Cleaning Up: As usual, when I set to ranting, I end up all wrong about everything. Turns out the flash drive I spoke of last time was working fine after all. My new and somewhat tempermental buddy, Mac OS X, managed to write some kind of bizarre file to it that had a date stamp with the year 2106. It probably wasn't the date stamp itself that caused the problem, but some other manglation (I just made up that word, but I like it) in the file that ended up making the entire drive unwriteable in some circumstances. Truly weird. But I owe the folks at SanDisk an apology for hammering them unmercifully last week. Very sorry guys. If it helps, many equally deranged idiots have done the same to me, so I know the feeling.

I am now down to one rebate to wrangle from Best Buy, official retailer of Satan, and my hassles of the past weeks should come to a close. Yes, I know there are countless people in the world who can only dream of a life where they only had my problems. I know this, but I have to write about something.

I could write about the weather. It's cold. Winter is here and I already hate it. I finally pulled my winter coat out of the closet. It sucks (winter that is, my coat is fairly stylish). And there are those countless people again, flipping me off for complaining about such trivialities.

Instead of going on in this vein, let me point you to my football picks for this week, and promise a big fat juicy Hawaii article Real Soon Now.