markpude.com

So I’m in Maryland for a conference, and I’ve got a few things I’d like to get off of my chest relating to my trip here.

1.  Do not drink heavily the night before a 6am flight, especially if you are susceptible to beer shits.

2.  Do not trust Google maps.  The conference is at the University of Maryland, so naturally when booking my hotel, I search on google maps for ‘Univeristy of Maryland’ thinking that was a smart idea.  Well for some reason, google maps returns a UM Medical Center in downtown Baltimore which is actually about 40 minutes north of the actual UM campus.  Good thing I got the rental car…

3.  Do not rent a 2008 Hyundai Accent.  If they try to give you one, send it back.  This car is one of the biggest sacks of crap I’ve ever driven in my life.  I feel like I’m going to break it whenever I sit inside it.  I probably am breaking it.  Also, it either has a three gallon gas tank or gets 12 mpg, I will update when I fill it up as to what it is… Aren’t these new small cars supposed to get great gas mileage?

4.  Do not drive in Maryland.  I was always under the impression that Massachusetts was supposed to have aggressive drivers, but the drivers here make Mass drivers look like sweet old ladies on the road.  Driving on the road with these people is like driving on the roads with a hospital full of mental patients.  First off, there are like 72 lanes on every highway, but regardless of when I’ve driven, they are always full.  Get a damn job.  Then there are two types of drivers on the road.  First you have the comatose mental patients that drive in the left most lanes at 10-15 mph below the speed limit while probably drooling all over themselves.  The other type of driver is the mental patient with excessive energy and retard strength who is weaving in and out across multiple lanes.  Sometimes this is to get around the mental patients, but most of the time its for no reason at all.  I’m suprised I haven’t died yet.

The list pros are short:

1.  At a McDonalds I got three tubs of BBQ sauce instead of the generally well accepted count of two.

 All in all, the pros and cons cancel each other out.  I am indifferent about this state.

UPDATE - Turns out the Accent has a 12 gallon tank, and I got about 30 mpg in a fair ammount of stop and go traffic….  I guess I just drove a lot because that is pretty decent…  I still don’t recomment it cause it… it looks stupid…

So I got ambitious a few months ago and decided to redo the website.  Starting from scratch as usual, I went and bought some server space and started hand coding my website.  That lasted about 3 hours…  Three months later, I hadn’t found any more time to work on the site, and since I’m actually paying for it now, I figured I better do something with it.  So I went with WordPress.  Long time readers will remember that I tried it for a few months back in 2003 before going with a custom solution.  The main reason for switching before is that I didn’t like the multi-user support and that was a big part of the website back then.  I’m pretty sure no one reads this anymore as two years of having a picture of Butters as the only content on the site has scared (or bored) everyone away.  So for that reason, I don’t need the multi-user support anymore.

 So here it is. markpude.com back up and running.  yeah…