writing something, right? Doesn’t that make you happy? Huh? Doesn’t it? Well, how about if I tell you I’m also working on a layout, too? A nice one. With colors and everything. And I’m planning on writing a whole lot more, too! And not only stuff about me this time. Nope, I’m also going to write about other things, like tutorial stuff and current events and gadgets and being a father and… well, things like that.

You know, life. But with humor.

I know you like that kind of stuff. Everybody likes that kind of stuff. And soon, I’ll be writing about all that stuff on a regular basis! With humor, even! And who doesn’t like humorous articles about all that stuff? No one, that’s who! So show me some love and give me a smile! Awwww…. is that…? Uh-huh. I think I see the start of a smile. Is that a smile? A widdle-bitty smile for GeekMan? It is! You’re smiling again! It’s a miracle!

Yeah, that’s right baby. The GeekMan is back.