|
tomdo98@aol.com |
||
|
Archives
Picture Portfolios Wendy's Going Away Party and Hung's Christmas Party Wardro p90X watch
Random Pictures
Longhorns are National Champs!! Longhorns are National Champs! (1/4/2006)
Go Horns! The start of the Horn's disappointing season (10/31/2006)
Watch your back BJ Penn, I got my blue belt in Brazilian Jujitsu!
Everyone should try to quit smoking. Smoke free 2.5 years. (pictured in 2002)
Really gay over the shoulder pose. (pictured in 2003)
Jujitsu/MMA commentary updated 12/04/07
|
April 2008 Archives |
movie reviews updated 04/16/2008
Painting and Drawing updated 2/21 Click on head for pics ordered by updates
Repeat Topics
|
|
04/28/2008 Why Would Anyone Buy A Pick Up Truck In This Day and Age?
I just bought gas this morning and the image above shows what I just paid. I pretty much have to get gas once a week. I believe my MPG is like 16 or something.
Some of you may have read earlier this month or last month that I was thinking about getting a Toyota Tundra. With gas prices skyrocketing, why would I or anyone else get a non fuel efficient car?
First of all, I just need a new car. My tires are getting bald and I feel my brakes are starting to vibrate heavily again like it did a couple of years ago. I need to get a new car before there is another significant repair that I need to make similar to the one I did in early March where a short in my fan prevented my car from even starting. I need a new car because my car sounds like you're driving through a wind tunnel due to faulty body work by CRC Body. My car may have another 10 years in it for all I know but my tires won't last another 3 months and I don't want to put another penny in this car so it's just time for a new, reliable car that would probably save me money in the long run.
The gas doesn’t really bother me that much because a truck actually burns a similar amount of gas to the SUV that I own. Now why wouldn’t I take this opportunity to just a buy a car that burns less gas? Mainly because most coupes that I can afford aren’t very interesting. I would like a Lexus or a BMW but those are definitely out of my price range. I could get a Camry or Accord or something but I’d probably pass out in my car while I’m driving it because it’s so boring.
A truck on the other hand can haul ANYTHING. You may ask, what would you haul Tommybear? I’ve “hauled” a million things in my life. I’ve hauled my bowflex, my television, my elliptical machine, my furniture, my mom’s books, my karaoke equipment, art equipment, and a number of other things that would absolutely not fit in a sedan. It’s not like I’m moving a million cement blocks a day but it’s nice to be able to transport stuff.
I decided to test the market by asking one Toyota dealership if he would knock $3,000 off of MSRP AND give me 0% financing. If you noticed the truck month ads from Toyota, it says it will give you $3000 off OR 0% financing. To my delight, the dealer emailed me back pretty quickly and said they would give me $3,700 off AND 0% financing. Pretty good deal right?
Just to make sure this was the best deal in town, I emailed another Toyota dealership and he said: "We're discounting ours $4,628.00 including $1,000.00 rebate plus 0% on in stock units"
I'm still not sure if that means $4,628 off and that includes your rebate or I get a total of $5,628 off. Hopefully it means that I get $5,628 off but even if I get $4,628 off, it's still more than the other Toyota dealership. I turned in my credit application yesterday and the dude said my credit is fine.
I'm going to the dealership tomorrow. Let's see if they find a way to snake out of it. |
||
|
04/28/2008 Pictures From Friday. Robb's Made It Into UT and Wendy's Back For a Visit
Robb's Graduation gifts from Mandy and I.
Flemings
You're not supposed to see my arm
|
||
|
04/24/2008 Some Pictures Trina Took At Golf, Maudie's, And Mertz's Birthday
I played golf for the first time in like 2 years last Saturday. I have my own clubs, been to the driving range a bunch of times, and probably have played entire rounds about 20 times in my life. And yet, I am no better than Wardro who's played a full round maybe one time and has been to the driving range only on a handful of occasions.
That's not saying Wardro and I are any good. That's just saying that I'm pretty bad and basically not much better than a beginner. I do remember that when I first tried to play that I was much worse than I am now. I remember not being able to make contact with the ball after swinging several times in a row or whacking the dirt so hard the club can't make it to the ball. Now I can always hit the ball but I might put too much top, hit too much dirt, hook it, or slice it. I'll make a decent shot only about once out of every 4 or 5 tries.
Last Saturday, eight of us got together and split up into two teams. We played with best ball rules which basically means everyone on the team hits the ball once and then on the next shot, you play the best ball. Everyone else picks up their ball and the team gets one score.
That was actually pretty fun because I didn't have to constantly hack at my own sucky ball. One of the crappy things about golf is when you play with people of differing skill levels. If you’re the worst one, you could be shooting an 8 on a par 4 and have everyone stare at you from the green as you constantly chip it in the trees. With the scramble, we played everyone's ball at least a few times.
|
||
|
04/22/2008 Yesterday's Bowling Results
We won all 7 points.
|
||
|
04/21/2008 Man Trapped in Elevator For 41 hours
I wouldn't watch this video if you get nightmares easily or you become easily paranoid. This is 41 hours sped up to 3 minutes that shows a surveillance video of a man stuck in an elevator for 41 straight hours over a weekend. This was back in 1999 so it's not like now where everyone had a cell phone and apparently the elevator phone wasn't working. He was leaving for an 11 pm cigarette break on a Friday when it happened so in addition to being stuck in a tiny box for almost two days, he was also fiending for his nicotine.
|
||
|
04/21/2008 Netflix's Dirty Little Secret Part 2
To test out my theory a little more, I made sure to put nothing else in my queue except Juno and Walk Hard. Juno is listed as LONG WAIT for Blue Ray. There was about a day delay since I returned my last movie where I had nothing coming in but sure enough, this morning, Juno is scheduled to be shipped to me today. I KNOW that if I had anything else in my queue, they would not have shipped Juno and would have just told me it was a very LONG WAIT for as long as I had something else in my queue they could ship me. Since when is LONG WAIT truly one day?
In the end, I think I want Blockbuster online anyways because of the 5 store transactions I can get a month and because I am in walking distance of it I can always see if there are extra copies of hot movies. |
||
|
04/18/2008 Netflix's Dirty Little Secret
I've been using Netflix for only about a month and I'm not really active with the queue like some people are. For those of you that don't know, Netflix is a service where you can pick your movies online and they deliver them to your door through the regular mail. To determine what movies you want, you pick movies from their online catalog and put it in your queue. You rank movies in your queue in order of what you want to see first.
For example, in my queue, I may have There Will Be Blood as number 1 and Land of the Lost Disc 1 as number 2. If for some reason There Will Be Blood is on “Wait” (it can be short wait, long wait, or very long wait) Land of the Lost will leap frog the number one position and get mailed to me before There Will Be Blood.
I seem to have had pretty good luck with my Netflix selections and I almost never have to wait for any of my movies. Some of the hot movies that I've gotten right away are Sweeney Todd, Into the Wild, No Country For Old Men, and the Assasination of Jesse James. My friend at work, on the other hand, has had terrible luck and all of the movies I've just named are on her queue as very long wait. Not only were these new releases in her queue as very long wait, but there were some really stale movies in her queue as very long wait that have been out for months. Some are ok movies like American Gangster (there are like 100 unrented copies of this movie at your local Blockbuster right now), but she also has some ridiculous ones like No Reservations (which is god awful and has been out for several months.)
What could the problem be? Was it the luck of the draw? An issue of distribution centers? Timing? My friend calls Netflix and complains and in what I believe was a huge slip up by the operator, she gets a real answer and not a phony excuse. The operator told her that people whose accounts were less active gets preferences to movies. I average about 3 movies or less a week like most people. It's pretty difficult to get more than 3 movies a week even if you watch them right away just because there's always a day delay for the mail. So what was so different between my account and hers? My queue only has about 3 or 4 movies at a time. Her queue has over 1000. In fact, she had multiple queues that she likes to switch around that has thousands of movies a piece.
I think Netflix's logic is if a customer like myself only has 3 or 4 movies in his queue, he's going to be angry that he can't hold 3 movies at a time because of lack of supply. He would definitely quit being subscriber if he pays for 3 movies at a time and can barely get one. Now my friend's queue on the other hand doesn't have that problem. Since she has thousands of movies in her queue, she will always have three movies at home because they can just keep sending her the crappy movies in her queue that no one wants to watch anyways. So she's basically getting penalized for being such a movie enthusiast and using the Netflix features to its fullest. I have put movies I barely want to see in my queue like The Warriors on Blue Ray and have seen it leap frog movies that are supposedly “Long Wait.” It seems like Netflix will always send you your crappy movies first and pretend like the other ones are “Long Wait.”
I think this algorithm is a company secret that the operator wasn't supposed to divulge. So if I want to keep getting fresh movies, I better keep my queue free and clear. Next up, Walk Hard and Juno. |
||
|
04/16/2008 2 Hour and 38 Minute Movie Doesn't Phase Me
When you can watch a 2 hour and 38 minute movie in one sitting without constantly checking the clock, you're watching a pretty good movie. There Will Be Blood is a movie starring Daniel Day Lewis written for the screen and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson who some of you might know made a couple of my favorite movies including Boogie Nights and Magnolia. He also did the lesser seen but still fantastic Punch Drunk Love (don't let the Adam Sandler casting deter you, this is not a comedy and Sandler does a great job) and Hard Eight (starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Sam Jackson, and John C Reilly).
Blood is a movie about an oil man looking for oil, digging for oil, and trying to get townspeople to sell him land so he can find even more oil. Not hooked yet? If anyone other than DDL was the star of this movie, I may have passed out after the first 30 minutes. DDL is mesmerizing to watch in Blood. There are some actors who overact all the time (see Jack Nicholson in the Departed) and some actors who do it all on subtlety (maybe Ethan Hawke?) but DDL in blood is a fantastic blend of quiet conflict and just plain old yelling and screaming.
Here's the scene they used at the Oscars. |
||
|
04/14/2008 Rage Against the Road
Every once in a while, I get in these road rage games. They're horrible, dangerous games that I wouldn't recommend anyone try but I just can't help myself. It must be a matter of respect or something. Why I should care that some random stranger driving some random car respects me I have no idea.
I remember one time I was in the left lane on I-35 just as traffic was about to clear up. I'm not going all that fast once all the cars disperse but there really isn't anyone on the highway. Out of nowhere this car speeds by me in the middle lane and cuts me off pretty severely, at least I remember it as being very severe. Just to paint the picture clearly, there is no one in the left lane that I'm in and there's no one in the middle lane for miles. It's not like he had to cut me off to get by me, he just wanted to do it because I was in the left lane and he wanted to be a punk. I'm all like, "Did that mother fucker just cut me off even though there's NO ONE on this goddamn highway?!? He doesn't know who he's messing with!" So I speed up and go after him. My goal is to cut him off and stay in front of him for an undetermined period of time to see how he likes it. I eventually do catch up with him because traffic ahead of us was beginning to get a little more congested. I drive miles and miles constantly switching lanes until I can get in that perfect spot that would prepare me to make my move. Of course based on his earlier behavior, I know that this driver is a very aggressive driver and follows people very closely so cutting him off would be difficult. I maintain speed for a while in the tiny gap that he's leaving with the car in front of him and I make my move into his lane. Honk! Honk! Honk! I just need to get my nose in. Honk! Honk! Honk! He has to slow down or he'll hit me. Of course he's a rational human being and isn't about to rear end me. Oh that rush of adrenaline and power washes over me. It was fantastic, there was just enough traffic where I could constantly go slower than ever because the semi to the left of us is preventing him from weaving around traffic. After a nice 15 minutes of this, my exit comes up and it's all over. It's a perfect ending because I was the one that decided that I was done being in front of him.
That brings me to my second road rage story that happened just recently. This is how it went down. I pull out of this garage and try to make a left turn before the light turned red. There are two lanes that turn left. Apparently, some sports utility vehicle like mine is also racing to make this yellow light and the driver feels like I turned too sharply and was on her side of the road a little bit. I make this drive every day of my workaday life and I know exactly which lanes that I have the right to and which lanes I don't. This turn lane basically turns into like 5 lanes but there's a dotted line that lets you know which of the 5 lanes you can go into first. So as this lady is passing me on the left, she honks at me and looks right at me and makes a sour face and shrugs at me as if to say, "What the fuck are you doing, asshole? Where'd you learn to drive?" I don't expect this at all and pretty much don't react right away because I can't quite process what's going on. Like I said, I make this turn every day and I've never seen this. Once I process everything I’m like A: I didn't do anything wrong and it's this bitch who doesn't know what lane she should be in and B: I'm not going out like a punk and let some lady give me a what-what face and not do anything. and then C: How is she going to disrespect me like that?!
So we're still at a light but the cars are still rolling so I roll up next to her with my sunglasses still on, I wield the most deadpan, expressionless face I can muster, and I give her a simple birdie. I'm not jamming it in the air or mouthing any curse words. I just let her know that I'm no punk and I got the last rude gesture.
Well little did I know that this lady was CRAZY and that little birdie would completely set her off. She eventually rolls up beside me as the traffic starts to move. This crazy bitch now has her windows rolled down and she's yelling and cussing up a storm. I think she actually believes that I'm going to roll my window down and have some cuss fight with her. That would be really stupid and not satisfying at all to have a yelling argument while we're driving. I take off and she takes off in the lane to the left of me. I know what she wants to do because it's what I would do. She wants to race past me and cut me off but I keep the gap in front of me really tight.
The poor bastard in front of me has no idea why I'm tailgating him all of the sudden. The lady can't cut me off in the middle lane so she moves behind me. There's one more lane to the right and I know she's going to go for it at any moment. I see her make her move so I immediately go right too and cut her off. HONK HONK! We're going fast at this point and I notice that she's in the lane beside me to the right. Is there a lane beside me to the right? NO! She's in like this extra shoulder where there are a lot of parked cars. I don't even look at her because I can't believe this crazy bitch is still beside me. Of course she has to break and go behind me again. It wouldn't have surprised me if I had heard the sound of her car smashing into parked cars. She busts over to the real middle lane and is still trying to get past me but to no avail. I make it all the way to MOPAC and half expect the game to be over but it isn't quite. Even though I'm ahead of her and traffic is at a complete stop she gets a little bit of her nose in my lane and just decides to come over. I’m actually not sure she got her nose in at all but she’s clearly coming into my lane. I keep it super tight to the point where no sane person would head in my direction. Apparently she decided that since we're only going 10 miles an hour, she was going to move into my lane whether or not I liked it and she was going to hit me if I didn't break. I almost ALMOST wanted her to hit me because at that angle, it would have clearly been her fault. As I start to imagine metal on metal, I see a huge dent in her bumper and I think of the ridiculous pain of having to get my car fixed, telling the cops our road rage story, and having to fight with this crazy bitch on the side of the road. With that huge dent in her bumper, I felt like the crazy bitch isn’t playing chicken. She’s playing for keeps so I back off and hit my breaks. BAH! I say the score is 1-1. |
||
|
04/11/2008 Sussudio
Ok last YouTube for a while.
Here's Arnold and Todd singing Sussudio back in 2006. Todd loves Karaoke! We're all planning to do Karaoke Part III with a Glam Rock/Hair Band theme sometime in May but I'm done being the KJ. I'll just bring the equipment. Someone else can run it.
They were actually singing all loud like that in an apartment. Them and about 50 other people all through the night. The cops were called and I remember looking out the peep hole and seeing the cop just standing there not moving. He had been standing right outside the door and listening to see for himself exactly how loud we were. I believe the hosts got a written warning.
|
||
|
04/11/2008 What What In the Butt Video is REAL and Has 9 Million Hits????
I didn't realize the What What in the Butt video that South Park had Butters do is real. It's so very real and so very gay.
Original
Side by Side with South Park version
|
||
|
04/10/2008 You Tube MVPs
Last night I watched a South Park episode that featured a bunch of infamous YouTube icons that are already basically pass their prime. Some of them I had seen before like the Sneezing Panda, Brittany guy, and Chocolate Rain (which was only like a few weeks ago) but some of them I had never heard of like Afro Ninja and Dramatic Gopher. I THINK I've seen laughing baby. Laughing baby has 44 million hits! Here are some of the originals after the South Park clip. The South Park episode has them all dueling to the death.
dramatic gopher 5 million hits
afro ninja 2 million hits
sneezing panda 10 million hits
numa numa 11 million hits
laughing baby 44 million hits
Star Wars kid 6 million hits
Tron Guy. This can't be the original video. It's so boring. |
||
|
04/08/2008 Mouse Pinky Callus
Just the other day I noticed the tip of my right pinky has a really dry spot. I thought it was pretty weird until I later noticed the way I hold my mouse.
Perhaps I hold my pinky out when I'm using a mouse much like a socialite might when they're drinking a cocktail. It appears that repetition of dragging my pinky on the mouse pad a million times a day is starting to build a little callus on my pinky tip. I'm going to have to look into a better made mouse pad rather than the one from 1999 that I'm using.
|
||
|
04/08/2008 Bowling Results
Won the first game, lost the second by 2, and then won the third and total points. We win 5-2.
|
||
|
04/07/2008 I'm Cereal About Sirius
I have horrible wires running all over my car. Mandy says it looks like someone hot wired my vehicle. It's worth it because now I have SIRIUS radio. I have been talking about getting a new car but now I might wait a few months just to save some money. A lot of new cars have Sirius radio built in.
One thing good about my old Jeep is that it has a tape deck. Having a tape deck means I can use a tape adaptor which is about 100 times better than any FM transmitter. I use my tape deck adaptor for my IPOD as well and it sounds pretty decent.
I didn't know exactly how great SIRIUS radio was until I listened to it in Mandy's new car. I basically can barely listen to only about 5 radio stations in Austin. Stupid MIX 94.7, 96.7, 95.5, BOB FM, and maybe a country station. And then sometimes I like to listen to FOX SPORTS 1300 for Sports Talk Radio. But often, there's a UT game and that prevents me from listening to AM 1300 because they cancel the broadcast of the normal Sports Talk Radio show to do a play by play of a baseball game or something. I don't know how anyone can listen to that.
Sirius radio has so many commercial free programs that it boggles my mind how great it is. Some channels do have some commercials but most channels don't have much or any. Even if I can get free MP3s, I still have to sort of know what I want. By now I have pretty much every song that I can think of off the top of my head which doesn't get me very far. I guess at this point, I just need the songs fed to me mixed up by someone else.
I used to watch Howard Stern on E! all the time and sometimes I would catch him on the radio. He's not on regular radio anymore and his TV show has been cancelled but he is on SIRIUS. I listened to him a little bit this morning but it was kind of weird because they can now freely curse on his show. It was a little funnier when they tried to keep their language under control. For example sometimes a guest would come on and say something completely obscene and everyone in the studio would be like, "whoa! whoa!" Now you got Stern dropping F bombs talking about the weather. I'll stay tuned though.
|
||
|
04/07/2008 A Few Drinks With Dae On His Birthday
(2008)
(2003)
|
||
|
04/07/2008 Pictures From Trina's Birthday Party
|
||
|
04/07/2008 A Few Shots From Paula's Birthday Party
|
||
|
04/01/2008 Dog or Wizard
Is it me or is this the stupidest online quiz of all time?
|
||
|
04/01/2008 Styling and Profiling
My gf, Mandy, just got a brand new car. Her previous car was an old, junked out Toyota Corolla. The car has accumulated a lot exterior damage over the years and is about to be completely put to rest. We have been stopped by cops on two separate occasions when I have been in the car with her and I don't often ride in that car with her. We usually just take my car.
One time we took her car to dinner because one of my tail lights was out. Her tail lights were working fine. On the way home I brake slightly abruptly at a red light but well before the intersection. I brake a lot at yellow lights ever since I almost got a DUI by running one on South Lamar. I figure running a red light is a crime but what's stopping hard at a yellow light before you reach the intersection? Being a considerate citizen? I didn't realize there was a cop behind me and sure enough, when I got moving again, he flashed his lights and pulled me over.
"What's the problem, oSifer?"
He tells me he's pulling me over because the registration on the car is expired but he makes sure to give the car a good eyeballing before he hands me my warning. Apparently, he wanted to check us out after we stopped hard at the light and ran the license plate on the car just for fun and found the expired registration. He was clearly looking for a drunk driver and once he saw a nice, young couple he made sure to tell me a couple of times to "not worry." Mandy and I were actually dressed nicer than normal because we just got back from the Melting Pot and we were celebrating our anniversary.
We got pulled over the second time about a month ago on the very same street and I could not believe the jacked up excuse this cop came up with. We were literally about 5 blocks from where we live when the cop pulled us over in the middle of the day. The reason? The license plate frame was blocking the word TEXAS. Mandy has had this car for over 10 years and that license plate frame was on there the day she drove it off the dealership’s lot. Usually when a cop uses technicalities like that, they are not interested in the actual violation. I guess if Mandy were to rob a bank and you copied down her license plates, there would be a slight delay in matching those plates to the millions of states we have in our country. Oh yeah, we only have 50. That would have taken all of 2 minutes on their supercomputers. I'm not sure what that cop was looking for in the middle of the day. You would think night time would be a better time to look for DUIs. Maybe he thought a car like that is used to transport drugs or something. Or maybe he got a report of suspicious activity by an interracial couple. |
||
