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If you have 10 minutes to read (and cry quietly at your desk), I cannot recommend reading this enough.

Gotta love those fundamentalists.

A private school in Kansas has barred female officials from refereeing boys sporting events on the premise that females cannot have authority over males.

Unless the school has an all-male faculty, how long will it be until one of the students goes straight Cartman on his English teacher?

Has Kansas finally supplanted Florida as the national leader is off-beat news?

This blows my mind, and serves as yet another reminder as to how the once lovable losers from Boston have become the new Yankees. While more than 20,000 “fans” have signed the petition, my unscientific review leads me to believe that for every Pats believer who signs there are 5 fans ready to mock their misery.

I leave you with Mr. Charisma himself, Bill Belichick.

In an effort to try to show Twitter as useful, behold commuterfeed.com.

Commuterfeed.com is a website devoted to collecting updates about commutes from around the country. The site sets up some common guidelines for the Twitter community to use when alerting others of commuting congestion. Most importantly, find your region and use the correct format (e.g. @commuter (SPACE) citycode (SPACE) incident). Check the site for more detailed instructions.

It sounds like a great idea, for those of us sitting in front of our computers and checking our commutes before leaving.

I just wonder how I would use this to receive updates to my phone. Being a Palm OS user for the time being, I don’t think I have many good Twitter client options. I know TwitterBerry is out there for you BlackBerry users (I’ve never used it).

Turning on updates to my phone from commuter would yield tweets from every area of the country.

Commuterfeed.com has an RSS feed for each region. But, then I see the only option as converting the RSS feed to e-mail. I’ve already discussed how not real time that would be.

Perhaps I am too greedy to want to see real-time traffic updates from the Twitter community about only my metro area, on my cell phone (I won’t look at my phone while driving).

The website is still useful.

I guess the alternatives are that old fashioned thing called the radio or staring at traffic cameras online (in my opinion, not very helpful).

Can any Twitter users help me filter real-time messages to my phone? What am I missing?

I recently heard a story about an intriguing side effect of eye dilation.

Apparently, when getting their eyes dilated at the the optometrist or ophthalmologist, some people will pass out. This may be a common side effect. This may not be all that embarrassing.

But, the protagonist in this story passed out AND peed himself. Yes, he passed out in an optometrist chair and went to the bathroom in his pants (at least it was only little potty).

The story teller actually asked his optometrist about this phenomenon at his next visit (bold move). The optometrist confirmed that passing out and urinating happens infrequently, but does occur.

Moral of the story?

Empty your bladder before going to your next eye exam. If you do happen to pass out, the worst case scenario is a few drops of pee come out. Hopefully, it isn’t all that noticeable….

Here’s how I’m doing so far, in descending order of success:

Contribute $20 each month to a worthy, off-beat charity (See, moustache, Baraka). On track. See below.

• January: Hire Heros USA - Not-for-profit providing career placement assistance to wounded vets.

Get Master’s Degree. Doing fine. Three classes into my final course. On track to finish in May.

Pay off all credit cards and truck. Doing very well. Thanks to tax returns, bonuses (and Grandma), 80% of my credit card debt is payed off (despite buying a beautiful 52″ Samsung LCD). I should ice this one by the end of March.

Lose 30 pounds. Going OK. Down 7.5 lbs after a shockingly bad January 1 weigh in.

Live on a 60-10-10-10-10 budget. Not there yet. Right now I’m around 75-0-3-16-6. Once I get rid of credit card and truck payments and refinance the condo I should be home. I’m thinking April or so.

Get new, awesome, job. Not going so well. I got a nice raise, making my current job somewhat more awesome. Plenty of work to do here.

Break into the top 10 Google results for “Zach Fletcher“, “Zachary Fletcher“, or “Big Ern“. No luck yet. I was on the front page for “Big Ern” during football season, but have fallen off.

Write the computer code for the project I’ve been mulling for the last few years. Have done zilch. This may be replaced with another project I’m working on with my fellow villagers.

Create (and use) at least 2 of Digg, Technorati, etc.
Done zilch. Need to get off my ass. This one should be easy.

Become more active. Be able to complete 1 full week (7 days in a row) of CrossFit workouts. Again, very little done. Will (re-)join a gym in February. I may even go to it and work out.

Crush Elroy, ACom, and Electronic Vagrant in Villager page views. Not going well at all. Elroy’s Don & Mike post is an unstoppable juggernaut. I refuse to link to it. Need to get on the ball here.

Remodel bathrooms. Haven’t done anything yet. Once the fiscal projects are done, I can get into this.

Acquire at least 1 useful skill. Think carpentry or .NET design. Done nada. The year is young.

Past posts:
January

In response to Zach’s resolutions, I thought I’d go over my list of things to do and areas in need of improvement. I had an eventful 2007, it was definitely a year I’ll never forget, but 2008 should be no less eventful. I think it will be easiest to categorize these by priority:

The Locks:
Run a marathon with my wife.
Possibly this one, but if we could somehow find a cheap one overseas this fall, I’d be sold. Also, we’re going to run a half marathon beforehand. We did this one a few years ago and had a blast.

Do some major home improvement. Leaky roof, you’re on notice….

Decide what I want to do career-wise. Preferably I’ll get a certification of some sort that can help me move onward and upward. I’m also looking at MBA programs, but if any of our blog readers know of any six figure cereal-eating jobs, I’m your man.

Take a honeymoon. I’m thinking this place would be cool:

The Maybes

Move out of our house, preferably to somewhere fun. Really, anywhere where the average age is <64 will be okay with us.

Move out of the country. I’m betting on this place, and if it works out, you guys can come too.

Play rugby for another year. We’ll see what the doctor says about my wrist this week, but I might become a full-time touch player.

Actively campaign for a presidential candidate. If a certain lady we’ll call “Millary Hinton” wins the nomination, I just might volunteer for a guy named “Vaughn McLane”.

The Longshots:

Win the lottery. I have my ticket, and island above would be my first (and only) purchase.

Cut down on donuts and cookies in favor of healthier items.

Bet way more money on the Giants the next time some idiot in Vegas gives me 12 free points!! You would have to be an idiot to think that the Patriots were actually going to cover that spread. When I was in Vegas last week I put 5 on the Giants, and I will rue the day because I didn’t multiply that by 50.

(This only goes in longshots because the Pats will never be as overrated as they were for the playoffs, betting purposes only)

Good luck to me!