Living in a Republican’s paradise

From a chat with Dad, who is in California:

Dad: I am pleased, just got a 15 yr old car smogged Me: Well I just got a 20 year old car smogged Me: though I am in utah Me: and I could smog a coal-burning train here.

Strep Update

First: I am conquering strep throat through sheer force of will. I predict total recovery in two days (we are not going to talk about how I am starting to cough and be congested).

Second: I am watching Ronin on tv. It is now obvious that I need to move to Europe and drive a BMW as fast as I can through narrow streets.

Third: This is what you would see if you were looking at my computer. If you were very clever you would recognize the wood pattern and entire concept as being stolen from some desktop on k10k.net. This, however would not lessen your enjoyment of my beautiful desktop.

Don’t Bother Me, I’m Retching

Dear Carl’s Jr,
2 steps to success:

  1. Bring back those old crinkly fries.
  2. Fire Satan, who you have obviously hired to do your advertising. Your commercials have destroyed any desire I ever had to eat your food.

Sincerely,
Josh Penrod

Strep Experiment

I am pretty sure I have strep throat. I felt great until last night when I started getting a sore throat. Then this morning at 4am I woke up because my throat hurt so bad. Checked in the mirror and saw the tell-tale white spots. Then went back to bed and crashed until 11.

I missed the 12 ‘o’ clock cutoff for getting to the doctor on a saturday so I have decided to conduct an experiment. I am going to cure my strep throat for sheer force of will.

I will keep you posted on my progress towards inevitable victory.

Snappy

I have just been informed that the following does not count as a real apology:

“I am sorry for being snappy with you.. I mean snippy. Snippy…snappy…snippy. I was snippy, but I am sure I was also pretty snappy when I was being snippy.”

Steve Gets Hit By The Ftrain

If any of you were wondering what Steve Burns (the former host of Blue’s Clues) was up to, he is being abused by Paul Ford under the pretext of an interview about Steve’s new music career.

75,000,000 Toddlers Can’t be Wrong
After six years of dressing in a green striped shirt and talking to condiments, kiddie-show host Burns is becoming a rocker, and, by many accounts, not a bad one. Signed to Play It Again Sam Records with a forthcoming album of ‘songs about science and love’ called Songs for Dust Mites, produced with help from the Flaming Lips’ Steven Drozd and luminaries including David Fridmann (The Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, the Delgados, Luna) and Ed Buller (Suede, Pulp), Burns seems ready to conquer the adult world as well. And the surprise? The songs are not bad. One or two even shine.

After you read the scary interview, (don’t worry, I am sure no Steve was actually harmed) go check out Paul’s site. There is A LOT there, and he is so talented it is painful.

The Searing Pain Means it’s Working!

I got my haircut today.

The girl cutting my hair washed it with Paul Mitchell Tea Tree Oil Shampoo. I could feel her every breath on my scalp for the next hour.

Now, I don’t want to debate the merits of tea tree oil with anyone. We will all just assume what I assume—it is a chemical irritant put in the shampoo to make you think it is doing something. What is it with that “The tingling means it’s working!” concept in product marketing? When I take antibiotics I don’t feel ripped-off if it doesn’t tingle. “Damn, that penicillin is worthless! I didn’t feel a thing!”

Since people apparently believe it, I have no choice but to capitalize on it. Next month I am going to introduce my new, “Penrod’s Eye-drops with habanero extract™—The searing pain means it’s working!©”

Bring the Noise!

One challenge of working form home is not being distracted by the supernaturally cute Reese or the incredibly creepy transparent guy on tv.

Blackhole media to the rescue! I am using their free “pink” noise generator, appropriately called Noise. It took a second to get used to the static sounds, but now I am working away in distraction free bliss (Well, other than distracting myself by writing this post).

According to them, pink noise is “Also known as a signal with even power distribution on a logarithmic frequency scale, pink noise masks background noise to help you concentrate”. The app has two modes, white noise and pink noise. The pink noise is a lot more effective at blocking out background distractions.

If you use OS X I recommend you download it.

(not so)Slim Goodbody

Working from home today, and some PBS for kids show is on tv. It is giving me a major childhood flashback. Do you remember the guy who wears the suit with the organs and blood vessels on it? I don’t remember if I thought he was creepy when I was a kid (he for sure was), but he is much creepier now.He is still running around in that embarrassing suit, but now looking old and with a little gut.

The man should have put a clause in his contract that stipulated he could wear a sweater or something after he hit 40.

(Apparently the character is Slim Goodbody. Hopefully the ads below will help those of you looking for a Slim Goodbody Costume)

Note To Fellow Passengers

I will be flying to the Washington DC area on what promises to be the eve of war with Iraq. Out of courtesy to my fellow passengers, this letter:

Dear Fellow Passengers,

We will be flying together at a time when the threat of terrorism will be high. We will also be flying to a high-risk destination.

Let’s try not to be rude to each other even though we will all be a little nervous.

Thank you
Josh Penrod


P.S. If any of you weasels so much as stand up to take a leak during the flight, I will tear your arms off and beat you with them.

Why Not Freedom Kissing?

Dear American Restaurants,

If I walk into your establishment and you are serving “Freedom Fries“, I am going to give you a “Freedom Kick In the Groin”™ .

Sincerely,
Josh Penrod


P.S. You are getting better. The last time you tried to capitalize on strife it was much more crass. At least now you are just stupid. Improvement!

UTOPIA

I can hardly type through the tears.

I just got a letter from the city. Modem users like Dan, may not want to read this.

Dear Resident:

The City of Orem has joined with 16 other Utah cities to work with the Utah Telecommunications Open Infrastructure Agency (UTOPIA) to provide fiber optics directly to each resident’s home. Fiber optics would provide residents with Internet Protocol (IP) phone capability, digital television, and Internet access capable of downloading files at speeds of 10 megabytes to 1 gigabytes per second…

cant type… too happy…….

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Turn It In

I was looking through my log files, and I noticed that my site is being scanned by Turnitin.com,

We prevent and detect plagiarism by comparing submitted papers to billions of pages of content located on the Internet and our proprietary databases. The results of our comparisons are compiled, one for each paper submitted, in custom “Originality Reports.” These reports are sent to participating educators, who access the results by logging into their account(s).

I was lucky enough to have been in college during a time when I could just do a search on a topic and turn in whatever I found! OK, could have but never did. I even went through the trouble of learning to cite my internet sources.

So kids, don’t copy from the amishrobot for your reports, Turnitin.com will find you!

Ready For Anything

In an attempt to make my little corner of cyberspace a bit safer I have redesigned the site. I believe this will render me safe from all chemical weapons, hacks, viruses, and denial of service attacks.

I did this in about 10 minutes (I was a little anxious), so expect further refinements to my defenses over the next few days.

(to add context for when the site changes some day, the header became a piece of duct tape with “ready for anything” on it.)

Soggy Airline Mechanic

I am a usability researcher. I conduct tests on websites and find out what is confusing for people and then I make recomendations to improve them. I don’t put any effort whatsoever into the usability of this website because I am lazy, short on time, and no one is paying me. I don’t write about usability because there are plenty of people out there already doing it, and the majority of my readers would get so bored they would punch themselves in the groin repeatedly.

Today I make an exception. Let the groin-punching begin.

When I do usability testing I sit next-to, and a little behind the person I am observing. A video camera records the screen and the audio. I broadcast this video feed out to anyone in the company who wants to watch. Some people watch and some of those watching Instant Message me during the test. It is important to note that today my pants smelled like Reese vomit. The vomit smell is not usually part of the testing, and it made it hard for me to concentrate. I will probably not wear vomit-pants in the future.

During todays test I was dared to say certain words to the user and make it sound like they were part of the test. I got an instant message, “I bet you lunch that you can’t use the word moisture during testing today”. I had earned that lunch withing 30 seconds of the dare. The next message bet me a soda that I couldn’t use the words “Airline Mechanic”. In spite of the distracting smell of my pants, that dare only took about 20 seconds.

I can’t give the details of what i said without revealing more than I care to about where I work, but I promise our site has nothing to do with moisture or airline mechanics, and it took some conversational gymnastics to slip those words in w/o freaking out the testee. They didn’t even notice it was wierd. If you could only read my clever comments you would stop punching yourselves in the groin.

Really.

C’mon stop it.

Sorry groins, I promise to never write about this again.

Marketing Masterminds

From: josh penrod
Sent: Friday, February 21, 2003 11:23 PM
To: info@colgate.com
Subject: Herbal White Beaver

Dear Colgate,

I just saw your commercial featuring “Mr. Beaver” and I am concerned.

Correct me if I am wrong here, but it seems fairly obvious that the campaign was created by the 10 year old nephew of someone in the marketing department in exchange for a piece of gum. If so, you were ripped off.

I pray that I am right, because if I am wrong that means you actually paid an advertising agency to create this garbage.

My suggestion, get your gum back and dump the beaver. I feel qualified to tell you this because:

  1. I have teeth
  2. I have an I.Q. over 12

Thank you
Josh Penrod

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Continue…

Attribution Error

3 things I commonly interpret as signs of divine favor.

  1. Waking up before my alarm goes off.
  2. Any and all precipitation.
  3. Good songs on the radio when I drive to work. (“Watching the Detectives” was playing as I pulled into work yesterday. God was obviously pleased with me.)

How about you?

I am a scientist

A friend told me about when he was a kid, he and a friend came across another kid who was pulling a dead cat out of a ditch, they asked what he was doing and he replied in a robotic monotone, “I am a scientist!”

I am scientist too. I like to know distances, speeds, heart-rates, and temperatures (I even have a light switch with a thermometer built-in installed in my garage.)

So being horribly sick these past couple of days has been pretty great. I have gotten to check my temperature every couple of hours (102 degrees most of yesterday, dropping to closer to normal today). The other night I puked violently for 10 minutes, and imagine my luck, I threw-up into a bowl with measurements on it!

12 cups! Is that a record?

Wearable Computing

The obvious next step in technology is wearable computers. Apple just introduced a step towards that with a ski jacket with iPod controls built into the sleeve. Not bad looking at all, but apple has nothing on this guy!

Who wouldn’t want to look this cool?