matthearn.com

In case you’ve visited here over the last few weeks and, instead of seeing my beautiful, beautiful words, saw a message saying that my website had been suspended for overambitious CPU utilization, rest assured that the problem has been isolated and we are in the process of resolving it.

Well, not we, it’s just me. Because it’s my fault, you see. When I arranged for my site to be hosted by my current service, hostmonster.com, I paid for a nearly unlimited amount of bandwidth and disk space, and proceeded to upload scripts and databases and images and hilarious posts about hairstyles for head-fatties and everything was super happy: me, because my website was still online despite my previous hosting service deciding to close up shop; hostmonster, ’cause they gets the dollaz dollaz; and the internet, because let’s be frank, the loss of my website’s content would send shockwaves that might well destroy the economy of Nigeria or perhaps the entire Indian subcontinent. (Which just wouldn’t do. OBVIOUSLY.)

What I didn’t realize was that, while hostmonster certainly was happy to have my business and store all of my crap for me, apparently they don’t much care for me to actually SHOW it to people. Every time a person would look at my website (specifically the picture gallery, about which we’ll hear more directly) it required a computer in Utah to do some processing, or “thinking,” and respond to the user with pictures and words and all that good stuff. Well, supposedly my site, which receives all of maybe 25 hits a day, 5 of which are me checking for new comments (there never are any), and at least 8 of which are googlers trying to find pictures of Dave Chappelle’s Hott AZN Wife, was overloading the CPU of the computer in Utah and causing smoke to come out of its ears, if it has ears, which it probably does not, but who knows what Mormons might do to computers when they get them alone in the Tabernacle.

Long story short: the online gallery had to go, because while the pictures contained therein weren’t getting me anywhere close to my disk space/bandwidth limits, the processing power required to get them out of the database was angering the CPU gods. On the other hand, I was never terribly happy with that gallery software anyway; it seemed to do about 18,000 things, and I basically needed it to do one: display pictures in a pretty format, which it didn’t do very well. So I’m working on my OWN, much tamer, online gallery program, which will basically give you a list of albums to view with pictures located there up ins, in a pretty format that doesn’t distract from the image on the page. Totally boss! As soon as it is ready, I will be certain to alert the media. Until then: go to Charles’s site, since roughly 97% of my photography is centered on him anyway.

Yay! DelDOT (The Delaware Department O’ Transportation) is finally going to do something about the hellish I-95 traffic!

Wait…crap. They’re doing the wrong bloody thing! Boo!

Everybody agrees that traffic on I-95, particularly southbound in the afternoons, is ridiculous; apparently the bone of contention is what the actual cause is. DelDOT seems to be of the opinion that the problem is 95 itself not being wide enough, which would appear to be the obvious issue. However, what they are overlooking is the fact that where the worst of the backup on 95 occurs in a three mile stretch where 295 and 495 (souhtbound) rejoin the main interstate, and storied Route 1 exits. And as anyone who has recently driven through there during a high traffic situation, the number of cars decreases dramatically after you pass Route 1. What this says to me is that maybe, just maybe, you might eliminate some traffic on 95 if there was more than a single-lane exit for 1, which is of course the main artery to Middletown and points south, also known as the FASTEST FREAKING GROWING AREA IN THE STATE? Don’t you think maybe this warrants an improvement of that particular junction?

Don’t believe me? Try going north on Route 1 to 95 north some morning, around 8:15am. You can’t. I mean, eventually you’ll get through, but it’ll be closer to 9am before you’re actually on the interstate. Might it perhaps be time to upgrade this route to look more like the 495 exit, which features three lanes for traffic and even during the worst of the rush hour is never clogged up, except by idiots driving in the left lane? Perhaps!

But nay, the State has decided to just add a 5th lane to each side of 95, the biggest waste of money since Paris Hilton got her sex change. (I refuse to believe that she wasn’t once a dude. Her jaw is squarer than a ceramic floor tile and her boobs are smaller than mine.)

Argh.

In which I hate technology, and technology hates me right back.(All up in my grill, yo.)

It’s heck of warm out today (low 60s), so, being a forward-thinking individual, I thought to myself yesterday “I should TOTALLY go running at work and try to eliminate the enormous amount of fat located between my crotch and my boobs,” and brought in running clothes and a towel to store in my locker downstairs in the poop room that has showers. And lo, I took an early lunch, went out, and ran 2.75 miles before the agonizing chest pain and developing foot blister made me stop.

Have I reached my point yet? Not even remotely.

So I came back in, showered, and grabbed lunch, which consisted of a Salisbury “Steak” made of, as far as I can tell, pressed gerbil cremains, along with green beans and cheesy potatoes au gratin (a quality side, to be sure). A few hours later, I realized I was still pretty hungry, so I said to myself, oh man, the SNACK machine will hook me up with FLAVOR.

So I wandered into the snack room, bought a bottle of Diet Coke, and then studied the snack machine for delectables. Sure enough, they had some kind of Apple/Cinnamon-flava’d Danish, all over which I desired to jump. I attempted to stick my dollar into the machine, but was foiled! It would accept no bills. And I had just used the bulk of my change on my drink. Bemused, I pressed a few buttons on the front of the machine, which showed no sign of even being powered on. Argh!

I wandered aimlessly around the halls, looking for another snack machine, and finally found one. Sadly, it had no Apple/Cinnamon-flava’d Danish. It did, however, have a three pack of chocolate cupcakes of the type I subsisted on in high school, so I inserted my dollar and pressed the proper buttons. The machine whirred for a moment, then beeped, and a small light appeared next to some words reading “Please make another selection.”

“What?” I replied. “But the other selections are not what I desire. Don’t mess with me, machine, I COLD RAN 2.75 MILES EARLIER AND AM NOT ONE WITH WHICH YOU SHOULD TRIFLE.” And I pressed the buttons again.

“Please make another selection.”

I tried to outwit the machine by requesting my dollar back, which came back in quarters, and inserting exact change, but I came to the conclusion that whoever inserted the latest supply of foodstuffs had improperly loaded the chocolate cupcakes. In the end I realized that the machines were involved in some kind of conspiracy not to sell me anything that might increase the amount of lipids bonded semi-permanently to my stern. I relented, bought a small package of peanut butter crackers, and went back to my desk to weep silently.

Just a few short notes for today:

• They still haven’t plowed my neighborhood, and so now the ice has sublimated and refrozen and is perfectly slick. I basically sledded out to the main highway today. Note that the 1998 Mazda Protege is NOT equipped with runners. I’d make some calls, but you know me, I don’t like to create a fuss. Plus I have a sneaking suspicion the guy in our neighborhood who is in charge of such things has probably taken 37 calls on the subject and might strangle me through the phone if I call him up and employ Sarcasm. So I’m gonna let it slide. For now. Unless I’m driving home with my son and I slide into a parked car at 5mph.
• My homeskillets Ped and Andy have started themselves a blog in which they intend to ridicule all things artsy. I fully support this, and not just because I’ve known the two of them for like 8,000 years.

  In fact, it’s an odd story, woven through the millenia: I knew Ped when I was like 8 or something, in public school. I think we ran across each other in Math League every year all through middle school and high school. Andrew I knew because we were in band in high school, but he also may have done dorky science and math stuff with me before then. And then we were all in the Ychromes together in college. Delaware is a small place.

  Anyway, check out their site, it’s highly amusing.

• I’m setting myself up for a serious amount of abuse here, but on the advice of my attorney Josh, I have invested in a neti pot. The idea, and this is really gross, is that you make a saline solution, and then you pour it into one nostril while it drains out of the other one. Then you switch nostrils. It’s very new age. It cleans out your sinuses, and then you get to spend a few minutes spraying water out of your snozz and spitting out nasty wet loogies.

  It’s almost as fun as it sounds, but I can report that my sinuses are so clear it’s disturbing. I’ve used it twice a day for about 3 days (although not this morning, ’cause I was in a hurry, yo) and have achieved major awesome results. There are downsides, however:

  1. The sensation of water pouring into your sinuses and back out the other nostril is pretty disturbing. It goes against all my principles of “avoiding sinus burn in the pool.” Doesn’t burn a bit, though, unless you’re an idiot and double the amount of salt in the solution.
  2. Sometimes the saline gets sort of trapped in your sinuses, and you can’t really feel it in there, then later on, you bend over for some reason, such as to kiss your wife, and salt water pours out of your nose all over, say, your wife’s face. Her response to this may be unpleasant.

  Still, it’s given me a reasonably clear schnozz for the last few days, and I’m looking forward to finding out if it improves my singing noticeably.

Man, local civic associations are AWESOME!

Wait, did I say awesome? I meant POINTLESS, ANNOYING, AND LAME.

We have a nice neighborhood civic association to whom we give twenty bucks a year, in exchange for which they operate some kind of community watch and send out monthly letters begging deadbeats to send in their dues. (They’ve actually started publishing the addresses of folks who don’t send in the cash, which I find greatly amusing; so far my block has been pretty good about paying up, because the monthly flyers seem to imply I’m expected to join a roving band of vigilantes to walk up to miscreant households and torch them to the ground.)

From these monies they also pay for mowing of the community park areas, and snow plowing in the winter. Which would be great if the plowing was done. It ain’t gettin’ done, son. You may have noticed on Wednesday that we had a pretty significant snow/sleet/freezing rain “event,” resulting in 2-4 inches (depending on where you measure it) of rock-hard ice on our streets and lawns. My wife spent about an hour yesterday chipping it off of our cars. (I would have helped, but it was HECK of cold out there.)

Now it’s been sitting for a day, and is thusly not going to melt until August, so we get the joy of driving over it for a few months. AWESOME! Er, LAME!

Okay, sure, the community watch does seem to deter crime; we haven’t had a murder in our neighborhood in 2 or 3 years (true story). And I do approve of them getting the grass mowed rather than, you know, letting it overgrow the jungle gym. Now if they could just find a way to prevent my across-the-street neighbors from parking all their crappy cars in front of my house. (Sadly, it turns out it’s illegal to slash their tires! Who knew?)

Hi y’all…I was going to post something more substantive today, but I just don’t have it in me. My world is shattered.

I love cars. Also, I hate cars. Or rather, I love cars that work or can be easily diagnosed and fixed, and hate cars that defy all attempts to repair them. At the moment, my Bomb@ZZ whip, the venerable Izzy B, has but one functioning brake light. The one in the rear-view window. I guess that’s better than none, but try to tell that to the guys at the Motor Vehicle Inspection Lanes. I did. They weren’t terribly amused. I’m assuming all the carbon monoxide has destroyed their senses of humor.

Anyway, I went to Pep Boys to get new bulbs for the brake lights. But Pep Boys had none. So I went to ANOTHER Pep Boys, which had them. I installed them. No change. So I bought some new fuses and tried those. No change. So I kicked the car and threatened to bring wrath upon it. No change.

I gave up after that, but the long and short of it is that I have a car with fewer then the recommended number of brake lights and my registration expires in three weeks. CAN MATT GET THE CAR REPAIRED IN THREE WEEKS, GIVEN HIS BUSY SCHEDULE? STAY TUNED!

Oh, and go here and check out a bunch of crappy pictures I took of Ye Olde Newe Castlee last month.

I enjoy me some fine pomp and circumstance, with the possible exception of the widely known Pomp and Circumstance March #1 by Edward Elgar, which over the course of my high school career I had to play roughly 483,384 times during graduation ceremonies. (I do like the fast part, which never gets played at graduations, that goes deet deet deedledeedledeedledeedle etc., you know what I mean I’m sure.) Thusly I set my Digital Video Recorder (it’s like Tivo, but not as well branded!) to record President Ford’s funeral proceedings yesterday, and sat down last night to watch them and enjoy me some egg drop soup and beef with broccoli.

Imagine my frustration: they’re showing the National Cathedral, and periodically showing the inside, which is filled to the brim with dignitaries, along with Cathedral officiants, the combined Cathedral choirs, and the Armed Forces Choir, which is singing a Copland anthem; meanwhile, Brian Williams refuses to Shut The F&$# Up. We’ve always been a bit of an NBC family; we usually watch the Today show, and on Thursday nights Sarah is most frequently found glued to the TV watching the usual prime-time fare. (I personally lost all interest in ER a few years ago when it stopped being a great show about an emergency room and became a left-wing political drama, but it does have its fun moments.) I assumed that NBC would do a nice job of delivering the funeral to me with a minimum of stupid discussion. I was wrong.

The various musicians inside played at least 20 minutes of music that I would really have enjoyed hearing, but unfortunately Williams, along with Tim Russert, Campbell Brown, and some other moron refused to Shut The F*#$ Up. They’re babbling about legacies and scandals and strength and blah blah I don’t care I want to hear the beautiful music please SHUT THE F@$# UP.

I nearly threw the remote at the TV. At least they did have the good sense not to inject silly little comments once the casket came out of the hearse, or else there’s a strong chance I would have driven to New York and kicked Brian Williams in his miniature gonads.

The moral, for any NBC executives who might be reading this, is: when televising a funeral, it is always important to Shut The F#$% Up. Thank you.

To all of my liberal, semi-hippie friends: I surrender. I concede. I confess. You win.

I don’t often discuss politics in this space, for the simple reason that I disagree with almost everyone, and no one would really bother reading my stuff if all I did was rail about the Drug War, or the Iraq War. I’m more interested in discussing human interest stuff like the Pee War, which is a game my son likes to play during bath time in which he pees all over the kitchen (we wash him in the kitchen sink) and we attempt to block the urine stream with our hands. This is Fatherhood in a nutshell: getting pee all over your body in an effort to prevent said pee from getting in the toaster.

Nevertheless, those who know me well know that for a long time I have espoused fairly libertarian views. My thoughts have long been, well, if it doesn’t hurt anybody, who cares? What I hadn’t considered, unfortunately, was how completely incapable the average American is of knowing when he might be hurting someone else.

Until recently, I believed that if you want to talk on your cellphone while driving, and you don’t drive into anyone, you should be allowed to do that. Personally, I try to avoid it, but then I talk on the phone as little as possible anyway. I have changed my mind on this subject, because I realize now that the the majority of Americans are simply too flat-out stupid to be allowed this privilege. I was caught behind a guy on the way to work today who:

1. Pulled out in front of me, causing me to have to decelerate to avoid hitting him.
2. Drove significantly under the speed limit.
3. When the next light turned yellow, he, despite being about a 1/2 second away from it, actually braked as if he was going to stop, causing at least 2 people behind me to miss the light.
4. Didn’t use his signal once to indicate any lane change or turn.

He had his cellphone to his ear the entire time. I’m not sure if the cellphone CAUSED him to drive like an idiot, or if it’s just an indicator of his general stupidity. What I do know is this: of the various idiots that ride in the left lane when they aren’t passing, fail to signal lane changes and turns, and cut me off in traffic, at least 85% of them are on the phone at the time. Of course, 85% of drivers are usually on the phone at any given time, so this might be statistically pointless, but it still makes me want to beat them to death with my bare damn hands.

So yes: I will probably vote Democrat in the next election because a jerk cut me off in traffic. I am one fickle bastard.