fine whine

So Skippy had a free evening and a hankering for bowling, see, and we went over to the local pins and balls joint, see, and had us a swell game of the ol' tenpins and a pitcher of AmberBock, see, and then we decided to head over to another place and let off some steam with laser pistols, see, where at first we were surrounded by trash-talking kneebiters, see, but their bedtime came and we finished the night out with several games against the guys who run the little arena, see, and you know, those guys know how to shoot a guy.

This run-on sentence in cartoony-gangster-speak is brought to you by having nothing better to do. Weeding, after all, is so skull-numbingly boring that I won't dare mention it outside of this sentence.

So everytime I turn around it seems I run into another program to get a free iPod or KitchenAid mixer or Burberry handbag or DVD player or flat screen monitor or something like that, for the mere price of endless unsolicited emails and a month or two of a diet pill club or Columbia House or AOL or something else like that, and referrals for friends to also join up and do the same.

I am aware that these programs do work, having gotten myself a portable DVD player for under twenty dollars having done just that. I must admit, though, that this was back in the early days of this sort of thing, back when men were men, women were women and you didn't need to do anything for the points/credits beyond signing up for, and immediately canceling, a free trial.

Nowadays most offers demand a small pittance, be it ten or twenty bucks and thirty days or so, but they're still much less than the selling price of whatever product can be gotten for free. The sticking point, anymore, is the referrals. There's a math problem in there somewhere, but basically after ten generations of everybody getting five referrals the globe's been covered over more than once.

So, short of spamming and putting posters up and whatnot, what is the prospective iPod recipient to do? I'm trying to figure out a way to form a cadre of five or six people, each doing a different offer through a different service, all of whom refer each other to the others' offers. Most places won't let people multiple join the same service (so Fred cannot be referred to more than one GiftFox or FreeSlide offer, but he can do each one once) but there seem to be enough of them that a good five could be assembled.

The next step, of course, is to assemble those other five people.

I've been disappointed by two books recently, and oddly enough they're both connected in some form to Comedy Central's Daily show. The first was Jon Stewart's Naked pictures of famous people, and the second was the much older book of sets of five questions asked every guest when Craig Killborn hosted the show.

Both books were, well, not funny. The latter one was a slapdash affair, padding out perhaps ten pages worth of material with bad television screen captures and other feats of bad layout. Moreover, most of it isn't really funny. The interviews on television might've been amusing, but they don't translate well to the written word. These, unlike a book of Dave Letterman's Top Ten lists, do not work in print. What a waste of paper.

Jon Stewart's book is connected to the Show only because he hosts it; it might've been published anyway but not nearly as widely. You see, it's not all that funny either. Jon's a funny guy with a great breadth of knowledge upon which to draw to make jokes, but he's pulling at straws here while I think he's shooting at fish in a barrel.

There's a chance that Dennis Miller would read this and roll on the floor laughing, but it sure didn't work for me. Far too many pages were spent on intricate but laborious jokes (such as the opening diary of a kennedy houseguest) that become tedious before getting a chuckle. Skip these books.

So today is wednesday. The week is half over, and the month is half over. This being September makes the latter half of this year half over (I think).

That said, Saturday can't come soon enough.

As I idly chatted today in the Last.FM chat room I though back to my early days of chatting in #efnet and #undernet IRC channels (and others I can but hope to remember) and even before that, BBS party lines.

Ah, those were the days.

Anyway, today I was struck with a memory of sorts. When I (and the rest of the cyber denizens of these seedy establishments) would return to a chat room after an absence (AFK) or having been logged off, everybody would respond with "re codger" or whatever nick I was using at the time. We'd all do this, and in heavily-trafficked chat rooms a good third of the 'conversation' could well just be "re"s.

Re-entering a particularly quiet room, particularly for me, would prompt a "re me" to spur some sort of response. If I recall correctly (IIRC), it didn't work very well.

I hope you weren't expecting a point from any of this. I'm merely struck by the fact that I remembered something, albeit something so trivial and pointless.

Microsoft PowerPoint is a program for creating slideshows and presentations. It is not, as apparently some think, a program for creating one page documents and posters. That is what Word and Publisher (and their better competitors) are intended to do.

Thank you for you time.