MikeRapin.com A man. A nerd. A web dev.

29Sep/100

That time of the year

Starting with this past Saturday, it's become the time of the year where I just get extremely nostalgic and think back on some of the best and worst times in my life.

In the past five years, around this time of year, things have gone crazy. Ups and downs, happiness and sadness. And it's different every year. This year:, so far It's happiness. Last year: confusion. 2008: sadness. 2007: frustration. 2006: abandonment.

Maybe it's been a bit more bad than good, but nonetheless, between September 23 and October 15, it's always something. All of which leads right up to my birthday on October 14th.

This was something I realized last night: it's been a year since [x] happened and three since [y] happened, but now [z] is happening... Sorry for the vagueness, there's just some hard feelings and memories in there.

So now, I'm holding on to this good feeling that I have and am going to try to ride it out until the 15th. What a weird time of the year...

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4Jul/100

Mike Rapin’s fake history of the United States of America

Given that today is Independence Day in the US, I thought I'd give my own version of the history of the United States of America. I'm going to tell this as I think it goes (and making things up to make the story work) without looking at any sources until I'm done. Expect lunacy and lies. I'm already laughing.

Enjoy.

After Christopher Columbus, after the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock, after Atlantis disappeared, after the Boston Tea Party, after the Shot Heard 'Round The World, and some other events of importance that I cannot, for the life of me remember, there were a group of men who decided that England was terrible and should be told to screw themselves.

These men were called The Masons. The year was 1776.

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27Jun/100

Insomnia Refresh: A Wish

Kincsö's silhouette smoking on the beach at dusk by Jonathan Clay

Hello again.

Here's wishing I was doing more than sitting on a couch right now.

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7Jun/100

Thought Lightning: Gnats and Mosquitoes

When I walk through Grand Rapids sometimes, I'm surprised at the amount of gnats and bugs I see. Why? Well, this is a damn city; a clear sign that we've conquered nature, so you'd think nature would stay the hell away sometimes. Especially in such large amounts. Strength in numbers, I guess. And you'd think that we'd have some kind of solution for this, yet these pests roam like they own the place. I guess I can't blame non-thinking types like gnats and mosquitoes for their arrogance.

--

The idea for under-100-word posts, stolen from Warren Ellis.

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18Mar/100

Songs stuck in my head lately

So, yeah. Here's just a list of songs with specific lyrics that have been in my head lately. You know, for funzies:

Looking over the lyrics... a lot are in random parts of songs. My head is just weird I guess.

All of those songs are pretty neutral, so I suggest everyone go check them out. The song by Refused is probably my favorite on that list as I've loved that version of the song since like... 11th grade. It's a sweet mix of that song--the original version is a more hardcore punk song whereas this one is a cool "techno" mix of the song. Man I love that band.

More later.

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3Feb/100

On being sick and the last four days

It's been a crazy past four days.

  • I moved into my new place in Allendale with Brian and Josh on Saturday
    • This includes moving a bed, a desk, a TV + stand, all of my comics & trade paperbacks, a bookshelf, stereo & speakers, all of my DVDs and books, all of my clothes and other odds and ends
    • I also helped Brian move his bed, desk, dresser, desk chair and other things into his room
  • I acquired a cold after unpacking 80% of my said moved stuff in my room (I blame the dust)
  • I've watched at least 8 episodes of Supernatural with Katherine as well as the last few episodes of The IT Crowd, series 2
  • I've sorted 200+ comics and filed them in my longboxes
  • I've washed all of my clothes and arranged them in a functional way in my room
  • I picked up last week's comics on Saturday
  • I shot some of Jeff & Mike on Sunday in the blistering cold over at Whitecap Comics with Jeff and the rest of the J&M crew
    • This only made me more sick

I'm sure there's some more in there, but overall it's been a long four days; so long, in fact, that my body decided to give me a big middle finger yesterday by keeping me in bed instead of going to work and class.

So, I'm still battling this cold and I'm making myself go through class and work today sniffling and coughing--oh yeah, I acquired a cough last night/this morning. DayQuil to the rescue!

This week is going to go by quick, I assume. Rest tonight. Comic Book Club, tomorrow--we're watching Batman. Friday will most likely mean D&D. Saturday will be dedicated to shooting Jeff & Mike. Sunday is the Superbowl--which I really don't care much for, but will probably be spent drinking beers and eating chili with Jeff and some people. Whew. This should be fun.

I hope everyone else's past four days have been good. I'll be around with more random updates.

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25Jan/100

Looking for a To-Do list

This is an issue that haunts people day and night: What To-Do list application should I use?

If you know anything about me, I am the type of person who gets things done typically in order of mental priority. It's a bit of a burden. So! Last night while laying in bed, I decided that when I woke up I needed to find a good To-Do app of some kind to keep my mind focused on tasks I may have and to make sure I remember the shit I need to do.

My options based on 20 minutes of research are these:

  1. To-Do for the iPhone
    • This seems like a pretty sweet application with many uses, but $10? That's a little rough.
  2. Google Tasks on the iPhone
    • I had no idea this existed, and the benefit is that it would sync to my GMail account so I could access this stuff all over--seeing that I use every aspect of Google that I can.
    • The only issue I have with this option is that it runs through the iPhone's browser and isn't it's own app which makes it a tad annoying.
  3. Pen & Paper agenda
    • I'm talking about using a small agenda that I carry around 24/7 to keep track of everything.
    • In all honesty, this seems like my best choice.

My decision is pretty much made, but if anyone has any better suggestions I'd like to hear them. I hate having a terrible memory...

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21Jun/090

A quick story about my night

map-scotlandSo, I haven't updated in like 3 months.. yeah.

I felt the urge to spread the tale of awesomeness tonight that I had.

It all began with my new found buddy Brian offering to Jared and myself to go out to an "Ugly Sweater Party" hosted by some people he knew from his work. I agreed, as the idea of such a party made me laugh a bit. So! After Jared and I bought some seriously 90s prep-looking sweaters from Goodwill, we proceeded to get picked up by Brian and head for this party donned in our sweaters. Mind you, it was a good 80 degrees out today, so wearing these sweaters was a serious task for us. Anyways, we get to the party and have a good ol' time with the 15 or so people there and at some point later on we ended up talking in Scottish accents. Jared, Brian and I were just going at it non-stop. So, we end up taking off from the party around 1:30am to get some IHOP--as we were ALL in the mood for something to eat. Oh and we got semi-lost/confused on the highways coming from dropping off Brian's friend Erica, but we made our way to IHOP eventually.

We carry on the Scottish (Irish for Jared) accents into IHOP and sit down and take our orders and the waitress honestly believed us to be from 'across the pond.' She kept asking us simple questions about why we were here in Michigan and how it's been since we got here and all that jazz. It was a serious riot. But of course, to keep ourselves into the mood, we kept speaking in the accents while the waitress was away making sure the other customers believed us as well. We made up a story about Jared's uncle Brenden who was a real party animal and how he was in jail for some reason and Jared kept getting snobbish because 'we knew damn well why his uncle was in prison and how we shouldn't speak of it any more' trying to play off being ashamed. Brian and I played it as if we were cousin's and how Brian could drive whereas I couldn't because I didn't want to take the damn driving test here dispite my being here in the US for a year and a half. We kept our composure for about 45 minutes and didn't laugh or break character for a second. It was flipping fantastic.

So my night ended in serious talk in Scottish accents and badassery. How about that?

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27Oct/080

Need the feed reed

It's "read" I know, but nevertheless.....

Thanks to Bob, I was inspired to write a monster post about ALL the RSS reeds I read. I'll let you know which once are my favorite as I go. Let's just go with that and start... now:

Blogs

Comics

Gawker Media

  • Gizmodo (RSS) - Favorite tech/gadget blog on the net
  • io9 (RSS) - Favorite sci-fi news and awesomeness on the net
  • Lifehacker (RSS) - Favorite general awesomeness site on the net

Tech News

Tumblrs - I can't really describe most of these, so check them all out.

Webcomics

Other

So... I read a lot of damn news.  I hope you got something out of this :).

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20Aug/080

Random IMs — wtf?

I've been on AIM a long time. I mean, a long time. And this is probably the first time I've ever really been harassed on AIM by a bot-type service.

Up until about 3 days ago I hadn't really ever been bothered too much on AIM by anyone... I mean, I have come across some weirdos, but starting about 3 days ago I've been getting random instant messages from screen names from people whose names end in "trout" and always ask a question or say something that should get you to respond (see picture for this post).

I have learned to not respond at this point but, it just so happens that I talked to one person for a small bit of time. She was very polite and used some random internet slang which had me convinced she wasn't a bot. It turns out that on my end, her screen name appeared to be "weightytrout" and mine appeared to be "MortifiedTrout"... it was odd. Especially since the IM started like this:

weightytrout: You're downright wonderful! I love you, I love you, I love you!
Me: ?
WeightyTrout: um...
Me: um
WeightyTrout: uuuumm, why would I die?
Me: what?
WeightyTrout: who is this?
Me: Mike
Me: who is this?

and the conversation continued and this person (it was a girl) ended up being kind of cool. Now, I don't know how the hell someone could have gotten my AIM screen name since I don't really give it out too much, but someone has it and is using it in a strange anonymous-based random-meeting type thing... I don't know what to call it... I'm not sure if this whole *trout thing is supposed to be a way to get people to randomly meet or whatever but it's getting damn annoying since I get 3-5 of these IMs a day. So long as I don't respond, nothing happens, but yeesh...

What really surprises me about all of this is that in all of the years I've used AIM I've never had a problem with bots or anything like that (though there was one time I got some crazy AIM hacker virus when I was in 7th grade that spammed all of your buddies thus making a giant chain of death). I mean, MSN and Yahoo! chat are always prone to random pr0n-bot IMs but this surprised me, especially since AIM is usually pretty good about that stuff (as far as I know).

Let me know in the comments if you've gotten anything similar on your AIM account(s) and maybe we can figure this thing out... somehow...

--UPDATE--

I tweeted this post and a fellow Twitter user (@funkcoaster) pointed me to a wikipedia article explaining this fun little happening. It turns out (from what the user(s) who created this article think) that Facebook is to blame for this random "attack" on random screen names. Nothing malicious has come out of this (yet) so here's to hoping AIM won't kill us all.

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