UPDATE: It appears that the “youparklikeanasshole” site I visitedis actually an infringment on an existing product that has been sold for a while. I’ve removed the link to the site out of respect to the original idea distributors, however my two cents:

First, when I was in grade school a friend of mine gave me a “leave-behind” that looked veeeery similar to this. It didn’t actually say “you park like an asshole” on it, but it did refer to the driver as an asshole and had a checklist of infringements on it. That was over 20 years ago, and somehow I’m in doubt that it was produced by Cold Cocked Cards. It looked like one of those jokes you see posted on the wall of your local auto body shop, photocopied to death. If I recall correctly, it had Mickey Mouse on it with his middle finger out.

Second, the addition that the youparklikeanasshole site provided that made it cool was the ability to upload and categorize photos of the asshole parkers. Connecting the real-world leave-behind to the online world is a great idea and is what pushed it over the top from an “interesting idea” to a “cool site.” It might be in Cold Cocked Cards best interest to either partner with youparklikeanasshole or settle or something because the photo upload thing is an idea that shouldn’t be missed.

Anyway, it sucks when someone steals your idea, so I hope things pan out for everyone involved.

Original entry…

My friend John just sent me to my new favorite site: youparklikeanasshole.com. Maybe I should submit some of my Traffic Assholes to this one.

There have been all sorts of power issues since a windstorm that hit last Thursday, but on Saturday a transformer caught on fire and blacked out the entire city where I live. We had gone out to dinner Saturday night and all was well; coming home, it was like driving into an abyss. No street lights, no traffic signals, no lights in any home. The airport by us also had no power, which was pretty crazy because it always has lights going.

We drove around downtown Hillsboro to see how far the blackout went, but we never really found the end. It was sort of like a crazy science fiction movie where a giant EMP goes off. Power was restored for us at 5:53 the next morning.

I picked up some new CDs on Saturday because I was needing a little bit of new tune-age. I can’t see buying from iTunes anymore because I can’t un-DRM it (haven’t really mucked with myFairTunes, but Stu says he can’t get it to work) and I’m really not satisfied with 128kbps compression.

[**Placebo

• Sleeping With Ghosts*](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00008AWOD/mhsvortex): I actually bought the import version of this, and not for the *Sleeping With Ghosts album, but for the bonus second disc the import version comes with containing cover songs Placebo has done. Specifically, I was after their cover of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill,” which is absolutely stellar. The rest of the bonus disc is good, as is the Sleeping With Ghosts album, but the killer tune for me is “Running Up That Hill.”

Nelly Furtado - Loose: The song “Promiscuous” just would not leave my brain so I had to get this. The rest of the album is pretty good, too, though I feel like the first half is stronger than the second half. The first half feels sort of hip-hoppish, while the second half feels like it takes of on this latin tangent that I’m just not as into. Still, it’s pretty good, and I think it’ll grow on me.

Real Life - Send Me An Angel (The Best of Real Life) - These guys were one-hit-wonders with the song “Send Me An Angel” and I’ve only ever had a worn-out tape with it, so it was time to step up to digital. The rest of the songs on here are pretty lame, but the two versions of “Send Me An Angel” make it worth it (for me).

Most of the rest of the weekend was spent in last-minute scrambling about in preparation for Christmas this coming weekend. The 24 marathon is at my house on Saturday, so the weekend is totally out of commission for anything last-minute. I got a little bit of gaming in on the ol’ Xbox 360, but not much. I think I’ll try to play a little more tonight because I miss my digital buddy.

I’m really not sure what this is - if it’s some sort of “viral marketing campaign” that I’m not smart enough to get, or just some experimental thing - but it’s tied to Microsoft Windows Vista somehow and it’s intriguing. There are these episodes telling the story of this guy, Demetri, and his odd psychological issues. I haven’t watched all of the episodes yet, but I will. How can I not?

Granted, I’m slow to find this stuff, but EGM has a couple of hilarious articles where they have kids from today play classic games like Space Invaders and Tetris. The reaction of the kids is too funny and makes you feel kind of old.

Article 1 - November 2003: Pong, Donkey Kong, Handheld Football, Tetris, Super Mario Brothers, ET, Space Invaders

Article 2 - 2005: Punch Out, Adventure, Legend of Zelda, Star Wars, Defender, 720°, Grand Theft Auto, Gunstar Heroes, Galaga, Street Fighter II

I wrote a couple of days ago about having to re-image my work machine. Got an interesting email from a fellow named David Groves about an application that may be the answer to my issues: HyperOS. Looks like it’s sort of a cross between ghosting and multi-OS booting where you can have several copies/versions of Windows running on one machine and easily back up/switch between them.

I’ve considered running my development environment in a virtual machine but I’ve never wanted to incur that overhead. Even with all the optimizations in the world, with the hardware I’m using the overhead of a VM makes it noticeably slower than running natively and I need more speed, not less. This HyperOS application looks like it gives you the best of all worlds. Maybe I should try it out.