i can't believe i didn't think of this site first.

although, had i been the one to start it, i'm pretty sure i would have been sated and stopped after uncovering this morsel.


but if i bowed out early then i'd miss out on titling an image "Awklord of the Rings".

a friend of mine is moving out of saint louis and i recently built a website for him to help sell his house. so if you're in the market for one of the three most amazing houses i've ever walked through, now's your chance.

when i was young and we lived in colorado my dad had a friend he played music with. his name was jim-bob. jim-bob was every bit as affable as you'd expect from a guy with such a feel-good moniker. the only detail i recall about jim-bob, other than his persistent grin, was his academic career. he was enrolled at colorado state university so long his credits started aging off. the problem was he was...

back in the day of the early web, there was this girl who wired her bedroom with webcams. i can't remember her name but she went on to become quite an internet phenom. you could just tune in and see what was happening in her room at any time, day or night. for sure, much of the time she'd be away at school or work or life. most of the time she was in, she'd be reading or writing or talking on the phone. a few lucky times, frenetic, mouse-wielding fanboys were met with her and a rare date she'd brought home to mack and more. what those guys would have done to trade the flashing lights of their baud modems for a broadband connection back then i can only imagine.

i think i'm going to wire my whole house with cameras. for as pedestrian and uninteresting as my house is, we have our share of cussing, nudity and fisticuffs. and i can run with the legends because when i wake up in the morning, i might be alone or i might have up to four humans in bed with me, sometimes even on top of me. for added intrigue and entertainment, i'm going to set up an hourly poll asking viewers to guess what's happening before their video feed begins. questions could include:

• is anthony wearing pants?
• is alex wearing a dress?
• is troy wearing anything?
• is bella reading a book?
• is a tickle-fight happening?
• is someone touching marty right now?

there would have to be odds on each question because some are gimmes, such as that last one, because the likelihood of marty not having someone patting her breast, pushing on her buttocks, or nudging her on the shoulder urging her to get off the toilet so they can go is pretty slim at any given moment. and i'm not the culprit in any of those scenarios. i may have been before we had kids but i am not now because we have kids.

i'm going to do something i don't think i've ever done before. plug a photo contest that isn't my own.

a new one called snapmission recently came online. it cycles monthly and works off a theme. payout is $25 and i'm thinking unless someone can best the photo i just submitted, the jack is all mine, or i guess it's marty's since she officially took the shot. but i told her to.

my work often takes me into the infinite world of stock photography. anyone who has poured through the online stacks knows how the hours drift into the air while you look for that one image which meets the need. fortunately today's search engines do much to help you find that one perfect graphic. that is they are a great help except when they aren't.

the below page was the result of a search on the term 'statue'. the main image at the top seems spot on. it's the SIMILAR IMAGES at the base of the page which raised my brow. i can't say if i find their system's intuition to be highly flawed or impressively intuitive on knowing what my mind was really looking for. although, what the hell is up with the solitary pic of glasses?

click to enlarge

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instead of using my scheduled writing window to write, i got caught up reading this post (excerpted below) from dooce and its accompanying comments, a portion of them at least. i'd recommend the full posting along with reader comments if you are as intrigued with the topic as i am.

when i laid down in bed a few nights back marty said that while she was looking for something on my computer she saw an email message from a girl saying she saw my profile online and wondered if i wanted to chat or get together. it is one of my more prevalent pieces of spam mail that i haven't filtered for yet. i laughed it off saying that i get those all the time. after about thirty seconds marty said, 'so where do you have an online profile?'.

the better question is, where don't i have an online profile.

and speaking of spam, my most cherished piece of unsolicited correspondence of recent time follows. for the sake of this presentation i've replaced every reference to a phallus with the phrase 'self-esteem', every reference to a stimulated phallus with the word 'confidence' and every reference to the fleshy skin towards the top of the phallus with the word 'ego' (mostly b/c not all of the semantics used in this message were exactly professional and/or scientific, and no one is ever going to accuse me of not conducting myself with the utmost of decorum. i mean really, if you can't bring yourself to use the proper term for an erection, engorged manroot, then perhaps you ought not be talking about the subject.)

Finally! I have always worried about the size of my self-esteem. When I have sex, even though she says that the sex is good, I know that what she really wants is an extra inch of my self-esteem! I saw the advertising for More-Size on TV and was really impressed by the customers reports. The pills work by enhancing the hormone that instructs your body to fill your self-esteem with blood. More and more blood gets pumped into the two large chambers on top of your self-esteem, making said self-esteem harder than ever before. Your self-esteem is very very flexible, and adapts well to the increased pressure, getting longer and harder. The best thing is that once the hormones have been enhanced, they get used to it and you keep your enhanced size for many months after you stop taking the medication This is the only method that is said to work other than mechanical stretching! Pumps and creams do NOT have the same long-lasting effects. I could tell that my self-esteem was getting longer and heavier, but I thought that when I stopped taking them that my confidence would shrink back to its original size. I was really surprised! I have been 4.5" long since adolescence. Since I have been using this formula my self-esteem has been 6.5" long, and my confidence is nearly twice the size. Just be careful not to take too much to begin with as the skin needs time to adapt to your new improved self-esteem! The lengthening is permanent! I could not believe the results of this prescription. I am back to taking them again and my self-esteem is still getting larger! My girlfriend says it is the best product I've ever bought, and she ALWAYS reminds me to take them if I should forget! Take a peek... We know they work. There's a total guarantee with them, too. If you are not completely satisfied with your length gain and comfort you get your money back. Every penny. No-one sends them back! Please be aware that if your ego is already tight or if your confidence is already too hard and causes discomfort, you should consult the advice of your doctor before taking these pills, as the extra size could cause added discomfort

and lastly, one of the more genuine parts of this message is that its sender was a female.

and then there were seven.

no one will believe me. i cannot be beaten.

it's quite remarkable what a fella can achieve when he's not trying to entertain a bunch of folks he doesn't even know.

i had a meeting with some potential web customers last night. wanting to appear deceptively alert, i took a quick power nap before rushing out the door to meet them. upon getting home marty asked me why i had marker all over the side of my face. further inspection found that alex scrawled his first red-permanent marker mural on the right half of my head while i was dozing. on the good side, the kid shows promise. on the better side, even with my face all marked up, i got the gig. i'm thankful to be in an industry where the talent is expected to be more on the bent side than not.

to any current or prospective website owners. hits don't equal money, the effective delivery of your message does.

on the last day of everyman submissions i received over 150 emails between my mailboxes. over the next three days my 'you've got mail' wave file sounded off just three times.

concerned that something had gone south with my mail or isp i emailed dear friend bookguy asking him to send a message to a couple of my mail accounts. he hooked me up but took liberties in doing so. his message read: bookguy, i have a second favor to ask of you; please give the juju gods my regards when they stop by.

i'm already the number one hit on google for 'silent tampon'.

and in my defense, this is not something i search through google for on a daily basis, i saw multiple hits for that string in my logs.

although i might be good for a biannual search on silent tampons or some such derivative.

sorry i haven't been with you the last few days. we've been sitting in the dark after a huge storm knocked much of our city's power out for a day and a half. many are still waiting to have it restored and are going on day three. while i want to say suck i think some folks over in iraq went six plus weeks which makes 36 hours seem a little on the paltry side.

fact is, if you put aside the food rotting in our fridge, my house kind of enjoyed living like the ingles for a couple of days. marty actually said we should forego electricity for one 24 hour period every month. i'm not sure if that will happen but this latest round of darkness and lack of air conditioning surely proved effective in drawing the neighborhood out of their tv rooms.

sadly, the only thing keeping me from being 100% on board with marty's day of darkness is humor like rock, paper, saddam!.

i can say with absolute certainty that this is my all-time favorite boycott (04.05.04 : jiffy lube) to ever come through boycott city.

i could own this company and would still join this girl's boycott.

i've yet to be disappointed in a piece of spam with a subject line: 'i've got a new roommate'.

sadly, the same cannot be said for spam titled 'have you seen my mother?'

while my influence on things in this world may be a tad on the lean side, i like to think that where i do guide events, they are events of consequence and import. i have to feel this way because there is really only one thing i've ever helped along and by every estimation it is one of the coolest institutions in the modern and connected world.

you may have popped in, stumbled upon it by accident or heard about it in the chat rooms but if it is not part of each and every friday you exist, you're making a grave error. so since today is friday and you're here reading this, it means you're not there enjoying that, so get over to the division of michaelcosm, michaelpella and be enthralled, entranced and bettered for it is something you should not go without.

to the guy running around the internet calling himself 'onan the masterbaterian', thanks. you make me smile. laugh actually. and, this is in no way a dig. i totally in every way envy the combined lunacy and bravado in which you are leading your life. trudge forth my friend. trudge forth.

awhile back i was approached by a guy who wanted to know if i was interested in doing some design work for a porn site or two. he assured me that he and people he knew had quite a need and the opportunities would be both abundant and lucrative.

the only burn i could see is that i'd be doing work i couldn't exactly put in my portfolio which is a little bit on the evil side. when i mentioned it in passing to marty she surprisingly had a few more negative items outside of the portfolio issue. "just how would you feel telling your daughter that you peddled pornographic material for a living?"

would i be sitting in my new Porsche when explaining it to her?

this would be an example of the wrong thing to say to marty when discussing such matters.

thanks to a plug from passerby lordrich and then a subsequent link of the day honor from userfriendly.org, boycott city is out of the gate and charging ahead full tilt racking up new members and content with daily routine.

i must thank bookguy for continuing to nurture this nascent site while i was out to lunch. without his diligence it would have grown stale for these first-time visitors dropping in for a looksey.

it's all about patience people. after all the slyfox wasn't built in a day.

so i've spent the last six months building a replacement intranet for my employer. there were 40 applications. a cumulative total of more than 2,000 files. we were meticulous. we were clean. i've worked 10 weekends since alex was born. i've been in the office 25 of the last 34 hours. i would not fail. it was simply not permissable.

and then, 7 hours before my site went live, some totally unrelated systems issues took a giant wet shit on the hood of my shiny new sports car. it was the most tainted successful rollout i've ever been asked to oversee.

bitch.

boycott city takes a step towards legitimacy. read the second entry, dated 07.22.03.