Randomness-a-plenty! That’s what we have for you tonight at Oddball Headquarters. In fact, we’re having an Oddball Halloween party! …Actually, we’re not, but it sounded good. Thought it might bolster attendance to say that, anyway. And sure enough, it worked—the people are just flooding in here. In fact, look—here comes another person flooding through the door right now. Now that all three or four of you are accounted for, let’s get started!

Been a productive day. I dragged out of bed at 7:50 a.m. just so I could go down to the library and EXERCISE MY RIGHT TO BE SOMEBODY! …Uh, no. No Mr. T. What I’m getting at is, since Florida is one of a few states that does “early voting” for the 15 days prior to November 2nd, you can actually go to one of a handful of sites and vote early here. So that’s what I did. I got there about 20 minutes before the polls opened and waited in line for maybe an hour before finally getting to vote. We use electronic voting machines down here now (via a new state statute; after the “hanging chad” debacle in 2000, they actually outlawed paper ballots in all Florida counties). Couldn’t be easier really. I was in and out of there in a flash.

All of the poll workers were old folks, which should come as absolutely no surprise, but the whole operation was conducted in a very organized fashion with no trouble at all. …Okay, what the hell? I just saved a draft of my post and WordPress deleted most of this entire paragraph. Dudes, don’t make me regret all the work I just did to get this weblog system installed, all right? I would really not appreciate it. Sons of bitches.

Now where was I? Oh yes, the old people. There was this old dude who was managing the line I was standing at the front of for a while, and he saw my Firebird shirt and asked if I had a Firebird. Yeah, three, actually. He remarked that he had a vintage ‘57 Chevy Bel-Air and that his sons were into Mustangs, and one of them also owned an ‘86 Buick Grand National. It was pretty cool, talking shop with this old guy. As I got called up to the next “identity verification” table, the guy remarked how nice it was to see “a young American man with an American car!” Hmm, yeah, you noticed that’s getting pretty scarce too, huh? DEE-TROIT, REPRESENT! …Uhm…as you were. Seriously, if Detroit would actually start producing cars young people wanted to buy, we might allieviate this problem. The Chevy Cobalt is a good step in the right direction. That little car is hot. I’d take one of those over a Civic anytime. Certainly a damn sight better than the insipid J-body it replaced, may that entire platform rust in pieces. Sunbird…Cavalier…Firenza…ugh. NO, NO, KILL YOU ALL, DIE, MAKE YOU SUFFER!

Anyway, after the whole voting thing, I bought an air and oil filter and changed the oil in the Trans Am. Noticed, however, that the gasket on the oil drain plug was shredded to hell, so I had to go back to the store and get a new one. They didn’t have the exact part number, but they had one that was almost identical, so I picked it up. That damn store never stocks the parts you need anyway. I might as well order the correct P/N from GM themselves for crying out loud. Anyway, while the oil was slowly dripping out of the pan, my wife helped me clean up the entire interior of the car…vacuumed the carpets, Swiffered and Armor-Alled the dash, and put that nice Zaino “Leather in a Bottle” conditioner on all the seats. Now the whole car has this deep, leathery aroma again. Smells gooooood. That leather conditioner rawks. I hightly recommend it. Makes the seats all soft and supple again. Tomorrow I actually wash the outside of the car, so the picture will be complete. And many thanks to my wonderful wife who lent a hand.

I finally got the Knight Rider soundtrack CD I’d been waiting for. Don Peake’s latest, containing the complete soundtrack for six episodes. OH MY GOD, IT IS TO DIE FOR. I don’t normally use inexorably hackneyed expressions like that, either, so it must have had quite an effect on me. I’ve been listening to it pretty much nonstop since I got it, and I’ve already reworked parts of the 7563 soundtrack album I’ve been assembling. My friends will know what that means.

Gotta play some more Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas! I was just joyriding around the city this afternoon, not accomplishing anything but having a great time doing it. I’ll probably resume “play time” after I finish writing this. My only problem is, the game world is so unbelievably huge, and the little mini-map is so unbelievably tiny, I can never figure out where anything is. Even when you’re doing the taxi missions, it’s near-impossible to see where the next fare is because the dots are actually dark blue and very tiny. It just looks like a blob on my hugeass TV. Need some high-def support here, guys. But that’s not stopping me from having a great time. CJ: “Don’ take dis personal, but you gettin’ jacked! This my shit now!”

Recently I mentioned in passing (in fact, it might have been in one of the comments on some earlier post) that I was considering posting up excerpts from old Oddball Updates here, just for shits and giggles. When I say “old Oddball Updates,” I of course mean “pre-2001 Oddball Updates.” The kind of posts I wrote solely for my own perusal, or benefit, or whatever. Most of them don’t stand up to public scrutiny (read: they’re quite mundane), but others are rather amusing. So, to cap off tonight’s update, here’s the text from one of my August, 1999 entries, in which I largely groused about my noisy upstairs neighbors in the apartment I was inhabiting in metro Orlando.

“Nearest Voc, sub-priority red-four, the fat dork upstairs is too loud.” Hi folks, and welcome to a spazz-o crazy Oddball Update!! Yeah baby, yeah!! You know what? Barney Rubble sounds really stupid when he does the Austin Powers “yeah baby, yeah” in that stupid old Cocoa Pebbles commercial. Just thought I’d throw that out there. Anyway, how y’all doin’ and blah blah blah. I hope you’re having an absolutely fantastic day. I had the whole day off today after about 12:30 p.m., but my day was not as fantastic as I’d hoped it would be. It was just kind of boring, actually. Every time I tried to do something, I didn’t seem to have much luck. It was kind of weird. I couldn’t seem to do anything right. I can’t even type too well today. Oh well, just not a good day for me I guess. I hope tomorrow is different, because I have to finish fucking “Project 3” and I do not want to have to come in for some dad-blamed open lab, or stay late, or whatever. I would really prefer to avoid that at all costs, quite frankly! But, we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it. Er, cross it. Cross the bridge. That’s it. Did I say burn? Naughty me.

Anyway, as for my Robot-movie-inspired opening comment about the fat dork upstairs being too loud, he sure as hell is too loud. Christ, what a moron. Actually, right now I don’t hear anything, and I haven’t heard a sound from up there for several hours. It’s actually rather pleasant. He must not be at home. I mean, that’s the only possible explanation when it’s actually quiet around here. Let me take a peek outside…although I probably can’t tell one car from another at this hour because it’s so dark. Well, the mother-lovin’ Cavalier is still out back in his unit’s “reserved” spot (which he probably doesn’t pay for, since he doesn’t park it there very often), but the other dude’s car is not around. Sometimes I see a crummy old Tempo all stickered up with ghetto band logos parked out back in that spot, or out front sometimes too. Maybe a roommate or a friend or something. Anyway it’s not here now, so maybe they went somewhere in that thing. Either that or he’s dead up there. <laughs> There’s no other way to explain the blissful silence. I don’t think sleeping is the answer because he never goes to bed, it sounds like. I’ve been up at 4:00 in the morning before, and he’s still going strong. Actually, that one Saturday night when I didn’t go to bed at all, he was going — and coming — quite a bit. He kept leaving in that stupid car. Where the hell was he going and returning from so quickly at that hour of the night, pray tell? To get booze probably. Or check in with his weed dealer down on OBT.

Actually, I’m painting a pretty piss-poor picture of this dopus, and he’s probably not all that bad in reality. For instance, I’ve got no way to know if he drinks, but since he’s a young American male in the late 1990s, it almost goes without saying that he does. I am beginning to think that I am the only such human being in existence who does not glean any particular enjoyment from alcohol consumption, or at least, the only such human being whose taste buds work like they do. But perhaps there’s something alluring about the peculiar combination of Mexican food and the suds which, as of yet, I have not experienced the glory of. Mexican food…it seems to be all anyone eats down here. Hey, that reminds me of another freakin’ hilarious bit from one of my old sketch pads back home. There’s a little ad I sketched up for some ridiculous form of new “Taco Bell Insurance”, including life, auto, and home policies. It said that they don’t have fire insurance coverage, because if they did, every time you ate there “you could make a claim because of the flames shooting out of your ass.” HA HA HA! Oh my God, that was too good.

Well, tonight was “The Naked Now” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (on UPN 65, with backwards Picard). God, was that show terrible before they fleshed out anything was supposed to work. So many continuity errors with later seasons, especially with how they refer to things. Isolinear data chips being referred to by the generic term “control chips”. And Wesley had to hook up some silly tractor beam emitter thing he designed just to activate a force field in engineering. So the ship didn’t have force field capability of its own yet, I take it? When did that just happen to get added in to the whole entire ship? Oh, it was a decent enough episode, though. Picard was so damn funny in those early ones…so snappish and pissed off and arrogant. He’s such a howl to watch, getting pissed at Wesley and all that rot. I love the part where, just after Wesley hangs up on him, Picard snaps in exasperation, “And what the hell is happening in engineering?!”

It’s 1:03 a.m. now. I’m going to go to bed soon. Quite soon, actually. Tomorrow is Blofeld day. And since you can’t possibly have any idea what the hell that means, I’ll explain it to you in different language: tomorrow’s gonna honk. Boring lecture, tedious lab as we try to finish an even more boring project with even less relevance to my future career. Thursday, a quiz, and some boring lecture notes that both keep me from being able to draw muscle cars (as I have been spending the last few EB classes doing), and make me want to fall asleep. Friday, final exam and a lab final too — then we get some tutorials checked off, and book it the hell out of there. Gone. Done. Leave me the hell alone. The weekend comes, my cycle hums, ready to race to you! Okay, knock it off with the Happy Days shit. I’ll sure be glad to see the weekend get here, though. I downloaded a Linux package from the Internet today, just not sure when I’ll have time to install it. Hopefully by the weekend, because I’d like the chance to play around with it.

So what’s in store for tomorrow, you ask? Uh….I told you that already. You see? I have to get to bed, now. If I start losing sight of why I’m saying what I’m saying, then we have a problem. I’m just not making sense anymore. Actually, I’ve more-or-less run out of things to say so that’s really why I’m pulling topics out of my ass right now. Okay, I’m going to close this update and hit the sack.

That’s it for tonight. Gonna get up early tomorrow and get some more chores done. Catch you all on the rebound.