On top of that, they’re not the greatest team ever, no matter how much ass felching Madden, Collinsworth, Michaels, Buck, ad nauseam, does. The Colts in week 9, Eagles in week 12, Ravens in week 13, and Giants this weekend showed that the Patriots can be beat. The Giants played a really good game Saturday. Did you watch it? Fuck, it was simulcast on three networks like a goddamn Presidential speech, and had six hours of pre-game coverage (no kidding) on the NFL Network! That matches the longest-ever pre-game coverage of a Super Bowl game! Collinsworth and Gumble were fawning all over themselves, clearly biased towards New England. You could almost hear their gagging as they gobbled up Brady’s cock and caressed his coin purse like a five-hundred dollar whore. I so wish I could have muted the television and listened to a New York radio broadcast. Everyone in broadcasting and the NFL brass wanted New England to go undefeated for the season. Most fans wanted to see justice for spygate. The almighty dollar wins again. I’m hoping they suffer a meltdown in the playoffs; the Patriots are due for a loss…

On a completely different subject, but one that still pisses me off, is Washington State’s new cell phone laws. During the holidaze, the WSP has been running television ads about drunk driving and seat belt, calling it their “emphasis patrol,” which is a politically correct way of saying “you will comply or we’ll rape your ass.” I’ve ranted about seat belts before, so I won’t cover it again. This time I’m peeved at the incongruity of the State in which I live. A new cell phone law, RCW 46.61.668, which goes into effect January 1, 2008, states that you can only be busted for text messaging as a secondary offense. This means that you have to be breaking some other traffic law before you can be fined for text messaging. This is completely stupid when you compare it to the seat belt law which is a primary offense. Somehow, the State feel that text messaging isn’t serious enough to make you stop doing it, unless you kill someone… then they’ll only fine you $124. How can Washington make text messaging a secondary infraction, but putting your arm around someone while driving or not wearing a seat belt a primary infraction? The logic escapes me! I personally watched a woman text messaging in stop and go traffic roll right into the back of another car on Interstate 5. LDriver and I busted up laughing because we watched the whole thing happen. I even directed LDriver’s attention to the impending incident as the woman was coasting; “Hey, watch this… {crunch}”

Let’s put this in perspective, shall we? If you’re not wearing a seat belt, which is not putting anyone in harm’s way, you can be pulled over and fined $124 in Washington State. However, some teenage twat, continually taking her eyes off the road and risking the lives of everyone in her immediate area of the highway (in both directions) while she text messages her slutty girlfriends about Ryan Seacrest, or some such shit, is perfectly acceptable? Great googly-moogly, man! How does that make sense to anyone? Only if Miss Snottybitch is going too fast, or swerving in her lane, or not indicating a turn will she be pulled over, then she be ticketed for both infractions. Yeah. This makes total fucking sense. Thank you RCW 46.61.668, I feel safer now. U R my BBF, LOL.

Even Washington’s new hands-free law (effective July 1, 2008) is a secondary infraction. Why is the harmless act of not wearing a seat belt a primary offense, but threatening the lives of others with a Scion xB hurling down the highway at seventy miles an hour, with a Hello Kitty cell phone glued to your head a secondary offense? Stupid retarded lawmakers. Maybe if Governor Mudcutter's Continental gets broadsided by some jackoff on a cell phone both new laws will be changed to primary infractions.

This very blog update is the 28th update in 2007, and the 158th since January of 2005. Actually, there were a few updates in late 2004, but when I upgraded to WordPress, I left the 2004 updates out. This is probably the longest and most active my domain name has ever been in its 10 years. It started out as a cock-waving novelty. In 1997, not many people had real domain names for their home page. Most were stuck with a home page at theirisp.com/~username. Having your very own domain name roxx0r3d, and was an indication of your l33tness! Okay… maybe that was all in my head.

I was working at an ISP (Galaxynet) at the time, and hosted wafwot.com on their servers. I eventually moved the domain name to its own dedicated server at Galaxynet before moving it to a hosting company in Florida, a virtual private server (VPS) in Renton, and finally a VPS in Seattle. Now I own wafwot.net and wafwot.org, along with wafwot.mobi and several other domain names.

Yes, wafwot.com turned 10 years old this month. I registered it on December 17, 1997, back when the only domain name registrar around was Network Solutions and domain names cost $35 per year. Today, Network Solutions still exists, but there are almost 900 different domain name registrars and domain names can be as low as $5 per year. This got me to thinking about how far things have come since I registered wafwot.com.

Microsoft Internet Exploder 4 and Netscape Communicator 4 were in a browser war, and Windows 95 was the OS that most of us used. Windows 98 was only in beta testing in December 1997, and my i486DX-33 was running OS/2 Warp 4 for the “superior” multitasking capabilities. Yes, I hated Windows even in 1997.

Speaking of wars, modems were king of Internet connectivity in 1997 (for consumers), and USRobotics and Rockwell/Lucent were in a battle to break the 33.6k barrier and deliver 56k speeds over a copper phone line. I was running a Bulletin Board System (which is why I ran OS/2 Warp) in 1997 on that old i486DX with a 33.6k modem. The fastest CPU available was the Intel Pentium II, which ran at a blistering 300 MHz, and an 8MB x 32bit SIMM of EDO memory was over $100. Those were the good ol’ days!

Many people had no idea what an MP3 was in 1997, but thanks to a new program called Winamp, we all learned quickly. No one knew what an iPod was, and in fact, Apple was in serious financial trouble in 1997 before Steve Jobs stepped (back) in to save their happy gay rainbow ass… and look at what the MP3 did for Apple!

There’s plenty more Internet and computer history from 1997, but I’m tired of typing, and should actually go to sleep. Four in the morning is only six hours away. I’ll Wikify this nonsense at work, which better be a short day. If you remember your computer or the Internet from 1997, tell me about it in the comments section. See ya next year!

The image here is a screen capture from a new page on wafwot.com. My new cell phone has a GPS chipset in it, and I’m running a cool little program that automatically uploads my current position to a database on my web server. The web page then plots the points using Google Maps or Google Earth. It so totally kicks ass! You can view my latest trip, or previous trips, or even see my current location! I don’t always have the program running on the phone, however, so the web page may not always show my latest position. The program is called TrackMe, and was written by Luis Espinosa. The web interface was written by jcleek/Slacker, also of the xda-developers forums, and I’ve even contributed a tiny bit to the web code. Check out my GPS tracking at gps.wafwot.com. If you have Google Earth installed, load up my KML file at http://www.wafwot.com/gps/routes/wafwot.kml. It’s pretty damn cool.

As I mentioned, I got a new phone. I’m such a technology whore when it comes to phones. My last new phone was only April of this year, but I was using it for so much, I was getting frustrated at the slow speed of the phone and the Int0rn3ts.

My new phone is an AT&T Tilt. Here’s another picture. This bitch smokes! It’s got more gadgets than Sean Connery and Roger Moore combined! Windows Mobile 6 Professional powered by a 400 MHz Qualcomm processor, a 65k-color tilting TFT touchscreen, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, 802.11b and 802.11g Wi-Fi, stereo Bluetooth 2.0 with support of up to 6 simultaneous pairings, a 3 megapixel camera with 10x zoom and autofocus, built-in GPS, quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, 3.6 Mbps tri band UMTS/HSDPA (that’s right, 3.6 megabits per second, baby), 256 MB of flash ROM, 128 MB SRAM, and a microSD expansion slot with support for 32 GB memory cards. I currently have a 4 GB card in the phone, because they don’t make 32 giggers yet. (My god, look at all them Wikipedia links!)

Oh, and it’s a phone, too! Imagine that.

The GPS chipset and large microSD card lets me run TomTom Navigator on the phone for voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation. I was amazed at how accurate TomTom is, at least on roads that have existed for more than a few years. It’s the dog’s bollocks, man! Of course, we drive the same route day after day after day after day after… but it’s nice to have for those trips around accidents, or the rare time I get lost. I’ll be fucked by starving Pygmies before I’ll stop and ask for directions! I’m a guy, damn it! We’re not supposed to ask for directions or the monkeys will fly out our asses, and we can’t have that.

It’s a beautiful thing when I can be secure shelled into work via VPN, chatting on a jabber server, live tracking my journey on Google Maps for the world to see, and surfing the web at DSL speeds — in the palm of my hand — while doing 75 miles an hour northbound on I-5. Don’t get your panties in a knot, I’m a passenger at those times. If I was driving, I’d be text messaging, too! Ha ha!

Okay, enough about my geek toys. What else has happened? I had some work done on my truck. Early in November, I had Les Schwab put on four new Wild Country tires. I bought the truck with the old tires on it, and they were getting a little thin in the tread department. The new tires are nice and quiet, and with winter on the way, it feels good to know my ass (and LDriver’s ass) will safer… because we all know how I worry about LDriver’s ass.

Just before Thanksgiving, I took the truck to Hilltop Texaco here in Oak Harbor. The soul-crushing commutes to Seattle on Fridays were taking their toll on my engine. After doing a hundred miles — forty of which are at 70+ miles per hour — the truck was running rough and felt like it needed a good tune-up. So, during lunch on one of the three days of the holiday-shortened week I worked from home, I took my F-150 to Hilltop. I sat in their waiting room for nearly four freaking hours, tortured by FOX News and watching people shovel popcorn down their esophagus like their name was Moses and they just got back from his little pow-wow with God in the mountains.

Anyway, the mechanics at Hilltop put in new spark plugs, new wires, a new distributor cap, a new rotor, a new serpentine belt, and tuned and scoped the engine. They also checked the electrical system and the brakes. The truck passed all it’s tests, but still runs rough at idle once it’s up to running temperature. Damn it all to hell, I hate vehicles, sometimes. Nearly five hundred dollars, and I still have the “trouble” I took the truck in for. It rides much nicer, sounds better, and even shifts gears smoother… but what the fuck, man?

Speaking of Thanksgiving, Tina and I had a nice holiday. We didn’t go anywhere, or do anything special. We’re boring like that. But, I had a nice nine-day span of being at home, coupled with turkey, stuffing, cranberries, and football. It was a relaxing weekend work-from-home four-day weekend string of days. I wish I could do that more often! Like once a month! Fuck, think of the gas (and money) I’d save. As it is, I spend more than $90 a week in gas.

Okay, there ya go. Not so great, but it catches you up a bit and prevents me from going the whole month of November without an update. December should be a little chattier.

I had, just had, to run an errand in town today. I still had the nebulizer I used to inhale the medication I needed when I had pneumonia. It had to be returned to the medical supplier or I’d have been the next Jim Carroll, sucking dick in the men’s room for money to pay the goddamn bill.

My 5am-to-8pm daily commute has made doing things in town a fucking production, requiring a scheduled day off, an official Congressional order, and a high level of coordination rivaling that of Cirque du Soleil. If we need to run even the smallest errand in town, we have to burn a vacation day (or feign illness) in order to complete that errand. The amount of bullshit we’re forced to eat when asking for a schedule change is out of hand. There’s a really long story that goes behind all this, but I don’t want to get into it. Let’s just say that my carpool was asking to have “work-from-home” Fridays that would allow us to telecommute. So earlier in the week, I requested today off if (and only if) we were still driving to Seattle. If telecommuting was approved for Fridays (and all of us were working from home), I wouldn’t need the day off. Okay, let me simplify this as if you were a 2nd grader: I was to have the day off if we’re driving, or I would work from home if we weren’t driving. And as predictable as the rising cost of gasoline, the word came down yesterday that telecommuting was denied, and we would not be working from home. Bastards!

So, I was working from home today. I was logged into the support queue with my X-Lite softphone, tunneled into the company’s VPN, and connected to our jabber server. I was handling my tickets and doing my thing. One of my pet peeves about the jabber server is chat etiquette. It drives me crazy that the people I work with have to start off a conversation with a stupid question — “You there?” Jesus fuck, people! If my online status says I’m available, there’s a high goddamn likelihood I’m at my desk. Just spit it out! There’s no need to ask for my fucking twenty. One of my co-workers asked me this question shortly after 3pm today, and I replied accordingly. They’re jealous nappy-headed hos because I was working from home, and they had to drive into Seattle. They campaigned, via broadcast message, for everyone to send me a jabber message… “hey, you there?” As you can see by the clips of my jabber log below, everyone who asked got the same basic response, regardless of who they were. It was all in good fun, though.

<Twigg> hey you there?
<Twigg> hahahahahahha
<wafwot> fuck you
 
<Ocelot> hey you there?
<wafwot> I’ll say to you what I said to Twigg…. Fuck you.
<wafwot> C’mon…. get the boss to ask me.
 
<mike> you there?
<wafwot> fuck you
<wafwot> LOL
<mike> your number one too!!
 
<mermaid> I’m to harrass you
<wafwot> Okay.
<wafwot> Just don’t ask if I’m here.
<mermaid> I was told to but I dont want to go with the crowd
<mermaid> I’m cool like that
<wafwot> ‘Ata girl!
<wafwot> Coolest in the whole building!
<mermaid> I know I know
 
<All> Hey u there?
<wafwot> fuck you
 
<wafwot> A broadcast messgage?
<wafwot> You ass.
<Ocelot> hahahahahaha
 
<paul> hey, you there?
<wafwot> Ffffffuuuuuuck You!
<paul> hehehe
 
<the boss> ‘hey.. you there?’
<wafwot> fuck you
<wafwot> lol
<the boss> Ouch hhaha you would not like it
<the boss> what a nice guy.
<the boss> where is that pen I sign your check with? hahah

I so wish I had the wit about me to mention to “the boss” that he doesn’t sign my checks… they’re automatically deposited. Muhahahaha!

Just before lunch, my new phone rang. It was Ditech. He took the day off to move car parts from his garage to Bellingham. I think he took the day off to celebrate 420, but I could be wrong. It’s been known to happen one or two… hundred… thousand times before. After work, I drove out to his house and helped him celebrate the “holiday.” During the 45-minute trip, I realized the “Spring 2007 Hey You There” campaign took to the highway. My carpool buddies were now sending “hey you there” text messages to my cell phone. It was pretty goddamn funny once I had a good buzz kickin’.

As we passed the pipe around just outside the door of Ditech’s basement, he told me they were fixing up the house in order to put it up for sale soon. He told me that the carpet in one particular room is haunted by a mysterious piss odor caused by a former owner, and no amount of cleaning has removed the stink. This was highly funny to me in my state of bakedness. He told me most of the time the carpet in the room doesn’t smell. But sometimes just walking into the house, the stink hits you so hard, it makes Ike Turner seem tender. I couldn’t help but laugh. Not in a mean way. Phantom smells are not something you take lightly. If I’ve learned one thing in my 40+ years on Planet Earth, it’s that jocularity and noxious clouds of urine shall not be fucked with. I don’t make this shit up, people. No, I was laughing because my THC-induced imagination went immediately to a new direct-to-video movie of “Scooby Doo and the Lethal Piss Stink of La Conner” (No, I’m not talking about the Swinomish Tribe. That would be mean.) I couldn’t help but picture Shaggy and Scooby, clinging to each other in a quivering embrace of gayness in the back of the Mystery Machine because they saw a Specter of Pee floating towards them, laughing like Ed McMahon. Fred, Daphne, and Velma solve the case, but Shag and Scoob bumble through and somehow expose the true identity of the Pestilent Pee Phantom as Old Man Meriweather… who of course would have gotten away with it had it not been for those meddling kids. We had a girly giggle over that. I was hilarious! Ditech was worried his tale of tinkle stink might make it to my blog… but I wouldn’t do such a thing for the same reason I don’t make fun of the Swinomish. It was after 9pm by the time I got home from Ditech’s house… thanks to that period of time you have to wait before driving while stoned… so you don’t draw attention to yourself. Paranoia is a stoner’s barometer… or something.

So, that was my 420. Hope your’s was twice as fun. Pass the bong. And the lighter… dumbass.

When we left work yesterday evening, the start of the soul-crushing love-fest that is our nightly drive home was like any other. The roads were dry, the surface streets were clogged (like they ate too much cheese… draw your own conclusions), and all appeared normal. But then we tuned in KOMO AM 1000 and heard about severe winter conditions in Everett and Marysville. Our cell phones began to ring. Worried loved ones were concerned that we might be stuck behind a recent 50 vehicle pile up (story – crash pictures) on I-90 near Snoqualmie Pass. Our commute doesn’t take us anywhere near I-90, thankfully, but the weather on north I-5 had us worried. By the time we made it to the northbound express lanes, the traffic slowdowns had already begun. Every day, we drive past a digital road sign that reports travel times to Lynnwood and South Everett. Normally that sign reads 30 to 45 minutes to South Everett. Tonight, it read 65 minutes. Fuck. As we got closer to the sign, we realized we misread an “8″ as a “6.” Eighty five minutes to make a 20 mile trip. Do the math, people… that’s 4¼ miles per hour. Four and a quarter! Jesus fucking cajun-style Christ! To be fair, that electronic sign is for the main line, not the express lanes. But considering the express lanes weren’t going any faster than the main line, it’s close enough for government tolerances. We tired quickly of the traffic radio, and switched to a CD of The Crystal Method.

It was slow going. After the express lanes ended, it was snowing quite heavily. We were driving in and out of snowsqualls up to Lynnwood, where it was snowing continuously. It wasn’t sticking, just making the roadway wet. Traffic flow sucked. The HOV lane was moving at about 20 miles per hour, where the regular lanes were stop and go. We finally made it to South Everett a full two hours late. The snow was coming down solid, and made for some pretty cool pictures with our shitty camera phones. Here’s a photo, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and even a short movie in MP4 format. Pretty cool new image viewer, eh? If you’re JavaScript-phobic, you probably just saw those images open in your browser. Yawn. People with JavaScript enabled saw the web page dim, and the images appear on a new layer, resized to fit your screen resolution. It’s fucking amazing. You know how I know? Because it’s fucking amazing!

Enough cock waving. By the time we got through Everett and Marysville, we were in a full-on blizzard. I’m not sure, but think we may have been experiencing whiteout conditions… but what the fuck do I know? The snow was coming down so fast and heavy, the headlights were reflecting off it, making it near impossible to see the roadway. The snow was also starting to collect on the slush between the lanes, which meant it was getting colder outside. Our speed wasn’t very fast. This picture of the car radio shows the average miles per hour we were traveling from downtown Seattle to Marysville, and the outside temperature. Pretty fucking swift, eh? I think we broke 25 miles an hour once or twice before things got worse, and they did get worse.

There’s a point where there so much snow that the highway eventually gets completely covered. We reached that point around Smokey Point, and it was not fun. The road was eerily free of traffic. It was us, a Subaru about 200 feet in front of us and a pack of other slow moving vehicles a mile behind us. Previous knowledge told us there was a highway under the car, but we couldn’t see it. “Where’s the lane? Shit!” We were literally driving by braille! As soon as we’d drive over those little bumps or reflectors on the center lines, we’d steer back into the lane until we hit the rumble strip. It’s funny now.

Several dickholes in 4×4 SUVs thought they were impervious to bad weather. Many were wrong. There were vehicles galore that had slid off the Interstate and were now stuck. One Dodge Durango driven by some old fuck sped by us faster than a priest leaving Chuck E. Cheese's with an 8 year old in a duffel bag. A couple minutes later, a cop pulled onto the highway, and his lights came on. Tardboy had spun out, and was now on the side of the road pointing the wrong direction. It appeared that there was a tow truck pulling a station wagon out of a ditch, and the Durango had to avoid the obstacle, and over corrected, spinning himself around.

A couple miles after that spinout, the highway was just wet, and we were back up to 70 miles an hour through the Skagit Valley. All that fucking snow was caused by the Puget Sound Convergence Zone, which we drive through twice a day. By the time we got back to Oak Harbor, it was 9:30pm. Ninety seven miles in 4½ hours. That’s an average of 21½ miles an hour. Fucking snow! We were home just in time to grab a bite to eat and go to sleep to do the whole goddamned thing over again in 6½ hours. Pass the melatonin… and the antacid.

Today was the day we picked up a former co-worker for a trip to the Westin. He had a convention to go to in the hotel. Yesterday’s wintry boot to the coin purse almost put a damper on things, but the powers that know nothing north of Everett forced us to make the 97-mile trip anyway, in the face of sure death on icy highways… and they were icy until Lynnwood, where they were just wet. It was good to see Jake/Di-Tech again, even though we suffered partial hearing loss from his maniacal, Ed McMahon-esque laugh. Good times, though. Made the commute seem shorter, and that’s always a good thing.