May 24, 2007
@ 03:19 PM

Waiter Rant has been out of commission for several days now.

For anyone wondering what happened, the good folks at SoundQue -- who host his site -- have confirmed that the WordPress software Waiter uses was hacked.

I suspected a hacker when, on the first day I began to get suspicious, I looked at the HTML source and saw that there was a hidden <iframe> tag that was downloading content from http://www.allddos.biz. None of that sounded good to me.

In any event, I'm assured that Waiter will be back on the air in a couple of days.


 
Categories: Everything Else | The Geek

May 16, 2007
@ 05:28 PM

This morning, for the first time, I felt my Daddy-Sense(tm) tingling.

My wife put our daughter down around 4:50am after 2 hours of struggling to get her to go back to sleep.

Around 5:00am, she started making fussy "eh eh eh" noises like she sometimes does after we put her down. We usually just wait these out, because she stops and goes back to sleep.

This time when she stopped, instead of the "ah, now I can go back to sleep" relief I normally feel, I felt a very strange sensation that something was very very wrong.

I got out of bed on auto pilot and went into the nursery. Our daughter was in the crib, struggling to breath. She had spit-up and had aspirated it. She was choking and rocking back and forth.

I picked her up quickly and started patting her back. She was breathing, but I could tell it was very labored. We spend so much time wishing she'd stop crying that it felt weird when I found myself wishing, desperately, that she would start crying.

It took us almost 20 minutes to get her to cry. Those 20 minutes were marked by labored, panicked breathing. Needless to say, we were scared to death.

When she finally started crying, we were desperately relieved.

She's OK, of course, but now she's absolutely terrified to be put on her back. I wonder how long it will take before she feels comfortable in that position again?


 
Categories: Everything Else

March 13, 2007
@ 06:05 PM

My inhaler ran out on Friday. On Sunday, I started feeling a little fluffy in the chest, so I went out to buy a new Primatene Mist inhaler...only to discover they're pretty much impossible to buy around here (i.e., Charlotte, NC) anymore. I went to three different pharmacies and they all told me the same thing: "We want to stock it, we keep ordering it, but none ever shows up." I went to Eckerd, CVS, and Wal-Mart.

One of the pharmacy assistants offered "I think they're trying to make it better for the environment or sumpin'", which is in line with an article posted on Fark several months back about the federal government requiring manufacturers of these inhalers to stop using CFC propellants by 2008.

After searching several online drug stores, CVS.com finally offered to sell me an inhaler, so I bought 2. The next day they canceled the order and, when I asked why, sent me a mystic e-mail that said they were unable to discuss the reasons for cancellation by e-mail. WTF?

Finally, yesterday, I found one of the SMALL bottles at a CVS about 10 miles away from my house. It was their only one, and the pharmacist told me they only get about 1 bottle/month.

Does anybody know what the hell is going on with this stuff? The manufacturer's website is silent.


 
Categories: Everything Else

January 12, 2007
@ 01:20 PM

R.I.P, Robert Anton Wilson.

You taught me to see the forest for the fnords. You helped me help the Widow's Son. You helped me realize that more laws only serve to make more criminals. You opened my eyes to the great truth that the greatest thing about masturbation is its availability.

You will be sorely missed.


 
Categories: Everything Else

December 12, 2006
@ 03:00 PM

So, the wife and I have been worrying about whether or not our as-of-yet-unborn daughter will get into the "right" pre-school.

Today we toured one, and it's the best we've found so far: it's close to us and the people there are clearly total pros. We observed an incidence of projectile vomiting. The ladies in the room sprang into action like...ladies dealing with vomit. They soaked it up with some sandy material (like an oil spill), swept it up, and in less than a minute, things were back to normal. As a rookie dad, I was very impressed.

Everything seemed to be going great...right up until the end of the tour. I noticed that there were whiteboards on each classroom door. These whiteboards are how the teachers communicate to the parents what the kids did that day. At the top of this whiteboard it said, "Today, we talked about Kwanzaa."

Dammit. <bang head on desk>


 
Categories: Everything Else

December 9, 2006
@ 10:02 AM

So, last night was just a little bit unexpected.

My wife and her co-workers got together for a sort-of Christmas party. Spouses were not included, so I told my wife that she should go out and enjoy herself and that I would be at Villa Antonio, our favorite restaurant, smoking cigars and drinking scotch until she was done.

When he's not crazy busy, I like to chat with Chris, the bartender. Chris was definitely crazy busy on Friday because he had a party of 80 "cocktailing" in the bar area when I showed up. But he got a few minutes to breath and tell me that Sammy Hagar was in the restaurant.

Woo hoo! I can't drive 55, baby! Half of Van Hagar inna house!

Now, I'm not one to fawn all over celebrities, but I do like to at least say "Hi" if I get a chance. I've met Congresswoman Sue Myrick and our esteemed mayor in this same restaurant.

Unfortunately, Sammy was cordoned off from the masses and was unreachable. But Chris told me they'd purchased a bottle of Sammy's tequila just for the evening and he suggested that if I wanted to meet Sammy, I should buy a round and have one of the waiters escort me to Sammy's room with it.

So, I had him pour out 5 glasses of Cabo Wabo with little lime wedges and off I went with Anthony -- the sommelier and son of the eponymous Antonio -- to meet Sammy.

Sammy was an extremely cool guy. He shook my hand and insisted that I sip, not shoot, his tequilia. So I sipped it, and I was glad I did. Cabo Wabo has a very mild but interesting flavor and it goes down very smooth. A little bit of lime right afterwards is the perfect complement. I usually only do a few obligatory shots of tequila on Cinco de Mayo when they send the hot chicks around to sell shots of Cuervo, but I could see myself drinking Cabo Wabo often and enjoying it. I'm almost certainly going to add a bottle to my liquor cabinet.

I chatted with Sammy and his entourage briefly, and then I got out of their way so they could enjoy their evening. No sense wearing out your welcome.

About an hour later, they disappeared out the door with a few cute chicks from the bar.

All in all, it was a very fun evening, although I paid dearly for mixing the tequila with the scotch. That's an experiment I will definitely not repeat.


 
Categories: Everything Else