CrazyHoboManisms

I am tired. It is only 11:25. What is wrong with me? When I get tired my thoughts wander. There is a red sharpie on my desk. I bet I used it recently to write on a CD. I just spent three minutes talking to people over ther internet. I almost spelled internet as ingernet back there. Yaaaawn. I just yawned. This is the most random post i’ve ever made. Damn it, why do I have The Shins in my playlist? Time to skip that one. Aaaah some piano stuff from Bryant’s cousin; better. Unh. Ha ha, that’s a funny word. I just burped. Man I need to shave. I haven’t shaved in two days. It’s itchy. Maybe I’ll photoshop my head onto Mr. T’s body tomorrow. Yeah… Wow this is the most random blog entry i’ve ever made. Oh wait, I already said that. Man, my C++ book is huge. It’s basically turned into an armrest. Wha? Ok, i don’t know what I’m talking about. My clock says 11:32 now. I’m gonna wait till it turns to 11:33, then write some more. There it goes. Man I’m bored. And tired.

Yesterday it rained for the first time since forever. Rain is awesome. The only drawback is that I was going to go longboarding today, but I didn’t really want to get myself or the EEEEEEEEEEERADICATOR!!!!! (my longboard) wet. There are many reason why I like it when it rains:

-It’s a nice change of pace after a summer of non-rain.
-It’s cool when it comes down really hard.
-The shards of glass from the flourescent lamp bulb i smashed in the frieght loading area got washed down the drain, so now nobody will know.
-The sound can be soothing.
-I’m getting DSL on Friday (ok, that’s unrelated, but it’s still cool).
-Thunder is freaky.
-Before it rains (when it’s all cloudy) I get put my hands on my hips and say “Storm’s a-brewin’” in a grave voice.
-Cart runs at work are fun in the rain, despite what everyone thinks (too bad I haven’t been able to do any yet).

The sun was nice, but rain every once in a while is cool. But what would be even cooler is if it rained apple pies. I could really go for some pie now. I think I’m going downstairs to raid the fridge, then going to bed.

I just finish reading Beowulf, the oldest piece of English literature known to mankind. Bewulf is awesome. It’s about this warrior who goes around and kicks a bunch of ass and then is given a bunch of treasure by those he helps. Beowulf is a badass. If you picked a fight with Beowulf, whe would rip you in half with his bare hands. He’d rip you in half with one bare hand. He’d rip you in half with only his big toe. There are many translations of Beowulf (it’s in Old English, which is a lot different from our English. Totally different). The one I read is this: http://www.lone-star.net/literature/beowulf/

Other people who are badass mofos include:

-Mr. T
-Conan the Barbarian
-Me
-He-Man, from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe
-Ghost Dog from, the movie Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai

My job is tough. I have to heavy stuff. Lots of heavy stuff. A lot. It makes me get real tired, sore, and/or sweaty. One of the most physically draining jobs is working ice. The only problem: people think it’s easy and cool to work the ice on a hot Summer day. These people are wrong. Filling ice is really one of the toughest jobs I do.

First off, ice is really heavy. Really heavy. Think about it: each bag of ice is seven pounds. Bags of ice come in bales of six. That’s forty-two pounds of ice per bale. On one pallett of ice there are five bales per row, stacked up about ten to fifteen rows high. Assuming the minimum on an unworked board of ice, that makes for fifty forty-two pound bales of ice.

Here’s what I do to fill ice, in order:

-Pull the board out of the freezer in the back.
-Pull the board of ice to the front end.
-Fill the ice box in the lobby of one door, which involves:
-Picking up and dropping each bale onto the floor in order to loosen up the ice
(sometimes it’s already loose, but very rarely)
-Swiftly open the bag with my well-honed boxknife skills.
-Pulling each bag out of the bag, and put it in the freezer.
-Putting the empty bags into carts.
-I then go outside and fill the box at the other door (outside… where it’s hot)
-Pull my garbage cart and the board to the back room, dispose of the plastic.

That’s a lot of ice. 300 bags. 2100 Pounds of Ice. A little over a ton. Holy crap, maybe I miscalculated. Oh no. I didn’t. I can’t even pull a full board without the assistance of the powered pallett jack. Then I have to lift up all of it and drop it on the floor to loosen it up (unless I’m feeling lazy… hee hee). Working ice makes you sweaty and tired.

This normally wouldn’t be a problem, since I possess Herculean strength, but it becomes such when people walk by and go “Oh, you have the cool job!” Although I appreciate the pun, the job is far from cool, especially when I work the ice outside. It’s not like I’m rolling around in the ice. I’m taking it in my hands and putting it into the cooler. The only thing that gets cold are my hands — although they don’t really get too cold since they’re constantly moving heavy bags of ice around.

Even worse than “you have the cool job” is when people say “It’s the Ice Man!” thinking they’re really witty or funny. I haven’t figured it out, but they’re either quoting something from the 1984 movie Iceman, which I never saw, or Vanilla Ice. Either way, I’m not laughing. I’m not the ice man. I wasn’t a prehistoric man frozen in the arctic alive, then uncovered by anthropologists. I am not a rapper, and OG, or whatever else those cool cats think they are these days.

Next time you go into a grocery store and see a helper clerk filling ice, don’t come up with some lame quip that everyone else already thought of. Give him or her a pat on the back and say, “Keep up the good work, ice-chuck” (that’s what we’re called).

Boy I’m glad I’m done with the grocery business come September 4th.

I found another blog webhost that doesn’t suck, so I will be enjoying blogging for until this one craps out. So without further ado…

A few days ago, my geforce fx 5900, which I had named Aries, was fried. It happened when I go thermal adhesive (which was somewhat conductive) on a part of the card that I shouldn’t have, thinking it was thermal grease (which isn’t adhesive or conductive, and not dangerous on the rest of the board). Thus, running my computer from my card resulted in a garbled display. Now I have been relegated to using my old, trusty ti4200, Cratos. Cratos has and most likely forever will be the best graphics card (in terms of performance vs price, and reliability) I have ever purchased, but I digress.

I first purchased Aries on ebay for $200 about a year and a half ago. I remember opening the big box and seeing the monster that it was. It stretched out to the hard drive bay in my computer case, and choked off any ventilation. I had to get a new case before I could do anything stressful to the card. Aries was not just a fast card, but it had the latest in pixel shader technology, which allowed me to activate special effects like mirrors in Max Payne 2 and bring Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic to it’s fulleset graphical capabilities. I remember the joy I felt running everything at a 1600x1200 resolution, with all the detail settings cranked to the max.

When I got my own computer a year later, and started 3D modeling, I soon realized that Cratos would not be fast enough, and took Areis out of my family’s computer and replaced it with an equally decent ATI card (since running an ATI card in Linux is near-impossible). Aries lived in there for some time. Then one of its fans started making a very annoying sound, and I purchased a new fan, some RAM heatsinks, and some thermal grease for it.

Little did I know that the “grease” was actually a conductive adhesive. Aries met an untimely fate due to my own oversight.

Rest In Peace, Aries. May your soul’s capacitors flow freely with energy wherever it may go.

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