i picked up gta4 on tuesday afternoon and have already put 8 hours and 12 minutes of game time into it. i’m 21.09% complete, having passed 28 missions, killing 91 people, earning $20,612, been on 5 dates, got laid once, fucked 4 prostitutes (then killed them) and only being busted by the cops once!

so far i’ve been having trouble connecting to people on xbox live and just keep getting “unable to connect to game session.” anyone else having trouble setting up private deathmatch games on xbl?

edit (5/5/08): geez, i’m still having trouble connecting on xbl almost a week later. even if i try to plug directly from my cable modem (no router issues like nat) it’s a no-go. i wonder what the deal is?

On Monday, google updated its page rank standings, and kentomatic, after dipping for a few months to a 4, is back at page rank 5! lots of other blogs i read or write for got a bump too:

sites i write for:

fishin’ impossible went from 2 to 3
the s2kblog went from 0 to 3
getbig.kentomatic went from a 0 to 2
cosnet webconferencing blog went from 0 to 4!

sites i read:

mike and lisa’s blog went from 0 to 4!
costin’s blog went from 0 to 3
james’ blog went from 0 to 3
elsja and jen’s blogs went from 3 to 2, whattup with that?

i pull into my carport this evening and my japanese milf next door neighbor has the hood of her ‘03 corolla propped up and is staring at her engine bay with a befuddled look on her face. she’s apparently late in picking up her jailbait daughter so being the mechanic and all around good samaritan that i am i offer my assistance. she tells me in really effed up english that she’s looking for the “coolant” so i point to the radiator cap and coolant reservoir tank. we somehow come to the conclusion that she doesn’t have any extra coolant to top off with, and not wanting to mix whatever she has with the wacky coolant i use, i tell her she can temporarily use water. so we get the hose and put about 2 cups of water into the reservoir before it’s full.

so then i bother to ask, why did you think you needed coolant? “was it over-heating” to which she says yes, and now i’m worried, because there was plenty of coolant in the system, and if it’s still over heating it’s probably the thermostat which is a trip to autozone and at least 30 minutes of wrench time. but while all this is going on in my head, she gets in the car and turns on the air conditioner and is unhappy that it’s still blowing hot air!

i guess it makes sense. coolant = cool temperature… it’s a logical conclusion… woman or japanese aside. so now i’m thinking fuck, she needs to recharge her AC compressor with R134a, and it probably has a leak, so even if i do a recharge it’s not going to last long, and the AC isn’t blowing *any* cool air, so it must have a hell of a leak and it’s going to be a costly repair for her.

then i realized she never pushed the fucking AC button.

what the hell is going on with the weather? it was about 100 degrees yesterday and it’s april! although looking at the 10 day forecast, yesterday was 98, today is supposed to be 88, tomorrow is supposed to be 78 and wednesday is gonna be 68? very strange.

i don’t have air conditioning in my apartment, so i didn’t sleep very well last night. it was too hot, so i would turn on the fan, but then it would get cooler and i was too lazy to turn it off so i’d be cold, then i would turn it off and it’d be too hot, so i’d turn it on at a lower setting, etc. stupid f’ing al gore.

so after another terrible fishing trip, eric and i are making plans to sell the boat. after not being able to get out last weekend because of trailer problems, this saturday we woke up at 5:30a to make up for all the bad fishing this year. we had some new fancy gps gear, filled up the 20 gallon gas tank, bought live squid… not counting the gps, this was a $100 fishing trip.

we have a few coordinates that we head straight to. we follow the gps and we’re watching the fish finder. we find our location, see fish on the meter and start fishing. within 15 minutes we’re both seasick, and about 15 minutes later eric’s puking. the sound of him puking makes me almost puke and we head back into calmer waters where we fruitlessly fish for another hour or so before we just give up. we got a few hits, but seriously, at $100 a trip and at about 2 trips a month, we’re getting some shitty ROI. we’d be much better off just chartering a couple of mexico trips a year and chase the huge fish, with a skipper that knows how to find them.

we’re definitely gonna keep it through the summer, so there’ll be wakeboarding. costin’s planning on selling his truck around the same time, so this summer’ll probably it for a while. i’m sure i or me and eric will buy another boat in a couple of years, but we’re both pretty fed up with the fishing for now and we’re gonna have other stuff going on here pretty soon. our glastron is also getting kinda old and we’d like to sell it while we can still get decent money for it.

taka and i found a new karaoke club about a mile away from our place last night. it’s the OG japanese style box-karaoke, with OG style japanese hostesses that don’t seem to speak english and wear sexy japanese getups. it’s pretty cheap, only $5/hour/person, and our bill was $21 for 1 hour and 4 drinks. the english song selection was mediocre, but not much worse than most asian karaoke places. who wants to karaoke?

taka’s always leaving me these silly notes, but i figured i should share her advice with you all since we live on the same planet.

click on the image to see a full screen shot:

i was standing out on a balcony of my office talking to dave about random things on my cell phone when i saw a gun-metal grey hummer h2 roll buy that said csi on it. my first thought was like “hmm, i wonder what happened.” my next thought was “wow csi really do drive hummers.” then an identical hummer drove by a few seconds later followed by a police car that said “miami dade police” grrr. i didn’t see any of the main characters driving them, so i assume they were just taking them from the studios to some off-site location to be filmed.

what the hell? some of the cnn articles now have a t-shirt icon next to them where you can click to buy a t-shirt with that article title on it? while it sounds completely retarded, i’m sure someday there’ll be a headline that i can’t resist.