Recently I've been pondering the mysteries of our universe (which explains my blogging absence as of late) and while I haven't solved any of these mysteries I definitely have put some thought into them.

The first mystery is why, oh why, has the idea of the automobile not changed in the last 100 years? I'll give it to Ford. He had one HECK of an idea. And in the beginning of the automotive era, there were some really huge advancements and improvements. But let's face it. The last 30 years have been pretty lame when it comes to what we putts around in on our way to The Workplace. Sure the hybrid was a novel idea, but the overall vehicle concept remained the same. Check it out automotive engineers. Our world has changed a great deal since the 1950s! I think it's time to redesign the automobile from the ground, er road, up. Do you need some ideas you jolly little money collecting chair warmers? It's a good thing I'm chalk full of them (I don't really have any idea what that phrase means, but everyone seems to use it).

The first is why the 2-slash-3 pedal system? If you ask me, the engineers of the sky got it right. Let's devise a throttle system instead of one pedal brake, one gas and possibly one clutch pedal. That's so inefficient and slow-reacting. One lever is all you need, whether it works with the foot or the hand (or even possibly with weight shift?), one direction speeds you up, the other slows you down. And let's make the throttle a "smart" throttle. When you set the speed for 50 mph, it accelerates properly and easily maintains your speed. None of this cruise setting garbage that doesn't really work when going up or down hills. If my foot can maintain a more consistent velocity, then so can a computer.

And seriously? Internal combustion engines? Could we use a more inefficient mechanical system? Here's a novel concept. DC drives and motors. Ever hear of 'em?

And why this two-passenger-up-front thing. If you're any kind of sci-fi freak then you've seen countless TV shows and movies that depict the bridge of futuristic spacecrafts containing three passenger chairs. One for the pilot, one for the navigator and one for the weapons specialist (which believe me would come in quite handy some days). Come on now. If alien and futuristic spaceships clearly see the need for such a setup, then why would automobiles be any different? Of course don't forget the pilot chair is always just a little more in front of the other two passenger chairs.

Now let's talk safety systems. The headlights for example have got to go. You're going to sit there in your comfy little chair and tell me that the dual, corner mounted headlight scheme that was cooked up back when we discovered darkness cannot be improved upon? What about one long, halogen stile front light? Or countless ultra-bright LEDs. Maybe even laser scanners that illuminate everything within a 100 foot radius of the vehicle.

Look people, here is my general gripe. We have clearly lost the will and the desire to come up with creative, and brand spankin' new ideas. We have locked ourselves in a room with well defined walls and decided that we can only improve upon old ideas. I call that stupid, idiotic and unmotivated. Let's break down the walls and look at the world from a completely new point of view. We've all seen video footage of people attempting to fly off of bridges in their homemade flying machines, way back when the world lacked colors other than gray. And who can forget the amazing story of the invention of the light bulb? Why can't we do that kind of stuff again?

So it's time to stop trying and actually DO something. Let's get inventive again. Let's forget about what we have now, and look at what we could create tomorrow. Well, that's one mystery pondered, another 314 to go.

So I've been reading up on the concept of Leap Year since we are experiencing one this very year and just had our Leap Day a few days ago. Of course we've all been taught in grade school that an Earth year is in reality 365.25 days, which is why every four years we add an extra day to our calendar. That way over time, our seasons don't get all out of whack. And for just about everyone alive and able to read this post right now, that rule will suffice just fine until we die.

However, what we aren't taught (at least I wasn't anyway) is that a standard Earth year is in reality 365.2425 days. Doing the math we can quickly deduce that our little add-a-day-every-4-years trick will truck the world ahead a few days after just a few hundred years, reeking havoc for our grandkids' grandkids' grandkids' whom would no longer be able to experience the Winter solstice on December 21 (assuming of course that the Maya calendar that predicts the end of the world on December 21, 2012 is incorrect). So to prevent this cataclysmic catastrophe the powers-that-be devised a sneaky little way to make that work. It gets a little complicated so try to keep up.

We in fact do not simply add a day every four years. Instead the logic goes a little something like this. If the year is evenly divisible by 400, then there will be a Leap Day that year. For example, 1600, 2000, 2400, 2800 are all years that have a Leap Day. If however the year is evenly divisible by 100, but NOT evenly divisible by 400, then there will be no Leap Day. Par exemple, 1800, 1900, 2100, and 2200 are all years that have NO Leap Day. Finally if the year is evenly divisible by 4, but is NOT evenly divisible by 100 UNLESS it is evenly divisible by 400, then there will be a Leap Day. Just like this year, or 2012, or 1980 or 1600. Here is how the math all works out. 365 days a year, plus one day out of every four years, minus one day out of every 100 years, plus one day out of every 400 years. 365 + 1/4 - 1/100 + 1/400 = 365.2425 days a year. Pretty clever considering I would just increase the time of a second by a fraction amount so that a year would be exactly 365 days. This however would eventually result in a completely night time, 12 o' clock "high" noon. Resulting in further changes by me in minutes, hours and days.

But like I said, unless I plan on living until I'm 120 (which I am not unless I look like I do now my entire life) a Leap Day every four years for my entire life should do fine. If we really want to get technical, a year is actually 365.242374 days long anyway, and increasing. Luckily the unpredictability of that increase should be close enought to keep on track with the above algorithm for millennia to come.

What do Halloween and Winnie the Pooh have in common? While I may not know, it appears that department stores around the area have some kind of demented clue. Today, in my car I past a giant inflatable Tigger dressed as a vampire. Of course it was Tigger so I wasn't really that scared, but still, who ever came up with that? Heck why not dress Lisa Simpson up as a jumbo turkey and put her on your lawn for Thanksgiving? Or better yet, let's stick a beard on Bugs Bunny and give him a tall, top hat and inflate his gray, hairy little body up for Presidents Day? I think these holidays and giant inflatable objects are getting out of hand. Do you really need cartoon vampire tigers with capes in front of your houses? Do you really think you are amusing people that much that you feel the need to purchase such a thing to put it on display? I'm waiting for the day I see the inflatable Halloween Playboy Bunny! Apparently tis the season for all women to dress up as sluts and hookers anyway. Might as well promote it as much as costume shops, the Internet and Hugh Hefner. I still don't understand why the majority of women dress up like that for Halloween. What am I missing? Is there a day when I can dress up as a Chippendale's performer without anybody judging me? Because if there is, I don't want to know about it, nor do I want to even entertain that thought. I'd much rather have a day where I can dress up as my favorite Star Wars character without the world thinking I'm some crazed nerfherder. Although people do seem to get used to it after a few months . . .

So here I am in a place called Reston, VA. What am I here for? Training. .NET training to be exact. So let's start at the top shall we?

The Boss and I signed up for this quite some time ago. The place where we go for the training is made for training. It's their job. They train people in technology for like two grand a week; stuff like databases, code, wireless, networks, all that good, fancy stuff. This company has training locations all over the world: Virginia, Maryland, even Paris and Tokyo. Now, less than a block from this learning center is a Hyatt hotel. And of course that is where the learning center recommends staying. Because then, you know, you can just walk yourself across the street and go to class. Like college but without the hangover. Well, The Boss had stayed in that Hyatt in the past and said it was too fancy for him. So instead, he signed us up for the "comparative," most cost effective Comfort Inn! Now if you've ever stayed in both hotel chains before you know that they really don't compare. Take these personal examples for instance. Hyatt - friendly concierge and helpful staff members: Comfort Inn - Ms. Personality at the front desk doesn't have a clue where you should eat or why the treadmill isn't working. Hyatt - big bathrooms with luxurious showers: Comfort Inn - the shower head dribbles water out slower than a tortoise onBenadrel . Hyatt - floors stacked so high with properly engineered integrity you don't even know there are 15 more floors above you: Comfort Inn - the foreign guests in the room above yours don't know how to use the shower curtain properly when they bathe, turning your bathroom door into a waterfall.

But sorry, I got off topic a little here. What I wanted to talk about was the city of Reston, VA. Let me tell you a little about this supposed "city." Now I thought if something was classified as a city that it had to have a certain population? That's how it was on SimCity anyway (remember that game? I loved building huge metropolises then demolishing them with a Godzilla attack!). Let's see, how can I describe Reston, VA? It's like a modern day ghost town. Picture, if you will, New York City: huge buildings and skyscrapers, little restaurants and shops everywhere, skinny little streets, parking garages, more high rises and construction. Yeah! That's Reston! Except NYC has PEOPLE!!! I'm missing something here because I find no people in this city! The streets are completely bare, there is no one shopping, no one eating, no one driving, heck I don't even see people working! I don't see people! Where are the people?! Before we get to the learning center, we park in a free parking garage. The garage is filled; filled with cars! Where are the people driving them!? Maybe at 5 o' clock the streets become packed with people leaving work and whatnot, but not during the hours of 9AM-4PM. I have no idea how this place employees anybody. In fact, if you can picture this, I literally walk down the streets and yell, "Where are the people!!" Of course after not seeing any speed limit signs either I made the assumption that most of this city must exists on some parallel plane of existence r dimension. Maybe if I can find the door that connects this Reston Dimension with my dimension I may find some housing property back in The Cove that doesn't cost me an arm and a leg to purchase.

Email forwards. We all get them. Everything from Saving Baby John from Cancer, to raunchy jokes, to hilarious videos to "valuable" information regarding giant-sized Mars in the sky and poisonous spiders. On average I say I get about 5 emails per week that I'd classify as "Stupid Email Forwards." Don't get me wrong, I enjoy some of these. I love watching the funny videos! Did you see the one with the people on the ginormous slingshot? HAHAHA! That was a riot. Some of these, I don't really care for. Now it's well known that I'm very skeptical of "what I hear." I've debunked such stupid things as prune juice in Dr. Pepper, poisonous Daddy Long Legs and balancing eggs on their tips during an equinox. Heck I'm a regular Myth Buster if you ask me.

In fact, just a few weeks ago I had a co-worker forward me an email forward because she knows that I'm skeptical of them and she wanted to know if it was true. The forward stated that in just a few days Mars would be the closest it has been to Earth in the last bajillion years and if you looked outside during the evening the planet would appear in the sky larger than the Moon!! "Wow!" I thought. That's pretty impressive and frankly pretty darn scary. For if Mars actually appeared that size in the sky, our planet would be in serious jeopardy! After some careful research I discovered that just a few years ago Mars was indeed the closest to our globe than it would be for hundreds of years to come, but that was a few years ago (which meant the circulating forward had been forwarding since nearly the dawn of forwards!) and while I'm sure Mars would have looked fantastic in a telescope, to the naked eye, the observer would have noticed nothing more than a puny increase in the planet's magnitude, nothing more.

Then last night I had a friend forward me one about a super-poisonous spider biting people on the caboose after camping out on the underside of toilet seats in a Floridian Olive Garden. A few things spiked my interest on this email. One, the only really poisonous spiders found in The States are the Black Widow and Brown Recluse, and even those would have a hard time killing an adult human. In fact I think the most poisonous spiders, the Brazilian Wandering Spider and the Six Eyed-Sand Spider, reside in Brazil and South Africa respectively, without either one really being small enough to hide under a toilet seat. So you can image I had a hard time even remotely believing the email. I took off on the Internet highway and discovered this email had been started back in 2002 , and it actually mimicked an email dating from 1999! Upon wiping the sweat from my brow I thought, "Whew, another stupid myth debunked."

Really my point here I want to make to my readers is to stop believing everything you hear, er read! Even if it comes from the mouth of your closest friend. Be skeptical of the world! I'm not saying everyone lies, but just put a little thought into what you listen to. If it seems a little far-fetched, it probably is. Don't be afraid to question and investigate! Regardless of what you hear about Wikipedia (pronounced wikee/pee/dee/ah, trust me, I know all about wiki, what it is, how to program with it and how it is pronounced), it is a fantastic tool (go figure huh?). Ask your other friends what they think of the matter. If all your friends believe one thing and you another, odds are you're wrong. Sorry to say that, but it's true. Finally don't trust any email forward! No matter how sympathetic, or pathetic it may sound, or appear, don't have a blind trust in what it says.

Of course I could really say the same goes for blogs and webpages, but then I'd have to make an amendment if the speaker, writer or forwarder is a genius and already a skeptic, like me. Well, let's just make that amendment anyway shall we?

So I was getting all excited a few months ago because the spam in my email inbox had all but disappeared. Ironically it seemed to coincide with the arrest of Robert 'King of Spam' Soloway just a few months ago. But now, my spam count is back up, and climbing like a tape worm gasping for air. The biggest culprit of the spam? A phisher! Someone apparently thinks they are just too cleaver. Well guess what, they are not, and it will never be Jimmy Season.

For those of you who don't know what phishing is, it's when someone sends you an email asking for information or luring you to a website, pretending to be a legit company. My current phishermen love to pretend they are from an online greeting company.

So far I have received emails from 123greeting.com, greetingCard.org, VintagePostcards.com, 2000greetings.com, freewebcards.com and Greeting-Cards.com. Sadly the subjects are all quite lame. "You received an ecard from a Neighbor," "You received a postcard from a Class mate," "You received an ecard from a Mate," "from a Family member," "from a Partner," "a School friend." Wow! Clever clever! This has got to be the equivalent of dangling a rubber ball in front of a fish. Entertaining, a little. Luring? Definitely not. Highly annoying? Absolutely!

I gave blood again today as the American Red Cross was at The Workplace again. Today's gift for giving; a tiny cooler which looks like it's made for a six-pack. Two things that make me go "huh" here. The first is that the American Red Cross is providing you, the blood giver, a means to keep your six pack of beer cold when you go out. This is sort of like how public schools give out condoms to students I suppose. While the school does not condone sexual activity among students, it does want the students to be safe if they are going to have sex. So while the American Red Cross does not condone drinking, it will give you a cooler to keep your drinks cold in case you do happen to drink. The second thing here is where does one even obtain a six-pack of alcohol here in PA? A bar I suppose, but if you're getting your beer at a distributor like most Pennsylvanians then you are buying a whole case of the stuff and not just six cans. And a whole case ain't coming close to fitting in this cooler. I guess really if you're going to use the cooler for soda and not beer then this is really a moot point. But come on now, who honestly does that?

I guess it could also be used to transport an organ like a heart or something like that. Gotta keep those things cool you know?

I still stand by the claim that I'll never be a city boy. I've never been a fan of the big cities and I never will. After spending an evening in New York City the other weekend I remembered why I never cared to venture into those places just for "something to do." As if the ridiculously bad service at the Film Center Cafe wasn't awful enough, the sheer prices of everything in the city would just make me never want to spend money period. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed spending time with my friends, it was a great time, but if I didn't have friends that lived there, I wouldn't have gone. Chasing down a train by rushing thru Time Square and sprinting thru the station to catch the 1140PM departure so we wouldn't be stuck at Penn Station until 140AM ain't my idea of a good time. Although it does give me good stories to tell.

Now, my friends say where I live now stinks. No, they literally say it stinks, as in smells bad. Sure there is poop all over the place (farm land people, not in my house) and a paper mill just miles away, but frankly the smell of poop is a fresh scent. When they get the liquid stuff out and start spraying the fields it's a little nauseating, but aside from that, you know you're not breathing in any toxic fumes. Now the big city smell; wow I don't even know what the ef that is! It's some bizarre combination of urine, exhaust and B.O. all wrapped into one scent. Yummy! Why pay $7 for a beer or $10 for a Margarita when I can get $1.50 drafts at Big Dogz (not to be confused with Big Guns) and free shots down at The Creekside? Also, when sodas come out in little 6 inch glass bottles, you know you have just forfeited your right to free refills and paid $3 for a Coke. And the people! My word the people! They are everywhere! What in the heck are mobs, gigantically large mobs mind you, of people doing wondering the streets at 1130PM? In Altoona you'd be hard pressed to even find a single soul meandering around at that time, let alone a single bar open at that time. The roads are practically bare!

So kudos to all you rich people out there that enjoy the city life. As for me, I'll continue to enjoy my much less stressful life here in The Cove. So you have giant skyscrapers, Lexuses and tons of things to do. I live in a two story house, drive a Chevy, and need to travel thirty minutes at 70MPH to get to the nearest mall. Sure it may not sound like much, but that's what volleyball and The Office are for. And boats too. Those are really fun!

When you walk into your local Martin's or Giant Eagle grocery store to buy yourself some of those yummy Lays baked potato chips that you love so much, you wouldn't really expect to see an advertisement there in the store telling you to go to nearest Bilo or Piggly Wiggly to get more food selection and at a cheaper price now would you? Of course not. But that is exactly what television cable subscribers are experiencing. Those of you who subscribe to satellite TV may as well tune to the next blog as this doesn't really concern you (mainly because you get CSTV and I don't and I hate you for that!).

But cable users; how many times have you been watching your favorite episode of Swanky the Teenage Fish when a commercial break comes on and the next thing you know Jessica Simpson is dressed in her hoochie gear telling you to check her out in HD 1080i on DirectTV? If you stop and think about it, here's what's going on. You pay money (real money mind you, not that Monopoly stuff you steal from The Bank every time you play) to your cable provider to be able to watch the TV shows you crave, and those you'll never ever see in a million years. In return, your cable provider offers you its services like any good company would. However because television is a medium for advertising, your cable provider also gets money (even more of the real stuff in amounts you'll never see in your lifetime) from other companies wanting to get you to buy their stuff as well. It just so happens that there are other companies out there that want you to buy your TV viewing pleasure from them and not your local cable company. Your cable company has no choice but to let satellite television providers as well as other competing cable companies advertise for their services on your local's commercial space.

When you think about it, it's really absurd that a company would do such a thing. When was the last time you went to fill your tank up with ridiculously expensive gasoline and the Exxon you stopped at kept flashing messages at you to go fill up at BP where the fuel is 10 cents cheaper? HAHAHA! Dream on you deranged petroleum psychopaths!