jobberts. [Lester]

just got a promotion. woop. includes: claustrophobic office space, some kind of phone pda device thingamajig, expense accounts, all you can eat Speakerphone action, and 10 elephants worth of stress sitting on my FACE. This is what i've been wanting for the past year, but i'm absolutely terrified.

I think i'll spend tomorrow with the door shut, crying. either that or masturbating. no, i think i'll just try to do work behind closed doors, preparing to dutch oven the next person that comes in.

hrm. i guess this job won't be so bad after all.

btw liam- junior designer position just opened up. apply

Hilarity ensues! [Mowgli]

So I'm back in India now, and I'll be teaching high school starting tomorrow. I've got a couple pictures for you, enjoy! It might be a little hard to see, but 'termite1' is a termite colony that started building a freestanding offshoot of their network. Presumably they smelled the soft, delicious wood on the nearby shelf and decided the shortest distance between two points was a straight tunnel. I don't know if this is rare or not, but I've never seen anything like it. The second is an ad from today's (Sunday's) paper, you might have to magnify it to read the text. Enjoy!

-Mowgli

Singapore diaries, part the fourth [Mowgli]

S'pore Greetings!

I was walking through the airport window shopping and killing time, and I remembered again how much I hate the way companies name their products these days. I mean, I guess Apple has the right to stick a lowercase 'i' in front of everything they sell, but I still don't like it. When other people do it though it's evidence of the complete absence of thought that goes into naming products. I passed a store that sold iDesire, iPamper, and some other fucking iCrap product just after getting off the plane, and now I'm typing this up in the iConnect free internet lounge. I just hope this stops being trendy before the killing starts.

Apple may have realized that slapping an i in front of a title is a dying trend, but they have a new and equally annoying plan in store for us. It doesn't work for everything, but if it's got a two word title, you're golden. Take Apple's new music mastering software for garage bands. I bet it took a fucking Ph.D. in advertising theory to coin the title GarageBand. I mean, I went to school with business students, so I don't have any really unrealistic expectations, but this is fucking pathetic.

They've changed the xbox games around a little. I played a few with one of the guys who works at the airport, mostly tekken tag. I couldn't play the soccer game he liked, and he didn't know soulcal 2 or halo 2, so tekken was the compromise.

My internet is on a timer, so here's the wrap up. Look for another blog post in the near future, from here or after I get home.

-Mowgli

*recognizable marks [Liam]

ok, so it's not exactly a scar, but...

i do have a recognizable mark on my forehead now.
i was totally just in the upstairs hallway, minding my own business and navigating through complete darkness with my catlike reflexes when i banged my forehead on something with the full momentum of my body behind the hit. it actually reverberated in my jaw, and i probably needed like 5 seconds or more just to figure out what had happened, followed by another 5 to figure out what the fuck i had plowed into. i checked my face in the mirror and there was already like a ring-shaped lump.

further investigation revealed that in fact i had been walking down the middle of the hallway, but that a right side double door had been closed and bolted with the other open. the result was an insidiously unavoidable hazard directly in my path along the center line of said hallway. I went back and looked, and I actually left some skin on the edge of the door.

on a completely unrelated note (really, this has nothing to do with me wandering around the house in the dark and hitting my head), 42 Below Vodka is an excellent product. It is among the best vodkas I've ever tried, along with Precis and Stoli Elit (the Russian KGB Spetnaz Ninja of vodkas, more on that to come).


42 Below is really smooth and it has a definite sweet, drinkable flavor to it. According to the website, it goes through 35 individual filters (before the final filter that is your liver). Big ups to Lester/Bob for employing the Brita method, but this is the next level hotness right here.

In other news, I bought my very first e-book tonight. It's a thriller by Greg Rucka called "A Fistful of Rain." I can already tell this whole e-book thing is going to be something of an addiction for me... the idea of being able to read without looking away from my precious computer screen holds incredible promise for me, my lack of self-sufficiency and my impending "gamer booty" physique. I mean it's like fucking 3 am right now and I just bought a book I wanted to read, without so much as putting on socks. I am blown away. In addition, I have to admit seeing all kinds of fancy adobe things happening on my screen to prepare me for this new media functionality was totally exciting compared to whatever else I would be doing on a thursday at 3 in the morning. If everything works out ok I will be able to intergrate reading my new book into designing ads for pet products and photoshopping hideous cellulite out of pictures nobody's mom should ever be in, and nobody will be the wiser.
There is undoubtedly some kind of outro that will bring all of this together, but I'm going to opt to pass out instead.



Nite.

monday morning [Liam]

as i am filling up the coffee maker,
the following things travel through my brain:

-someone has already made one pot of coffee this morning.
-[name] is a morning person. that's a potentially valuable trait to have.
-if this is true, it follows that many people are not morning people.
-when the fuck did morning people take over the world and declare this
an appropriate time to do business?
-obviously, they took over at like 7 a.m. when the normals were sleeping.

-i'm a night owl. i know this because i am up at 3 a.m. every night.
-i wasn't previously aware of it, but i am awake at 3 a.m. because i'm waiting for the revolution.
-specifically, the revolution that will be squashed without fanfare 3 hours later when my people pass out and the daylight folk start brewing coffee and kicking asses.

in other news good luck to brian at his interview to be an IT troll today:

(sometimes you gotta rock it MS Paint style)

buddy list bloodsport (quick work post) [Liam]

ok so i am sitting here at work using AIM express, and I see something on the aol homepage called "AIM fight"...
So I hesitantly check it out, and it's like this hilarious "AIM popularity battle" setup where you enter two screen names and it does some friendster-esque algorithm to measure the extent of your AIM network and assign a pair of numerical scores.
in blatant defiance of post-lunch productivity, here are the top online superstars of my particular buddy list:

1- Bob (he pretty much beasts everyone on here with his work account)
2- Rylan (the whiteboy online hustle & flow comes close)

3- Brian Siu
4- Chiao Yen *(Bob's other account would place 4th)
5- Lester

(Eric "eze" Chiang places just outside the top 5)

...big ups to rylan for breaking up the asian monopoly of popular adventuresoflbo buddy list entries. with that, i am back to work.

P.S. I REALLY WANT TO SEE THIS MOVIE

Punchline contest [Lester]

Korean Scientists Clone Dog

obvious: ...to feed the starving North Koreans

monday [Liam]

i'm sitting at jen's house right now, hanging out with her and brian. i'm pretty wiped out from my monday.
to pass the time i just got done clipping a walkie-talkie to jen's dog chloe's collar, and then talking to the dog as it ran around the house trying to figure out where the voice was coming from.
this probably seems somewhat unkind to an outsider, but seeing as how i am almost certainly a reincarnated housecat i think it's actually pretty fuckin' proper. and hilarious. especially beeping the page button.

so i'm not going to get into the details of why there is a record or why i have seen it, but it's come to my attention that according to the government one of my identifiable features is a "scar on forehead."
how awesome is that? i mean seriously. not to mention the fact that i obviously mentioned this feature myself during some kind of information gathering or interview process (no comment... it's about a quarter inch, hiding between my eyebrows in a generally crease-heavy area of my face), it makes me sound like i'm either harry potter or a rowdy burmese knife fighter on the loose. sure i'm not as smart as danny, but at least i have street cred to show for getting dropped on my head as a baby. thanks, mom.

before i forget, my folks bought a honda crv this weekend. they don't actually drive it yet, but it's totally sitting in the garage like right now.
(i just looked up from the computer because brian was chanting "porno" at something on jen's laptop and jen was laughing at him. i have no comment to offer. i shall continue typing... trust me though it's not as interesting as that sounds or i would have left like 5 minutes ago).
the crv seems innocent enough, but i just can't wrap my head around the idea of us being an suv family. any day now my folks are going to force me to join a soccer team so they can come pick me up from practice on the way to the grocery store. well, at the very least if there's a fkn avalance somewhere between pioneer elementary and the union landing shopping center our family is way prepared.

um, what else, what else. i'm trying to do this thing where i don't plan my blogs out ahead of time... if i do that i have a tendency to keep tweaking them until i actually don't post at all and that negates the whole point of me even paying $5 a month for this domain (or is it a year? whatever). OH RIGHT i remember

check it:


i drew and printed an adhesive vinyl monitor frame at work and put it on my computer. it's so loud. i feel like my eyeballs are going deaf after 10 seconds sitting in front of the damn thing. i don't even look at what's going on onscreen, i'm too busy being overwhelmed by the aloha shirt of computer decorations hovering a foot from my head. at least it's got ninjas though. i loves me some ninjas. anyway i think brian's gonna drive me to my car now so i gotta bounce. new comic strip this week!

(by the way, the "kevin bacon game" i referred to in the last post involves drawing a line of association from actor to actor by way of movies where they appear together to make a continuous line from a certain movie star to kevin bacon... to do an easy one, kaite holmes in batman begins with tom cruise, who is in a few good men with kevin bacon. you can do up to six steps. i'm still hoping for some challenges, but not holding my breath)

anyway, i'll try to update if i get a chance, put in some drawings and whatnot from this week. right now i gotta go though.
latelatelatelatelatelate