My prank on A was so good, she thought it was Google’s prank! I had changed all her iGoogle stuff to be in German, including widgets all in German and a different theme and everything. I used Google Translate to put instructions on how to restore the backup I made beforehand, but she didn’t bother with it - just went to the tab where I had stashed all her real widgets. It wasn’t until tonight that I prodded her about it and she said “oh that was you!”

Tomorrow I am going to these people to see about buying my Epoqs. VR has new rules that mean I would have to wait more than a year for service, and very probably longer, so I didn’t even bother opening a file. I will get a trial period through these people, so I get to figure it all out and stuff.

I left school early today - skipped linguistics class and College Bowl practice - because I am all anxious and depressed and don’t feel good. I think I am better now though. A and I just finished watching Gypsy 83 and I feel okay.

Also, my story and picture finally got published in Budget Travel magazine’s funny travel stories contest! check it out!

OH HAI
I MADED SUM LOLCATS FOR DA CONTEST
THEY NOT DOIN SO WELL IN VOTING
PLEEZ VOTE HEER AN HERE
KTHXBAI

If you know me, you know I love to travel. You also know that I don’t care where I’m going! I would travel just about anywhere except places where the State Department’s travel warnings are particularly grave. But I would go anywhere in the United States as long as it was free! You can win a Free Raleigh Giveaway from their Convention and Visitors Bureau. This opportunity brings you to a city that has been around since 1788, which has great weather year-round (average 38.9° in Janary and 77.1° in August). During the time that the fall getaway is offered, temperatures will be in the 50s and 60s!

It might seem that Raleigh is not a particularly interesting place to visit, but that’s not so! For children, there’s the new Marbles Kids Museum, which was formed by a merger of PlaySpace and Exploris museums. Anyone interested in history would enjoy the North Carolina Museum of History, there’s an art museum, and for those who love motorcycles, there’s the massive Harley Davidson Museum and dealership! There’s also more than 150 parks and recreation facilities.

If you win the giveaway, you’ll receive one night accommodations for two at the Courtyard by Marriott, a $25 gift certificate to the renowned Bloomsbury Bistro, and a pair of tickets for to the NC Theatre’s production of Man of La Mancha, the Landscapes from the Age of Impressionism exhibit at the art museum, and the upcoming Dinosaurs exhibit at the natural history museum. It’s free to enter, so have fun!

This is so cool - I’m taking a bit of a break from PayPerPost because I earned my iPod money, but I got picked to host a secret puzzle piece as part of the hunt from HP! I think the prize is an HP camera, but I’m not sure. So if you’re looking for that secret piece, here it is! (I’m not actually getting paid for this post, BTW - it’s just for the hunt.)

Tonight we went to Tortilla Flats for dinner; we made sure to mention to the manager on duty that their website was broken. We ordered a pitcher of margaritas, though, so I am quite funny right now. What’s amazing is that I won bingo! They have trivia nights on Sundays, and I sort-of won that once before but there was a tie so I made our friend C chug the beer for mee, but tonight was bingo night and I won that outright. What’s amazing is that it was free to participate, as opposed to the only other time I play bingo ever, which is on a cruise ship and NOT free.

I had filled up on hoppin’ john earlier in the day and I wasn’t planning to eat, but after a margarita and a half, the chips and salsa weren’t enough and I ended up ordering nachos (which were nowhere near as good as I was expecting). But it was fun to win bingo; in addition to a plastic lei and a round of tequila shots for my table, I also got an Ernest Borgnine Night t-shirt (apparenly he patronizes that restaurant) and a “Big Bingo Winner” Tequila Flats t-shirt, which was the only prize I’m actually happy to have won - even though nobody back home will know what Tortilla Flats is.

Anyway, boroparkpyro called while we were at the restaurant, and we’re having lunch tomorrow before my 3:00pm bus. Hopefully he didn’t detect on the phone that I’d already had a couple of margaritas, and doesn’t think I’m crazy! Tonight was fun and lunch tomorrow should be too.

I really wanted to go to Tasti-D-Lite after dinner, but I was persuaded to settle for a pint of ice cream from a deli, because of how drunk I still am.

eudyptes sent me to Firefox Flicks, where users can submit video testimonials for Firefox. The weekly winners get $50 Amazon gift certificates and Mozilla schwag, and the grand prize winner gets $500 from Amazon. So I made a long and fancy video testimonial, complete with subtitles, only to find out that Firefox Flicks insists that you upload directly through their site - and they only give you 30 seconds! So my nice script was pretty much useless, and I just said something along the lines of “Uhh…Firefox is great! It has lots of options! It’s a great product! Go ahead, try Firefox TODAY! What are you waiting for?!” So I made the fancy one into a blog entry instead, and uploaded it here. I won’t bother posting a translation here because it’s subtitled! (I’m not sure if I’ll try that again…it was kind of a pain.)

Added: The testimonial I actually submitted to them can be found here but it’s pretty cheesy.

I forgot to mention this earlier, but our kitty Amanita is apparently deaf. She’s probably about nine or ten years old, and she recently had ear mites, but those have been cleared up. We’re not sure how long she’s been deaf, but my brother-in-law pointed it out to us this morning so we did the usual tests and didn’t even get a flicked ear. We’re holding off on bringing her to the vet because she acts fine and we don’t really feel like dealing with another veterinary crisis right now.

• I am mildly disappointed that I did not make it onto the Babes of Xmas list, but I came in #106 out of 277, which is not bad. Thank you to the 39 people who voted for me a total of 90 times!
• I found this collection of antique photos of Baltimore, including this cool one of the Power Plant pre-corporate influence. Another cool one, of the B&O Building is here - kind of eerie!
• I really, really should not interpret important meetings before having some form of caffeine. This is especially true if said meeting involves a lot of voicing. Because that meeting, um, sucked.
• I’m still obsessed with Faerie Bubbles.

I subscribe to Lucky magazine because I wish I could afford the stuff in it. I can’t, but I just know if I could, and if they came in my size, I would be instantly supah-cool! Anyway, for those of you into shopping, here are some of the deals and contests from the Lucky Breaks section in the October issue. For all deals, the code to enter at checkout is “luckymag” and for all contests, click the “Lucky Breaks” icon on the site.
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Hey, I forgot all about this! I was going to submit more pictures for my gallery (that link NSFW) and I didn’t get around to it - damn. Anyway, I was nominated to be one of the 12 Babes of Xmas, and I’d actually like to make it onto the calendar. If you would be so kind as to vote for me (I’m on page 6), that would be awesome. It would be great if you used all 12 of your votes for me, but if you must vote for others than I would like to recommend britgeekgrrl, dorei, and leanasidhe. But seriously, vote for me. 12 times, if you please - click once and then reload the result page 11 times!

What a cosmic surprise - I’ve won at Blingo. I couldn’t sleep because I kept feeling anxious about the situation with my co-worker, so I got up and got the computer out again. I intended to just slink around on Second Life for a while, but I watched the Gmail Notifier cycle through my new e-mails. I saw there was one that said I’d won at Blingo! Talk about perking up from a funk!

I opened the e-mail immediately, and it turned out that Fellow Eskimo, who had signed up through me, won a Sony Playstation Portable while logged in at Blingo! According to the tiered structure, that meant I won the same prize. I just about fell down with excitement as I ran to tell my wife about it before running back downstairs so she could try to fall asleep again. When I pulled up the prize claim page, it gave me the option of the PSP or $249 cash. I logged onto LambdaMOO to consult with friends there, and most of them encouraged me to take the PSP. I thought about it and realized that even if I had a PSP, it was unlikely I would actually play with it very often - better to spend the cash on something I’d really use. So I filled in the form, and *poof* I’d won the cash! (sorry firesign3000) I have no idea what I’ll spend it on - all of the things I was considering recently are still possibilities.