Attack of the Buggles!: Use your mouse to move around the screen touching blue boxes and avoiding red buggles. Every time you touch a box, you collect the points, and another red buggle appears on the screen.

Each blue box starts at 10 points, but with every passing second, the box’s value drops and your size increases, making speed as important as accuracy. Every 20 boxes, you get a little relief in the form of a green buggle, which gives you a small amount of time to destroy some of the red buggles that inevitably fill up the screen.

I’ve played a few variations of this game before (such as Ballo), but I think the added time pressure makes this game a lot more more fun than its peers.

My best score was 620. Post your high scores in the comments.

Enjoy!

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 364): The Old, Angry Man

I woke up groggy and turned on the radio, which was set to the oldies channel because even though my in-car entertainment might be death metal, when I turn on the radio lately, I happily listen to the oldies. The DJ started a monologue about “Remember the cartoons you watched as a kid?” and I was groggily nodding along and saying things like “Ha, Jabberjaws” or “I hate smurfs” to no one in particular when it hit me: The DJ wasn’t talking about old cartoons of the 50′s. This guy on the oldies channel was talking about cartoons from my childhood.

Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, there. Sure, I remember The Jackson 5ive, The Herculoids, Thundar The Barbarian, Top Cat, Grape Ape, Hong Kong Phooey, Speed Buggy, and the friggin’ Wonder Twins, but I’m not old, man. Oldies stations are supposed to talk about stuff that old people enjoy, like, I dunno, pudding or something. They are not supposed to communicate with me directly because I’m not their target audience. Right?

Just as I was shaking my head at the station’s audacity, “Photograph” by Def Leppard came on, and I said something like “Yea, bitches. ROCK! Who’s old now?” #1GF! thought it was a good time to point out that I hadn’t changed the channel and was still listening to the oldies station. Damn hell crap. Are you telling me that when me and my mullet-wearing friends were in the basement listening to Pyromania on cassette on a boombox and wondering what “Onta Glieben glauben Globen” meant, most 25 year olds weren’t born yet? Fuuuck me. Wear all the big shorts and t-shirts you want, but when the oldies channel is talking directly to you, you might want to start stocking up on pudding and Depends.

Shotgun CD reviews are short reviews on CDs that you can usually pick up for $10 or less. For further explanation, check the FAQ

Tipsy – Trip Tease (dj): Trip Tease is an oddity by a San Francisco DJ outfit that uses space age pop as a basis for their samples. It seems like a novel concept, but when it was released in 1996, there were a fair number of people doing exactly the same thing because of an easy listening and lounge revival. The only other album I can remember in this style from the time was an album called Sacrebleu by Dimitri From Paris, which I. Fucking. Hated. That album shut me off from the style because it wasn’t done right. This one is. If you were ever into space age pop, it’s pretty cool to hear all the different samples mixed together coherently. If you weren’t ever into space age pop, it may not hold the same interest without the mental gymnastics of trying to recognize the samples as they swim by. Is it an interesting oddity to have in your collection? Yes, definitely. Would you take it to a desert island with you if you could only take 25 albums? Probably not, but it’s put together really well for both turntablist and space age pop fans who are looking for something a little different. B

Antonio Carlos Jobim – Wave (bossa nova): You may not recognize Jobim by name, but almost everyone is familiar with a little bossa nova tune called “The Girl From Ipanema” that took the world by storm when Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto recorded it on their album Getz/Gilberto in 1964. Jobim not only wrote the music for that tune, but he’s credited with writing most of the songs on that album. Jobim was a native of Rio de Janeiro and the sleepy, smooth sounds of bossa nova were his playground. For many, Wave might remind you of being trapped in an elevator in 1967, but to me, it’s an awesomely relaxing ride that transports me to a place where I’m smoking a pipe and looking out over the city from behind the plate glass of my wall-sized picture window. With one hand in the pocket of my smoking jacket, I wonder who the beautiful woman is swimming downstairs in my pool, but I can’t be bothered to investigate because women like that tend to only lead to more questions… B+

The Toothbrush is a mustache that was originally made famous by Charlie Chaplin, but it’s so far out of use today that I didn’t think to include it in my beard quest. After getting a lot of e-mail pointing out my omission, I had to figure out a way to include it that would naturally imply a reference to Chaplin and not make me look like one of history’s biggest douches.

I planted the Toothbrush in the list so that it changed when the mouse passed over it, and waited for #1GF! to find it. Like a lot of people, she never did.

Once I pointed out the mouseover to her, she suggested that it needed its own post in case other people missed it, too. Even though it’s a pretty lame to point out your own easter eggs, I figured that revealing this picture should keep me out of corporate offices everywhere and let me stay home and write forever.

I mentioned yesterday how you can add an list to your sidebar composed of all the people that are linking to you, but didn’t mention that, by default, all the links are “dofollow”. Because there is no approval process for links included in an RSS feed, some people prefer to set the links to “nofollow” so that Google is aware that you do not directly endorse every link that appears.

The RSS widget doesn’t include the option to set links to nofollow, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t add it. This is going to require a hack to one of the WordPress core files, widgets.php, which you can find in your wp-includes directory. Because you’re hacking a core file, you will lose these changes every time you upgrade WordPress.

Ready for a little WordPress hackin’? Well, let’s get to it.

I’ve mentioned before that I do my best to give a little something back to people who link to me, but during my recent flood of traffic, I found that sifting through incoming links would eat entire days. I won’t pretend that I minded, but I wondered if there was a more automated method of thanking linkers for people who have jobs that get in the way of spending eight hours a day dedicated to their blogs. Well, there is, and it’s really easy to implement.

If you’re running WordPress, you have probably seen the “Incoming Links” panel on your dashboard that lists people who are linking to you. With WordPress 2.3 and above, that data is simply an RSS feed from Google blogs. Because that same RSS feed can be added to your sidebar through an RSS widget, giving a link back to people who link to you is a snap.

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 357): 11,000 Visitors

When I got up to check my stats, I had just been brought up after being taken down for 24 hours due to going over my monthly bandwidth limit. I estimate that I missed about 18,000 visitors in that time period, but I don’t blame my host. I agreed to a bandwidth limit when I signed up, and I had gone over it. It was as simple as that. I had never come close to my 100 Gb limit before, so I never thought to check my usage regularly. If I was lucky enough to have this happen again, I told myself that I’d have to keep a better eye on things.

We filled the day with looking for lights and other house stuff, but it seemed like we should’ve been doing something fun because the weather was so nice. I’m starting to think that filling time with errands is the Yankee way.

Monday (Day 358): 16,000 Visitors Today

We got up early because #1GF! wanted to go out for a walk. I’m not much of a walker, but I had nothing planned, so I figured I should go. It was early and cold, so I threw on sweat pants, not thinking that we would be out too long. After a couple of hours of wandering our town, we decided to stop in to a local restaurant to refuel. We sat at the counter, which I like to do at breakfast time, and got a quick meal.

From there, we walked to the house because #1GF! can’t come within a half mile of the place without thinking of some reason to visit it. I don’t like to visit because I always seem to pick out something wrong, but I went anyway. Once she got her fill, we walked on and on, checking out new houses that were being built and trying to imagine what it must be like to live in different locations. After about four hours of this, I was sweating my nuts off, and itching to get home and into some shorts.

As soon as we walked in the door, we picked up a message from some friends who were coming down to the beach and wanted us to go along. We headed down to meet them for a few hours on the sand. The beach was packed thanks to the nice weather, and we had a group of girls next to us who really wanted us to be able to hear the new Madonna CD. As a male, I have the innate ability to ignore almost anything that isn’t shaped like boobs, so tuning out the music wasn’t really a problem for me. But seriously? Madonna? Even I know that Madonna can’t be hip, and you can tell I’m lame by the way I wear my shorts. Dear girls, U R lame.

Anyway. Our friends’ teenage daughter showed up to say hello, and she’s always fun. She’s a nice kid, and I’m not making fun, but the teenage mind is such a foreign experience to me that I almost always end up shaking my head and laughing. My favorite quote from that conversation was that “Girls don’t like boys who write,” which everyone found amusing, considering that’s all I do all day. She may be right. Maybe girls don’t like boys who write. As long as no one tells #1GF! that I write all day, instead of riding around on a motorcycle, things should work out fine.

When Mike sent over an old commercial for a weird kids’ toy called the Swing Wing, my first thought was, “Monkey? check. Elephant? check. Soundtrack? Meh. If this toy only had a big name band doing its jingle, it could’ve been as big a fad for the head as hula hoop was for the waist.”

It didn’t, so it wasn’t, but thanks to some creative individuals out there, the Swing Wing may still have a chance at catching on with pre-headbangers, tiny hustlers, and kids who are on the “E”. Or the “X”. Or whatever the kids are ingesting that makes them swing around glow sticks these days.

The Swing Wing Thrash Remix (featuring Slayer)

It looks like Netflix has added around 111 movies to the Watch Instantly service in the last couple of weeks, putting the total number of titles at a little over 4500 movies. I’ve listed 6 that stand out, and the other 111 additions and 22 deletions are listed below.

This is a much smaller addition than we’ve gotten used to, and the trend to add more crappy TV shows continues. Sure, I might think it’s cool that a season of The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Incredible Hulk were added, but will I really sit down and watch them? Probably not. I’m even less likely to sit through the additional season of Simon & Simon, and the four additional seasons of both Coach and Dragnet.

I can understand that there are many different tastes that Netflix is trying to serve, but it’s awe inspiring that someone actually sat down and made the decision to add six full seasons of Kate and Allie. And if that didn’t drag down the quality of the offerings enough, a season of Immortal also got added. What? You say you don’t remember Lorenzo Lamas as demon fighter Raphael Cain? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. The show was so good that it was canceled after one season.

Hey, at least the movie additions were a little more interesting. They not only brought back District B-13, but they sneaked in Kama Sutra, which is one of those “instructional” sex videos. Meow. Netflix, I had no idea you were such a dirty bird.

As always, if I miss something worthwhile, be sure to drop it in the comments…

Recommended Netflix Watch Instantly New Additions (6)

Some of the people that have been stopping in to check out my quest for every beard type have mentioned that they are incapable of ever knowing the macho feeling that comes with wearing a full beard. For those folks, there is now a flash application called Mustachr that allows you to add over 90 types of facial hair to any photo. The only drawback is that you need an account to save anything, but there’s nothing stopping you from using [Alt] PrintScreen to copy and paste your creation into your favorite art program.

Need Proof of Awesomeness?

This was me as a kid. If I had any idea what kind of ass kicking comes with plaid shirts, thick glasses, and lunch bags with my name on them, I might’ve posted a Mustachr-ized picture on my Myspace page that looked so ultra-badass that it would’ve deterred a lot of scraps in the school yard.

Oh yea. When I was a kid, there was no Myspace. Hell, Prodigy wasn’t even though of yet. GI Joe had a beard and pong was blowing everybody’s minds with the sheer awesomeness of two lines and a bouncing square. We had no internet, and no Mustachr. If I did though, you can bet that I would have added a few pics like these:

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 350): Too Much Choice, Not Enough Wins

It was a nice day out, so we got out of the house with no particular plan in mind. We went to look at a Prius because we wanted to get it crossed off my list, but the dealer had sold out of them and was quoting the sticker price as reasonable. He also said that he was sure that gas would be at $6 per gallon in a few months. Hooray for car dealers.

We decided to switch gears and try to pick out some furniture, but we couldn’t find anything that we agreed on. It was a pretty uneventful walk through a furniture store, although I did get caught by a salesperson when I was fiddling around with the buttons on a recliner and then had to explain that I didn’t want help, I just can’t help playing with buttons and switches when they seem harmless.

Because we had so little success, we decided to switch gears again and try to pick out paint. After an hour in the paint store, we now have 423 shades of blue, 237 shades of red, and 136 shades of green at our apartment to decide on. This is the problem with America. It will take me a week to sift through various shades of blue, but I can only choose two people to lead the country who are essentially cut from the same sociopathic mold. There is too much choice where it doesn’t matter and too little where it should.

We went to dinner at our local dinner haunt, and when we got home, I kicked up Sketchup to try to get an idea of what paint would look like. It was then that I realized that not only have I designed a house that is incapable of hosting a decent media room, but my sectional is probably not going to fit unless we decide to use it as a bed.

My pen certainly didn’t run dry making marks in the win column. To take my mind off of all the decisions that were still unmade, I decided to learn “I pity the fools” in sign language. I can’t imagine it being useful, but I think it’s fun to learn useless things in other languages as long as they don’t involve past or future tenses.

Monday (Day 351): Lost to History

I forgot to take my notebook with me when I drove to the North Shore to look at a piece of granite, and completely forgot to record anything about the day. All I remember is that I drove an hour and a half for a two minute look at a piece of granite and thought that something was going wrong with my car because the High On Fire disc I bought plays a low thundering tone for the first minute of the disc.

Shotgun CD reviews are short reviews on CDs that you can usually pick up for $10 or less. For further explanation, check the FAQ

Valient Thorr – Legend of the World (rock): This, my friends, is what I have been looking for: something with enough driving intensity to trick me into playing air guitar in places that are a little too public for air guitar. This 2006 release from Valient Thorr is similar to the straight rock of the Hellacopters in some respects, but with a more driving, and purely American sound. Thanks to old school rock breakdowns that drag you down like a giant squid and then body slam you onto the shore when you resurface, the dynamic power of this album has made it one that I continually return to. If the energy of this album doesn’t get your blood pumping, then corporate America has dried your bones and left you for dead. This is denim jacket with no sleeves and a patch on the back rock n’ fucking roll. I’m not even going to mention that the band supports the National Kidney Foundation or that they have a collection of the baddest ass beards that I’ve ever seen in one band. Whoops. Well, they do. ROCK. A-

Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings – 100 Days, 100 Nights (soul): Even though this album was released at the end of 2007, it has the feel of an album that should’ve been released 40 years prior. This is the third release from the queen of New York neo-soul, and it’s a living museum that even a hardcore Motown fan would have a hard time believing was made so recently. I can’t help feeling like I should be listening to this on a transistor radio while laying on a beach blanket on a warm summer day when gas was low and hemlines were high. It has that easy, grooving feel of the summer beach day when all of what you’re feeling is expressed in your smile. For a kid raised on Motown, it doesn’t get much better. This is just that good. A-

PongOut: If you’ve played either Pong or Breakout at any point in the recent past, you know that they offer as much fun and challenge as a hot round of mud wrestling at the senior center when everyone is full of tapioca and getting ready for their Sunday afternoon naps.

Where PongOut makes things interesting is that you have to play both games on a split screen at the same time. You move the mouse horizontally to control the breakout paddle, and vertically to control the pong paddle. It’s like wrestling two seniors at once: You don’t know why it’s challenging or appealing, but strangely, you keep going back for more.

When I play, I tend to suddenly and inexplicably stop paying attention to one of the sides and lose a couple of lives before I realize what’s going on, so the best I’ve been able to do is 11,035. The only essential trick to doing well in this game is knowing that pressing ‘M’ will mute the music.

Enjoy!

Over the last week, you may have noticed that the comments on this site now have little pictures next to them. Have you been wondering what they are? Those are gravatars from Gravatar.com. A gravatar (or globally recognized avatar) is simply a picture that follows a commenter around from site to site when they leave comments.

Why Would You Want That?

A picture is worth a thousand words, really. As a commenter, having gravatar allows you to create a more recognizable online identity that spans across sites. As a site owner, allowing a commenter to have a picture next to their comment makes them infinitely more recognizable when you run across them in your surfing. Unfortunately, gravatars only show up on sites that have gravatar support enabled.

Since Gravatar.com is run by Automattic, the same company that runs WordPress, gravatar.com support was rolled into WordPress 2.5. If you have a WordPress blog, you can easily add support for gravatars by adding a few lines of code to your current WordPress theme. If this is something you’d like to do, the complete instructions are below.

If you’ve ever encountered my lack of fashion sense in the real world, you know that I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with not looking like you stepped out of a magazine, but in order to learn how to retouch photos with the GIMP, I’ve had to pick someone to practice on. Because they are really easy to find, I figured that I’d try to enhance some of those pictures of celebrities when they get caught looking like the rest of us.

Here’s a picture of Alicia Silverstone that I retouched. To see the original from Top Socialite’s Celebrities Without Makeup Page, hover your mouse over the picture

I’m no pro and Ms. Silverstone can afford way better retouchers, so I gave up with a “good enough” before I wasted too many hours on it. I’m trying to learn how to retouch things while preserving natural skin texture, but the original photo was a little too pixelated to get any real detail out of even if I had the skill. You can see where I gave up near the hairline, but I think the eyes, eyebrow, and that little bit of hair over the ear show that I’m making progress.

Can You Help Me Out?

Retouching celebrity pictures feels pointless because it’s unlikely that they would ever see the results or care if they did. If I know that someone is going to see the result, I’m more likely to spend time on it, so I’d like to ask a little favor:

If you have a photo that you would let me take a shot at retouching, I would really appreciate the practice.

This is free, and the worse the photo, the better the practice. I know it might be embarrassing for some of you to send me bad pictures of yourself, but I wouldn’t think of putting the results on my site without your permission because I respect your privacy and recognize you as the owner of your pictures. You would be doing me a big favor by helping me to learn how to enhance photos, and hopefully you’ll end up with a picture that you really like.

If you’re game, drop me a comment or use my contact page. The best photos to send are the ones where you think, “This would be a great picture if only [insert issue here].”

And you know that I think your fine just the way you are.

Thanks for your help.

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 343): Eat The Rich, Not the Chocolate

I woke up tired, so I stayed in bed and listened to a musical tribute to Mother’s Day on the oldies station. Because I’m used to putting together 45 song Finetune playlists, I felt a little ripped off when the tribute was only seven or eight songs long. I felt superior for a minute, until I realized that the DJ on the radio had a job that paid him to play seven songs, and I was getting paid zippo for laying there listening. I dragged my ass out of bed, and #1GF! and I met my parents for breakfast at at a local restaurant that #1GF! and I used to be regulars at. We hadn’t been there in a couple of yeas, but it was nice to talk to the host again.

After we left, we went to a park to take a walk. When we were leaving, a guy in a Mercedes started tailgating us. It was a small, neighborhood road, so #1GF! pulled over and waved him by. The guy crossed the yellow line, and as he passed, I could see his spiky hair, sunglasses, and one of those golf shirts where the collar is a different color than the shirt. He’s had the gut of a guy who hadn’t seen the inside of a gym since high school, but that douchetastic look of a guy who thinks that whatever power he has in his workplace transfers to the outside world. As he passed by, he yelled something unintelligible into #1GF!’s window followed by “FUCKIN’ BITCH!”

Since she had actually pulled over to let the guy by, I gave #1GF! a look like “what the fuck is going on?” and gave the guy a smiling, but very long one finger salute out of the windshield. Because I wasn’t sure if it was aggravating him, I stuck my arm was out of my window way past the elbow. He jammed on his brakes as if he was getting out of the car.

People who know me know that I’m the furthest thing from a violent guy. I’m a firm believer in “live and let live” and actually go out of my way not to offend anyone, but fuck you if I think I’m backing down from anything when I feel threatened. Within seconds of both cars being stopped, my seatbelt was off and I was going for the door, and #1GF! was going for the locks and saying “Nonononono.”

I was a city mouse who was raised on soul. #1GF! was a country mouse, and no matter how much she denies it, she was raised on both kinds of music: Country and Western.

#1GF! might deny her musical roots, but classic country has earned a special place in my CD rack. When I’m slow on the draw and I need somethin’ to chaw, it’s not the tight pants wearin’, goatee sportin’, WWF lovin’ country of today that I’m after. It’s the classics: yesteryear’s harmonies of heartbreak and melodies of melancholy are what I need to get me back in the saddle.

If you’re ten gallon hat is feeling five gallons flat, click the little green button below.

Enjoy!

Warning: Before listening to this playlist, check with your doctor if you have a history of alcoholism, depression, or bleeding in the brain from a head injury. If you have any of these conditions, you may not be able to use this playlist, or you may need to adjust your dosage accordingly. If after listening to this playlist you experience tearing of the eyes, consult a physician immediately because you may be suffering from a rare, but serious side effect as a result of very specific type of heart ailment.

It looks like Netflix has added around 288 movies to the Watch Instantly service in the last couple of weeks, putting the total number of titles at a little over 4400 movies. I’ve listed 12 that stand out, and all 288 additions and 63 deletions are listed below.

It seems like Netflix is continuing on their quest to add TV shows that I haven’t thought about since I was a kid. Yet another season of Adam 12, The Incredible Hulk, and Quantum Leap were added, which I might be able to understand because they’re mildly entertaining. I might even be able to understand that adding a couple of seasons of Leave it to Beaver might be justifiable in a hokey sort of way.

Where they lost my support is when they added two more seasons of Gimme A Break, six seasons of Simon & Simon, and five seasons of Kojak. I don’t care how many times I’ll listen to Telly Savalas singing “Who Loves You Baby, I’m not sitting through him or Nell Carter in 60 minute doses. Are there really people out there who are demanding these shows enough to justify wasting the disc space on them? Seriously?

Not to worry, though. They completely redeemed themselves with their decision to add that craptastic vintage television show, Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp. How can you argue with the comedic value of a spy show acted out by an all-monkey cast? I can’t watch the show for five minutes without laughing. Try it. If you don’t laugh, you may need to call a doctor. I’m serious.

As always, if I missed one of your favorites, be sure to drop it in the comments…

Recommended Netflix Watch Instantly New Additions (12)

Having a list of your best posts is essential to retaining visitors, but creating and maintaining that list can be time consuming. Best Foot Forward is a WordPress plugin that I wrote to take some of the grunt work out of creating those lists.

With Best Foot Forward, you simply tag your top posts with a specific keyword (like “favorite” or whatever you prefer) and then tell the plugin to show anything marked with your keyword. When you want to add a post to the list, you simply add your keyword to the post’s tags. This means you can create “best of” lists on the fly without wasting time copying and formatting.

The plugin was updated to version 1.1 to fix a bug that created incorrect links for certain users, so if you had a problem with version 1.0, it’s time to upgrade.

For more information, head over to my Best Foot Forward WordPress Widget Page.

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 336): #1GF! Helps Humans, I Help Bits & Bytes

#1GF! went to visit family and I wrote until I stopped caring what words were coming off of the keyboard. I ripped some new CD’s into MP3′s, backed up some files, downloaded the latest version of Mediamonkey, removed some unused applications and games, defragged my system drive, and ran a spyware scan. While I was doing all of these fun things to pass the time, I noticed that my Joseph Palmer beard post had absolutely caught fire and pulled in more traffic in a couple of days than I normally get all month.

#1GF! called and said she was going to the hospital to visit her sick aunt and wouldn’t be back any time soon. Her aunt wasn’t doing well, so I picked up a little around the house and took out the garbage so that #1GF! would be a little more comfortable when she got home. Surprisingly, #1GF! hadn’t eaten anything by the time she arrived, and I hadn’t cooked anything because I assumed that she would’ve grabbed something with her family. Both of us had bowls of cereal for dinner, which always feels like a tribute to my old pal, Dick Clark.

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 329): 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 330): 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 322): 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.

This is week 46 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing 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 315): #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 316): 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?