You can never be too prepared in the 10th safest city in America. After a recent distressing incident, I decided it was time to arm myself. So if anytime things aren’t bending your way, I’m now your gun for hire.

Especially if you need something heated to 760 OR 920 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s right, I bought a heat gun.

What will I do with such a tool? Well fix the plastic bumper of my car which I bashed in a few weekends ago for one. After that, uh, dry my hair really fast? Melt stuff… I’m sure there are thousands of things I haven’t thought of yet. Anyway, who knew they invented such cool toys? I can at least feel proud of owning one.

Like the random guy ahead of me in line at Pep Boys said, “19 bucks? You can’t go wrong!”

I’ve finally found it – the most obnoxious personal home page in existence. Oh boy. Bonus points to the first person to identify the midi song.

One thing I’ve never really gotten used to on the west coast is how people go to meetings. Today was a perfect example.

I had a meeting at 1 pm and I arrived a few minutes early, because that’s what you do when attending meetings with people from the east coast. There were some people in “Yosemite” conference room when I arrived, so I patiently waited outside for them to finish.

1 pm rolled around and they weren’t leaving, but I also didn’t see anyone else arriving for the meeting. I thought maybe that I had the room wrong, so I took a lap around the floor to see if anyone I recognized was waiting in there. Didn’t see anyone so I returned to wait outside the conference room. 1:05 arrived and still there was no one, so I took another lap. Maybe I got the date or time wrong? It was in my Treo though.

After a full lap, I ran into a coworker who told me that the meeting was at 1 today, but in the “Yellowstone” conference room. There are plenty of National Parks, couldn’t they name them a little more distinctively?

Anyway, after wandering around some more, we found a conference room map and then the room. At 1:07 we were just the second and third people to arrive. Of course there was someone else in the room already, so we had to kick them out.

Seven minutes into the meeting, the first task was to get the presentation up. This wasn’t my presentation of course, but what else did I have to do while others showed up? The computer in the conference room actually worked, except for the small fact that there was no network cable attached to it. And it wasn’t just unplugged – there simply was no cable. So someone else ran out to find a network cable. Amazingly the projector worked since those usually never do.

In the meantime a few more people showed up. At 1:12, the organizer of the meeting appeared and began trying to figure out how to conference in the participants from remote sites on the phone. He tried this and no one was there, which was strange. So I sent an IM from my Treo to Todd who was supposed to be calling in. He said he was waiting for us. Something wasn’t right. So the organizer called the admin and got a bunch of different conferencing numbers. I’m sending confusing IMs back and forth trying to fix this. Then the admin calls back and gives us the right numbers and someone else sends out an email to everyone who was invited of the correct numbers.

Finally we called the right number and everyone was there. I’m amazed they waited for 25 minutes. The meeting then started promptly at 1:30, just before the final participants moseyed in.

The meeting was pretty free-form, with half-presentation and half-discussion. At 2 pm, people started gathering outside for their meeting in the room at 2. So we got kicked out.

No wonder people hate meetings. With meetings like these, it’s a wonder we get anything done at all! Campus wi-fi would sure help the networking situation, but I’m not sure what to do about these west coast meeting attitudes.

In light of recent events, I think it can be finally proven that Michael and Janet Jackson are NOT the same person. Then again, maybe Michael has had more surgery than just his nose…

Traffic hit an all-time high on news on Monday. A little nudity goes a long way.

I did.

Our cat, former 20th cutest object in the universe, is an indoor cat. The apartments he ‘grew up’ in were not suitable for him visiting the outside world. Since we now live in a house, with a small yard, occasionally we let him wander outside for a bit to eat some grass and mostly just sniff everything in sight. This usually ends when he decides the yard is boring and he’d like to jump up and see what’s on the other side of that fence.

Since he now has a view of more ‘wild’ territory, occasionally he spys another animal, usually a cat or dog. His reaction to this is perfectly rational. For a cat. He screams.

MMmmmrraaaaarrrwwwwrrrraa!

Really loudly. Over and over again. It’s quite disturbing. If you get too close to him while he’s in this mood, he might just attack you. He took a chunk out of Anne the other day because she was just in the vicinity. His tail expands to the point where he looks like a racoon. I guess he figures if he can’t physically get to the animal to defend ‘his’ turf, he can at least yell at them loudly enough that they might go away. It doesn’t work.

So this morning there was a cat on the fence again and he started with his yelling. Walking around him carefully I went over to the back door and opened it. You wanna go out and fight, fine. Go ahead. I called him and he carefully slipped out the door, meowing as to say “Is this really OK??”.

I expected him to bolt for the fence and yell at the cat, but no. He completely forgot about the cat and just did laps around the yard, nervously sniffing everything that could be sniffed. The whole time the other cat was looking down on him from atop the fence, relaxed as could be.

I tried to show him the other cat, but it he just didn’t see him. Finally the other cat started moving around and Pixel spotted him once I held him up and pointed his head in the right direction. “Mwrrrrarrrrraraaarrraaaa!” But by this time the other cat was casually walking away and it was time for me to go to work. I shooshed the cat inside and he went without protest.

Stupid cat. Cute, but stupid.

When my computer starts acting really funky, I’m pretty good at reformatting the disk and reinstalling Windows or MacOS or whatever. It seems that this will work even if your computer is on Mars.

Well, that’s not exactly true. There were a whole theater of people who shared this distinction with me. It was surprisingly full actually.

After a long day of geocaching, we stopped to grab dinner when we decided to see what movies were playing across the street. Low and behold, Return of the King was playing in half an hour. We quickly grabbed some grub and headed in.

It was a very good movie with battle scenes that more impressive than any others I can remember. The special effects were seamless with the live action.

It was quite long though and I wish some of the “character building” scenes were a little shorter. Yes, he’s dead. Get over it.

If there’s ever a drinking game based on the Lord of the Rings movies, you should have to take a drink every time Frodo appears to be dead or Sam starts to cry. You’d probably have alcohol poisoning by the time the three movies ended.

I was glad to see that Sam has gotten over his athsma since the days when he was a Goonie.

I wonder if Elijah Wood had a personal trainer to prepare for these movies. Not for his physique, but for his eyebrows. He spent most of the movie with his eyebrows pointed up in the middle, looking bemused at just about everything he came across.

The scene in the pub after they return to the shire could have been straight out of Budweiser commercial. “What do you do after you’ve saved the four lands? Enjoy a cold, refreshing Budweiser with three of your short friends.”

Having never read the books, it was a great story to discover even if the ending was a bit cliche. They literally sailed off into the sunset. Then again, maybe that wasn’t cliche yet when Tolkien wrote it.

We’re still only about halfway through the Fellowship of the Ring audio CD set we got for Christmas last year, but I’m looking forward to hearing the full story of all three books and all the details that come with it.

Long live the King!

10. “You’re never feeling cheesy!” – Anne, irrationally upset at Jeff’s lack of desire for cheesy scalloped potatoes.
9. “What do you want to do today?” “I dunno, what do you want to do today?” – Either of us on most weekends
8. “Meeoooowww” – self explanatory
. “Did you read my blog?” – Jeff, demanding attention again
7. “You stole all the blankets… again!” – Anne, who doesn’t pull hard enough
6. “What do you want for dinner?” “I dunno, what do you want for dinner?” – Typical evening conversation
5. “Nobody is calling” – Answering machine notifying us of no caller id
4. “I gotta pick out my clothes” – Anne, who needs to announce this every night
3. “I’m going in the hot tub” – Anne, in another of her nightly rituals
2. “What are you doing, Jeff?” “Nothing” – Anytime Jeff is near a computer
1. MEEEEOOWW!!! MEOOOWWW!!

I just got a gift certificate from Amazon in the amount of $34 for doing just about nothing. A coworker mentioned a few months back about how he put up some links somewhere on a web page to Amazon under their referral program and he just gets money everytime someone clicks a link and buys something.

I decided to try it out and put one up on The Scrabble Rack, my Scrabble tool site that gets the most hits of anything on boulter.com. Based on people buying random things through there and a little bit of Christmas gift purchases on my own, I made $34 for doing just about nothing.

So I decided to blow it out and make it easy for people to give me money. If you’re going be spending money at Amazon anyway, why not give me a cut of the action? Check out http://boulter.com/amazon/ for some nifty tools for you to use my amazon links.

One of the fun things about this program is that you get to see a report (without names) of the things purchased through your links. You would think that most of my stuff would be Scrabble-related, but that’s far from the case. Here are some of the more interesting ones.

• Plaid big shirt – does this come in small?
  
• Your Yorkshire Terrier’s Life : Your Complete Guide to Raising Your Pet from Puppy to Companion – The perfect stocking stuffer!
  
• Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics – got $1.45 from this one!
  

What would happen if you ate only at McDonalds for a month? Luckily, someone else has performed this stupid human trick for you.