Category: General

For the women out there: All you need to know about men

Rich Pav 14 Comments

You’ll, ah, want to listen to this with headphones. The people around you might not be as in tune as you to the deep and profound wisdom in the message.

I can just picture all the people in the control booth and behind the cameras, completely speechless. Maybe you can tell, but I have the utmost respect for people who can willfully and proudly expose themselves as complete basket cases in front of a large audience. They have a sense of freedom I can’t even begin to imagine possessing myself. If I were to somehow unload like that on TV, I’d have to live under a pseudonym and move to another country…oh, wait.

Happy Blog Action Day

Rich Pav

I guess I’m supposed to write something about saving the environment.

  • If you need to pass gas, wait until you get off the train. Like me, unless I’m in a mischievous mood. Better yet, stop farting altogether. Greenhouse gasses and stuff. Probably causes cancer too. Everything else does.
  • Conserve water: sleep at work every other day and don’t shower. Like me. Cologne is your friend. Your only friend. You stink.
  • Ride a bicycle and use public transportation. Like me. (Doing it while holding a camera in your mouth is optional.)
  • Every half hour, walk around the house turning off all the goddamn lights your kids left on. Like me. And shut the refrigerator door all the way while you’re at it. I can’t wait till they grow up. Paybacks are hell.

But seriously, I think anything you do to save the environment will be canceled by pollution China puts out.

Announcing “The Japlish Podcast”

Rich Pav 13 Comments

Japlish PodcastWell, I’ve put up the website with the first episode, and I think it looks really nice. All that’s left to do is convince Tony to help me create the content on a regular basis.

Here’s the concept and the reasoning behind it. Learning phrases is an important part of learning to speak a language. I find that in my mind I have a library of set phrases that I permutate into whatever I want to say. So that’s why we’re going to do phrases.

Why do silly, useless phrases? Because they’re fun, and language learning is too often the exact opposite of fun. But even if you’re learning to say something like “Please whack me in the head with a baseball bat,” you’re still learning grammar and vocabulary you’ll be able to use for real. Just not in the way we teach it.

To get started, we need your help in the form of suggestions for phrases we can teach. You can either write them here or go to the contact page at www.japlishpodcast.com and upload an MP3 we’ll play on the show.

I don’t know if this will succeed or not because it all depends on out willingness to stick with it, and unfortunately Tony inherited from me the tendency to not finish what he starts. But if it does, the idea is to offer the first two month’s worth of lessons for free, then maybe start charging (to support our video game habit).

Other phrases I’ve thought of:

  • Stop picking my nose.
  • I’d like to drink your bath water. (sure-fire pickup line)
  • My favorite food is monkey brains.
  • Oops, I pooped my pants again.
  • Excuse me, I found this eyeball. Is it yours?
  • I learned many magic tricks while I was in prison.
  • When I grow up, I want to be a serial killer/garbage man/gas station attendant
  • I made you a bracelet from my leg hairs. I hope you like it.
  • I ate a rat for lunch.
  • I haven’t showered in three months. Don’t I smell nice?
  • Please stop licking my armpit. It tickles.

For some reason, Google loves me.

Rich Pav 1 Comment

There are a number of search terms for which my blog ranks very, very highly:

  • Used Panty Machine: #3 and 4 out of 1,850,000. I have to say I’m very proud of this. (P.S. There are NO used panty vending machines in Japan.)
  • Used panty: #21 in Yahoo (Welcome, all you sick wankers!)
  • Chikan: #3 in Google Images, the photo of the guy I caught (SERVES YOU RIGHT, FU*KER!!), #8 in Google
  • Mouthcam: #4, 5, and 6! Take THAT, porno industry!
  • Groping Women: #2, the podcast about the guy who groped my wife who I nearly beat to death (OK, well, actually I only bitchslapped him) then had thrown in jail
  • Herro: #2 Why the hell are people searching for herro, and why are there over a quarter of a million pages with the word?
  • Japan podcast: #5
  • Bleach blonde: #6
  • How to become a Japanese Citizen: #6 (I’m still American, but I’m kinda sorta thinking about it…)
  • Conveyor belt sushi: #5
  • Burma Myanmar: #1 at blogsearch.google.com …Huh?

By far, most people who land here from Google are looking for used panties or videos or stories about groping women. In other words, one-handed typists wearing only one sock, and it’s not on their foot. (Here, let me help you out: “Lunch Lady.” “Ann Coulter.” “Condoleezza Rice.” “Janet Reno in a thong.” “Your grandmother is watching you from heaven right now.” Finished yet?)

The First Law of Troubleshooting

Rich Pav 6 Comments

I’m going to tell you a story that might not be very interesting, but who knows, it might come in handy someday.

Here’s the short version first: Whenever there’s a technical problem, check the wiring before you do anything else. Even if your intuition tells you otherwise, ignore it. They actually teach you this in networking courses. Really.

OK, here’s the story. On Saturday, our home Internet connection went out. (or “went off” or however you say it. Couldn’t connect to the Internet.) This happens every so often, so I waited for it to fix itself and kept checking the router syslogs for any good news. (About 100 times in eight hours.) In the meantime, I configured my laptop to leech off the neighbor’s wireless. (Don’t worry, it’s OK, I scanned their network first and found out they didn’t have any PCs using it at the time.)

Day two: still no joy. I can see in the syslogs that the router is dialing out over and over but the other end of the line isn’t picking up.

Day three: Tony’s going through some serious Counter Strike withdrawal and Andy’s whining because he can’t play Gary’s Mod. Not to even mention what it’s doing to my sex life. (Ha ha, just kidding. Well, OK. Not just kidding. But yeah, anyway.) So I decided to check the wiring. First, I checked the phone line that we use for ADSL. Well whaddaya know, no frikkin’ dial tone! Just for kicks I unplugged the splitter (the little box that splits the incoming phone line into two: one that goes to the phone and the other that plugs into the ADSL modem) then plugged the phone directly into the wall. Voila, we have dial tone!

At this point I’m guessing the splitter is broken, although I can’t imagine how some stupid little box with no moving parts or power supply could break. It just sits behind the desk collecting dust bunnies and splits the incoming frequencies (or is it bandwidth?) into to separate streams. But whatever, so I hop in the car, buy a new splitter at the local home electronics store, bring it home and plug it in. So now the phone works when it’s plugged into the new splitter.

But still no Internet, dammit. However, since my laptop still works thanks to the involuntary generosity of my neighbor, I give up for the night.

Fast forward to this morning. I want to update my podcasts, but I have to do it on my desktop PC, not the laptop, so I check the wiring again and discover that last night when I plugged the phone into the new splitter, I forgot to plug in the $%$# modem!

Moral of the story: Check the wiring first. And then, check it again.

P.S. The only reason I’m telling this story is because I haven’t written in a while, but nothing interesting has happened lately. Truth is, I spent most the three-day weekend just studying Java, pulling weeds, doing laundry and horsing around with the kids. For excitement, I installed Ubuntu on my laptop via Wubi. Hey, what can I say, I’m a real fun guy.

[tags]anecdote, geek stuff[/tags]