Author: Nick

Well, Fezboy is back. Whatever that means. . . It’s been a long time in coming, but I hope you will be pleased. Since I’ve spent the majority of this day working on the redesign, content will have to suffer. Anyway, good to see you again. More later . . .

Listening to the radio today, I encountered "The Last Straw."

What exactly is it about the word "billion" that forces every broadcaster in the English language to hesitate a half-moment and then explosively with the "B" sound say, "Billions"? I’ll take the time later to find a link for the unimaginative, but here is an example in context

"Today, President George W. Bush announced a four-hundred [pause] Billion dollar tax break to huge corporations . . ."

It is as if we, mere mortals, are supposed to cringe and gnash our teeth, rending our clothes at the mention of the word "billion." As if Americans have not been running a multi-trillion dollar deficit for decades now, we are supposed to be dazed, frightened, or sufficiently awed by the use of the word "billion."

Well, sorry . . . Fezboy! is not. I say fuck their explosive B’s and pandering pronunciations. I refuse to be impressed by Billions of anything. For all Fezboy! cares, they can Bite me, lick my Balls, or Bury their heads up their arses!

and good riddance I say

After putting in a totally useless day at home, I wandered into work and have now sucessfully wasted an entire evening.

Anyone know how to use CorelDraw 10?

Fezboy! would appreciate your input on how to use this wacky software and any references you have found particulalry useful.

Other than that, the apartment is still not cleaned, the laundry is not done, and my paper abstract remains untouched. An excellent spring break, eh?

Spent the entire evening wandering around the blogs of others. Now the feelings of inadequacy gently rip at my ego. Never fear, making a fool of myself has never stopped Fezboy! before. I only wish someone would come to my blog. I feel like Kilgore Trout – making love to the world with the windows open, not expecting anyone to actually watch.

I now have several designs I want to implement as well. Look for changes at some point. However, the semester is about to get really funky and there could a be a dearth of time for such inanities as redesigning this blog. In fact, it may be difficult to post regularly throughout the day. I do pledge to make at least one post, just to let my fan know the Fezboy! is still typing, if not breathing.

I would like to rant about my instructor’s email message received today. A class project (and oh, lord, what am I doing in this class?) I recently completed was to mock up a web site for an imaginary company or organization. While not expressly encouraged, I used 4.0 transitional and CSS to put the site together. I got a message from him today stating that I needed to comply with the requirements of the assignment and eliminate the CSS.

Whatthefuck??

Nevermind that CSS is the W3C recommendation and that the use of such tacky things like <b> or <i> tags are deprecated by 4.0 or that 4.0 and 4.01 are both outdated standards themselves, I need to bring my site into compliance. Nevermind that I complied with the distasteful practice of using an unordered list to put a table of contents at the top of my site. Nevermind that I complied with every other whack and bad design oriented requirement for this crappy assignment – I need to drop the CSS.

Let Fezboy! know if you can find any prohibition against using CSS in this assignment. I sure as hell can’t.

Anyway, Fezboy! probably signed his own death warrant in this class because he fired off an email to his instructor conveying the general gist of this rant, replete with links to W3C, the course syllabus, and a position paper on CSS vs. style tags in HTML that weighed quite heavily against the latter.

Who wanted to go back to grad school anyway?

Egads! How does the time fly?

Fezboy! spent a wild and crazy weekend in the thriving metropolis of Chicago. Upon arriving back in Flowertown, I have been busy getting projects together for school and baseball. However, it is no excuse. Regular posts to follow . . .*he says with renewed committment*

Youshoulda seen the guys who came to rid the attic of raccoons this morning. A pair of mullets who went by the names of Mike and (I’m not kidding here) Bone Daddy. The pair was definitely scary in a "Deliverence" sort of way. Bone Daddy looked like he would be perfectly comfortable having someone "squeeeaalll like a piggie." He also reeked heavily of patchouli oil and was wearing some sort of bear claw necklace. At any rate, the two ventured off into our attic and poked around for a time before coming back to say that, "Yup, there’s been a couple of critters up thar." I’m not kidding about the "critters" or "thar" either.

Anyway, last night there were no noises. I think the raccoons have moved on, finding the wife and Fezboy! unfit as neighbors after all. In case they return, there is a Saf-T-Trap chock full of kitty food to lure them into a "relocation" program. Hooray! I can finally sleep at night.

Sorry, not much time this morning. The raccoons were back last night. Back, hell, they live in the attic now. They were doing some kind of landscaping up there or something. The burrowing lasted for most of the night. I kept expecting one to dig through their floor (my ceiling) and land in me lap as I sat up in bed cursing their existence.

My apologies to PETA in advance, but I think a couple of raccoons have earned themselves a nice frosty glass of Arsenic-Ade.

Well, off to interview for a school mentoring program. Someone is actually going to trust Fezboy! to mentor a child. The scary part is, Fezboy! will probably be the most stable adult in this kid’s life. People scare me.

Anywho – wish me luck. More later

Raccoon Update

I think they made it in last night. Sometime around 3:30 this morning they really went to work on the eaves over the bedroom window. I looked out the window at one point, and there were two of them scratching and ripping at the loose board. They seemed unfazed by my sudden appearance at the window, and even seemed to stare back, imploring me to climb out and help them rip up the roof on the house.

In the way of background, last fall a family of raccoons (do they come in families?) moved into the attic of the house our flat is in. There was a loose board in the eaves and the managed to eek out a little doorway to the attic. Well, they just happened to pick the wrong week to move in because the landlord had the roof redone that weekend. While the roofers were up there, they patched the hole after having the occupants "removed." We felt a bit bad for the recently homeless family, but they keep outrageous hours, even by college town standards. Anyway, we didn’t hear from them this winter until two nights ago. Either it is the same family, or no one got around to taking our attic off of the real estate listings in the Raccoon Weekly. So we’ve got neighbors again

While there is a sense of pleasure associated with being thought of as good neighbors, the kind of folks you’d tunnel through the eaves to live with, the nightly disco party at 3 a.m. will probably get old quickly. However, perhaps is won’t be so noisy tonight since the majority of the construction work is done. I only hope they don’t decide to finish their basement or put on an addition. There is plenty of room up there already.

I also have fears that they’ll start subleasing some of the space. Raccoons are okay, but what if they let out space to some possums from the wrong side of town. Birds are also kind of messy and I just don’t know what they will do to the property values. Anyway, I hope our landlord screens the new occupants closely.

Anyhoo – I should have went to bed earlier because they started in right about the same time I was finally able to drift off. Needless to say, I’m strictly coffee-powered today.