Perpetual Smile

Apparently more and more grocery stores are setting up shopping cart wash stations. These stations are supposed to kill all of the germs living and breeding on your shopping cart, just waiting to give you or your kid a cold.

Now, I’m all for washing my hands after I use a public bathroom or sneezing on my arm. I’ll sometimes use that Purell hand sanitizer. For the life of me, I cannot begin to understand why people — particularly new parents — are such germophobes. It’s a proven fact that we need germs to protect our bodies from diseases. They help us to build up healthy immune systems so we don’t catch dangerous diseases such as tuberculosis or the measles. The more exposure you have, the healthier your immune system is; you get sick less. The flu shot gives us just enough exposure to keep us immune from the flu virus, by exposing us to the germs that cause the flu.

So thanks, germophobes. Because of you, our entire species will be killed off within twenty years by the common cold, all because of your damn shopping cart sanitization stations and your stupid handiwipes at the cheaper supermarkets. Captain Trips, here we come.

This guy came up with a really good theory as to how the ancient Egyptians got the bricks to the top of the pyramids to build them.

Great Pyramid Mystery Solved?

I’ve always been interested in this stuff. Guess it’s my nerdy side.

I got ink yesterday. I went with Mike to Beauty Mark, where Sean is apprenticing, and got the word Love on the inside of my left wrist. I’ll post pictures later. Sean touched up Mike’s Spawn tattoo as a sort of practice run. Then when Sean got out of work we picked him up and hung out for a little bit. I’m slowly realizing how difficult it is to perform daily tasks when your wrist is smothered in A+D. Not easy. I leave little smears wherever I go. Heh.

I’m really glad that I’ve been hanging out with Sean again, even though the circumstances behind the whole thing are beyond sucky. Even Mike is happy, because now he has another guy to chill with and talk about comics. I always feel a little left out of these conversations, because I may be a nerd but I’m not a comic book nerd.

Anyway, my Visual Basic class is starting so I’ve gotta run. I swear I’ll write a real post later.

I do a lot of networking because of Letters of Love. Jenna, founder of Rising Above, recently announced her latest book project. She is collecting letters from survivors of abuse, to themselves or their abusers. If you have a MySpace account, you can view the event posting here, or you can email Jenna for more information.

If you know anyone who might be interested, please pass this on!

Earlier today I posted about grown up things, like politics and money. Now it’s time for nerdy things — specifically, Visual Basic.

I first came into contact with VB when I was either 15 or 16. My then-boyfriend was actually very smart, even though all he did was get high. Heh. One day he surprised me with a disc and told me he made me a present. If my memory serves me well, I thought it was a CD and tried to play it in my boombox. Turns out, it was a CD-ROM with a little program he’d made on it, to display RGB and hexadecimal values when I made colors. Web design was just a hobby for me back in the day, so I didn’t have anything as neat as Dreamweaver or EditPlus. I worked with Notepad and coded everything by hand. If I wanted a particular color, I had to Google for it.

The program he made me was so simple and yet very helpful. I asked him how the fuck he’d done something so cool — because doing things wasn’t normally his thing, you see — and he said he’d been playing around with Visual Basic and had made it for me using that software.

That ex-boyfriend is long gone, but my curiosity about Visual Basic never left me. When it came up that I had to take some kind of programming class for my degree, I didn’t hesitate to take the Visual Basic course.

This is my last semester. I’ve taken plenty of Flash/ActionScript classes, so I’m seeing a lot of similarities. Oddly enough, so far VB seems a lot easier to use. You really don’t have to do a lot of memorizing. Of course, I say this now and maybe a couple weeks down the road I’ll be eating my words, but hey.

Maybe it’s my history with other programming languages, but even the lab assignment — with virtually no instruction — is going to be a piece of cake. The egomaniac in me is hoping I’m the only one in my class who gets it done.

Edit: After writing this post, I went to do the lab… and discovered the instructions are in little charts. So much for my egomania.

Look, two posts in one day!

I finally jumped on the bandwagon and picked up a copy of Twilight. I hemmed and hawed, letting everyone know how much I hate the Teen genre and how much I hate doing things that are overrated.. and five pages in I was riveted.

So if you’re like me and are stubbornly refusing to read it, give it up. Go get a copy.

In other news, I bought one of those lap desks and I am loving it. NaNoWriMo should be relatively less painful this year.

Stephen King has been a busy man lately. I checked my Gmail this morning–which is rare, for me–and saw Stephen King in the subject of my Marvel newsletter. The newsletter said that Marvel had created a video adaptation of Stephen King’s “N.”, which I’d never heard of–and trust me, for me that’s weird. Turns out that “N.” is an unreleased short story that will be released in November in King’s new collection of short stories, Just After Sunset. Even better, Marvel will be releasing a limited edition comic miniseries of “N.” in 2009. (You can read the full Marvel news article here.)

Each episode of “N.” will be released every weekday until August 29th and can be watched on your phone or online at NisHere.com. Five episodes are out so far and each are about a minute and thirty seconds long. The art is amazing and the storyline is intriguing, but unfortunately as soon as I start really getting into it the episode is over. It’s a little cheesy at times, but not too bad. The storyline so far is a little confusing, just because it makes you want to know more and you can’t exactly figure anything out yet. Here’s what I got so far (stop reading if you don’t want to be spoiled):

A religious woman’s brother–who is a psychiatrist–has committed suicide. She goes through his belongings and finds a box marked “Burn This”. Naturally she opens it and discovers that it’s a box filled with things about her brother’s patient “N.”. Apparently N. is an obsessive-compulsive who believes his disorder began in Ackerman’s field, where an unusual circle of seven stones stands. When taking photos of the stones he discovered that the camera picked up that there are actually eight stones. Suddenly he felt the urge to touch each stone, and by doing so revealed the eighth stone. Not feeling that something was right, N. ran to his car but turned around before getting in. He saw a demon in the center of the eight stones and knew that if the eighth stone were to disappear again the demons trapped inside would be released into the world.

Episode five ends there. It seems really intriguing, but I bet King’s story is even better when read.

I’m also excited because–if you haven’t heard yet–Marvel is releasing a limited edition comic miniseries of “The Stand” this fall. And of course, there is always their “The Dark Tower” series. If you are a King or Marvel fan, you need to go pick up a copy. NOW. (:

Speaking of “The Dark Tower,” the next issue of “The Dark Tower: The Long Road Home” comes out this week!