Texting to the rescue...

So I put my car on CL sunday. I've gotten a few bites but I wanted to share a faux pas of the new age. Below is the text conversation from this afternoon from someone I've never talked to:

[Stranger]
Sill got your car

[Me]
yeah

[Stranger]
Yeah what sorry i text alot

[Me]
I still have the car

[Stranger]
Which car is ugh

[Stranger]
This

I didn't get back to him because of principal. I'm in no pinch to sell my car. You would think after I clarified that it was a car ad that he had been texting about he would look back to where he got numbers from and see which one I was. If he had too many to get back to then he's not real concerned. OR, he could have just called me. That would have solved everything.

I do realize that I'm the one selling but over the years I've gotten too many douche bags calling and I think a little courtesy is in order when you are trying to exchange thousands of dollars.

Was in DC this last weekend with my old roommate and managed to snap a couple of decent photos.

Changing of the guard at Arlington Cemetery

Lincoln Memorial

New lens

Pretty cool shot from my new .66 wide angle lens that I took this last weekend out side Mammoth Lakes, Ca.

Inventions of the devil

I'll throw them right out there:
Empire waist dresses
Oversize sunglasses

These are two things that are fashionable with women lately.
I typed empire waist dress into google and found this definition that seems to fit:
http://fashion.about.com/cs/glossary/g/empire.htm

Definition: A type of dress or top where the waist line is raised above the natural waistline, sometimes as high as right below the bust. Best on slender-on-top or petite figures, the empire dress creates the illusion of length and camouflages a bottom-heavy figure or thick waist.

Camouflage! WTF

So between the camouflage dress and the oversized sunglasses guys are pretty much in a guessing game as to whom they are talking to.

I really do live in a cartoon

So apparently a while back I must have done a google search or something on ebay and ended up setting my default ebay to ebay.uk. So here I am buying things from the UK getting an unfavorable exchange rate that ebay/paypal (conspiritors) pick and having to wait weeks for delivory.

Short cut

I've always found it perplexing that delete and create shortcut are right next to each other in the contextual menu. Just when you want something to go away a little slip and you have more of it, which could easily happen again when trying to get rid of the first shortcut. Or inimically when you are trying to make it easier to find something you've pushed it over the cliff.

Sky dive pics

Went down to Perris, Ca a couple of weekends ago and here are some stills taken from the video:
We stopped at March AFB on the way home and took some shots of some hard to find but awesome aircraft on display:

B-29


B-47

Whats a landline?

So this weekend I get one of those annoying calls from my cable company trying to sell me home phone service to go with my cable/internet. I haven't had a land line phone since early in college and I see no reason to have one these days.
The conversation went like this:

Lady: "May I speak with Marshall"
Me: "This is he"
Lady: "Marshall, I'm from Time Warner and I would like to offer you home phone land line service."
Me: "Landline?...I'm sorry, but I don't seem to understand what that means."
Lady: "Oh, Vonage and AT&T would be wireless and we provide landline service"
Me: "Oh, I didn't think that kind of stuff existed anymore. I use AT&T for my home phone...my cell phone that is."
Lady: "Oh, I assure you that it does still exist. Would you be interested in this type of service for your home?"
Me: "I can't imagine what for, so no."
Lady: "Okay thank you for your time"

Of course I know what a landline is. I just want to try and drive home to the cable company to stop offer that crap to people and get with the times, and I wanted to make it where she gave up trying to sell me anything...its hard to sell when I thought it was extinct.

Filtering people out of life

So I frequent the facebook. Its a good way to keep up with friends... er acquaintances... er people whos couches you want to sleep on at some unspecified time in the future. Well that's all fine and dandy, but who gave them the nod to post every little piece of mundane crap thats going on in there life. Now, I like to know what my friends are up to, but here is an example of what I'm talking about:

Yesterday at 10:06pm
[name] ewww eff you myspace...and your stupid squirrel spider....creeps out!

Yesterday at 10:25pm
[name] photoshop, vitamin water, and duffy... could it get any better?

Yesterday at 10:40pm
[name] ughh my ADD is ridiculous tonight. done with photoshop, now playing piano lol

16 hours ago
[name] going to sleep. blah, i just dont know anymore.

15 hours ago
[name] its 3am...and im reading perez hilton..... insomnia FTL!

6 hours ago
[name] ughh, just woke up. i feel like such a bum. i did wash every stitch of clothing i own tho, and my sheets too. lol

6 hours ago
[name] dear girl behind be at starbucks... i do not care to hear about your "monster cramps" and "heavy flow". i just want my latte. xoxo [name]

5 hours ago
[name] home, folding laundry, and enjoying my period free latte... aim = [name] you know you wanna...

3 hours ago
[name] almost three weeks in... down 11 lbs! =D

3 hours ago
[name] working on Hotel California on piano... wish me luck =D

3 hours ago
[name] ohhhh sally field on Rachel Ray... umm yes please!

about an hour ago
[name] ive been switched to nightside tomorrow. its election night. should be interesting...

Really, really, is that what you want to leave for the world. That guy that had lots of nothing to say.
I'm not saying that you should wait until you have an earth shattering post of biblical proportions to post but give it a little for thought. Some people don't live on facebook which means when they log in all they see is the truck load of mindless dribble that society has give you the tools to spew to every "friend" you collected on facebook. {I do see the coincidence that is befalling me as I am doing the same kind of thing on blogspot, but I would like to think that I'm not pushing this little slice of the interweb onto anyone and thats its a little classier}

Now facebook does know that this kind of thing happens and have gracelessly given us the ability to filter applications and people out. I've been pretty hair trigger with filter applications because no matter who you are I don't care what city best describes your personality. I've been very hesitant to gun down friends as I'm afraid that I might miss something truly important.
After seeing the above refuse when logging in this afternoon I've been left no choice but to filter that dribble out.

The reason that I'm even blogging about it is I'm concerned that the offender will never realize there ways. I would really like it if facebook saw that I've filtered it out and send some sort of certificate to them that read something like,

"Congratulations douche bag but you had nothing but gibberish coming out of your life and some of your friends are quite frankly tired of it."

Well, thats kind of my rant for the day. I do have some real updates/pictures to post that hopefully I can get to this weekend.

Green eggs and ham

Made green eggs and ham for dinner tonight....tasted fine. Was really odd to get the eggs to cook correctly when they didn't change color while cooking.

Was In Utah this last weekend doing a little snowboarding. Pretty poor conditions overall but we did manage to squeeze out one day of pretty good riding.

Normally I'm not the kind of guy to buy pictures from the people standing around taking pictures, usually at the top when you get off lifts....but as it turns out there was a guy/girl taking pictures in the middle of a hill. I had no idea that there was even a person doing that as I was moving pretty quick. My buddy was behind me and heard the photographer yell out a number. So at the end of the day we went and checked out the photos and I pretty much had to have them since I never get any decent action shots.
Here they both are:




Like always you can click on them to enlarge the photos.
They turned out pretty well considering I didn't see this person.

Florida!

This past weekend I was in Florida visiting a friend. Having never been to Florida before I did all the things that I could fit into the weekend in south Florida.
Airboat ride
See Alligators up close
See the Everglades
Party in Miami
Lounge on the beach
Watch Swamp Buggy Races!!

Here are some photos from the weekend.

Before getting on the airboat in the Everglades.

He was maybe 10' from the boat...whoa

Looking out over the beach.

Ft Lauderdale and Miami were just over flowing with excess spending.

Two of the buggies getting ready to start.

The buggies had up to 900hp and would fly down the water/mud track.

Fortune cookie

So I was in San Francisco last weekend, pics to come, and I bought two bags of chocolate/regular fortune cookies from a little fortune cookie factory/sweat shop in china town. So I crack one open just know and the fortune is:

Seek out the significance of your problem at this time.
Try to understand.

What the hell is that? My fortune pretty much told me to deal with it, what ever it is. The reason I go to the fortune cookie is to understand life's mysteries.

Full circle

I pretty much heart irony. Its the kind of thing that even when its something bad you have to marvel at it. Well, a while back I had a great idea and after telling my brother apparently I totally forgot about it until he reminded me about it just this afternoon.

Now before I toss the idea out there for public consumption I need to put the following disclaimer, I have given to the homeless/less fortunate in the past and will continue to in the future. One of my pet peeves is someone taking advantage of people.

There are some establishments that you can't walk through the parking lot with out getting panhandled for money. I've seen them carrying cell phones and asking for money, I had one dude at a truck stop in New Mexico asking me for money to fix a flat tire to make it home while he stood next to his car with all four tires ok but he had had his hood up obviously from earlier lies.

The idea I told my brother was that I need to make some waaaay fake checks that I can carry just for the occasion when I'm being panhandled by someone who is just taking advantage of the average passerby.

Panhandler: "sir, could you spare some change? I need gas to make it back home to __________"
Marshall: "Oh, I'm so sorry to hear about your ploy. I don't have much money but I think I could spare a few dollars for such a purpose. I don't have any cash on me but I could make a check out for ten dollars and I'll just fill in with 'TO: CASH'. How about that?
Panhandler: "That would be great. Thank you so much and God Bless you."

I think I would be fine spending a few moments writing my fake check knowing that they would have been duped.

Another good one

So even though my friends/family know I have a blog it slips their minds and goes under the radar, so I have the freedom to post practical jokes that I'm playing pretty much with impunity.

About two months ago I'm over at my brother's house enjoying a meal and chit-chating with him and his wife when I am on there computer and notice that they are still logged into Netflix. Wanting to have some fun I add Brokeback Mountain to their queue knowing that neither of them would want to watch it to see what happens.

A couple of weeks go by and I forgot about the netflix thing until I stop by and my brother says they watched it and gave his review.

So two weeks after that I go over to babysit my neice and nephew while they are away. I take the oppurtunity to add some more fun to the Netflix queue.
I add, Trained in the Ways of Men, Happy Endings, and Transamerica. I don't have a clue what they were about other than they were in the Gay & Lesbian genre and they sounded funny.

Fast forward to last week and I'm having dinner with my brother and his wife having completely forgotten about this joke. My brother thanks me for Trained in the ways of Men and Happy Endings...bahahaha. I couldn't stop laughing. They tried to watch both assuming that the other had put it in the Netflix queue. I love having fun.

New York photos

Was in NYC weekend before last to hang out with a couple of friends. Went to the last two touristy places I missed over the summer, the Intrepid and the Natural History Museum. Here are some photos:

Me messing around on the Intrepid.

Ashley, Me, and Peter waiting on some food.

Me...being awesome.

Before I post this last picture I wanted to introduce it. I pretty much think this exhibit was designed by the summer intern or something as I think it is blatantly made up.

Now come on. The museum was trying to pass off some sort of swimming unicorn. I bet that the supposed horn was actually the weapon that killed the beast but since someone unburied it with it in this shape and the poor guy needed a research paper topic we now have to pretend that this swimming unicorn existed at some point.

On a pretty cool side note. This was my first touristy trip where I left my camera behind and just took my camera-phone, so all these shots where from my phone. These shots and others leave me believing that I made the right choice with my new phone (Motorola ZN5). As Peter put it, I have a camera with a phone in it.

Salmonella...

Pretty miserable day at work today and I get to my car and notice I have a voice mail. New voice mail is always excited as its like opening a non-junk mail letter.

It's from Ralph's (grocery store chain) saying that a recent purchase of mine is being recalled. I check the website and some bakery cookies I purchased last week were made with peanut butter that could be linked to a recent investigation into the Peanut Corporation of America. Whew, that was a close one, I was this close to eating the last two cookies in the container...

Mini

So I was wandering walmart this evening buying light bulbs and came across mini hot dogs.
Seems like a pretty solid buy. They are about the size of a pinky finger....so I guess its like eating delicious little fingers.
Kind of wish I could find some little hot dog buns to go with them. Oh snap..or I could just cram like four of them in a regular size hot dog bun.

Outside the box

Found this cartoon while stumbling the other day. Thought it was worth sharing.