Ryan’s Ramblin’

That’s right baby! I’m off to Lanzarote (in the Canary Islands) for a week. Expect not to hear from me. Expect to see lots of pictures of beach, and pool, and sun. I plan on coming back VERY tanned

The beard experiment, take 2 part 1

After my previous beard experiment, I figured it would be quite some time before I could provide photographic evidence of my lack-of-beard-growing-itude, but it turns out I was wrong. Sure enough, shortly after the last experiment, Liz and I headed off to Galway for the easter long weekend. I forgot my razor at home, and therefore didn’t get to shave all that weekend. The result, of course, was that I ended up looking like THIS by the next Friday. I took pictures this time just to have proof (closer, but blurry shot here). So yes, I am unable to grow a beard. However, that doesn’t seem to stop me from being the king of lazy when it comes to shaving!

Since Graig asked for it, another BUDTAWTS post! Not really all THAT much to report, since BUDTAWTS wasn’t at the gym yesterday. However, I *did* see him walking down the street, with a RIDICULOUSLY hot woman, whom I can only hope was his sister or some other non-girlfriend relation, because otherwise that’s just not RIGHT.

Scene: Just finished working out. Walk into the change room. Big-ugly-dude-that-always-wears-teeny-shorts is standing in front of my locker, with his gym bag TAKING UP THE WHOLE DAMN BENCH.

Ryan: “Sorry, could I get to my locker behind you there?”
BUDTAWTS: “grunt” *takes half step to the side, so that if I want to look into my locker I have to stick my face into his hairy ass*
Ryan: “Excuse me, sorry, just need to squeeze in here and don’t want to get a closeup look at your dingleberries, thanks”
BUDTAWTS: “grunt” *takes another half step*

Proceed to get changed, and need to sit down to put on my shoes.

Ryan: “Sorry, could you slide your bag over a bit so I can… sit… on the bench… which is meant for sitting on?”
BUDTAWTS: “grunt” *moves bag 3 inches to the side*

Seriously, I just don’t understand the inconsideration of some people. Sure, I’ll throw my bag on the bench if there’s nobody else needing to use it, but as soon as somebody else approaches, I’ll move it to the floor. Not only did BUDTAWTS (man, I love saying that… BUDTAWTS!) not move himself out of the way, he didn’t even say a single word to me during the whole interaction.

Also recently added to my list:

• Guy who is sitting on one of only 4 benches in the ENTIRE FREE WEIGHT AREA, chatting up some girl, blatantly not working out
• People that butt in line to use the cardio machines. Yeah, I know you saw the rest of us standing around and said “Jesus, what suckers. I know they’re too polite to confront me when I jump in ahead of them instead of waiting 5 minutes for a treadmill”. Jerk.
• Guy who takes 6 different weights of dumbells off the rack, even though there’s only one of each weight available, instead of grabbing the ones he currently needs and then returning them when finished. And then goes to a machine in the machine area, and gives you a dirty look when you’ve taken one of “his” dumbells while he was gone. Sorry, jerk, this isn’t your own private gym to monopolize as you see fit.
• Gym membership coordinator douchbags, who are signing up at LEAST 2-3 new groups of people every single day in the single hour or less that I’m there, despite the fact that gym is already RETARDEDLY overcrowded and basically unusable if you show up between 6:30 and 8pm
• Guy who brings a 2L water bottle and stands at the fountain filling it up for 5 minutes, despite the fact that there are 10 people behind him who just want a sip from the fountain
• Guy who leaves his towel on the leg press machine, then goes and does a spin class, and expects the machine to be available when he gets back. See dumbell guy above.

In other words, I can’t wait until we switch gyms. Hopefully the Crunch Fitness at UCD will avoid many of these issues. And it’s also right across the street.

Today is National High Five Day.

5 year old Fyn Stec was diagnosed on March 17 with liver cancer. His family is raising money for his treatment, with the help of the Cartoon Network (Paul Stec, his father, works for them), by having a silent art auction. There’s all kinds of stuff on there, but the coolest (IMO) is that you can bid on your chance to be an incidental character in The Family Guy. At $1000 already, so WELL outside of my range… hehehe… but still pretty dang cool and for a good cause. Check out the auction if you have any interest.

(via The Family Guy Blog)

Liz and I went off to Galway last weekend… we had a fantastic trip, (photos here) but there’s one lingering thing that’s been driving me crazy: what the hell is this thing? I posted an Ask Metafilter question about it, and there’s been some great ideas in there (as well as people tracking down another picture), but nothing definitive yet. Anybody out there have any nautical experience, that has any idea what the heck this thing is?

Welcome to the world, Suri. I’m sure you’ll write a great tell-all book some day. Oh and by the way, how cool is it that your dad ate your placenta?

I find it quite humourous that this story is one of the top 3 Canadian news stories on news.google.ca. And the best part? It’s not even ABOUT Canada!

Over the past couple weeks, Kevin Smith has been chronicling the story of his relationship Jason Mewes, and Jay’s struggle with drugs. It’s a FASCINATING story, incredibly engaging, but LONG. It’s in 9 parts. I’ve been wanting to blog about it since I read the first chapter, but I wanted to be able to post it all at once. And after reading Anthony Kiedis’ Scar Tissue over the last two weeks, it was an interesting few looks into the life of a junkie. The funny thing is, this was all precipitated by the news stories that broke a few weeks ago about how Jay had sex with Nicole Richie in a club bathroom, which is the tiniest itty bitty part of the end of this story. So, here’s the links to all 9 parts:

Me and My Shadow, Part 1
Me and My Shadow, Part 2
Me and My Shadow, Part 3
Me and My Shadow, Part 4
Me and My Shadow, Part 5
Me and My Shadow, Part 6
Me and My Shadow, Part 7
Me and My Shadow, Part 8
Me and My Shadow, Part 9 - The Conclusion

Update: It seems that Kevin took all of these entries off his site, probably because he decided to publish them in a book, and didn’t want people to be able to get it for free. For those of you too cheap to buy the book, I’ve updated the links to the Archive.org cached versions.

Yeah, that’s right. Google Calendar! It was only a matter of time, but the fact that it’s compatible with Outlook, Yahoo, and iCal makes it VERY impressive. I’ve never really used any calendar apps, but then I never had one that so neatly integrated with all my shit before. So I’m gonna give it a try, see what I think of it. Not that I ever really have that much going on that I need a calendar (Saturday: sleep in. Go to gym. Go to movies.), but I’ll play with it to see if I like it.

So, it’s that time of year again. That’s right, Easter Cadbury Creme Egg time! I love Cadbury Creme Eggs, but I can really only eat MAYBE one a year without getting nauseous. And yes, I know that they are basically in stores year-round now, but they’re SUPPOSED to be an Easter-only treat dammit, so I’m talking about them now. I’m not so sure about the slogan from the web page there though: Dip in the goo to unleash your naughty, playful side! EWWWWWWW. There’s also a Cadbury Creme Egg Podcast… for some reason. I can’t get up the nerve to actually listen to it though.

Also, Cadbury has added a Dairy Milk with Creme Egg filling this year. I tried one, it was a bit much. But still yummy. I had some of my Kinder toys check it out.

And of course, there’s a link that precipitated this whole thing: Replacing eggs with Cadbury Creme Eggs in a recipe. I just thought it was hilarious at the beginning: Hypothesis: THIS IS GOING TO BE SO AWESOME. I couldn’t stop laughing! Ok, I could, but I still chuckled.

This is one of my Google Adsense ads right now… at least when I visit the site it is. Connection Power, a site that lets you build “church growth” websites with their software. It’s amazing, really, that such a thing exists, but I guess I shouldn’t really be that surprised. Spookier is some of the “testimonials” on their site:

Alyssa: 2003-09-26: She is doing well, loves the church and will be there this week. Commented that she has a lot on her plate right now with a sick child and her husband away from home. Has been there 3 times and seems like we have her. Her coworkers brought her to us.

“Seems like we have her”??? Jesus, let’s try to sound a bit more like a cult, shall we? The whole site kinda gives me the heebie jeebies.

An interesting link I found via a MeFi conversation on Google Adwords: Google’s Highest Paying Search Terms. The highest paying one? “Chicago personal injury lawyer“. Weird that those are the highest paying search terms, I guess there’s lots of scumbag lawyers in Chicago. Apparently the previous high was Mesothelioma lawyers, which is why if you do that google search, you’ll see that all of the search results (including the sponsored links) end up pointing at blank adsense linkfarms. You’d think that Google would catch on to this, but apparently not. Strange. Anyway, here’s the top 10:

1. $78.30 chicago personal injury lawyer
2. $73.01 chicago personal injury attorney
3. $69.17 lasik new york city
4. $64.27 new york personal injury lawyer
5. $64.17 new jersey car insurance
6. $63.10 new york personal injury attorney
7. $61.64 chicago personal injury lawyers
8. $61.17 mesothelioma lawyers
9. $60.74 atlanta personal injury lawyer
10. $60.29 new york personal injury lawyers

Not that mesothelioma is still up there in the top 10… and all but 2 of the top 10 are for lawyers. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Google Adsense. Once I make enough money to actually get a payment from them, I’ll have my hosting payments covered for the year. Woohoo and all that. But I can almost guarantee that this post will result in lots of those ads being placed. Likewise how previously, my post about the aborted beard experiment resulted in all kinds of ads about hair loss (and one for a beard trimmer, which I guess is pretty good placement). Seems like Google will place the most high-paying ad that is even remotely connected to your content, which is their prerogative, but then they suspend payments to the ad posters for “click fraud” because they don’t want to pay them what they’re owed? Sounds pretty shady to me.

(obviously via MeFi)

Yeah, you heard me right. Yogabeans is a site where the author takes pictures of action figures displaying various yoga techniques. I don’t know anything about yoga, but I found it entertaining.

In other news, I’m going to try to do more blog posting of little sites that I find around the net. I’m CONSTANTLY finding crap on the net that I bookmark for myself, and think “Hey, this would be a great thing to blog about” but then I’m too lazy.

Welcome to the world, Moses. Ugh. All you celebrities out there? Giving your babies horrible names? You realize that it’s going to cost you a FORTUNE in therapy someday right? And that you are guaranteeing that any dirty laundry you have hidden away, is just about guaranteed to be exposed in a tell-all book by your children when they hit about 22? Oh, you know? Ok then. Fire away!

A few weeks ago, Liz pointed out that I’d gone over a week without shaving, and that I was extremely prickly. This isn’t all *that* unusual for me, as most people who know me can attest to the fact that I am generally at least partially scruffy. It has very little to do with aesthetics, and almost everything to do with the fact that I am SO LAZY. I mean, don’t get me wrong - I feel that I generally do look a bit better if I have a 2 day stubble going. It’s just that normally, I just can’t be bothered shaving in the morning before work, and shaving at the end of the day feels like a waste of time, since I’ll have stubble again by morning. So, in general, I end up shaving on the weekends and that’s it. On this particular occasion, though, I hadn’t shaved on the weekend so I was ESPECIALLY scruffy, and I decided to let it grow out and see what it looked like, see if I was one of those people who can successfully grow a beard. I am not. While the hair does indeed grow out longer, it is still somewhat…. sparse. So instead of growing in a nice full beard, I just have a scraggly sparse beard which makes me kinda look like a crazy homeless person. Oh well, lesson learned right? Sadly, I didn’t save any photodocumentary proof. Well, maybe the next time I get lazy for a couple weeks the crazy-homeless-guy look will return.