Mild Amusement

This, my friends, is the story of a long con . It involves some relevant background information, so bear with me while I explain. The pay off is worth it, trust me. Without further ado, I have an old friend that I have known since high school. And as with all good friends that you've known that long, I've spent a lot of time hanging out with this person. During those occasions, we have shared stories, talked about the latest happenings in our lives, and occasionally reminisced about years past. That last part is the relevant bit for this story. She swears that there used to be a rumor of sorts circulating about yours truly. I'd never heard of it, but she assured me that people used to say that my first English word was "octopus." English wasn't my first language (that'd be Spanish ), so I got to learn while going to school. I don't really remember much about it, though I know that my teachers and classmates were kind enough to try to pronounce my n...

A long time ago, I remarked that my sister thinks I read very quickly . It's one of those things that I've apparently done for a very long time, but I've never really spent much time thinking about it. It's not like it's ever made much of a difference one way or the other. Until recently, that is. A shorter time ago, my brother and sister got me some comic books for my birthday. Well, to be precise, they got me the comic books a few days before my birthday, so I was pleasantly surprised. What's more, they'd actually gone back to a Secret Santa wish list from years past to figure out which ones I thought would be interesting (clever of them, I must say), so I was even more pleasantly surprised. In fact, I was so pleased by the gift, that I was reading them within the hour. Now, just to give you an idea of how much there was to read, one of these was an inches-thick anthology. It was easily several hundred pages long. Even if you account for the fact that th...

As I've mentioned before, I use Google Reader to track various RSS feeds . It helps me to keep up with various sites and stories that I find interesting and/or educational, so I like it quite a bit. On most days, I read my posts and go about my business. Recently, though, there was a post that made things anything but just another post on any other day. To begin with, the post that came up on my feed was from a site called "Clients From Hell." In hindsight, the title on the thing was "NSFW Work Opportunity," so I should've known that this was going to be awfully interesting. Now, I should also mention that I usually read my feeds while at work. So a post that says " NSFW " made me a little leery. Still, it showed up on my feed, and those posts are generally text-only, so I figured I'd take my chances. If you haven't already read the post, the story is about a guy who asks a designer to make his anatomy look bigger in a "risque pr...

I am an information junkie. Always have been. I'm one of those people that cares far more about the storyline in a video game than the actual game play. At work, I will spend time researching things related to solved problems, because I want to know exactly why it failed in the first place. And if someone learns something new, I want to go see what it's about, because I want to know what they know. I know it's not exactly the average outlook on life, but it is what it is. Anyhow, this mentality leads to my habit of tracking various websites, blogs, and other internet web sources to keep my information flow constant. Doing all of this manually is tedious at best, though, so I use Google Reader  to organize all of these feeds. It just makes things simpler to have a single source of RSS feeds, so that I can quickly browse through items related to my interests. Given all of that, it should come as no surprise that I also try to keep up with my feeds on a regular basis. I ...