Tonight is our first actor meeting. Last year we expected 3 people to show up at the first actor meeting. We had like 60 people show up. This year, we’re expecting around 30 or so, which means that we will have 3 show up. Tonight could be really good, or really bad. So I’m not sure if I’m looking forward to it, or dreading it. We’ll see as the day progresses. In the meantime, like I have in the past three days, I’m going to come up with another new room design to try and freshen up the “haunts”.

Okay, I never knew that the song was called Voices Carry….because I never knew that’s what they say. Always sounded like s-s-scary to me. Thanks to Peck for letting me rip this VH1’s I love the 80’s CD. Now I know, and knowing is half the battle! Go Joe!

I think it’s funny. Thanks to Tommy over at ExplorerX for this one:

A Husband takes his wife to play her first game of golf.

Of course, the wife promptly hacked her first shot right through the window of the biggest house adjacent to the course.

The husband cringed, “I warned you to be careful! Now
we’ll have to go up there, find the owner, apologize and see how much your lousy drive is going to cost us.”

So the couple walked up to the house and knocked on the door. A warm voice said, “Come on in.” When they opened the door they saw the damage that was done: glass was all over the place, and a broken antique bottle was lying on its side near the pieces of window glass. A man reclining on the couch asked, “Are you the people that broke my window?”

“Uh…yeah, sir. We’re sure sorry about that,” the husband replied.

“Oh, no apology is necessary. Actually I want to thank
you. You see, I’m a genie, and I’ve been trapped in that bottle for a thousand years. Now that you’ve released me, I’m allowed to grant three wishes. I’ll give you each one wish, but if you don’t mind, I’ll keep the last one for myself.”

“Wow, that’s great!” the husband said. He pondered a
moment and blurted out, “I’d like a million dollars a year for the rest of my life.”

“No problem,” said the genie. “You’ve got it, it’s the
least can do. And I’ll guarantee you a long, healthy life!And now you, young lady, what do you want?” the genie asked.

“I’d like to own a gorgeous home complete with servants in every country in the world,” she said.

“Consider it done,” the genie said. “And your homes will always be safe from fire, burglary and natural disasters!”

“And now,” the couple asked in unison, “what’s your wish, genie?”

“Well, since I’ve been trapped in that bottle, and haven’t been with a woman in more than a thousand years, my wish is to have sex with Your wife.”

The husband looked at his wife and said, “Gee, honey, you know we both now have a fortune, and all those houses. What do you think?”

She mulled it over for a few moments and said, “You know, you’re right. Considering our good fortune, I guess I wouldn’t mind, but what about you, honey?”

“You know I love you sweetheart,” said the husband. “I’d do the same for you!”

So the genie and the woman went upstairs where They spent the rest of the afternoon enjoying each other. The genie was insatiable. After about three hours of non-stop sex, the genie rolled over and looked directly into her eyes and asked, “How old are you and your husband?”

“Why, we’re both 35,” she responded breathlessly.

“No Kidding,” he said. “Thirty-five years old and both of
you still believe in genies?”

Something Kel and I noticed at dinner last night.

If you’re fat, don’t wear a really short skirt. I mean REALLY short. If you do decide to wear a really short skirt…..wear underwear. Seriously. Blech.

Happy anniversary to us! I make the joke that it seems like it’s only been 10 years since we’ve been married, but honestly, I can’t beleive it’s been a year already. Talk about time flying. Good times though!

HAPPY 1 YEAR ANNIVERSARY BABY!!

Kel and I went to Burger King the other day and we both got whoppers. They’re having a promotion right now where you get a free music download with every whopper purchase. So I gave it a shot last night. Here’s the skinny.

The files you download are in Windows Media Audio (.WMA) format at 128kbs. You can only listen to the files you download, on the computer you downloaded them on. You can’t copy songs from one computer to another. You can burn them to cd 5, but only 5 times. Also, you can only download 4 songs a day. This is to try a deter you from hijacking a truck full of whopper wrappers.

So, is it worth it for one song? Let’s see. First, I downloaded two songs. The search is okay, but it seems that the selection is a little lacking. It has most of the popular music right now, but most of that is garbage. No, Ashlee Simpson is not pretty, and no she can’t sing for shit. Anyway, I found a couple of songs to download. The download was fast enough. The first thing I did, of course, was copy the tracks to my other computer to see if I could play them. It wouldn’t work. Okay, so their copyright crap is working. Back to the laptop, I then burned an audio CD containing the songs. What this did was convert he songs from .wma to .wav. I then took this cd and popped it into my desktop. I brought up Musicmatch Jukebox and ripped the songs off of the cd in .mp3 format. The only thing I had to do was manually set the track tags. I then added these files to my music library in iTunes, and ultimately onto my iPod. Each time you rip, or re-rip music it looses a bit of quality. So the test is to see what the end result sounds like. On my iPod, it sounds pretty good. I was actually surprised at how good it ended up sounding, considering.

What I ended up with was two mp3’s on my desktop that I can do whatever I want with. In this day and age, limiting a download to one computer is stupid. Almost everyone I know has multiple computers, and it’s dumb to ask them to waste two download codes, just so they can listen to their favorite song on both of their own computers. This might not be why this system is in place, but it is definitely a negative by product of it.

Again, is it worth it? If you could download more than 4 songs a day, maybe it would be. But since you have to edit your tags manually, which is kind of a pain, it’s not really worth the time. In the time it took me to get these two tracks from my laptop, to usable files on my desktop, I could have downloaded 3 cd’s from KazaaLite. And it cost me a blank CD-R in the process.

Conclusion: Burger King free download with whopper deal=crap

“If it wasn’t for luck, I’d win every game”

That is a quote by Phil Helmuth Jr. Phil Helmuth Jr. is a professional poker player. He’s been a world champion, and he’s won 9 WSOP (world series of poker) bracelets. 9 WSOP bracelets is tied for the most all time. He has a poker book….a damn good poker book. With all of these accomplishments, do you know what he’s known for? For being a whiner. He’s very vocal at the poker table. He bitches about bad beats, dumb calls and blind luck. Is that wrong? When is it okay to complain about a bad beat? Is it only okay to complain when the person doing it doesn’t win much?

I’m fed up with people bitching at me, the same argument over and over. Why is it okay for you to complain about a call, but not for me? Why can you say this person played dumb, or that person made a dumb call, but I can’t. I wasn’t even at the game last night, and Billy tells me that a bunch of people were jumping on his shit for what they considered bad calls. The thing that makes me laugh is that if I was the one jumping on his shit, I would, yet again, be called a whiner or an asshole. A bunch of fucking hypocrites. Period. Fact is, if you’ve ever complained about a hand, you can’t bitch at someone else for doing it.

And for all you thin skinned people, if someone bitches about a call you made, after you take a pot from them, there is absolutely no reason for you to get pissed off. You played that hand for whatever reason, and you won. If someone bitching about your play bothers you that much, stay away from the poker table. You don’t belong there.

Everyone deals with their ups and downs at the poker table differently. Me? I express my feelings right then and there. I’ll bitch, yell, whatever I feel fits the situation. I even kicked my chip case once. I stay mad about 20 minutes, and thats it. Then I’m back to joking with everyone, dealing, or whatever. Some people don’t say anything until the next day. Some people don’t say anything at all. They just grab their keys and leave. My question is why is one better than the other? I prefer my method. Within a half hour I’ve complained and gotten over it. Is that so bad? Bad enough for people to call me a whiner behind my back. On a side note, to the pussies who don’t have th balls to say that shit to my face, go fuck yourselves. You know who you are….and so do I.

So, why me? Why do people bitch about me when I complain? Joey and I came up with the reason. And it wasn’t hard to figure out. Hell, people have flat out told me this was the reason. Because I’m in first place. Easy target I guess. This brings me to my next point about who plays cards with us.

Joey and I had a good conversation tonight. We were talking about complaining and complaints. He said something that made me think. What I came up with is that there are two people that we play cards with. “Friends” and “other”. We might be close to the time we recycle the “other”. I’m getting pretty testy at the poker table with people bitching. I think it’s because I’m sick of the same old complaints. The problem is, it’s never the people that push you to the edge that get the brunt of your wrath, it’s the innocent that nudges you over. That’s what I’m going to try and stop.

All hell, I had a lot more to type, but I’m tired. It’d 4:00am, and I’m going to bed now.

So I’m waiting in my car for billy to arrive at the haunted house yesterday. Billy pulls up, and mouths the phrase “what the hell are we doing here” through the windshield, lol. I then proceeded to get out of my truck, and welcome Billy back “home”.

I admit, I was nervous. I almost wanted the bad news that we couldn’t do the haunted house again, just so we wouldn’t have to bust our asses ilke we did last year. But going to the house yesterday was good for us. At least I beleive it was. Walking through, and seeing what was all still there really helped to put things in perspective. Are we really that far behind? Yes. The real question is can we get done, what needs to be done. The answer to that, is of course, yes.

Right now we are at just about the same place we were at last year at this time. The major difference being that we aren’t rookies this year. We aren’t flying blind like last year, making it up as we go along. We know what needs to be done, and we know how to do it. I can honestly say that I walked out of that building last night feeling comfortable about our situation. Am I nervous? Sure. But there are a few things I know not to do this year.

One, I’m not counting on anyone but myself. Especially friends. A society where someones word is their bond in long dead. I no longer count on anything unless it’s physically happening.
Two, kids are kids. And having a bunch of kids working for you, sucks. Last year I was the bad cop. I was the one who yelled at the kids when they screwed up. At least when it was bad enough that it needed to come from me instead of Tony. I will admit though, that was kind of fun.
Three, we are going to have a good time, because we always have a good time. That’s the best part about partnering with these guys. No matter what the job is, no matter how hard the workload is, we always have fun.

So today I work at Rayl. I leave here around 4:30, drive home, hop on the treadmill for a few minutes, take a quick shower, then leave again. Pick up some Red Bulls and go to work. This will be my regiment for the next month and a half. It’s exhausting. The vright side is that we’re only going to be open Thurs, Fri and Sat this year. This gives us more time to get things done on the off days.

Punch in punch out- Seven Mary Three on the iPod

Just testing changes made to the server.

We got the news. The building that we had the haunted house in last year, is available for us this year. They could have waited til October first to tell us…bastards. But in any case, we’re going with it again this year.

Last year was a learning experience for us. This year will be totally different than last. It should be good. The downside, we have a TON of work to do over the next week. The upside, the house is still up from last year since we never knew if we should take it down or not.

So, for the next month and a half, I will basically be out of commision. No social time for me. That means that poker is out for me, unless it’s an after the haunted house game like we did a few times last year. Other than those, I’m out. The game on Friday will probably be cancelled now, although there are a lot of people that wast to play in game two, including myself, so maybe we’ll just start later. I think that anyone that wants to continue to play, should make an effort to get everyone else’s numbers this weekend. For this next month and a half, I WILL NOT be the go-between for all you guys trying to get games together. Normally, I don’t mind so much, but I literally will not have the extra time to make phone calls.

Maybe I will run a late game on Friday, or see if Chris will, to get everyone together so you guys can exchange numbers. Hmm, let me see….