I am cancelling all my accounts with my shitty credit union. My employer uses direct deposit to deposit my paycheck into my savings account, and I usually transfer some money from savings to checking on the day I get paid. This morning, I transferred $900 into my checking account, then I went to get some gas in my truck. I used my Visa check card, but it was declined. I called the credit union, and the bitchy lady I talked to told me that they only update account balances once per day, and it had already been done for the day. What the fuck good do direct deposit and electronic fund transfers do if I can't spend my money immediately?!

And what the fuck business do bitchy women have working in a public service job? You'd think the woman I talked to would have been sympathetic...after all, if somebody were holding her money hostage, she'd be just as pissed as I was. But instead, she chose to be rude, and as a result, the credit union lost not just one customer, but three (my wife's and my son's accounts will be closed too).

I just got done tilling what used to be my back lawn. Since I moved into this house, it sorta turned into my back weeds, but I'm going to plant grass this weekend, and hopefully my lazy ass won't let it all go to hell again. I also bought a lot of cedar bark and peat moss--I'm going to tear everything out of the flower beds in front and plant flowers and shrubs, then fill it all in with bark.

I got pretty badly sunburned today while I was in the back yard. I was wearing a tank-top, so I'll have a stupid tan line there...I guess it's better than a farmer tan.

Women's minds really do work differently than men's. Today a baby robin fell out of its nest in a tree in my front yard. I heard it and its mom both making a lot of noise from inside the house (probably both quite distressed), and went outside to see what was going on. I picked up the baby and held it for a bit, then just let it go. My wife seemed to think there was some way it was going to live, even after I explained that it can't fly or climb trees, and its mom can't carry it back up to the nest. If there had been a way to get it back into its nest, I would have tried, but the trees in my yard are over 100 feet high, with no way to climb them. My wife wanted to keep it and feed it until it could fly, but she can't even take care of house-plants, let alone a wild bird. So it probably ended up being dinner for one of the neighborhood cats...

I've just recently become a big fan of The X-Files. Since my son was born, I've been staying up several hours later than I used to ('cause kids are a hell of a lot of work), so I would watch Leno then Conan, and afterwards, I would just flip through the channels. A few nights, I settled on X-Files, and I really started liking it. Now I watch it whenever I can, and today they played 12 episodes in a row on FX, so I watched a bunch of them. I think I'm going to buy the first three seasons on DVD when I get some money.

KFC really should implement some sort of basic math test to be given to new hires. I mean c'mon, how damn hard is it to count out 20 spicy bbq wings?

I'm definitely going to be tired tomorrow (well, technically, today). I stayed up watching a couple of Jackie Chan movies, and I've been on the computer ever since they got over. I'm considering just not going to bed at all, but then I'd probably take a nap during the day and end up sleeping for 10 hours. At least if I go to bed now, I can still sleep in 'til 10:00 or 11:00 and not waste the entire day.

I must be really tired...here I am thinking aloud on my site. I guess I'll just go to bed now, then... =)

This is quite ridiculous...PETA has started an anti-fishing campaign in Utah. They are also against hunting, among several other things. The way I see things, humans are animals, just like all other wildlife. If we hunt and fish, it's because it's in our nature, just like mountain lions take down deer, or bears eat fish. Sure, humans have advanced to the point where many of us do these things for sport rather than for survival, but does that change the nature of how we started? Is that reason enough to stop using animal products altogether? I don't think so.

So some animals are caused a little pain...so fucking what. There was a time when humans weren't at the top of the food chain--not only were we dishing it out, we were also getting it up the ass. That's just how our ecosystem works, and that's the way it will continue to work until this entire planet and everything on it is destroyed.

I cut my own hair last night, and it turned out to be the best haircut I've ever gotten. My hair was probably just over ¼" long, and I just shaved the bottom part and blended it into the top, which I didn't cut at all. I'm really surprised I didn't fuck it all up...the back was the hardest part. Last time I let my wife try to cut my hair, she screwed up and I just ended up shaving it all off. Ah well, either way it's worth it not to pay some fat chick at a salon $10 to cut my hair, which takes all of 3 minutes.

Damn, I love it when Maynard screams.

Seat belt laws are so fucked up. Just reading this article pisses me off. I don't have a problem with seat belt laws for children, but to require adults to buckle up is wrong. Although I always wear my seat belt, if somebody else chooses not to, I say let them. What the fuck ever happened to natural selection? The next thing you know, the government will be passing teeth-brushing laws, or shoe-tying laws. After all, I'd hate for people to trip on their shoelaces and harm themselves.

My wife went up to Provo with her mom today, so I'm staying home with the baby all day. I was worried that he'd be fussy most of the time, but he hasn't been all that bad, actually. He let me sleep in 'til 11, which is about when I usually get up on weekends. But I've still got several hours before my wife gets home, so hopefully I don't get shit or puked on before then.

I'm really looking forward to next week's Indy 500 and Coca-Cola 600. Tony Stewart is attempting to drive in both races on Sunday, and he's got very little time in between races. I think it's totally insane, driving 1,100 miles in a single day--actually, in about 11 hours. Joe Gibbs told Tony that if the Indy is still going when it's time to leave for the NASCAR race, he's just gotta park the car and get his ass outta there. I'd like to see what Tony will really do if and when that time comes.

It seems like there aren't very many people who live in Utah who see the craziness of the way religion dominates everything here, though I'm sure I know only a very few. It's always cool when you read something that puts your thoughts into words better than you can do yourself (or maybe it's not, 'cause that means you're a retard =), and this post does just that for me.

I've got two super-sized (and several regular-sized) blisters on my hands from raking my front yard yesterday. I didn't rake all the leaves up last fall after the trees had gone bare, so they were all compacted in my lawn. There were enough leaves and dead grass to fill up my wheelbarrow four times, and I have a very small front yard. I borrowed Ty's lawn mower (thanks!) and mowed the front lawn, then I borrowed my mom's badass weed trimmer and chopped down the jungle in my back yard. And since it rained last night, there's no doubt that the weeds will be three feet high again in a week.

Some punk bitch copied my code and graphics shortly after I put this new layout up, but the dumbass left the Extreme Tracking code in the HTML. He was using some lame cgi script to edit the HTML files directly on his site, but it required a username and password to access the script. His web host sucks so bad that they passed on the username and password as part of the URL, and when he clicked the link to view the document he had just edited, it passed the URL, along with the username and password, to my Extreme Tracking thing.

So I was checking my site stats yesterday, and this URL kept showing up as a referrer. I of course clicked it, but all it showed was a directory listing. I clicked on the file called main.html, and bam, there was my layout, with the graphics changed to reflect the name of this dude's site. All the links to the sites I link to were still there, and even the code displaying my link button was there.

Instead of getting destructive right off the bat, I decided to give the bitch a chance to remove my stuff from his site:

From: Dennis Udink

To: r2kstudios@hotmail.com

Subject: Don't Even Think About It, Sucka

If you're trying to go a little more professional, I don't think stealing copyrighted graphics and HTML is the way to do it. Please cease whatever the fuck you're trying to do with my layout and try designing your own.

Thanks,

Dennis Udink

http://www.udink.org/

And his reply (sent in two different emails):

(email #1) First off, who the hell are you? and my site isnt even open yet...

(email #2) and what makes you think i am taking your layout? when my site isnt even open? and i never showed a soul my design i am working on....

So I replied:

Don't try to pretend you don't know who I am, motherfucker. Seeing as how you stole the code and graphics from my site (udink.org), it should be obvious who I am. It doesn't matter if you didn't show anybody the shit you ripped off from me, because you left the Extreme Tracking code from my site in it, and consequently I found out about it.

You should have taken my warning seriously...

And his final reply:

Um ok... as you can see my site isnt open and no one has ever seen the design! I am not going to use your design.... just wait till I am done ok. Then you can cry, all your designs is a big box in the middle and text around it.... not that complicated.

Ok, so the guy is a little retarded. But I had his username and password, and since he wasn't going to remove the infringing materials from his site, I did it for him, then changed the password. It still surprises me how stupid people can be.

I went to the ONLY music store in Price to get my new albums, but they were sold out of both. Apparently they failed to realize how big these albums are. What's sad is that I went to K-Mart to see if they might have them, and I managed to get the last copy of both albums. Right after I grabbed them, some punk kids were there looking for the same thing, and were very disappointed--they hurried out of the store grumbling something about Wal-Mart possibly having the CDs.

The Weezer album is damn cool, but Tool's is much more worth the money. I haven't listened to both of them entirely, but I'm pleased with both...how could I really go wrong with these bands? =)

My wife and I were going to spend the day in Provo today, but we just don't have enough money to keep ourselves entertained up there all day. I was planning on getting the new Tool and Weezer today as well, but I can't afford those either. I'm surprised that there aren't any new Tool songs on Audiogalaxy yet, though somebody thought it would be funny to rename some Pavement songs and make me waste my fucking time downloading that shit.

Actually, I guess I could just use my credit card to get the new albums. I was going to buy a new lawnmower with my credit card, seeing as how my mom's old lawnmower bit the dust the other day, and I haven't mowed my lawn in weeks. I just couldn't find a cheap enough mower with all the features I wanted, so I didn't get one. My yard will just have to look like a jungle for a while, I guess.

I didn't get out of bed 'til noon today. I have today and tomorrow off from work, and I've been lazy as can be so far. Tomorrow, Traci and I are going to stay at home and fix dinner (lobster and steak), then rent a movie. It should be a relaxing anniversary, hopefully much better than our first. We're gonna watch another episode of SG-1 right now...just four more left 'til the end of season 4, then the wait is on for season 5, which hopefully Ty will record for me. =)

The new layout is up. I had to clear my cache in IE5 to get the new background image to display. You're supposed to be able to hit CTRL-F5 to refresh a page no matter what the timestamp on the server or the locally-stored version says, but it just didn't work. Now it's time for a new poll question.

This weekend was great. Mike and his wife got here late Friday evening, and we barbecued some chicken, then just sat around and bull-shitted awhile. Our wives went to bed early, so Mike and I stayed up 'til 2 am watching X-Files. We had planned on going rollerblading yesterday, but I forgot that my blades got ruined in The Great Flood of '00, so we ended up playing basketball instead. We went to a friend's wedding reception yesterday evening (after barbecuing some italian sausage), then returned to my house and played card games for a bit. Mike and I watched TV again last night, this time 'til 3 am. He and his wife left this morning, then my wife and I went and visited our moms.

My little sister had a baby yesterday, just in time for Mother's Day (congrats Mandy!). She lives in Ogden, though, which is way too far for me to feel like driving up to see her, so I'll have to wait 'til she comes down here.

I found out today that my truck isn't really suited to jumping. I was out for a drive on Wood Hill and took a bump really fast, and when my truck landed (yeah, I caught air), the suspension bottomed out really bad. The damn thing's just too heavy for that kinda stuff. Maybe I oughta try my car sometime.

Well, it's clear from looking at the poll numbers that it's time for a new layout. I designed one in Photoshop today, and I spent the last hour and a half chopping it up into HTML. It was quite a pain in the ass to get working, but I finally did it. Making transparency look good is tough.

Of course, Netscape fucks it all up--the background image doesn't line up with the overlying table. Netscape always has a hard time understanding what width="1" means. There are two columns that are supposed to be one pixel wide, and I've removed all white space between tags, but the columns appear 2 pixels wide. I might try to fix it before I get the layout up, but then again, I might do a browser check using javascript and redirect Netscape users to a place where they can download a decent browser.

I was cleaning the downstairs bathroom (very nasty), and using a lot of bleach to do it. One of my fingers now has a spot where the skin got eaten a little by the bleach, and it hurts like hell. Breathing the fumes didn't help me much, either...I not only feel a little ill, I think I lost several million brain cells.

Mikey Marshall and his wife are coming down from SLC this weekend and staying at my place, so I gotta do some tidying up around the house. It's been since before the baby was born that they were here last, and we went rabbit hunting that time, but I think I'd like to do it again. It's been quite a while since I shot anything but stationary targets. Even some clay pigeons would be fun, but I'd have to buy some more expensive-ass 16-guage shells, as opposed to the cheap-as-hell .22 rounds I'd need for rabbits.

When I went shopping last Friday, I bought some cabbage to make stuffed cabbage rolls with, but it's turned up missing. I don't even remember putting it in the fridge after going shopping, so it must have disappeared somewhere between the store and my house. There's always the possibility that it never got bagged and put in the cart, but I think I'd have seen it sitting on the conveyor. I even checked to make sure it didn't roll under the seat in my truck or something...that could be a nasty surprise if it had, but it wasn't there. It's just annoying, really, since all the other produce, including a head of lettuce, made it home.

Albertson's had Pepsi on sale for $4 a case, so I bought 6 cases. That's not bad, 17¢ per can. I should have gotten more like 20 cases at that price.

UDOT says they've committed something like $80 million to make US-6 between Price and Spanish Fork safer. So far, the only thing they've got planned is to re-pave the widest, longest, safest stretch of passing lanes. Instead of making the road safer by widening and straightening out the narrow winding parts of the highway, they're making the ride a little smoother on the part where you're least likely to get killed. That's some smart thinking...

This weekend went by way too fast. I don't really remember what all I did, except that I slept a lot, and watched about 8 episodes of Stargate SG-1. I saw the "groundhog day" episode last night, Window of Opportunity, which has got to be my favorite yet. I'm going to try to finish season 4 this week, but waiting for season 5 to start is going to suck.

Wow...Thursday already. I think I'm finally going to try and fix a few problems with my truck that I've been avoiding for the past few months. I need a new front driveline, new u-joints for both drivelines, and a new oil seal on the rear differential. I also need two torque wrenches (one foot-pound and one inch-pound wrench), and I'm hoping they're not too expensive. I just hope the weather gets a little warmer by tomorrow. It's probably going to take me most of the weekend to fix everything, and I don't want to be laying on a cold concrete slab the whole time.

There are two stories on cnn.com today with people criticizing the way Dennis Tito got into space. One story has the head of NASA saying Tito used the wrong approach by circumventing the Americans and paying the Russians for the opportunity. The other article has John Glenn saying, "The time will come when we permit more people in space. I don't think that time is here yet." I think the people at NASA think a little too highly of themselves. Nobody owns space, so if people can find (or buy) the means to get there, good for them. Shut the fuck up, NASA.

Last night, when I was sleeping (I think), I had a semi-conscious thought that I had forgotten to do some minor little thing for work yesterday. I was supposed to remove some variables from a dialog box in a template I was working on, but since I was asleep at the time the thought hit me, I dismissed it as just a dream. I didn't believe I was capable of conscious thought like that when I was asleep, but when I started working this morning, I checked the template and sure enough, I had forgotten. Very strange...

On my drive to work this morning, I saw more construction signs warning of impending road work than I'd ever seen before, except there wasn't one bit of construction going on. That is, until I drove home--then I saw even more than on this morning's drive, and still no construction.

There's also a lane of highway near the Scofield Reservoir turnoff that's been closed off with orange construction barrels for several months. A pothole in the road turned into an ugly gaping trench, and apparently UDOT's long-term solution is to just close the lane and put signs up that say, "Road Work Ahead." If that were their solution to everything, the six-mile stretch of potholes and patches that is Billy's Mountain would be closed entirely. As it is, the "Road Damage - Next 6 Miles" sign has been up for over a year.

Utah is spending all its highway funds on fixing up I-15 for the upcoming Olympics, so all the damn foreigners coming in can enjoy the pretty, shiny highways, while the southern half of the state suffers through worn shock absorbers and bald tires.