After disposing of our previous car, we bought a new (to us) car from a dealer. So far, we love the car, and it's been a wonderful replacement. My only complaint, isn't with the car itself, but with the dealer from whom we bought it. We have received no less than 5 letters from them thanking us for purchasing the car – from the manager, the service manager, the salesman, the finance guy, and the guy in the service department who puts those paper things on the floor when they bring it in for service. Actually, I don't really know the titles of each of the people… nor do I really care. We got the message though. You're thankful we bought the car from you. Next time, charge me less money and don't thank me – I'll be a happier customer.
Well, technically it was all on MT4 before, but some of the pages still had the old template. I'll admit I'm going to miss that old template. I should build a little homage to it, just so I don't have to lose all that quality work. I had it on my site for a long time. But now the Billboard Charts, my About/Contact page, my not-super-impressive portfolio, and the page copies are all incorporated into the new look/feel. I'm working on some additions to the Billboard charts (more links to the actual songs, so you can more easily reminisce/dedicate). Want to know what I learned about MT4 while I was doing these conversions? MT4 is flippin' sweet. I won't geek out on you here, but I fully admit I love the new system, and I doubt I've really even scratched the surface.
I think I was 10 years old before I realized that the “game” called “52 Card Pick-up” wasn't trying to make any reference to small trucks. It was obvious that the game itself had nothing to do with them. Somebody would spray a deck of cards all over the floor, and the point of the game… was to pick them up. Any time the game came up I had these thoughts:
- This is a retarded game. Why am I playing it?
- Why on earth do they call it a “pickup” when there is clearly no pickup involved?
- Why am I playing this” again?
Yeah, turbo… it's because you're a sucker enough to pick up somebody else's mess, not because you get to drive around a little wannabe truck. Thanks for playing & come again!
For some reason I was thinking of a movie I saw when I was a kid about a family that either lost their grandmother or somebody like that, and they got a new one. The catch to the “new” grandmother was that she was a robot (The Electric Grandmother). The coolest thing about this robot though, and something I tried to do for years following that, was that she could dispense liquid from her finger. She'd just point at the glass, and it'd start flowing right into the glass. You want some orange juice? *BAM* There you go. Milk? *BAM* Diet Coke? *BAM* Water? *BAM* Magic. Truly magic.
How exactly did I try to do the same feat? Well… when I'd get water on my hands (while washing my hands or when I was in the shower, or even when out washing the car), and it'd start to run off the end of one of my fingers in a stream… I thought I was the coolest kid ever… since obviously I could dispense liquids from my finger… as long as the liquid was water, and you didn't mind that it had a little soap in it. Yeah… I had magical powers like that.
I'm in total shock to find out that Maria has never read a Choose Your Own Adventure book. I loved those things as a kid, except I totally sucked at them. You say to yourself, “How can you be bad at reading a book where you impact the flow of the story?” Well… it's not that I couldn't make a decision, or that I couldn't read (the latter does not work as an excuse of why you didn't do your homework in the 5th grade, btw). It's that I cheated. I would get to the decision point, and it would tell me to turn to X page if I chose one way, or Y page if I chose the other. Not only would I turn to both of those pages to see how it would go, but I'd follow the page numbers after those, and even after those, until all my fingers were holding various pages. All of this was in my attempts to avoid the inevitably lame ending of “Your head a splode” or something like that. The point here isn't to focus on how bad I was at the books, and spoiling the intended excitement and reader engagement, it's to focus on how deprived Maria is for having never read one. If you, for some reason, still have one of these things around your house, and would be kind enough to alleviate the shame which Maria should be feeling over this hole in her childhood, please send it to me her. kthxbye