I am Geek. There is no question about that. But I am not nearly as Geek as I could be. In case you need any proof of that…

I did not have a Klingon wedding.

I did not have a renaissance wedding.

And I do not own a 20-sided die, much less one on a ring.

You can click on the D20 ring image, if you feel you must own one for yourself. They also sell a D12 if your hands are too dainty for the D20 (which, if you think you need one, is probably true).

You may have seen the following when trying to surf my site lately:

The site was down for a little while because BlueHost was moving it to a new server as part of a free upgrade. Free?! Shyeah free!

Can I just tell you BlueHost rocks? Okay, cuz they do. I paid $6.95 a month (24 months up-front, about $170) for this service and they’ve upgraded it for free. Now I get 15 Gb or storage and 400 Gb/month of bandwidth, not to mention 50 databases, 25 domains and 20 subdomains, and 2500 email addresses. The web admin rocks. The service rocks (I usually get replies to service emails in about an hour.) and they have all kinds of great tools bundled into the service with one-click installs (including WordPress, the software that this blog runs on). Granted I only use a tiny fraction of all that, but it is growing. (I’m hosting a total of five web sites right now, and a sixth is on the way.) And I have no worries about running out of space or bandwidth.

Yaaay BlueHost! If you want to sign up, just crick here!

Last weekend Tammy and I celebrated our 7th anniversary. (We got married on the 22nd but last weekend was the best time for us to get away.) It has been somewhat of a tradition since we moved to DFW to spend our anniversary at St. Botolph Inn in Weatherford. It’s a really nice place and they have two rooms that feature a full-sized hot tub in the room.

That night we were cruising Weatherford for a nice, romantic place to eat. We found a quaint looking Italian place. Inside we were reminded why we will never live in a small town again.

I’ve never experienced red-neck Italian before. On the walls I saw a framed poster of Venice at night (like you might find at Hobby Lobby), a watercolor painting of a palm tree on a beach (probably a school art project), and two paintings of cowboys and cattle, framed in old barn wood and barbed wire. The front of the menu had the name of the restaurant in a script font and, twice as big as the name and in bold letters, “BYOB”. (I swear I am not making this up.) I said to Tammy, “That just means they don’t have their liquor license yet, so they can’t serve wine.” The words were barely out of my mouth when three couples were seated at the table across from ours. One of them was carrying a beer can in a “koosie” and another was carrying an old Igloo cooler. The only thing missing was a camouflaged, John Deere hat and a Dale Earnheart Jr. jacket.

The food was actually pretty good and the ruckus party with the Igloo made for some good entertainment.

After a wonderful evening and morning at the bed and breakfast, we headed back to the big city and had some real fine Italian cuisine… Olive Garden.

I’ve been drooling over motorcycles again, and as usual, my friends have been absolutely no help. I know that I am not in the position to buy a bike, but as soon as one of them catches me looking at CycleTrader.com, they all try to talk me into it. Can’t a guy dream in peace?!

The main debating point I get is, “Think about how much you’ll save on gas!” So, I did. I put on my geek hat and figured it out. Once I had the formula, I figured I might as well share it. Now you too can figure out how much you spend on gas!

First what are the known values?

miles/gallon for your vehicle
miles/week you drive your vehicle
dollars/gallon you spend on average

Now, build the formula using unit algebra.

dollars/year = dollars/gallon X gallons/mile X miles/week X weeks/year

For my explorer I have the following values.

13 miles/gallon
100 miles/week
2.90 dollars/gallon

Which yields:

2.9 dollars/gallon
1/13 gallons/mile
100 miles/week
52 weeks/year
---------------
$1160/year

Not to bad, relatively speaking. Now take from that the fact that I can ride my bicycle about two months out of the year (more if I don’t mind my office smelling like a gorilla cage) and the fact that a motorcycle is going to get about 50 miles per gallon with all other numbers the same and here’s what you get.

Explorer + Bicycle
2.9 dollars/gallon
1/13 gallons/mile
100 miles/week
44 weeks/year
---------------
$981/year

Motorcycle + Bicycle
2.9 dollars/gallon
1/50 gallons/mile
100 miles/week
44 weeks/year
---------------
$255/year

So I would save $726/year and it would take about five years to save enough money to offset the price of the motorcycle, riding gear, insurance, license, etc. And that does not take into account all the weeks I would drive my explorer anyway because I’d need to haul something (taking a box to UPS, dry cleaning, bringing a PC home from the office, etc.) or because of bad weather.

I think that’s a pretty good argument against buying a motorcycle right now … but I still want one. *wink*

This week’s WBQotW gets back to the roots of the original white board quips. By that I mean that when this all started ages ago, I would write bizarre, random, weird things on my cubicle white board. Nowadays, my white board quips are usually more about humor or provoking thought. This one is just plain weird.

I found out yesterday that I don’t have a left arm.

Don’t try to figure it out. Just nod and walk away.

First, let me say that I am strongly in favor of the death penalty. It has nothing to do with deterring future crime. It has nothing to do with hate or vengeance. It has everything to do with the fact that a dead rapist will never rape again.

BUT in the case of a radical Islamic militant, a life sentence is a VICTORY for the prosecution. You have to understand that not everyone in the world views life the way we do. (Yeah, I know. Stop the presses.) For an Islamic militant, death equals martyrdom which equals heaven. Sentencing Zacarias Moussaoui to death would have been giving him exactly what he wants. Instead, the U.S. justice system gave him the one thing he didn’t want. He will not go free to plot the downfall of the infidel. He will not be given a free pass to 40 virgins in heaven (that’s Mohamed’s heaven, not mine). Instead, he will spend the rest of his life in a concrete cube with a black and white TV listening to American propaganda and, if God really wants to get even, Robert Tilton. (I heard this morning that while SuperMax cells have TVs they only have educational and religious channels. I’m guessing the Koran does not make frequent appearances. *Evil laugh*)
On his way out of the court room, Moussaoui spouted off that America lost and he won. Please don’t be offended by this. It is the equivalent of the skrawny punk on the playground running off crying with a bloody nose and then, from the other side of the fence shouting, “Oh yeah?! Well you stink!” To the person who delivered that bloody nose, it is icing on the cake. And I loves me some extra icing!

This week’s WBQotW is another one for the geek crowd. If you don’t understand this, then there’s a fair chance some tech support jockey has this opinion of you.

</stupid_people>

This used to be on a shirt over at ThinkGeek.com, but I can’t find it now.

Ewwww.

From Engrish.com

When you were born, who was on the cover of…

Time Magazine? Richard Nixon, “The Push to Impeach”.

Sports Illustrated? College football, “Notre Dame Stacks Up USC”.

Esquire? John F. Kennedy eating ice cream, “Trying to remember J.F.K.”.

Rolling Stone? Daniel Ellsburg (Some antiwar-pinko-liberal who contributed to the downfall of Nixon. Ellsburg is still around, now trying to bring about the fall of Bush.)

TVGuide? A collage, Bob Hope, Julie Andrews, Sammy Davis Jr., Elvis and more.

National Lampoon? A soap box derby kid on fire, “Sports”.

Mad Magazine? Alfred E. Newman (duh!) building a sand castle.

I stole this idea from a blog I frequent, but don’t link to. (She’s a brilliant, gun-toting, conservative Christian, but she has a poo-poo mouth not suitable for my kiddie readers.) If you ask me nice, I might send you the link.

Ahh, celebrity. It’s that unique quality that turns a very likable person into a complete jerk. Fred Allen said it best:

A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.