My car is fixed. The broken driver’s side inside door handle was replaced yesterday, finally. Such a small thing, but it’s so nice to be able to simply open the door from the inside again.

Link of the Day: Super Mario Crossover – Play Super Mario Bros. – as Samus, Link, or other characters.

Spam of the Day: “Love the mall, but only the private spots.”

Funny of the Day: Beyonce – Masonic Satanist.

Pic of the Day: Sulu likes it!

Video of the Day: Slave Leia Car Wash

Quote of the Day: “Pros: Zero to ecstasy in 3 minutes. Works great on sore and knotted muscles too.” – Reviewer on Newegg.com for Hitachi Magic Hand Massager.

I don’t really feel like going in-depth about the con.  It wasn’t quite as fun as I’d have liked, I didn’t get to do quite as many things as I wanted.  I’ll still do it again.  But dammit, next year, I’m staying for the Dead Dog party.

I’ll try to post a pic from the ones I took at GenCon here every day or two for a bit.  Here’s the first one, which I simply call “Umbrella Girl:”

Link of the Day: Portugal: Proof that Drug Decriminalization works?

Spam of the Day: “Best prices, best pilules”

Funny of the Day: Tears of Lasers.

Pic Vid of the Day: Shoe Magic with NPH

Quote of the Day: “It sounds like the Cirque du Soleil being chewed up by their own chainsaws.” – Jeremy Clarkson

Later that night moving into Saturday morning, I ended up chatting (and then later texting) with a woman in Odessa for hours.  I really want to meet this woman, largely to see if she’s all that she’s represented herself as.  Since I was up so late Saturday morning, I slept quite late, and after I finally got up and moving and showered, shaved, dressed, etc., went out to my Dad’s for a visit, because my Aunt Kathy was in town for the weekend.  I helped my dad try to work on updating her computer (she boxed up and brought the entire thing over), and in the process of trying to install Windows XP SP3, things went FUBAR.  I think Norton Internet Security is to blame.  It ended up in this endless reboot cycle where Windows would do the “oh crap, we didn’t start successfully last time, what do you want to do?” and no matter what option we chose (couldn’t even get into Safe Mode more than once) it would fail and restart again.  Joy.  That ate up hours Saturday night, I left my dad’s after midnight, and it’s still not properly functional.

Sunday . . . after a late start, I went out shopping for a few things.  Hit JC Penneys and capitalized on this awesome sale they had going yesterday, and got my bathroom plans -mostly- taken care of.  Picked up 4 bath towels, 2 hand towels (they were out of wash rags in the same color), and a bath rug for $19.  I think I’m going to go back and pick up another rug as well as try to get the same Royal Red wash rags to match.  I also picked up 2 awesome Sealy pillows on the cheap there.  After that, I went to Academy Sports and committed financially to the whole “ok, let’s add regular exercise” concept.  Too much money spent on some workout clothes.  

I finally hit 78 last night in WoW, 2 more (long) levels to get to 80 (which I should have been at, oh, 3 1/2 weeks ago), then I can try to get gimpily geared up as quick as possible to rejoin Warfare in raiding.  I’m a little mixed on that, I hope getting with the guild in raids will re-inspire my love for the game, because just right now working on grinding my Warlock up to 80 I’m just not feeling it like I used to.  I’m not sure if it’s just not being able to raid with my guildmates, or if other . . . interests and diversions . . . are more appealing now.

Link of the Day: The 411 on Free 411

Spam of the Day: “Women are put off by the sight of a dwarf hook”

Funny of the Day: Works for me

Pic Vid of the Day: John Madden: Dungeon Master – “Think fast!”

Quote of the Day: 
“My best friend gave me the best advice
He said each day’s a gift and not a given right
Leave no stone unturned, leave your fears behind
And try to take the path less traveled by
That first step you take is the longest stride” – If Today was Your Last Day, by Nickelback

Update of the Day: So, I certainly learned one thing . . . when I leave for the day and shut down my browser and Wordpress grumps at me about leaving the page – do a manual “Save Draft” before I allow it to close, otherwise work WILL be lost.  I got some good news on one of the two fronts I was looking for it on last night.  The next couple of weeks won’t be as lean wallet-wise as I was fearing they might be.  Met with my dad, talked about work stuff, ate fried chicken, totally blew my diet.  I’m giving some serious thought (since it’ll take me 2 days or so to get back into ketosis) to either just enjoying the weekend and indulging, or switching to Weight Watchers for a couple of months to give that a try.  Not sure how I want to go there.  Would really like to talk to a specific someone about that, but that’s the other front, haven’t heard anything in two days.  :( 

Link of the Day: The 50 Best Selling Console Games of this Decade (So Far)

Spam of the Day: “Satanist housewife cooked cats!” 

Funny of the Day: We’re going to have to confiscate that.

Pic of the Day: I like the attitude.

Quote of the Day: “I guess she’s a gay dude.” – Name withheld by request.

Link of the Day: The Perfect Boat for the Infected / Zombie Apocalypse

Spam of the Day: “Supermodel became hauler!”

Funny of the Day: Work of art indeed.

Pic of the Day: MINE!

Quote of the Day: ”Gardening Coaches?  Didn’t those used to be called . . . OVERSEERS?” – Me.

It’s been a very good weekend.  Got almost nothing accomplished as far as cleaning/organizing the apartment, or any of the leveling I’d sort of planned on in WoW.  That’s perfectly ok.  I spent a lot of time with Goddess this weekend.  Good, good times.

Edit: I started this Monday but was so busy with work, I didn’t get a chance to finish it.  Then it slipped even further to Wednesday.

Link of the Day: Zen Habits - I like this site so much, it’s not only today’s LotD, but it’s joined my “blogroll” links list on the left column.  Good stuff.

Spam of the Day: ”Queen guitarist May named university chancellor”

Pic of the Day: Madonna Before and After Photoshop

Quote of the Day: “Satisfy your lover . . . WITH STAGGERING PENIS SIZE!” - Name Withheld by Request

Happytimes! Reader Steven says:

Come back tonight at midnight and use this link:

http://shirt.woot.com/Friends.aspx?k=8110

It’ll be $15 instead of $10… and it will be that way until it falls below the top 20 of the 27 currently printed shirts.

So, if you want some of the Dicey Goodness, you can still get it – just not for the awesome $10 price.

So, I’ve met Wil Wheaton twice. The first time was at a Creation Star Trek convention in Midland, Texas, where he was a guest the guest and signed autographs.  The con pretty much sucked a bit, a little because it was when Creation was first starting to take over and monopolize Star Trek cons, and mostly because it was in Midland.

The second time was at True Dungeon in GenCon SoCal the first year I was involved with True Dungeon.  Wil ran through the dungeon with a group of his friends, and he was one of the best and most amusing Bards I saw that con.  Less than halfway through the dungeon, Wil started having a really bad urge to pee.  This resulted in some of the more amusing improv Bard Songs I’ve heard in all the time I’ve been involved with True Dungeon.  I don’t remember the exact details, but one room with a giant spider he was singing something like “kill kill, kill the stupid spider” and worked in something about how he had to pee.

I was coming off shift just as Wil’s group started their dungeon run, and radio chatter started to the effect of, “OMG WIL WHEATON IS IN THE DUNGEON!”  I was tired, and had honestly gotten a teensy bit jaded by seeing some of the Gaming Scene Bigwigs come through True Dungeon (we’d had Michael Stackpole run through the dungeon, a bunch of WOTC folks, including Ed Greenwood, the Hickmans, etc.) – I was like, “oh, that’s cool.  I hope he enjoys it.”  The radio chatter went on, with DMs and Blue Hands talking about how awesome a Bard he was.  So, I wearily trudged back to spy on his group from behind the black curtains.  One of our female DMs started begging to switch with a DM for the Spider Room (she ran it on the opposite shift).  After it was ok’d, she then stated, flat out, “I’m going to kill Wesley!”

She did, of course.  She was unfair, and had the giant spider repeatedly attack Wil’s Bard character.  He was kind of justificably irritated by her picking on him like that – but he handled it with more grace than I would have then.  I think he was more relieved to be able to get to a bathroom than mad.

I hope to see Wil at True Dungeon again.  He was a lot of fun, he seemed to enjoy it, and we’ve made a lot of improvements with the experience.

UF: Yeah, I Was Right
Looks like I was right (or at least two-thirds right anyway). User Friendly’s notice that the site was closed down due to pending litigation was in fact an April Fools prank. The normal site is up now with a new strip for the day in place. I do so love being right, and I give Iliad his kudoes for staging such a good joke, with all the prior setup on it.

Quarterly Statistics
I ran my web log statistics analyzer today for everything from the beginning of the year. I really wanted the 1st quarter stats but chose the wrong option and didn’t realize until it had all run (and it takes forever to do everything, so I’m just suffering with the slight errors that including today will introduce). For those of you who are interested, yggdrasil.net scored 38089 pageviews (impressions) since the beginning of the year, with 24501 user sessions (uniques). The site has had, thus far this year, an average of 418 impressions per day, and an average of 269 uniques a day. Those numbers are roughly half what I really desire.

An even 10% of all site visitors are international visitors, but there’s 8.05% percent of visitors which are tagged as “unknown” and some of those are likely international as well. AOL still leads in user sessions, but cable modem users (home.com) have pulled ahead in hits and percentage of hits. RoadRunner and MediaOne are also in the top of the pack, with 7th and 5th place spots respectively (UUNet is in the #1 spot, but I don’t know if that’s accurate, or if it’s because UUNet is my local gateway for my primary ISP). The top referrers 5 external to the site are Infoceptor, The StatBox, Tech-Base, SC Legacy, and SimpleCraft (in that order). What’s amusing though is the next-placed referral URL is listed as “c:/WINDOWS/Desktop/starcraft/list.htm” – apparently someone has their bookmarks on their desktop and my site has a proud spot in it.

On the Browser and OS wars front, MS Internet Explorer has 53.93% of all hits, with 36.61% for Netscape. 91.41% of all Netscape users are using version 4 or 4.5, whereas 86.88% of Internet Explorer users are using IE4, and 10.96% are already using IE5. The numbers for the Quarter don’t reflect it, but the graphs for March alone show IE4 in a decline and IE5 taking over. Windows95 shows up with 42.13% of systems used to view the site, Windows98 with 36.2% (98 has been gaining steadily the last few months), NT with 6.55%, and Linux with only 0.58%. There’s a mysterious “other” listing though with 12.9% of the platforms. I wonder what that entails (as I don’t have detailed information on that without digging through the raw logs, which is never fun).

Weird Links Of The Day
I thought long and hard about pulling some sort of April Fools prank with yggdrasil.net, but decided that I’d just cover the more intreresting ones other people are doing, and post other weird stuff, like the two links (unless of course I think up something really brilliant later today, then I’ll probably do it anyway) I have today. The first is The Church of the Gerbil. This site might appeal to all those weirdoes who went nuts over that Hamster Dance page. Speaking of the Hamster Dance, another site that someone mailed me about (I apologize, I forgot your name and don’t have the e-mail any longer.) that I’ve been holding off on posting until the time was “right” (read as: when I bloody well remembered it) is The Penguin Dance. As I just now checked the web site, I noticed that the “pengwins” have been removed (they are now Ex-Penguins!). Doh! Should have posted on it earlier, I guess. Anyway, it had dancing penguins to an annoying little music clip, much like the Hamster Dance.

NVIDIA and 3dfx to Merge
Yes, I know, it’s an April Fools prank. It’s the best one I’ve seen yet today, though. Check out the (entirely fake) press release for all the details. The release itself could be pretty credible looking if it weren’t for the “NV4199″ project name.

User Friendly: Down, or April Fools Prank?
I went to check out User Friendly today, and was greeted with a notice they have that the site/strip is discontinued indefinately, pending litigation against Iliad. Now, I don’t know what to think of this. My first impulse is that this is an April Fools prank that Iliad is playing. My second impulse is that maybe it’s not, and maybe it’s real, and the timing is just really ironic. I consider that a possibility because I was reading on some other sites yesterday (Geek Life maybe, I don’t recall exactly where) about an e-mail and followup registered letter from a certain Evil Empire corporation threatening legal action due to “defamatory” humor in the comic strip. My third impulse is that this is all an April Fools prank, but an elaborate one with cooperation of other sites and extensive pre-April 1st setup to make it more believable and carry the whole thing off. I don’t know what to think, but I certainly do NOT want UF to go away.