I'm sorry I haven't been very active on the site lately, I've been a little sick. I've also been watching the complete second season of the O.C so I'll be up-to-date for the third. By the way, it starts tomorrow! I'm so happy shows are coming back! Reunion is also going to premier tomorrow and it looks awesome. I don't think it stands too much of a chance though, considering it's competition. Coincidentally, it's in the same timespot as "life as we know it" was, and we all remember what happened to it. The Emmys are going to be on my 18th birthday. That should be... fun I guess. I'm more excited about the week after my birthday. Lost comes back, Invasion premiers, Battlestar Galactica has it's half-season finale. It'll be an awesome week. Rockstar was pretty good last night. Marty blew everyone else away with his song. It's been in my head all day. He's so good I hope he loses so he won't have to be tied down to an 80's band for the next two to three years. And Big Brother is entertaining again! I hope Ivette does see that the only way she can win is if she lets Howie and Janelle stay. That would be so awesome. That's all for today, I'll have a better and longer blog entry (and maybe some other stuff) when I feel better.

So much for Labor day. Instead of going outside and doing things I'm going to be watching 15 hours of 24 on "A&E." Happy Labor day to you all, I'll be back tomorrow.

What happened to the little "Friend's blogs" and "Friend's Posts" box? Why is it gone? I'm much less upset about the profile blackout than I am about the fact that the community section is gone. Am I going to have to go to all my friend's profiles everyday to see if they've put up a new blog entry? If so, I'm going to have to cut my friends down to a manageable level. At least half of them are people that I liked when the site started but have been relatively inactive ever since. And I only interact with half of the active ones (Chrisbd1, Danasdude, Darquesyde, Freo_Dude, HappyYellowBall, Jmarsh89, LisaGansky, and Matthewv1. So I might have to cut it down to them. And in case you guys didn't notice, that was a big props to you guys. ;) Please bring back my community box! So I saw Prison Break this morning. It was pretty good. I hope they get out of that prison before the first season is over though... it will get old after a few eps, And it appears it's going to get 'em. Tonight I'm going to watch Firefly and the big telethon. Is this the one that's going to have Green Day on it? I certainly hope so.

I have a few RSS feeds in my "Bookmarks Toolbar" One of them happens to be "Wikinews." Today I looked in my Wikinews tab to find that most of the article titles were too long to see in their entirety. Sor of like "Yesterday, something happene..." So I browsed through them getting only a partial picture of the news. And this was fine until I came upon this title: "Little Caesar's Pizza to open eight stores in Ir.." And I thought "Where? Iraq? Little Caeser's is going to open stores in Iraq? How much are those delivery guys going to get paid?" So I clicked on the story to find it the title in its entirety: Little Caesar's Pizza to open eight stores in Ireland. I must say, I am quite disappointed. Anyway, today I get my chance to catch the pilot of "Prison Break." From what I hear it was pretty good. I'll have to tape it though; it comes on at the same time as BB. I hope I'm not percieved as sexist for what I'm about to say: There are no men on the Today Show. What has happened to Matt Lauer? I guess it's because women are more friendly to both sexes. Women like seeing their own kind on the news, and men like seeing women. Or maybe there was a scheduling conflict. Uh Oh, commercial. I hate my local commercials. So unprofessional, so accented. I just saw a commercial with two men who own a furniture store. This is a close transcription, spelled the way it sounded. Man 1: We here at genairic furnuchur store have some great deals fer you! Man 2: A lither reclahnur chair fer only one-nahnty nahn. Man 1: A comfturbull couch fer only fahv nahnty nahn. Man 2: And a Dahnin' room table fer only nahnty nahn nahnty nahn. Man 1: Come down to genairic furnuchur store fer are big sale on Frahdy. See you then! If you happen to have a southern accent, I apologize. I mock out of love. Most of my family and 97% of everyone here has a southern accent so if I had a real problem with it I'd have a pretty hard time. This is a Flash video of Japanese drumming. It's awesome, especially if you're a fan of Japanese culture and there seem to be quite a few on this site. Speaking of drums, Here's an "Indian drum machine." They call it that, but it's really and "Indian Music Machine." Play around with it for awhile and you'll be able to recreate all the background music of Battlestar Galactica. One last link: Poke the Bunny. That's all for today. Tomorrow I hope I'll be able to talk about "Prison Break."

This is one of those times when you just can't turn away. I've had CNN on in the background all day while I was researching Katrina's aftermath on the computer. The most informative page I've found so far is the Wikepedia page on "The Effect of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans." This is devastating stuff. CNN's "Situation Room" is cool, but I can't take three hours of Wolf Blitzer. His voice... it sounds so condescending, so monotonous, so annoying. I'm sure he's a great guy but he should be on tv only one hour a day. The link to my homepage works now. > Try it out. It's a collection of all the other things I've done on the internet. Some I'd like to forget about... :) Last night's episode of Rock Star: INXS was unbelieveably awesome, especially Suzie's "Bohemian Rhapsody" (I am so tired I caught myself typing "CNN's Bohemian Rhapsody.") Jordis and Mig also did great with "Imagine" and "Live and Let Die," respectively. And Big Brother was actually not so upsetting. In fact, it was hilarious! Seeing Janelle get a phone call from a person she's known for two weeks over Ivette getting a phone call from the person she came out of: priceless. I feel very sorry for Ivette, and of course she deserved the phone call more, but having her sit through Janelle talking to Michael ("I miss you so much" "I miss you more" "No, I miss you more-er" "Has Brtiney Spears had her baby yet?") was maybe the funniest thing that's happened in Big Brother History. That's all for today. I'm going to go watch more news, Rockstar, then sleep.

Everytime I start a webpage I have to mention my favorite website of all time. It is Engrish.com! Sorry TV.com, but you're just no Engrish. Engrish is a collection of user submitted photos, usually from Japan where a small portion of the population pronounces English "Engrish," featuring misspellings and misuses of English. The featured sign today is a lawn post that says "Don't touch me - I'm afraid of hurt." There's even a spot on the website that teaches you how to make your own Engrish by using babelfish to translate English to Japanese and back. This is the previous paragraph translated into Japanese then back into English: Engrish is "with the erroneous spelling of English where the part where population is small pronounces English Engrish and the user from Japan which designates misuse as the feature the embankment the collection of the photograph which is put out, usually,". As for the sign which makes the feature concerning present "me it is the post of the lawn which says good thing, - I fear the scar. " Amazing, right? There's another site full of funny signs that I'd like to highlight: Road Trip America.com. It's similar to Engrish, but all of these signs are in the United States. Now on to TV business. I missed the premier of Prison Break last night due to... umm... a nap. I did, however, get to see last night's "Weeds" and Sunday's "Entourage." They were awesome, I really like 'em. Entourage especially. Speaking of that word, up until today my mom thought it was spelled "expecially." Tonight is Rock Star: INXS concert night. This is a show that improves everynight I watch it and I doubt that will change tonight. If you haven't checked out this show, at least give it a look. Also on tonight: A bad episode of Big Brother. This is the worst year ever. Nobody on the show this year was particularly virtuous and nobody was worthy of fandom. And now that all the people that were at least somewhat good are going home, the only reason to continue watching is just to see how it ends. It feels a little bit like having teeth pulled everytime it's on but I have to keep going. Anyway, I'm sorry if I've made a great deal of ironic English mistakes today but I've been awfully tired lately. My thoughts aren't coming out naturally, lol. I think I might go take a nap. TTYL, bye.

A hurricane passed by today. Luckily we only got a tad bit of rain and some noisy thunder. This is what happens most of the time but every once in awhile we get hit. Jeanne was the worst of recent years. Most of the town had no power for 3 days. The only place that had power was Wal-Mart (But that's how it usually is, heh heh heh). Yesterday I got the 2nd season of the O.C. and the 6th season of the Simpsons. I just got done with my traditional Simpsons blow out. It was awesome, but I didn't do too much on the site (or the internet altogether) last night because of it. Now it's time to start watching the O.C. I didn't see too much of it last year because I started watching "Joey," which was a mistake I realized too late. By the time I started watching the second season Kirsten was already an alcoholic. But from what I hear I didn't miss a whole lot. Maybe this year will be better... I hope so. It's going to take me a lot of effort to tape it (it's on at the same time as Alias, which takes priority) since I'm not very VCR friendly. In fact, I hate them. They're getting so old they hardly ever tape properly, and getting a new one is a huge waste of money. That's why I've given my VCR the nickname "You will be replaced when the price of DVRs goes down." I saw the Season Finale of the 4400 tonight... good, but I have some issues with it. Evil Dennis, Shaggy Jordan, and Naked Isabelle are what come to mind. Are we going to have to wait a whole year again for that show to come back? Hopefully not. And I'm having quite the level drought. For a long time I went up very quickly for doing what I percieve as less than most others, and now that well has gone dry. I'm going to have to work for levels now. :( I'm actually not sure how much I deserve this level compared to others. Maybe more, maybe less, but I'm going to try to figure it out. Here is the index of everything I've done on TV.com: Level: 15 and 34% Reviews: 19 Blog Entries: 18* Posts: 185 ** Submisions Accepted: 43 Google Results: 236*** *= not including this one **= That's the number under my name in forums, but when I look in my history I can only find about 115 ***= The number of results when I google "Midwestrocker site: TV.com" so it only includes this site in the search. Now compare that with your index. A couple of links: First, The Baby Name Voyager. Put in a name, your own, for instance, and see when that name was most popular. It goes back about 100 years, and yes "Edna" was extremely popular in the 20's. This one you've probably seen before, but I don't care. Big props to Google Earth, a geography geek's ultimate time waster. It's a program that uses satellite photographs to create a detailed and interactive map of the Earth. You probably shouldn't try to use it unless you have broadband. One of the best parts of Google Earth is the community interaction. People can post Placemarks on the map as they wish. Some point out famous landmarks, some point out interesting gliches (ALIEN LAKE!!!), and some are just plain stupid. I was looking around Washington D.C. last week and I found a placemark that said "My House." That's it my friends. That's the stupidest thing I've ever seen on the internet. Someone advertising the location of their home. It doesn't get much worse than that. And finally, play around with "Stereotypes," an experiment with peoples faces. Note: There are at least three combinations you can use to make a face that looks JUST like Michael Stipe's. Well, I'm calling it a night. TTYT.

I've gone back to Firefox! About a week or so ago I had a problem in Opera and wondered if it would be any better in Firefox. So I opened it up and apparently Firefox isn't slow anymore! It's great. So I've been using my Stumble Upon toolbar to find a whole bunch of new and interesting webpages. Today I will focus on interactives, or "interactivities," a word I picked up somewhere but cannot place. This is a game in which you try to stump Darth Vader. It's not as good as the Dictator or Sitcom Character game but it's still fun to see Darth Vader try to guess the word "Puppy." Keeping with the Star Wars theme for a moment, This is an example of different lightsabers. They don't make different noises and you can't hit one against the other, but it's a good 30 seconds of entertainment. Here's something I got off TV. You draw a line that makes noises. It comes with an example that I can never even come close to. And for something completely inexplicable, try the Singing Horses. And finally, try Grow and Fly Guy. The first is a weird game in which you try to... I'm not totally sure what you try to do. The second is a semi-game in which you fly around and look at stuff. I'm going to take a break from link addled blog posts for awhile, maybe write something original when I feel like it. But until then, I'm out.

Today I've been doing geek research (doesn't get much geekier than that) on Wikipedia. I found out many things, for instance the difference between a geek and a nerd. I'm a geek, not a nerd, and apparently I also fit in to several geek subcategories. I'm part music geek, geography geek, history geek, Trekkie, Wikipedia geek, and of course, TV geek. All of those links really are in my bookmarks. For those of you that aren't geeks I'm sure that was scary. But everybody is a little geeky about something. Try taking the Geek Test to see just how geeky you are. I got a score of 22%, which puts me in the "geeky" level (15-25%) and I just missed the "total geek" level (25-35%). Also take this geek/nerd test. I scored a 38, which means that I'm geekier than 38% of the people who took the test. I didn't think I would be very high because I'm not that into technology. I didn't even know for sure what "Linux" was until a week ago, although I had a pretty good idea from all the context clues I was getting. I'm also not very good at math, so I won't be sending man to Mars anytime soon. Lastly, this is the Geek Hierarchy, the ranking of who is geekiest among the geeks. Fun stuff. Well, I'm going to go watch Attack of the Show and Big Brother so I'll see you guys later.

It came with my AIM upgrade. It's the "AOL Explorer" and I'm not quite sure what to think of it. It's somewhat fast and offers tabbed browsing, but I haven't come across too much that would make want to use this over Opera. It's very slick, and I like that, but slick doesn't make useful. I'm going to keep it around, and maybe I'll use it every once in awhile to spice things up. Moving along... have you ever been to Flickr.com? It's awesome. I recently set up an account, but my pictures suck. I didn't think they did, but after seeing other people's pictures, I... I... can't talk about it. This browser is still better that IE. Maybe their next version will be better, maybe it will add something new. Like extensions! That would be awesome. I went shopping for new computers with my grandmother yesterday. We picked up a nice HP Pavillion at Circuit City. It's a media center, it's got tons of RAM, it's I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT got a very cool dvd recorder, and it comes with a subscription to PC Magazine. I'm very happy WANT A NEW COMPUTER for her. We get a computer about every three years, so we're due next year. Maybe we'll be able to get "Longhorn." Maybe we'll be able to get a media center, with tv tuners. That WANT IT would be awesome. Today is Scifi Friday, my favorite day of the week. Four hours of non-stop science fiction and Best Week Ever. A Pop-Culture geeks paradise. What are "Chanells?" This browser says it has channels. I'm curious, but I don't want to click the "Channels" button in case I lose everything I've typed... oh well. I'll copy and paste. I'm back... Chanells are awesome! The Television "Channel" has a big page full of Battlestar videos, including a preview of tonight's show, which is awesome. I actually like this browser now. On the TV subject, I've been watching Showtime and HBO On Demand, specifically Weeds and Entourage. What can I say? I'm a sucker for hype. They were surprisingly awesome. I've always thought that the premium TV was only good for giving people a false feeling of superiority, like "The common folk watch CSI; I watch Six Feet Under." I'm not saying that's no longer true, I'm just acknowledging the fact that I'm in on it now. Well, I'm going to go explore some more channels, catch ya later.