AtomicInternet Archived News

Archived News starting from 11-11-2011 and earlier

Even though I'm not allowed to talk about fight club, I want to shout about it from the top of the highest hill! After getting into the latest Xbox LIVE beta (every one so far, this post might jinx that) I was excited to post a beacon and brag about the life defining achievements I have via built-in social sharing. Aside from that not much else changed, I'm still waiting for the Windows Phone companion app that will help me feel better about being an outcast.

At 6:00pm today, minutes before I arrived home from the wasteland of Detroit, our crappy power grid succumbed to the high winds. While not surprised, I was a bit annoyed at the timing having hoped to get a few hours of Battlefield in. The wife demanded her television be returned to operation, which became my immediate priority. Once the generator was up and powering the TV and refrigerator, we watched "Cedar Rapids" while our neighbors enjoyed the stone age. More importantly, Lila didn't have to spend one minute doing something other than watching TV. The power eventually came back around 8:30pm, but the cable modem refused to come back in time for any Battlefield action.

One of the many pleasures of living in a northern climate is the annual leaf pickup required to keep grass from suffocating and landscape rocks from turning a deep brown. This year, however, I had the assistance of baby which made the task entertaining. Between fits of giggling and attempts to eat the leaves, she commented on how unnecessary this task is south of Georgia, and that we might consider moving to that area if we truly loved her. I made sure she understood the reason we don't live there is because Lisa loves her parents more than her, and if I had my druthers we'd be living in sunny Florida selling beach rental equipment by the ocean. Satisfied, she let out a celebratory fart.

After 12 years of reliable operation, my Cougar finally found itself in a completely immovable state. Only 15 minutes after informing my carpool I planned to drive the Cougar through the winter, all transmission shifter operation ceased. A firm believer in the personality of inanimate objects, I'm convinced the Cougar simply did not want to drive in the snow. A quick check of the cables under the shifter and visual confirmation of movement on the top of the transmission was all I needed to call the tow truck while TomTom stood watch as rape guard. Three days later, with a $900 estimate I told the dealership where to shove it and towed it home with the obligatory bumper destruction that always accompanies my tow-dolly adventures. Further inspection revealed the problem to be inside the transmission, which means the Cougar gets its usual winter slumber as I wait for warmer weather to properly fix it.

With last years all time low trick-or-treater turnout it was decided we would visit the Kelleys for Halloweeen this year. Unfortunately, Lisa decided to play gender identity confusion and dressed herself and Lila as Pooh and Christopher Robin. This frightened away approximately half the normal amount of visitors the Kelley house typically receives, proving transgender equality still has a long way to go in this enlightened society.

The depths to which automated bots will go to get SEO keywords placed has reached a new low today. While viewing my site stats I noticed the join_success page on my ancient Cougar Club site had fairly high traffic. Upon further inspection, I found over 200 new accounts all generated by some bot. Unfortunately for the bot, none of my registration fields were compatible with linking to anything, so all the processing cycles were for nothing. Whoever developed it must have just took a stab in the dark at fieldnames and sent it on its merry way. I guess this is the future we all knew was coming, but instead of legitimate machine intelligence we just get spam bots.

After several long months of anticipation, a teaser preview at E3, an alpha and a beta, Battlefield 3 is finally here. At 12:10 today I obtained my pre-order from Best Buy and played till 4:00am with some pretty good random people. After initially picking up a kit that was actually worse than mine it was clear this was launch day, and surprisingly the servers worked. The decision between PC and Xbox version was easy for me as 60% of my friends are Xbox exclusive. While the graphics suck compared to PC I stopped noticing after my evening of full squad domination. I can see a good chunk of my life disappearing to this game.

Today marks the 4th day of Occupy Detroit, an entertaining group of 100 people (or less) who decided to march from the spirit of Detroit statue to Grand Circus Park. I find them entertaining not because they have outrageous demands, but because I'm stuck working here and they are easily the most interesting thing happening in the city. Today we toured the tent city which was disappointingly empty aside from a few people banging on a plastic bucket and someone spouting off about aliens. We were accosted by a homeless person, but he had no political agenda to push and nobody else approached us during our visit. Disappointed, we returned to have a red wings player serve us donuts.

Over 8 years ago I caved in and bought a multimedia head unit for my Cougar. At the time, it was exciting enough to watch DVD movies and store a whopping (at the time) 8.5GB dual layer DVD of MP3s. Little did I know it would lead me down the path of mobile Xbox and mobile rock band to elevate my nerd status significantly. However, in the age of cheap 64GB USB flash drives, blu-ray movies, streaming radio stations and WP7 gaming its cutting edge feel has worn off. Fortunately nobody told eBay this, and it's currently fetching over $150 with 2 days to go. The nav system saw me through 21,000 miles of fun, and provided proof a Cougar can indeed reach 130mph. While the stock radio has warped me back to 1999 and doesn't even play MP3s, I can take comfort in the fact that this time next year I'll be crusing in my new Focus ST.

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