It’s here! It’s here! It’s really here!

Tonight is opening night for the Boston Bruins! Oh Happy Day!

This one is my favorite, of course.

Jen just sent me a cool link. It’s a site called Bing vs Google. Give it a search string and it will return a side by side comparison of… well… Bing vs Google.

I’ve been giving it very goofy search strings such as how long do I have to wait before redheads take over the world? Google is consistently faster when given nearly nonsense input and the top items returned appear to be more relevant. In fact, the just mentioned search string actually returned a site called Realm of Redheads which I will be checking out when I have more time.

Try the comparison out and see which one gives you better results. I think I will be sticking with Google for my searching needs, although Jen pointed out that Bing has an API that works with Microsoft technologies and that is pretty awesome.

Still, I go with Google for my own meager uses.

And if backing Google in the search war with Microsoft doesn’t get me an invite to Google Wave then I guess nothing will.

hehe

Just so you can see what I still haven’t been invited to test.

This one’s going to be as random as the last one…

Well, I have reached the point of just wanting my bad teeth (two, maybe three) pulled the hell outa my head. Nothing seems to beat the pain at this point. I’ve had a couple of days now where the best it gets is a dull ache mixed with periods of pure hell fire. I can live with it for a while, but it’s messing with sleep. Sunday I slept very little due to paranoia. Monday we were out a little bit later than normal. Last night I couldn’t sleep when I tried even though I was exhausted to the core of my soul.

I’m an optimist now (thanks to my lovely wife who I am absolutely, ridiculously in love with) so I am sure today will be better. I’m just really tired and a little edgy.

No Google Wave beta tester invite yet.

I have been using the new facebook lite instead of the normal every day facebook. I really didn’t see anything about it that was all that special, it was just new and different. Until now, that is. I went onto facebook proper and my entire news feed was taken up with friend’s announcements from farmville and mafia wars and what not. I like playing mafia wars (on myspace, generally) but I don’t feel the need to broadcast announcements to all of my friends every time I do something. Those kinds of application based posts are not displayed on facebook lite. That means I miss out on surveys which I sometimes take because they can be fun or funny, but it also means I get to see my friends actual status updates without scrolling through three pages to do it. Sorta like twitter. (gasp!)

I didn’t notice this until I looked at my stats this morning, but I topped the 7,000 public image milestone on Flickr this weekend. Thanks to the Rochester Fair. I had hoped (sillyishly) to top the 10,000 image mark (public, private, and restricted combined) by the end of the summer. I didn’t make it. I went over 8,300 though. Proof of just how much of a nerd I am. HA! Suck it non-nerds!

The Google Wave beta tester invites are supposed to be coming out in two minutes. I casually glance at my email… nuttin’. (I don’t know why I even want this. I don’t do much instant messaging anymore except with my wife during those sad times we are not sitting next to each other. I guess it’s just nerd points. I want to look at the lesser nerds around me and say, “well I was a Wave beta tester” and look down my nose accordingly.

The Boston Red Sox are in the playoffs again. I think that is six times in the last seven years. Congratulations to my once woefully awful but in the 21st century dominant home town baseball team. Of course, they have lost their last five games in a row and only managed to clinch because the team chasing them for the wild card is proving to be just as inept as they are. Texas lost to the Angels last night after we had lost to Toronto. (We lost to Toronto again!!!) Still, it doesn’t really matter how you get into the post season, it just matters that you get in. When the playoffs start there will be eight teams with an equal chance of winning it all. I am 100% behind my Red Sox, god bless them, but in what feels like a bad memory coming back to haunt me yet again I really don’t expect anyone to beat the Yankees. I am going to root like hell against them, as is my duty as a loyal Bostonian, but I think they have the team to take it all this year. That is depressing. Go Red Sox!

I just tried loading Google Calendar and it is down. Hmmm… Google having issues… is it Wave related somehow? Are their servers getting hammered or something? hmmmm (no, I don’t think they are related. Google is a giant and I will not doubt them. They are a glorious collection of perfectly placed 1’s and 0’s that I hope will someday topple the Microsoft Monopoly (well, maybe not topple… I like a lot of MS stuff, despite my CS degree, and I don’t want them to go away… I would just like a little more of a level playing field and more honest competition that results in more awesomely ass kicking software for nerds like me to drool over) and bring the wonders of open sourced goodness to the masses.) It’s 10:10… still no Wave invite. >insert sad face here<

Today is the last day of September (more on that in a minute) which means tomorrow is the start of October. That is important for three reasons. First, my niece is about to have her first birthday. More cake smooshing pictures to take. I love it. I love her. I can’t wait for the party this weekend. Second, Halloween fun. No spook houses this year, unless the kids beg… and they won’t… not yet… not for another year or two I think. It means costumes and candy and silliness. I love it. I have always like Halloween, but now that I’ve spent the last two of them seeing them through the eyes of two amazing kids I like it even more. The third reason, and the real reason I broached the subject, is opening night for the Boston Bruins. They are opening up against Alex Ovetchkin and the Washington Capitals. After the pain of last season’s play off ouster at the hands of the fricken Whalers I am really anxious for some pay back. I want that cup this year. I want it bad! Go Bruins.

Speaking of today being the last day of September. It is the 30th, which means it’s our Monthiversary. Happy 0.33 years of marriage Jenny. I love you more and more each day. My only want or need in this life is to make you happy. At least as happy as you make me. I love you sweetie.

And with that… I am ending this one on the best note possible.

I might win the nerd lottery tomorrow. Google is unleashing the new Google Wave beta tomorrow.

Based on the confusing info I’ve read, Wave will take instant messaging, email, wiki, and file sharing and smoosh it all together into one shining chunk of wicked awesome.

A few weeks ago I put in my name to be one of about 100,000 beta testers. The invites come out tomorrow. If I get one I think I will get to invite a few other people to use it with me. Which means you all had better start being nice to me pronto! (just kidding, you’re all nice to me all ready)

What else?

My teeth have been hurting like holy hell all day today. Pain meds have not been having much of an affect. I think it might be related to the fact that I am completely exhausted. That would be counter productive though as the teeth pain tends to make sleeping difficult. Figures, eh?

What else?

The Bruins regular season starts Thursday. Oh Happy Day! I should log into yahoo and get my fantasy line up squared away, pronto. I just clicked on a link to a hockey news article on rookies to keep an eye on this year. Maybe I’ll try and grab some as free agents and look like the fantasy hockey nerd who can read the future. Or something like that.

What else?

The books on tape experiment is proceeding nicely. I am well into the second of the seven Dark Tower novels. (Eddie has already been drawn and I was introduced to Detta/Odetta this morning.) I am not finding my mind wandering while listening to some strangers voice talking to me. I am following along with the details quite well. Of course, I have read this book three or four times in the past so maybe it’s all subliminal in some weird way. I don’t care, I’m enjoying it.

What else?

I am about to read an article called How Iconic Movie Characters Would Deal with a Zombie Attack. The first iconic character is John McClain from the Die Hard series. Isn’t it obvious? He’d machine gun the entire zombie horde to jello while running around barefoot. duh

What else?

Nothing. We’ll call it a night… for now.

I’ve posted a youtube clip from this and it is brilliant, but Larry just sent me this. It’s the whole episode and it is the most amazing piece of (uncensored) television in the history of the human race.

Watching puppets drop F-Bombs is one of the greatest things in the universe.

Last night we had dinner with Jen’s friend and former co-worker Wendy, her boyfriend Rick, and her daughter. It’s a strange vibe. We make plans with them fairly regularly and almost every time when the day arrives something comes up and one of us has to cancel. Last night we pulled it together. It was a close thing though as Jen and I were so incredibly tired after our night of possible-breaking-and-entering paranoia (which in my case at least hasn’t eased all that much yet).

We had a good time. Wendy made a nice dinner and we talked about a lot of things, including real estate shopping, Rick is an agent, which may have been a sort of subconscious maybe-we-should-move thing on my part. I don’t know.

What I do know is that I have learned to fricken hate the Everett Turnpike.

If you take the Northern half of Route 3 across the Mass/New Hampshire line and follow it North for a while it eventually turns into the Everett Turnpike. This is a toll road with the tolls (at least the ones I know of) situated on the exit ramps when you drive North, and the entrance ramps when you drive South.

I didn’t know the area and I am not familiar with that stretch of highway. I had directions printed off from Google Maps and I had the GPS on my phone showing my location with the route to Wendy’s marked.

Maps told me to take exit 11. When I approached exit 11 the GPS appeared to be telling me to stay on the highway. I decided to follow the GPS. I did not make a mistake by doing that. Nor would I have made a mistake by taking exit 11. As it turns out, exit 11 runs perfectly parallel to the highway for a long stretch. Maybe a quarter of a mile or more. It wasn’t until I saw the toll booths just a few feet to the right of the highway that I realized my mistake. The GPS did want me to take the exit, it’s just that the two roads were so close together you couldn’t tell by looking at it.

Crud, thinks I, as I continue heading up to exit 12. I took the exit, paid the toll, took a left turn and crossed the highway via an overpass, took a left turn to get back on the highway, and paid the toll again.

When I got to exit 11, this time heading South, I took it. Again, it stayed parallel to the highway for a while. There was a hard right turn at one point, but the tolls were still ahead of me so I knew I had things right this time.

Except that the tolls are on the entrance ramps on the South side. Suddenly I was on the friggin’ highway again.

I went South to exit 10, crossed an overpass to get to the other side of the highway, and paid the toll again and got back on heading North. This time I managed to raise my IQ a few points to a level somewhere above that of a chimpanzee and navigated the exit correctly. I did make one more wrong turn on the way to the house, but it was just a minor one and easily corrected. In the end I was 17 minutes late.

The moral of this story is, I would prefer not to live near the Everett Freakin’ Turnpike. Stupid highway. Stupid, stupid highway.

(more like stupid driver, but let’s not consider that.)

Okay, two more brief things from last night.

Well, inspired by last night as the case may be.

I have been scouring the Internet for a police log for the Methuen police department. I want to know if anything came of our call. I want to know if two nitwits got busted messing with people’s parked cars. It’s the 21st century and I have become quite accustomed to getting tons and tons of information at the touch of a button. I cannot, however, find any logs for the Methuen police department for yesterday or any other day. I was hoping the Lawrence Eagle Tribune would have one but they appear to suck even worse than the Lowell Sun. (Maybe someday I’ll write another hate filled post about how the Lowell Sun nearly destroyed my beloved UMass Lowell college radio station, 91.5FM WUML, a few years ago. Not today though.)

So in this age of instantly available information, I cannot find a Methuen police log. I am saddened by this. Google and the area newspaper sites have let me down.

The second thing is more along the lines of weird coincidences that really don’t mean anything but just feel freaky at the time.

What was I reading last night? I was reading Duma Key by Stephen King.

Last week I wrote a little thing about how I loved reading the horror novels of Clive Barker. I said something along the lines of the only horror writer I still read regularly is Stephen King and how Stephen King hasn’t done anything all that scary in a long time.

Leave it to last night for me to stumble upon King’s return to form.

I have been reading Duma Key a little at a time for a very long time. I bought it in hard cover almost as soon as it was published. I would read a few dozen pages, put it down and read something else for a while, and then go back and read a few dozen more pages… wash rinse repeat.

A couple of nights ago I got back into it. It isn’t bad. It’s generally pretty good. I just keep having something more interesting pop up and I sort of lose track of it. One thing it has going for it is creepiness. It is a spooky story.

Last night after Jen and I had settled down enough to go back to bed I picked it up and started reading it again. Maybe ten minutes later the main character walks down a flight of stairs late at night in the dark. He looks out his picture window and sees what can best be described as a ghost ship sailing in the Gulf of Mexico. That was creepy. He turns on the light and standing right in front of him is what can only be described as a zombie who had broken into the house in order to get him.

Yeah, that scared the shit out of me.

You’ve still got it Mr King. Bless your heart, you’ve still got it.

Okay, here’s what happened last night. 16 hours after the fact it all is starting to seem silly, but the paranoia and the pissed-off-ed-ness is still there.

We put the kids to bed a little after 8:00pm and Jen and I stayed in our room, sitting on the bed, each with a book. We call this a reading date. We both love to read and we both love being in the same room with each other, so we read together.

At about 10:00ish there was a knock on our door. I got up to answer it. It was the neighbor in the apartment next to ours. He said he just saw some one in our driveway, possibly messing with one of our cars. He said there was a woman in a car parked on the street in front of the house and when he (our neighbor) came out of the front door she yelled to the guy in our driveway and he started walking toward her. Our neighbor confronted him and asked him what he was doing. I don’t know what he said in reply, but he jumped in the car and he and the woman drove off.

We checked the cars and they seemed all right. The locks weren’t tampered with, no windows broken, no signs of mischief. I checked the back of the house, the back door, and all of the rooms and windows. Again, no signs of foul play.

We called the police and told them what happened and they said there was nothing they could really do about it based on the tiny amount of information we had for them, but they would send a patrol car into the area. That was really all I wanted them to do. If they were still around I wanted the cops to come and wave the flag a little and scare them off. Within minutes I saw a squad car drive up to our house, slow to a crawl as the officer driving took a look around, and then slowly move up the road. Thank you very much. It’s a small thing, but it was seriously appreciated.

So what was this pair-o-twits doing in our driveway? I suppose there are a few possibilities. The innocent hippie in my thinks he might have been cutting through our yard to meet up with his lady friend. Doubtful, but possible I guess. Maybe it was a teen from the apartment building behind our house sneaking out for some non-parental-approved Sunday night fun. Maybe we were the first (at least I think it was first, none of the houses around us seemed to have anything out of the ordinary happening) stop on a smash and grab spree. Maybe, as our neighbor (who once told me that he was a police officer in his native country before moving to the United States. I suddenly see that as a plus) suggested, they were looking for car parts. He said their car looked similar to ours. Again, it’s possible. They weren’t trying to steal the car as it was parked on the inside of the driveway with another car behind it. Who knows.

What I do know is that Jen and I both reached a level of paranoia that neither of us has ever reached before. Even though nothing actually happened we still felt pretty violated. There was some definite freaking out going on. It was quiet, we didn’t want to wake the kids, but it was there. We did a lot of walking through the house looking out the windows. We did a lot of quietly listening to whatever was going on outside. Jen got to sleep at about midnight. I was up until maybe quarter to one, and when I did finally sleep I didn’t stay asleep for long (partly due to my fricken teeth, but that’s beside the point).

We both felt better this morning. Jen decided to sleep a little later than usual so we didn’t get a lot of time to talk about it prior to getting to work. Still, our house shopping plans that we had put on hold for a couple of years or so may now be back on the table. I also think any home shopping we do might be in more rural neighborhoods. Both of those points are paranoia talking, but that doesn’t make them any less there. We’ve asked our landlord for a few security upgrades. Basically more lights on the side of the house. I would have liked to have been able to flood the hell out of the driveway with light last night, but we really couldn’t.

When we come right down to it, nothing happened. We’ll relax a little as time goes by and prepare ourselves a little better to handle something like this in the future. We live in a fairly urban area. There is a city with a bad reputation not far away. Neither of us ever thought that something like this was impossible. There has always been a healthy dose of paranoia to begin with (it’s not uncommon for me to check the doors a few times a night, just to make sure everything is cool).

Nothing has actually changed except our level of freaking. There will be more vigilance on our part, that’s for sure. I still feel safe in the house, just not quite as safe as I felt 24 hours ago. We’re not going to move out any time soon… but at this point it’s possible that we will move out sooner than expected. Who knows.

I thanked our neighbor a few times last night and I will thank him again now.

We’ll have to see how this situation affects our attitude in the future. I honestly don’t know how it will go.

Last night was a bad night. (I’ll share when I feel up to it)

This video sort of shows my mood right now.

Thank the Hockey Gods for Milan Lucic.