8:30pm - About 10 minutes ago, I came to the realization that I had entirely forgotten about one of my classes (in terms of final exams). I could’ve sworn that not 2 weeks ago, I had talked to the professor and teaching assistant (TA) and turned in a hefty assignment (around 10-12 pages or so). Upon checking with my school’s online course system (which is far from perfect and, often, far from useful), my worst fears came true. Not only did I totally forget about it, but it was due this morning. As in around 12 hours ago. And I haven’t started…yet. I’m thoroughly fucked and have a long night ahead of me, but getting some points for a late paper is much better than getting zero points for a non-existant paper.

9:09pm - Just got back from my first break. Once I got organized and created a rather specific plan for my work, I decided that it was time to take a break (and check on the Yankees score, which is still zero by the way). Now that the inning is finished, as is my (first) cup of coffee, I am back to work with a sombre yet markedly positive demeanor.

9:48pm - Solid work has been accomplished, so time for a break. This time, it’ll be old chinese food to accompany old episodes of Arrested Development. Work will be resumed soon enough.

10:25pm - Hunger satiated, now it’s back to work. I am still optimistic but am working with a strong sense of urgency.

11:35pm - Enjoying the second cup of coffee, but starting to notice a sense mental drifting… It’s not that I’m tired (hell, I slept in until 11am today), but the laziness is trying to take hold.

12:15am - Changed Pandora stations and now starting the third cup of coffee. I need something more upbeat than the classical music that I have been listening to for the last 3 and a half hours. Additionally, I am starting to freak out a little bit…then again, I always do that about this time of night.

12:40am - I believe that, despite the fact that I have probably sacrificed a significant deal of quality at this point, I am half-way done. Time for a break.

1:08am - Some of my comrades have decided to jump ship and have ceased work to watch a movie. If I work at the same rate as I have been so far, I won’t be done until around 5am. I plan to work faster.

2:55am - I have just returned from a break celebrating the 3/4 mark in my work. I enjoyed it by watching some of the movie Cube as well as some GTA4 being played.

5:28am - My pace slowed drastically, but I am finally done. The paper will need some final touching up in the morning, but I must sleep at least a few hours now. Maybe it’s just because I probably should’ve taken out my contact lenses hours ago, but I’m starting to see some weird shit.

9:17am - I slept in later than was planned, but I’m confident that I can still make the noon deadline (even if I wasn’t I don’t have too much of a choice about the matter at this point). Rejuvinated by the nap, I’m optimistic about the rest of the work.

2:54pm - I got in touch with the TA and turned everything in. Fucking done… Note to self: try not to forget about any finals next semester.

I know that, since I took that nap for a couple hours, this wasn’t technically a full all-nighter. Nonetheless, I think it is a relatively accurate representation of what often happens when people claim to pull all-nighters.

Why do we, as a society, have exercise equipment?
To stay in shape and keep our bodies healthy.
Why do we want to stay in shape and keep our bodies healthy?
So that we can live long and satisfying lives.
And we spend a noticeable amount of time in our life exercising and working enough to pay for the equipment that we buy.
Well, yes.
Now that we have established the foundation of the situation, allow me to get right at the heart of the issue. Why do we build and use equipment that is supposed to improve many aspects of our health, such as strength and flexibility, when we have been living for thousands of years without this equipment? Not only had we been doing fine during those thousands of years, now the world (and especially our country) is filled with fat lazy assholes. These are the same assholes that have infinitely more resources at their disposal yet still keep their body in worse shape than the average caveman. The funniest part is that it’s these same assholes that buy most of the exercise equipment. Not only are they fat and lazy, but they’re dumb enough to fall for the infomercials.
But the exercise equipment allows intelligent and proactive people to keep their bodies in even better shape than they would be able to without the equipment.
First of all, I would argue that the number of these people is incredibly small compared to the number of the aforementioned fat lazy assholes. But more importantly, what are we doing with these super fit bodies that this equipment allows us to mold? We, meaning the majority of modern American society, are not the hunter gatherers of the stone age nor are we even the simple but hard-working farmers of a couple decades ago. We use these bodies for several different things but they all achieve the same end: making you desire your body to be in similar shape and making you feel bad when it isn’t like that, which is usually the case.
So you’re saying that we should all stop buying exercise equipment and turn into fat lazy slobs together?
No, certainly not. People should still exercise; my argument is against the equipment. Instead of buying some ridiculous “Aeronox version 2.0 Extreme Sport Utility Edition” or whatever they call them these days, maybe you could go take a jog and then use rocks, small logs, cinder blocks, or similar materials for resistance. Or, if you really want to be proactive, (literally) run down to the store, pick up some milk, bring it back, and then clean out the garage. If you plan it right, you’ll use all the same muscles and give them just as good a workout. The only difference is that instead of moving the same heavy thing back and forth over the same distance of around 6 inches about 200 times, you can actually get something productive done.

So that’s as far as I have the conversation going so far. Feel free to add your replies in the comments.

These commercials could not make me hate the thought of purchasing something any more. We’re a civilized society (well, not always the case, but go with it)! We don’t have to club each other over the head for the last piece of meat anymore. We have developed a complex system of trading goods and services that uses a little thing called money. Money is an amazing thing because you can give it to somebody and then they will either give you something or do something for you, sometimes both. There’s no competition between the buyer and the seller. There is, of course, competition between sellers. That does not mean, however, that we should create competition between the buyers.

A big counterpoint to this whole rant would be the existence of auctions, beyond just Ebay. People have been auctioning stuff for a gazillion years, and it looks like it will continue to happen until the end of the world on December 23, 2012. In defense of my original point, I see auctions as a method of selling something adapted to the situation that the good or service being sold is somehow unique or special and many people want it. This applies just as well to limited edition Ferraris as it does to the cupcake that the lucky kid has at the lunch table in the cafeteria. But if, for example, the lunch lady was selling those cupcakes then the auction would be rather worthless. Even if it was sold for cheaper than what the lunch lady was selling it for, only one person reaps the benefit of that deal while the rest ignore the whole thing and head for the counter. In the case of Ebay, it’s like there are a bunch of cupcake kids filling up the cafeteria, but the lunch lady is still there. The best part about the lunch lady is that she is reliable whereas nobody knows what those cupcake kids did to their merchandise. Hell, maybe one of them is a prince from Nigeria that will give you a fortune if you just let him borrow a few hundred dollars from you.

Ebay’s recent advertising campaign is just another step backwards in this wonderfully-mediocre culture of ours. And yes, I do think that it is kind of funny that my Half.com (Ebay) profile is one of the first results when googling ‘fedorpheux’.

So who is Tyler Perry? I don’t know, I don’t care, and I’m sure as hell sick of seeing his name all over the place.

Imagine a spider on your ceiling. I know most spiders don’t really behave this way but now just imagine it simply lets go of the ceiling and falls to the floor. No web or anything, just free fall to the floor. What do you think it would do? Would it be splattered into a little mush or would it just flip over and scurry under the nearest large object? I put my money on the scurrying.

Your average ceiling is about 8 feet above the floor, so that’s 96 inches. Your average spider isn’t very big but just for the sake of easy math, lets say he’s 1 inch tall. That’s a fall of almost 100 times the creature’s own height. Now compare this to a human. Take a 6 foot tall human and raise him up to 100 times his height: 600 feet. A drop like that and the human would definitely splatter and no scurrying would be possible.

I know spiders have fancy exoskeletons and humans don’t and there are plenty of other biological differences, but that’s not my point. My point has to do with how fast they fall. Anybody who took science in middle school knows that gravity is (just about) the same everywhere on earth and one thing wont fall any faster than another thing, regardless of mass. It’s the classic feather and bowling ball trick; they fall at the same speed. The catch, as most of you should know, is that the feather and bowling ball will not fall at the same speed on Earth due to air resistance. It’s a similar deal with the human and the spider. The ratio of surface area (creating air resistance) to mass is drastically different between the two. But most everybody should have realized that before they even started reading this paragraph.

So my point of all this is about trying to imagine an environment that is filled with a certain gas that is denser than oxygen, nitrogen, and whatever else we have here on earth. Something dense enough that it provide enough resistance that we could fall 100 times our own height and walk it off. Maybe a few scrapes and bruises, but no splatter or mush. The concept is very similar to how astronauts train for spacewalks in giant swimming pools. It mimics how they would feel in space. But I’m not trying to mimic that feeling as much as I’m trying to mimic that falling spider phenomenon.

These are the kind of thoughts that go through my head while I’m sitting at home on the crapper and see a spider on the ceiling…

Seriously, though, this really pisses me off. My technique to combat this if I ever find myself at the raw end of this deal is to simply begin talking louder and louder once I realize the other person refuses to be reasonably audible. They either think I’m crazy or deaf, and at least one of those isn’t too far from the truth.

…and yet some people still wonder why I have no faith in corporate mass media, especially when it comes to reporting news.

As I interpret this story, this is just another painfully frustrating example of extremely poor decision making on the cops. It seems as though they had very poor threat assessment and generally poor arresting procedure, likely a result of poor training. This is what happens when any jack-off can go to any hole-in-the-wall community college for 2 years while working his shitty fast-food job to finance it and come out with a shiny new badge and a gun (with a fancy holster, no less). These days, cops will describe anything as a life-threatening situation in order to defend their morbid actions. Even worse, juries will often buy it. The additional variable of the German shepherd (also shot and killed) does not surprise me in the least. I know from personal experience that law enforcement officers will freak out when a citizen just happens to own a German shepherd, whether it is truly a threatening situation or not. I understand that they are probably trained to be careful around large and potentially dangerous animals, but that doesn’t imply that every single animal that fits that description necessarily is dangerous.

Before you get ahead of yourself, Mr. (or Mrs.) Anonymous Reader, don’t even bother generalizing my statements to make it sound like I hate all cops or I believe cops can go around killing whoever they want without any repercussions. My point is simply that the situation described in the news article bothers me quite a bit and I’m sick of seeing shit like that going down as often as it is, or ever. Honestly, becoming a law enforcement officer should require more education and once the officer has his job, he should be continually attending various training and educational sessions regarding all sorts of topics that would improve their law enforcing skills. In all practicality, however, that is not going to happen. My conclusion? Anarchy rules all. When entropy makes the world go around, as it always does, my strategy is to have more firepower than the other guy (whoever the other guy might be).

When you go to your bank and make deposits in such a way that you’re interacting with an actual teller, no deposit slips are needed and no deposit slips should ever be asked for. If the teller requests that you use one, they are essentially saying that they are less competent than the little hinged-door covering the drop box that was installed by the middle-school drop-out meth-head of a janitor 17 years ago, which has long-since rusted and has more diseases on it than Courtney Love’s cervix. The part that frustrates me the most is the fact that, in order to make themselves appear somewhat human, the tellers let you know that you don’t really need to fill out all of the fields on the slip. They will need your account number, but they don’t really need that if you carry your bank card with you, as I do. Other than that, all they really need is your name and the total amount of money being deposited. Well, useless sacks of body fluid, that information is on the check to begin with! Oh, depositing more than one check? Well that gives the teller who has to concentrate quite a bit just to breathe yet another chance to see your name and the amount! Oh, but now you have to add up the total amount. And what if this poor mentally deficient teller has to deal with checks and cash being deposited at once? That would truly be a shame, for they would have to use all of the addition skills that they learned in 3rd grade to figure out the total amount deposited. Just to fuck with them, try telling them to deposit some of the money into savings and some into checking. When they ask how much into each, just say “Surprise me” and then distract yourself with the endless pamphlets about that mortgage that you’ve always never cared about. You’ll find their little finger trembling between the F4 button and the F5 button on the keyboard while they try to decide whether to deposit into your savings or checking account first. Just wait until they start trying to figure out how much to put into each. In some cases, the teller may actually collapse and loose consciousness. Oh, and I almost forgot that sometimes these financial harlots covered in cheap make-up have the balls to ask that you write the date down on the precious deposit slip. I figure that even the slowest of bank tellers must catch on to the pattern after the first 10 or so customers all use exactly the same date on their slip. Since I never have my banking transactions at a high enough priority to do them first thing in the day, they tellers should really figure it out by the time I get there. And I’m convinced that they know the date, because how could they not? In that case, they are basically testing if I know the date or not. Frankly, it’s none of their damn business. I could be 3 days into a week-long binge of dropping acid and think it was 783 years in the future, but I still feel that I should be able to make a simple deposit of money into my account.

Point being that bank tellers need to get off their high horse and realize that a trained dolphin could do 99% of their job. Hell, it could even be the dolphin who failed training, is missing a fin, and can’t even swim very well.