Janicek.com

Janeen e-mailed this morning stating that she and her family are moving to Minneapolis in six weeks. Her husband recently accepted a job with General Mills. I know some great people that live in Minnesota but I could not begin to fathom the thought of even considering to start to think about entertaining the notion of moving north of Round Rock. I hate cold weather.

Four years ago Elise and I moved to Temple, a small town sixty miles north of Austin when I accepted a job offer from Scott & White. Elise kicked and screamed and cried because she didn’t want to leave Austin. I convinced her that our new home would be great, I would thrive at my job and we would live happily ever after. I was dead wrong on all counts and learned a valuable lesson. I busted my ass and knocked on every door until I found a good job back in Austin. We were piss poor and desperate when we moved to Temple. I understand moving out of necessity but if we have the choice, we’ll choose where we live because we actually want to live there. Never again just for a job.

Elise and I spent Christmas with my parents in Cat Spring this year. We left Austin mid-afternoon on Friday in time to have gumbo with Mom & Dad. After dinner we went to see Adrian play at The Fainting Goat.

On Saturday we got up and did some last minute Christmas shopping in Brenham. We got back to Mom & Dad’s in time to change clothes and then head out to Bellville for church. We made it to the church at 4:58 to find out that mass started at four. We drove back to Mom & Dad’s and made taco salads and tamales with chili for dinner.

Elise and I left again for mass in Bellville at ten and yours truly got the annual stand, sit, stand, sit, stand, sit workout.

On Christmas morning we all woke up and exchanged presents in the living room. Elise and the baby made out like bandits this year!

For Christmas dinner, Mom steamed brocolli and baked beer bread. Dad cooked rice and I smoked two pork loins, one stuffed with a fig and cayenne chutney and rubbed with crushed anchos and coriander. For the other I used parts of a recipe e-mailed to me from Barin von Foregger, cream cheese, garlic, bacon, kalamata olives and bread crumbs and rubbed with Mexican spices and coffee.

Dad didn’t get out of bed on Monday. Mom looked and felt horrible when we arrived on Friday night and was feeling somewhat normal by Christmas morning. Since Dad was sick, I finished the electric wiring to Mom’s greenhouse.

Later in the afternoon we headed home for Austin. I woke up this morning and felt weird. By the time I got to the office, I felt like shit, my stomach was knotted, my office manager knew it and sent me home. So my extended Christmas vacation has consisted of my curled up in bed, holding my stomach. But I finally got to watch The Graduate in its intirety!

Elise and I left Austin for my parents’ house early in the afternoon on Friday. We got to Mom & Dad’s in time for dinner and then Elise and I headed out for Bellville to watch Adrian perform an accoustic set at The Fainting Goat, a New York-inspired cafe & bar. It’s a quaint little spot with fun foods and trendy beers. The service was sub-par but seeing some old friends and watching Adrian perform made it worth it.

Adrian pulls Josh on stage for “A Song About Bellville”

We went to a Christmas party last night that doubled as Cyndi’s surprise birthday party. Food and friends were great. Elise and I brought a crudite platter and I made two great sandwich spreads.

The evening progressed. Most people left after a few hours and there were but a few of us stragglers who loitered in Jenny’s kitchen. The topic of husbands, wives, raising children and working full-time was brought up. I bravely mentioned the concept of “bread winner”, which struck a few the wrong way and I had to dig myself out of a hole pretty quickly.

After the debate, Marc, Cyndi and Christine shared recent child rearing horror stories, most of which made me wish we had purchased a gently used German Shepherd instead of getting pregnant.

On the drive home Elise and I discussed how our lives are going to change beyond our imaginations when our baby is born. I’m a moody asshole who should probably be on anti-moody asshole medication. Elise is worried that I’ll become more of a MA after the baby is home, when we lose any and all concept of schedule and when our house eventually turns into wreck.

Who knows what will happen. That’s one of life’s little secrets.

Here’s another little secret: If you find yourself in a kitchen with pregnant women, don’t use the term “bread winner” unless you’re referencing a bake sale.

My first job out of college was with LearnFREE.com, which later became Vidbook.com. We were a dot-com and we fell with the rest of them. When business was slow we either shopped eBay for radio controlled monster trucks or used our multimedia computers to edit videos.

I was digging through old CDs and found some outtakes:

(These videos are all encoded for Real Media [I'm sorry ])

• Jason needs some dating tips
• Tips for Kanye and Fiddy Scent
• Honda?
• A Multi-track Techno Experiment
• Swim Shady
• A to the B to the Y?

Randal “Not the Apprenti” Pinkett was hired on Thursday’s “The Apprentice”. It was the riveting season finale but my favorite part was seeing Jim Florentine wearing a Wednesday 13 shirt during his stand-up routine benefiting the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation.

Awesome free advertising: Comedian Jim Florentine
wears a Wednesday 13 shirt on NBC’s “The Apprentice”

I e-mailed Matt to see if he knew of the free ad. He didn’t know about it but said, “Wow… we’ve really made it!”

After three years of intense training, I earned my first degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do on October 16, 1992. I went on a nine year voluntary TKD hiatus when I left the nest for college in August of 1994.

When I decided to return to the sport in 2003, I set a short-term goal for myself: Earn your second degree black belt. I will test for my second degree in four months. I’m not going to stop after that.

Long-term goal: I’m going to be the dad whose kid can say, “Oh yeah? Well, my dad can kick your dad’s ass”, and actually mean it.

It could be a friendly store clerk, one of the company’s customers, my father-in-law, the cat, anyone. When the conversation is coming to an end I have made it a painfully annoying habit to say, “Okay, we’ll talk to you later!” The moment I begin hearing it roll out of my mouth I want to repeatedly stab pencils into my ears. “We’ll“? Who’s we? Me and my schizophrenic other self?

I don’t know when or why I started saying this but when I hear it again, we’re going postal.

The weekend before last I got up early Saturday morning and was hell-bent on putting the Christmas lights on the house. The neighbors across the street were also putting up their lights. I was trying to untangle the netted icicle lights that are “easily draped over shrubs and bushes” and remembered the holiday joy that I felt this time last year. You know, the holiday joy that drives you to raise your fists to the heavens while standing atop your home and scream, “WHY THE **** DO I HAVE TO PUT UP THESE *** **** *********** LIGHTS AND ****** **** ***** ***** ****** *** ******** **** ***** ****** ***** ****** *** ****** ***** **** *********** *** ****** **** ****** **** DAMN **** **** **** **** ******** **** AGAIN!!!!”

I looked across the street and saw my neighbors with blueprints, a laser level and one of those surveying scopes and said, “To hell with it all!” These neighbors are the guys who won an all-expense-paid Caribbean cruise a few years back for their Christmas decorating theme.

Elise is set on having Christmas decorations and lights outside as well as mulled spices on the stove this year. We went to Papa Noel to get our Christmas tree this evening. I thought it was going to be an in and out affair but my lovely wife had to find the tree. Immediately I reminded myself of Jeff’s recent tree buying experience and thought, “Shit… we’re going to be here ALL NIGHT.” Luckily Elise found her tree within half an hour and we got an official Papa Noel coffee mug to boot.

Mrs. Preggers lights the tree.

Bring on the egg nog.

Guess what I had for lunch today? Yeah. A bacon jalapeno cheeseburger.

DO NOT play this game if you have anything to do today. Or this one. This one either.  Ever hit a penguin?

For Elise: Egg white omelet with sauteed leeks, sweet pepper, bacon, spinach, cheddar cheese with a tomatillo, guajillo, garlic and coriander salsa and a San Diego tangerine from my sister, Terri’s back yard.

For Josh: I had to one-up yesterday’s breakfast so today I made myself a jalapeno cheesburger topped with bacon and a fried egg. To make sure I was doing the healthy thing, I went the Atkins route and omitted the whole wheat pita bread.

I hate breakfast.

I will preface this by letting you all know that I was recently inteviewed by a writer from one of those big pregnancy websites regarding cooking and eating healthily during pregnancy.

At last night’s Christmas party, Elise ate cheese and crackers and an assortment of fresh fruits. I ate breaded stuffed mushrooms, chicken quesadillas and miniature open faced roast beef sandwiches with greasy cheese.

Elise had long since left for work by the time I rolled out of bed this morning and knowing her, she had some fresh fruits and grains for breakfast. I made myself a jalapeno cheeseburger for breakfast. I put it on whole wheat pita bread because that was the healthy thing to do. For lunch a couple hours later I had half a bag of Fruit Bowl Jelly Belly Jelly Beans and a Shiner Bock.

My kid is going to love me.

Elise and I went to see Rockin’ Christmas Party at the Zachary Scott Theatre this evening. The folks at OnRamp were nice enough to invite us and it was fun to hang out with those guys somewhere other than the conference room. They hosted a small cocktail party before the show and Elise and I were able to talk to OnRamp’s president, Chad for half an hour or so. He offered some great light-hearted and fun parenting advice.

I would rather watch the cat hock up a hairball than go to a musical but this one helped put me in the much needed Christmas spirit. We had a really nice time. Thanks OnRamp!

My account representative from one of our major vendors visited recently and she and her boss took me out for lunch. They brought me new product catalogs and samples of new products to look over while we ate. Melanie opened the product catalog and began explaining the improvements they’ve made in our Men’s Extra supplement.

“…And we’ve added horny goat weed to our proprietary blend.”

“Melanie, when I form my rock band, I’m soooo going to call the group Horny Goat Weed.”

I don’t remember how I stumbled upon it, but I’ve been lurking around Say-So.org for the past couple of months. I’ve asked the Internet a few questions that have been the source of argument.

• How do you pronounce “Coupon”?
• How do you pronounce “Crayon”?
• How do you pronounce “Pecan”?

Now “Sarah” asks the definitive question.

It froze yesterday. Central Texas was under a sheet of ice for 18 hours. I waited until noon today before heading to the office. I passed 22 stranded cars on Hwy 71. Six of which were totalled. One particular truck careened off the road and down a very steep embankment where it met a tree. Another car smashed into a tree just off the highway. It was like driving through a trail of dead vehicles. Or a trail of vehicles driven by Texans in icy weather.

Elise’s called me at 3 o’clock yesterday afternoon and said she was leaving work early so she could go home and cook chili.

“Okay, but use my recipe.”

We got home at the same time and yours truly prepped 91.4% of the recipe. Elise changed a few ingredients so it’s officially hers. She changed the recipe to include ground beef, kidney beans and accidentally guajillo chiles (she picked up chipotles and anchos as well but accidentally threw guajillos in the bag). I added a tomatillo, we used Shiner Bock instead of Saint Arnold Spring Bock and we have an awesome new chili recipe .

They say real Texas chili isn’t supposed to contain beans. I’m a tried and true Texan and I personally like beans in my chili. It adds another flavor and texture element and that’s what chili’s all about. And this recipe is 50% Midwestern.

I HATE COLD WEATHER. When the temperature drops below 60-degrees, I’m bitching. Early this morning rain drizzled and has been for most of the day. Sometime this afternoon the temperature plummeted to 33-degrees.

As the sun went down the temperature dropped even more and the drizzle began to freeze. That made for a fun commute home. As I was crossing the Pedernales River bridge near Pace Bend, I saw two cars and two Suburbans spin wildly out of control in almost-choreographed unison. One Suburban and one car crashed into the guard rails.

I hate this weather. Wake me up in March. Damnit, I hate this weather.

Have I mentioned that I hate cold weather?

- The Darkness
- Work
- Avoiding deer on the commute home from work.
- Dooce.com
- Cops (TiVo has managed to serve up Cops. Non-stop.)
- Magazine subscriptions. And not paying for them after invoice.
- Trimming ear hair.
- Driving my monster truck into the ground.

It’s gotten to the point where I can no longer giggle when I check Janicek.com’s statistics. Nearly 1/4 of my visitors are in search of pirate treasure. 1/6 are looking for BIG pirate treasure. Many are looking for moist pirate treasure while others are searching for unsanitary and epileptic pirate treasure.

“Josh, why are people coming to Janicek.com in search of pirate treasure?”

I’m glad you asked. A couple years ago there was a party held at John and Christine’s house. Seeing how it was a party there was alcohol involved and soon a drinking game ensued among the girls. This game involved a sort of chant where the girls would slap the table and clap their hands in cadence. Slam clap slam clap. They chanted this song while slamming and clapping that went something like this: “Big pirate treasure, big pirate treasure, big pirate treasure. Uh huh. Big pirate treasure.”

I filmed a few minutes of this chanting game, named the video file “bigpiratetreasure.mpg” and uploaded it to the website. A few months later, Google Video and Yahoo! Video were launched and bigpiratetreasure.mpg was indexed. Since then many people have sought video of big, voluptuous, black, bouncy, juicy, nasty, stanky pirate treasure and I HAD IT! Woot!

A few months ago I spent one evening and reworded the reference to pirate treasure on Janicek.com and I renamed and moved the pirate treasure video file. But people still come to Janicek.com in search of pirate treasure.

Here is Yahoo!’s Video Removal Procedure just in case you have a video stored on your server that you don’t want the world to see. Or if you have a lot of pirate treasure.

Yahoo! Video Search – Video Removal Procedure
Standard Removal Procedure:
Yahoo! Video Search crawls the Web for video files, and our crawlers comply with the Robots Exclusion Standard. In order to remove your videos from our index, we require that you create a robots.txt file using the Robots Exclusion Protocol to indicate which files you want excluded.

In order to use a robots.txt file, you or your webmaster need to have access to your web site’s hosting server. For more information on the Robots Exclusion Standard and its practice, please visit:

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html

You must stipulate the following user-agent in your robots.txt file to block Yahoo!’s video crawler from accessing your specific directories or video files:

User-agent: Yahoo-MMAudVid

Once you have placed this file at the root level of your hosting server, Yahoo!’s video crawlers will no longer access those files or directories you have stipulated. Please note that it can take several weeks before your block takes effect in our index depending upon when you first implement your robots.txt file.

Any videos referencing Pirate Treasure are a precious commodity and are exempt from the Robots Exclusion Standard.

Here are the contents of my robots.txt file:

#
User-agent: *
User-agent: Yahoo-MMAudVid
Disallow: /01dz/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /video/
Disallow: wp-config.php
Disallow: wp-login.php

If that doesn’t work, I don’t know what I’ll do. We’ll see what happens in the weeks to come. If nothing changes than I may just have to embrace the fact that Janicek.com is a great source for your pirate treasure video. Naughty pirate treasure. Aaaaarggg!

I’ve had my iBook for a little over year now and thought I would publish my short list of free OS X applications that I use regularly and that have made my “switch” to a Mac a little bit easier.

In no particular order:

Quicksilver – because it’s so much easier to hit a set of key commands to search and open apps than to move the cursor six inches to the dock.

iPhoto Diet – because I love iPhoto but hate the fact that I can’t just browse the contents of my digital camera to delete images that have already been downloaded.

ImageWell – because it makes uploading photos for the website simple.

WhatSize – because I like to know what’s hogging the hard drive.

MacStumbler – because sometimes I need to borrow someone else’s WiFi.

NetNewsWire Lite – because it’s a great little news aggregator. And it’s the free version. I’m cheap like that.

iBackup – because it’s simple and now that I use a Mac exclusively, I’ve made it a habit to backup data on the first of each month.

iProduct – because it works.

Screenshot Plus – because it makes taking screenshots simple.

When Elise and I lived in our last apartment prior to buying our house, I can’t remember how many times I would find myself in the kitchen, beating my meat. I would be in there, just going to town and I would break my concentration and think, “I know the neighbors can hear this.” But there’s really no other way to do it. Now that I own my own house, I can hit it as hard as I want and the neighbors are none-the-wiser.

Round steak, New York strip and chicken. I like to pound those flat on a plastic cutting board with a meat mallet so I can make some sort of rolled and roasted concoction.

Tonight I pounded some yard bird breasts to make a southwestern chicken Flourentine with cinnamon chipotle chutney, raisin and walnut wild rice and acorn squash drizzled with butter and brown sugar.

A great seasonal, Winter meal

Elise scheduled a dentist appointment for us a few weeks ago for cleanings this past Wednesday. So in that two week window I did some mad flossing so Dr. Cox wouldn’t get pissed at me for not flossing.

Marilisa cleaned my teeth. Marilisa is awesome because she sings while she cleans teeth. She’s a folk singer and it’s nice to listen to her sing her folky songs about folky things while she’s folkin’ with my grill.

Your humble narrator and his wife both have clean pearlies, no cavities, no extreme tartar and no gingivitis. Whew.

On the drive that morning to Dr. Cox’s office I stopped at a red light. I looked at the car to my left and saw two young ladies in a nice hand-me-down sedan. The two seemed of the high school sort and both could easily be perceived as student council representives and/or cheerleaders at first glance.

The light turned green and the hand-me-down sedan accelerated through the intersection. I paced behind. I then saw the driver take a BIG tokeroony from a fluorescent weed pipe. Then she passed it to her copilot and she partook in the inhalation of the funky skunk. Tokeroony and the Funky Skunk would be a good name for a band. Or Dave Matthews’ next album title. I only know this vernacular because I listened to Cypress Hill in the college years. The smell of marijuana has always made me nauseous so I was limited to 40 oz. Olde English or Busch tall boys in my somewhat-remembered wild and wacky college days. All six years of them.

I couldn’t believe it. I officially felt OLD. “Those crazy kids!” I thought to myself. “What are they doing? All smoking the pot before heading to school to tend to their studies.” I thought about speeding up so I could drive along side of them, roll my window down and yell, “Are you on the grass? Is that what you’re doing? The reefer? You’re probably listening to that Puffy Kanye Daddy Diddy Cent music and wasting your lives away! Damn kids.”

The driver sped up enough to get in front of me and then turned into the high school parking lot.

I didn’t think much of it that day. That particular experience popped into my head this week as I continue to think about my unborn child’s life and what he or she will experience in it’s life. I can only pray that Elise and I can pass along our moral strengths and good judgement. And a Cypress Hill CD.

Rest in peace Carmela

Somewhere between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. this morning Carmela decided to leave us for a better place. She held on for a little over a month. She had been sick since we brought her home and her partner, Tony Soprano kept her going as long as he could. Research indicates that Carmela suffered from a form of bladder abnormality that hindered her appetite and balance.

Forensic reports lead us to believe that Carmela hanged herself as indicated in the photo above.

While feeding him fish flakes, I asked Tony Soprano how he felt about the imminent loss. His response: “Wuddya gunna do?”