If I had a friend who worked in a casting agency somewhere in the LA area (which I definitely don’t or I wouldn’t be posting this on a blog where both of you can see it) and that friend perhaps drank consistently to the point where they complained about their liver hurting, these are the suggestions I would give them (see?  I stayed gender neutral, Kate!):

• get a new liver from one of those idiot actors… just post a gig as an extra on “House” as “liver doner” and tell them Hugh is really into method acting… once they are unconscious in the alley, the work is pretty easy… I’m pretty sure wikipedia has instructions on doing a liver replacement surgery.
• homeless… aren’t there tons of homeless there?  This is slightly more risky… you’ll want to seek out the mentally unstable, not the homeless alcoholics.  Not that there is anything wrong with being a homeless alcoholic, but they probably are drinking hairspray or lighter fluid and that can’t be good for the liver.  I’d mark this down as a temporary solution…
• illegal aliens… they’re everywhere over there, right?  Find someone young and healthy, tell them you’re with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and you will grant them a green card in exchange for their liver
• I’m pretty sure if you google it, you could find a Canadian pharmacy that would sell you a liver pretty cheep
• My friend Darin… not sure that his liver is any better, but that’s a good picture

• MIL’s swingset dismantled, daughter’s bunkbed mantled, dressers moved, kids relocated to various rooms, tropic thunder viewed #
• first day of school… had to get 1 to 3rd grade, 2 to 1st & the wife to college while the MIL told me what I was doing wrong… YAY! #
• I get sad when I think of all the comics I don’t read anymore… #
• Are the olympics still on? #
• @TheBloggess In Ohio we have a medicaid waiver program that people can qualify for regardless of income, but based on medical needs #
• Lunch at Chile Verdi w/ a buddy talking EQ2 & other geek stuff. Good times… #
• Found myself getting really excited talking about SCRUM today & feeling good about it… read what you will into that #
• Oh & cuz of lil’faith in my abilities, I DID get the kids up, dressed, fed & off to the bus stop w/o ANY issues today-SOLO quest … #
• sand volleyball rocks… go go good team! #
• GO TEAM VENTURE! #
• messin’ w/ social stuff (twitter->blog, blog->twitter, twitter->facebook) #
• messin’ w/ social stuff (twitter->blog, blog->twitter, twitter->facebook) #
• messin’ w/ social stuff (twitter->blog, blog->twitter, twitter->facebook) #
• nice, so you can’t do a dash with the left or right pointy arrow thing. it just looks like -> cool. stoopid hackers makin life hard #
• nice, so you can’t do a dash with the left or right pointy arrow thing. it just looks like -> cool. stoopid hackers makin li … #
• nice, so you can’t do a dash with the left or right pointy arrow thing. it just looks like -> cool. stoopid hackers maki … #
• nice, so you can’t do a dash with the left or right pointy arrow thing. it just looks like -> cool. stoopid hackers … #
• nice, so you can’t do a dash with the left or right pointy arrow thing. it just looks like -> cool. stoopid hack … #
• nice, so you can’t do a dash with the left or right pointy arrow thing. it just looks like -> cool. stoopid … #
• nice, so you can’t do a dash with the left or right pointy arrow thing. it just looks like -> cool. stoo … #
• ok, first blip… deactivate the FB app that updates Twitter with FB status if you tell Twitter to update FB status. (circular loop) #
• Very powerful stuff here… http://suitcaseexhibit.org Worth your time, but will leave you unsettled #
• We found out our son had asthma after spending a summer getting on him for not running enough during soccer #
• We found out our son broke his arm after spending a week telling him to suck it up after he fell off his bike #
• Our son told us this morning that the scrape he got on his knee hurt, we took him to the doctor a few hours later… he has an infection #
• Listen to your kids #
• @TheBloggess “SYCSTPIRLSIYJYIOT” Can you use that in a sentence? in reply to TheBloggess #
• lost 4lbs… now I can eat like a pig this weekend! #
• Oh, and I listened to Crazy Train (Ozzy, of course) cranked on my way to work… didn’t even feel weird doing it in the volvo. Good Friday! #
• coo-loo-kuku-coo-kuku… coo-loo-kuku-coo-kuku… good day, ay! How’s it going, ay? #
• Bob & Doug McKenzie returning in an animated series: http://is.gd/1Pzt So, don’t be a hoser, ay, take off your tuque, grab a brew & watch #
• @ningyang1 but they know you and are watching everything you do! For example, you’ve been working from home alot lately… in reply to ningyang1 #
• dinner & margaritas @ neighbors tonight & then weekend filled with kids’ stuff #

Alone on a desolate planet… completing it’s mission because that’s all it can do…  What a brave little toaster we have up there!

@MarsPhoenix: The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will monitor the encroaching ice cap from above, @BrianFinifter. I won’t see it (darkness will get me first)

First, I’m a gamer.  I’m what real gamers consider casual.  I own an Xbox 360, am wired up to the innerwebs, and play a handful of games on my PC (including an MMORPG).  I’m also a bit “old school”… Back in the day, I stole quarters from a jar in my mother’s closet to go down to the arcade at Shakey’s Pizza in Grand Forks to play the likes of Defender, Pac Man and Donkey Kong Jr.  I played text, turn-based games like Hitcherhiker’s Guide in junior high, owned an Atari 2600 and later moved onto MUDs over the free college internet hookup (none of that kid WORLD WIDE WEB crap… were talking the only graphics you saw were the ones you could build out of creatively stacked characters from a keyboard).

Second, I vote.  Lot’s of reasons why, but deep down below the hard sarcastic, cynical layers of crust lays a soft, gooey center filled with tears over ol’ yeller, excitement when old Jack shows up in the Grizzly Adams reunion movie, belief that a man can fly and a strong sense of patriotic duty.  While I tell people I joined the Army Reserves back in the day to help pay for college (when my mother told me she’d help me if I went for something dealing with computers, cuz they would be big some day and I told her no fricken way… I was gonna be a writer… ), it was more because I really felt I owed my country something.  No way do I think I paid the same price the full-timers did/do nor those weekend-warriors who were called up for war, but I paid A price and feel like I have a further duty to voice my opinion on election day.

Why go through that?  Because Xbox and Rock the Vote partner to get gamers to the polls.

These people think they understand who they are targeting and that they will be able to motivate them.  Gamers can’t be pigeon holed into a specific type.  They are fathers, mothers, students, soldiers, basement dwellers… and much more.  They are also some of the best wired in people around.  They understand information, sift through it, categorize, process and file away more than he average person out there.  They know there is an election.  I’m sure there is a huge percentage that is very politically charged and already planning on voting.  There’s also a large number that could care less about the election.  They will go wait 20 hours in November for a new gaming system, but why would they go to the community center, school, library to vote for someone who’s never done a dungeon crawl, defeated Tom Morello on expert, raced the streets of Liberty City or fought against the Covenant side by side with the Arbiter?  Are you going to release Halo 4 on election day at the voting booth?  They will not be motivated by public service announcements, ads or anything else… some will probably never vote until they can do it on their phone or in their console.  The politicians don’t relate and can’t communicate ideas that really matter to them.

Again, this isn’t every gamer.  But the ones already motivated, interested in politics don’t need the annoyance or condescension of the ads.  Why waste the money?  Is this really the segment of the population we are worried isn’t voting?

My tweets have become spam to myself…  Raised a packrat, I like the idea of “archiving” them as blog posts here, but the daily updates are just creating too many entries that really aren’t that interesting (unlike my blog posts).  With that, I upgraded the Twitter Tools plugin to a beta version that allows doing a weekly post of the previous week’s tweets.  I also enabled my “latest” tweets in the sidebar on the left.  There were a few hickups (plugin requires PHP5, which I have, but it wasn’t detecting it properly, so I had to “reenable” PHP5 on the server to get it to work) so hopefully there were no adverse sideeffects.  I checked out a couple of the other sites I host and they all seem to be working.