1. Find Fools.
2. Pity Them.
3. If they deserve extra pity, have a certain someone drop by to pity them for you while you’re offline. Ungh.

This is what happens when I’m left alone all day with nothing to do. It’s hard to look away from though, isn’t it?

The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 317): Lunch And Errands

I made #1GF! breakfast and then went out to lunch after showing the progress on the house to a couple of her friends. After lunch #1GF! and I drove around town with nowhere to go, and I got a good talking to because my attitude was low for no good reason. Sometimes, you need people you trust to snap you out of things by telling you what’s what. We went to the local home store to look at paint, and then came home to watch The Dewey Cox Story, which surprisingly, sucked badly enough that it got shut off before the halfway point.

Monday (Day 318): Drowning By Dumbness In Foodness

After #1GF! left, I watched How It’s Made all morning. After four or five episodes, I found myself aggravated because I hadn’t learned a damned thing. Everything they show is made by machine, so if you asked me to explain how any of the items on any of the shows were made, I couldn’t tell you beyond, “a bunch of junk goes into a machine and stuff comes out”. Because the machine is usually a huge black box in the process, it seems like you’re learning something, but you’re not. What I really would like is if the show was called How To Make Things instead of How Things Are Made.

The rest of the day was spent writing my hybrid vs. non-hybrid car comparison, which had unexpected results. I thought that hybrids were bought to save money on gas, but I guess not. I drowned my disappointment in one of my favorite dinners that is made up of leeks, apple-smoked bacon, parsley, pasta, parmesan cheese, and eggs. One day, I will post the recipe because it’s one of the few recipes that I have successfully cooked from Bon Apetit, and it’s just too awesome not to share.

If this is it (oooh wop), please let me know. Well, this is it, folks. The final edition of Finetune Friday. It’s been going on for a year now, and this month’s theme is putting out any playlists that you’ve been itching to get out the door.

Over the last 12 months this has been an experiment in communicating with each other through sharing music. It was a lot of fun, but coming up with playlists that fit within my themes could be a challenging and time consuming task. I know that some lists took me hours to put together, and some of the more complicated lists took me days. The following people stuck with it every month and dedicated the time and effort into compiling lists that we all could enjoy, and I think they deserve a little something for the effort. So when they die, on their death beds, they will receive total consciousness. So, they got that going for them, which is nice.

Thanks for playing along, folks. It wouldn’t have been the same without you.

The Kings and Queens of Finetune Friday

12+ FTF’s
Me.
I’m the king (boomboom boom boom), but I don’t get credit because it was my gig. No soup for me.

11 FTF’s
K
She only missed The Mr. Men Edition. That’s it. “The Ballad of Dirk Diggler” from FTF: Sex was probably my favorite, followed by “Metallicar”, which was submitted for the King Of The Road Edition.

M-Shel
M-Shel also only missed the Mr. Men Edition, earning her place in the royal hall of Finetune Friday Fame. I think my favorite list of M-Shel’s was Hittin’ the Road, but her Christmas Holidaze list made me chuckle, too.

9 FTF’s
Christina
Christina participated in 9 of the previous 12 FTF’s, but she put out two playlists on the cinematic character list, which really should give her the bump up to 10 for the extra effort. That month, she submitted lists honoring both Damien and The Thing. Now that’s dedication.

7 FTF’s
Viv
Viv came to the party late, but has been involved with FTF without a break since December of 2007. My favorite list of hers is easily her contribution to the Science Fiction Edition, which she called “4e 65 72 64 63 6f 72 65″. The title and the entire description of this list was written in hex, which I made me burst out laughing. It’s bits of effort like this that made these things fun.

4 FTF’s
Geoffry

2 FTF’s
Digital Darryl
Tony

1 FTF
Sushi
Scott
Brian

It looks like Netflix has added around 230 movies to the Watch Instantly service in the last couple of weeks, putting the total number of titles at around 4200 movies. I’ve listed 11 that stand out, and the other additions and 10 deletions are listed below.

Maybe I can understand the reasons for adding three seasons of The Incredible Hulk, and maybe I think the demand for two more seasons of Adam 12 and three more seasons of Emergency! may be a little questionable, but there is no logic that can get me to believe that adding two more seasons of both Charles In Charge and Gimme A Break was a good idea.

That said, I picked out what I could from what was made available. There are a few documentaries, some mindless entertainment, and even some ladies’ mixed martial arts fighting. If I missed something noteworthy, be sure to drop it in the comments.

Recommended Netflix Watch Instantly New Additions (11)

With gas prices going through the roof, and no relief in the foreseeable future, a lot of people are looking for ways to save a little money at the pump. It seems to be common knowledge that the one of the better ways to save money on gas is to switch from a standard gas engine to a hybrid, but will a hybrid really save you money, or will you merely be paying for an expensive seat on the green bandwagon?

We do mostly city driving in my household, and I had heard that people who drive mostly stop and go city miles reap the most benefits from a hybrid. I headed over to Edmunds.com to investigate just how much green I’d be saving by going green. I was going to be like those people on TV who fill up so infrequently that they can’t remember where their gas tanks are. The oil companies were going to weep for me…

The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 316): Raking And Snaking

I decided that we should go over to the house and rake out the leaves that haven’t been touched in over a year because of the timing of our house’s transition into our ownership. We only had one rake available because all of our stuff is stashed away in storage, so we went to the local home store to pick one up. I had seen two garter snakes (that could’ve been the same one), but I had to kill it so that #1GF! would be able to continue raking. I felt bad about killing it because I felt like the snake couldn’t help that it was born a snake, but unfortunately, the snake took one for the team.

After filling up half of our leaf bags, we went headed home thanks to #1GF!’s large iced coffee. We grabbed a quick sandwich, and returned to fill the rest of the bags. It was late afternoon by then, so we showered and went out to an early dinner. There’s something about showering before dinner that made it feel like summer was on its way. It was still early when we were done, so we drove around the town looking at people’s landscaping to get ideas for our uneven (but raked) slice of heaven.

The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 309): #1GF! Loooooves Country

The weather was crappy, so we puttered around the house all day, with me giving up on showering. The biggest thing I did was create a classic country playlist on FineTune to prove to #1GF! that she actually likes country. She will solidly deny it, but she was singing along to a lot more songs than I could.

We ended the day by watching a Netflix recommended movie. It was so frustratingly bad, that I had to shut it off in just over 12 minutes. #1GF was asking for mercy in 5, but I kept hoping that it would pick up somehow. Sometimes, I hate Netflix for recommending movies that suck so bad it hurts.

Monday (Day 310): Don’t Be An Ultra-Douche

I called the contractor because nothing had been going on with the house for a week and then did the food shopping while listening to Valient Thorr. I took the self check line, and had to stand behind a woman who was writing a check. A couple of soft rules for the modern supermarket shopper:

Rule 1. Don’t write checks at the fucking supermarket. Use cash, a credit card, or beep beep boop your way through with a debit card if you have to. Don’t write a check. There are people behind you who, even though they look like they are really interested in the plethora of gum choices, they are just counting the number of packs so that they don’t reach over and strangle you.

Rule 2: Self checkout lines are for people who are trying to minimize human contact and race out the door. DO NOT FLAG SOMEONE OVER TO PAY BY FUCKING CHECK IN THIS LINE. You’re fucking up the system and porking everyone behind you.

Rule 3: If you forgot rules 1 and 2,and you’re paying by check in the self-check line, at least bag your fucking groceries while you wait. Don’t flag down the manager, write your check, wait for approval, and THEN start bagging. Fuck. Have that shit bagged up before the dude gets back. Not doing so will mark you as an ultra douche who doesn’t give a flying shit about anyone around them. Wait. Are you retarded? Of course not because even retarded people can follow simple fucking rules.

After standing behind a check writing ultra-douche in the self-checkout line, I ended up leaving the milk on the counter and remembered it only after I got outside. A woman picked up that something was wrong probably due to me bending at the waist and mouthing “shit!” as I walked out, so I had to pull off my Walkman, shrug, and tell her that I forgot the milk. I had been in a low mood for a week or so, but as I walked across the parking lot, I suddenly felt really awesome about not having to work. Maybe it was being free of the ultra-douche, or something else, but it was a great mood lift. Rather than lug my groceries back in to purchase some milk, I went to another grocery store on the way home.

When I got home, I did some research and wrote my Joseph Palmer beard post.

#1GF!: What are you doing today.
Me: Practicing my beatboxing.
#1GF!: What?
Me: Practicing my beatboxing.
#1GF!: Oh no.
Me: Gahd. It’s not like I’m going to do it while you’re here or anything. I know the rules.

I’ve been a sucker for beatboxing since I first heard The Human Beat Box in 1984 a sucker for people who can beatbox, and Beardyman shows us the recipe to a perfect beatbox mix. This is what got me buh buh pft buh b’buh pft’ing for hours.

Kitchen Diaries

It looks like Netflix has added around 164 movies to the Watch Instantly service in the last couple of weeks, putting the total number of titles at almost 4000 movies. I’ve listed 9 that stand out, but I can’t say that I’m particularly psyched about any of them.

For folks who are old enough to remember Jim’s answering machine, the GAAHHH OOOH AHHHHH! of the fire alarm, or “1 Adam 12, 1 Adam 12, see the man at [location] about [crime]”, seasons of The Rockford Files, Adam 12, and Emergency! have all been added for those days when you’re drunk, you’re bored, the cable is out, your friends all died, you’re glued to the floor, and you’re trying to pass time while waiting for someone to discover you’re missing. For those of you who need that extra something to get you to chew your own legs off and crawl away to safety, multiple seasons of both Charles In Charge and Gimme a Break were added.

Unless you can find some recommendations that I missed, I’ll have to say that it wasn’t a particularly good batch this round.

Recommended Netflix Watch Instantly New Additions (9)

If you can hear the Super Mario theme and feel like you’re home, then two things are true: you’re old and you’re a geek. Yesterday, while watching Attack of the Show, I saw a video of a radio controlled car playing the Super Mario Brothers Theme and thought it was awesome enough to add to my list of 44 Ways to Enjoy the Super Mario Theme.

After watching it a few times, I’m not so sure that I should’ve included it. The tones of the bottles during the test runs at the beginning of the video really don’t match with the tones when the theme is playing, making it seem like it might be a hoax.

What do you think? Is this a fake?

May will be the twelfth edition of FineTune Friday, and while I think it has been a fun ride, I’m sorry to say that this will be the last edition of Finetune Friday. The theme is completely open ended, allowing you to finally showcase that clever playlist idea that you’ve been kicking around for a while. I’m sort of psyched to hear what you come up with, as long as you aren’t including Europe’s “The Final Countdown”. Doodlooo dooooo. Doodloot doot dooooo… Gah crap.

Information on how to join in on the fun can be found on my FineTune Friday Page. If you haven’t joined in yet, this is your last chance.

Recently, I made a special trip up to Evergreen Cemetery in Leominster, Massachusetts to see the grave of Joseph Palmer, a veteran of the War of 1812 and a member of the short-lived Utopian community “the Fruitlands”. I’m not much of a history buff, so why would I drive halfway across the state to seek out the grave of a man who died a century before I was born? It was too interesting of a story not to investigate.

The “Crime”

He was described as a kind and tolerant man, but life was not easy for Joseph Palmer after he moved to Fitchburg, Massachusetts in 1830. People would openly insult him, throw rocks at him, regularly break the windows of his home, and even cross the street so as not to be near him when he passed by. Even though he was deeply religious man who regularly attended church services, Palmer was publicly denounced during sermons by his pastor, Rev. George Trask, and even refused communion.

What awful thing had this small town butcher done to warrant such persecution? Joseph Palmer’s crime was that he was the only citizen in Fitchburg, Massachusetts who chose to wear a full beard, which (contrary to my vision of the 1800’s being a beard grower’s paradise) had been out of fashion in the United States since the time of the Pilgrims.

The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 302): Wasted the Day With My Lady Friend

We wasted the morning watching TV, including a documentary about girls who were in the play, Annie. you would expect that if someone went through the trouble of making a documentary about Annie, it would be interesting and full of strange stories. It wasn’t. The only thing I learned was that a lot of famous people have been in the play and a lot of non-famous people can’t let go of it.

Somewhere in the mid afternoon, we went over to check on the house. Fifteen minutes later, we were safely back at home doing nothing again. I made chicken, broccoli and ziti alfredo for #1GF! and we watched My Best Friend, which made me feel like I was running out of friends. I’m not sure if that’s normal for someone my age.

Monday (Day 303): Picked Cabinets

After #1GF! left for work, I watched TV for an hour until an ex co-worker called. She has two kids and became a stay at home Mom, while I have zero kids and became a stay at home blogger. My life is filled with finding things to occupy my time, and hers is wishing she had a spare moment that wasn’t filled. It was an interesting conversation.

The World’s Hardest Game: All you have to do is move the red square from one green zone to another while picking up yellow dots and avoiding blue dots.

While I can’t say that this is truly the world’s hardest game, I will say that it’s certainly a lot harder than it looks.

Enjoy!

You want more traffic? Of course you do! If you’re ready to learn the top five mind-blowing secrets that will help you to generate more traffic and achieve your dreams, then read on.

1. Pick a subject that people are drawn to but have no expertise in like “How To Score a Porn Star Girlfriend In 5 minutes” or “5 Ways To Rake In Easy Money On The Web”. Who’s going to dispute you? Tommy Lee? Darren Rowse? Fuck no. Those guys are too busy banging porn stars and stuffing mattresses full of money to find the time to debunk your claims. And the average person wouldn’t be reading your list if they had any idea if you were right or wrong, so picking that obscure but interesting subject will allow you to kick back and snort a line of that ever increasing pile of stats that are at the heart of your very existence.

2. Make sure that your points are very general. Research and testing are for scientists and nerds. Do you have a lab coat or a twelve sided die there, Bilbo? Hell no. Being ambiguous will make it seem like you know what you’re talking about, while letting you spend less time writing, and more time compulsively checking your stats. The trick is to make statements that seem like good advice, but are really nothing more than logical generalities like “write good content” and “don’t forget to breathe”.

Valient Thorr will be postponing all activities April 15th through June 10th because the lead singer is donating a kidney to his ailing father. They are going public with what would normally be a private family matter to help give some publicity to The National Kidney Foundation’s media outreach program.

“If I can go from a hospital bed to playing in front of a crowd of 75,000 at the UK’s Download Festival in just eight weeks, people out there might consider becoming organ donors as well. If they have family members who need a kidney, it’s definitely something to think about; and if not, they can still learn about designating themselves as organ donors on their driver’s license.”
-Valient Himself

I’ve been a fan of Valient Thorr’s driving rock and badass beards for a while now, but as someone who asks for donations to the PKD Foundation in lieu of gifts every year, this news makes Valient Thorr rock a whole lot more.

Read the full press release or get your face rocked off at Valient Thorr’s Myspace Page.

And if you’re feeling charitable, consider making a donation to National Kidney Foundation or The PKD Foundation.

The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 295): Nothing To See Here

After I cooked breakfast, I started looking up info on green technologies while #1GF! cleaned the house. I didn’t even realize she was cleaning until the vacuum was on, and by then it was too late to help out. We had nothing pressing to do, so we eventually went out to a furniture store to browse. We ended the day by hitting a local restaurant for dinner and watching a really crappy sci-fi movie called Sunshine.

Monday (Day 296): Taxes and Fish Cakes

Attempted to watch The Simpson’s Movie first thing in the morning, but found that the disc was cracked and had to order another copy. Once #1GF! got out the door, I assembled the taxes. Because I was pretty sure that there wasn’t a local place that did photocopying, I decided to scan and print all the documents myself. Scanners are not a fast way to photocopy, so it took me a half hour just to get #1GF!’s taxes printed. Just as the last page came out, I ran out of ink and staples, so I ended up having to make the drive up to a local office supply store anyway.

Once I got home, I finished scanning and printing my own taxes, and then used Eraser to wipe the files from my drive with 35 passes of random data. Call me paranoid, but I didn’t even like the idea of having the scans temporarily on my drive. You can take the man out of data security job, but you can’t take data security job out of the man. When I was done, I went to the post office and physically handed the envelopes to a postal worker. At least I think it was a postal worker.

I went over to the house to check on the progress, and by then it was 3:30, so there was no way that I was going to fight the traffic to get to the market considering #1GF! wasn’t coming home for dinner. Once I saw the progress, I headed home and wrote the Life of Riley. I made some fish cakes at 8PM so #1GF! wouldn’t come home and think that I was incapable of fending for myself.

Tuesday (Day 297): April Fool’s, Bitches

I nailed everybody with my So Long And Thanks For All The Fish Post. I thought it was pretty funny that people who know me fell for it hardest, while only the ladies from Chi-town firmly refused to buy into the lie. Every time I started feeling bad and thinking about adding a comment that would expose the post as a hoax, another person got sucked in.

I actually went so far as to make sure that I published #1GF!’s prank of karmic justice after midnight so that anyone getting the RSS feed would have an equal opportunity to fall for the prank. I was really psyched that I was able to pull one over on my readers, and even more psyched at all the people who came out of the woodwork to in opposition to my resignation. That was pretty cool for me. Thanks, folks.

Here’s a quick summary of the top 10 posts from dyers.org in March 2008. Did you have a favorite?

1. Every Movie Available From Netflix On Demand
   This was a runaway favorite, because I don’t think there’s any other way out there to get an easy to read list of Netflix’s On-demand offerings.
2. Got Cowbell Fever? Here’s The 180+ Track Cure
   I have a cowbell addiction. So what? It’s a very common ailment in my family. This was a labor of love to compile this FineTune playlist, so if you have the fever, tune in for your prescription.
3. Better Blogroll Widget For Wordpress
   This plugin is easily the most popular one that I’ve written, and this update added more flexibility to which categories are displayed or hidden.
4. The Quest For Every Beard Type
   Beards are always popular around here (with me, anyway), and my quest to complete every beard type has been going on for years. Here are 19 of 33 types that I’ve completed and photographed because there’s probably something wrong with me.
5. Good Netflix Watch Now Additions For March 5
   Every few weeks I compile a list of good additions to the Netflix Watch Instantly service. I don’t know why this particular one was so popular, but maybe I can thank Kevin Smith.
6. What Would You Do If You Didn’t Have To Work?
   Everyone came up with some good ideas on what they’d do if they didn’t have to work, and I really need to compile the list to see if we can get some of you to your goals. If you didn’t throw in your two cents, there’s still time.
7. Please Don’t Try To Hump The Virtual Assistant A friend of mine works in speech recognition, and he sometimes sends me robots to mess with. And mess with them I do.
8. LOLWars and LOLTrek
   I was looking at some LOLCats, and really wished that there were LOLCreatures themed around Star Wars, so I made one. Then I got carried away and added one for Star Trek. Luckily #1GF! came home and stopped me from going any further.
9. Life of Riley Week 42 I have no idea why this particular Life of Riley post was so popular, other than the fact that it was the week that #1GF! forbid me from getting a job. The comment has since been retracted and even denied by said #1GF!. I smell a conspiracy.
10. FineTune Friday: Science Fiction Edition All the geeks rallied and squeezed this post into the top 10 this month. And why shouldn’t they? Who wouldn’t want to listen to a bunch of free science fiction based playlists? Probably the Jocks.

Breaker one nine, this is Baron Badass Von Kickass and I’m southbound with freightshaker full of trucker tracks. If smokey is riding your back door today, get in this convoy and let the King of the Road edition of Finetune Friday help keep your hammer down until you reach the weekend. 10-4?

Quiz

Think you know the lingo of the road? Why not take a quick quiz and put your green stamps where your mouth is? Answers can be found at the end of the post.

1. What is considered the truckers’ CB channel?
2. If someone is stuck in the chicken coop, where are they?
3. If you hear that there’s a smokey in a plain brown wrapper on your back door, what should you do?
4. If there’s a 10-33 ahead of your 20, what’s going on?
5. If you’re deadheading from BeanTown to Hog Town, how high are you, dude?

It looks like Netflix has added around 130 movies to the Watch Instantly service in the last couple of weeks, putting the total number of titles at around 3800 movies. I’ve listed 9 that stand out, and the other 129 additions and 19 deletions are listed below.

I’m not going to pretend to understand why Mannequin or Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey were added, but there is certainly something for everyone in this batch. There are exercise videos, bad 80’s movies, Anime, horror classics, and more Wiggles videos than any child should be allowed to watch.

I pulled out some below that I thought might be worth a watch. If you only have time for one of these, check out Weeds. It’s a well-written TV series about a suburban mom who deals drugs to support her family after her husband dies. #1GF! and I watched the first two seasons a few months back and really, really liked them. It’s not half as gritty as I had expected, but I can’t recommend it enough.

Recommended Netflix Watch Now New Additions (9)