The same guy also did Pole Position, Pong & Space Invaders. Pretty cool, though he must have quite a bit of time on the hands…

Today, friends, was a breakthrough in culinary happiness

We’re not just talking, like, “That was some fine cuisine” good. No…no…that’s just way to little. We’re talking, “Oh my dear sweet god…there has never been, and there never will be, similar foodstuffs that could come anywhere close to the goodness of what I just put into my belly.”

That is what I experienced today at Torchy’s Tacos…pure culinary genius. Little (but big for tacos) bundles of pure heaven served within shining sheaths of aluminum foil.

I truly believe that if I all of a sudden died right after eating these tacos, I would have died one of the happiest individuals on the planet. I would have died thinking, “I have experienced Taco Nirvana.”

If heroin is the true drug connoisseur’s “Drug of Choice”, then I would have to say that these tacos are one above that.

If I could direct inject them into a vein, I would happily tap a vein or five and start pumping away.

I hope my point is made.

Torchy’s is located on West 6th street in the parking lot of a restaurant called ‘Woodrow’s’. Note that I said in a parking lot; these glorious little bastards are served from a trailer. A new friend at work told me about it, and I was excited. These are TACOS we’re talking about…and who can’t get excited about tacos in Austin?…especially when you’ve been taco-deprived for most of the years of your life.

But I had no idea that I’d basically be falling in love.

I ordered a breakfast taco with potatoes, egg and cheese and a Green Chili Pork Taco, flour tortilla (instead of corn) hold the cilantro, please. Upon getting back to the office and sitting at my desk, I promptly unwrapped the breakfast taco. I was surprised at the fact that it wasn’t completely soggy and gross as I had just walked about 5 blocks to get back. I also got waylaid for about 10 minutes at CVS because they didn’t have enough cashiers. But that’s a different story…

I noticed they put some green chili salsa and what I think was green chili queso in with the bag. I threw the salsa on but decided to save the queso for the other taco.

Within my first bite, I recall seeing Jesus. In person. Dressed in a nicely cut wool suit. With really pimp looking sunglasses. He was pointing at me saying, “Son, that is the best taco you’ve ever had, right?”

Right.

It was the kind of experience where you feel like every bite is magical, like you want to savour it as if it were going to be the last bite of something you ever take. Everything was in its place and as it should be…a beautiful greasy mix of eggs, potatoes and cheese all glommed together in one of the tastiest (most likely 100% lard based) tortillas ever.

After finishing the first, I quickly moved to the second…the Green Chili Pork Taco. This one was something special because I am a green chili fiend. And even though we live in Texas, green chili just isn’t as prevalent as I thought it would be. But here we had it ready and available in a taco, ready to be consumed with much vigor.

After dumping some of the green chili queso AND the remainder of the green chili salsa, I took a bite. Again, Jesus, standing there in the wool suit, pointing at me with a smile and saying, “Son, I sinned. I lied to you. But that’s OK because I’m Jesus. That first taco was child’s play. This one you’re eating now…THIS one is the best taco you’ve ever had, right?”

Right.

I’m not even going to try and explain how good this thing was because, honestly, I don’t think there are any words to describe it. Let’s just say that my life has changed. I now know that not all tacos are anywhere NEAR created equal.

If you haven’t been and you live in Austin, I need for you to stop what you’re doing right now and go there. NOW. Go there and eat a taco as if your life depended on it.

If you haven’t been and you don’t live in Austin, do yourself a favor and buy a plane ticket to come down and have lunch there.

You will be happy.

Here’s the menu for you. I’ve been told that The Trailer Park, extra trashy (read “take the lettuce off and smother the thing in lots of queso) and the Ranch Hand are unbelievable. If they are better than the two that I had, then I’m note quite sure that my taste buds would be able to take it without my head spontaneously combusting.

Why are you still reading this? Go now.

Guess that makes sense and all, seeing that they are my client and all…specifically the Small to Medium Business unit (SMB).

I came to work on my first day to be greeted by a ridiculously large cardboard box…one that looked like it should be carrying a giant nuclear tower or something like that. It was very ugly and had a huge black Dell logo on the side of it.
This was quite the opposite of of my Macbook Pro purchase.

After plowing through opening the thing, I realized that, buried beneath several other smaller cardboard boxes, was a flatter, more thin cardboard box containing a brand spanking new Dell 630C laptop. After getting it all setup and running, I have to say that I’m pretty impressed with it.

The overall look of it is pretty aesthetically pleasing. Though it’s certainly not anywhere near as sleek and ‘designery’ (I made up another word…awesome) as a Mac, it doesn’t look like a brick of black electronics. It’s black and grey, and the plastic used seems to be of high quality. It’s thin and light, but it doesn’t feel like if you were to drop it, it would shatter or break.

There are two things about the feel of it I noticed right away. First, the hinge on the lid is almost perfect. It adjusts very easily, but it doesn’t make you muscle it to get it to a proper viewing angle. Once you get it in place, it doesn’t move or wobble. And second, the keyboard is fantastic. It feels very solid, tactile & responsive.

Overall operation of it feels fast. I guess it should, seeing that it’s a 2.2 Dual Core Intel chip w/ 4 gigs of RAM. The video card is an nVidia Quadro 135M, which isn’t a slouch when it comes to strictly business-class usage. It operates quietly, the fan kicking on only every once in a while. Otherwise, it runs cool. Using it normally, I can have it sitting on my lap with some shorts on and it doesn’t burn my legs.

The trackpad feels decent. The ‘eraser head’/'mouse nubbin’ is throwaway, but is OK nonetheless. There are 4 USB ports, a 1394 firewire port, an SD slot, 1 PCMCIA slot, DVD-RW/CD-RW, a serial port and a VGA port. The screen is 14.1 inches and looks decent, though just a tiny bit on the dull side. Of course, I’m spoiled by my Macbook Pro; the screen on that thing is pretty much unbeatable in my opinion…

My point isn’t to write an in-depth review or anything like that. Rather, it’s to point out that I think Dell has made some pretty great strides in their product line over the years. I mean, yeah, I’m ’supposed’ to say that, seeing that technically Dell keeps me in a job. But I honestly feel like this is a great improvement over what I used in the past.

I’ve also seen some of the XPS M1330s floating around, and those are pretty nice looking too, though I haven’t used them at all. They have a very sleek look about them…

Anyway, so overall, I’m not disappointed with my nifty new work laptop. Then again, just about anything would be better than the piece of crap Trashiba…whoops…Toshiba…I had previously.

So…if you’re looking at buying a PC, buy a Dell. Not only will you be getting what seems to be a pretty darn good quality machine, you’ll be keeping your ol’ buddy Andrew in a job that much longer, and that’s what we all want, right?

Right.

Finally, after a week, I decided to stop being lazy and actually downgrade back to V2.1 of Wordpress. You’ll notice that my categories are finally back. Amazing. I was starting to get discouraged, but thankfully, it’s now fixed.

Also, if you use Wordpress, I highly recommend the Tiger Administration tool. I gotta’ give it to this guy, he has done a fantastic job of making the wp-admin interface a much, much nicer thing to navigate through. It’s very clean and well designed. I’m impressed.

Let’s see…in other news:

• Finished up Condemned 2: Bloodshot. The game was awesome, although in retrospect, it was a little restrictive in the way you approach how you play. It’s a very linear game, and there are a lot of sequences where you just hit a button and your character  does what he’s supposed to do in a sequence. For example, if you have to climb up something, you don’t actually have to figure out how to do it; rather, you just hit the spot where the sequence is triggered and hit ‘A’, and then he climbs.  However, the experience overall was pretty amazing. It was a great story and is truly one of the creepiest games I think I’ve ever played.
• Picked up Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 and have played through the first mission and a half or so. As with the last one, it’s really great. Not much has changed in the overall mechanic…and really…why should it? The first one was awesome. So far, I’m having fun with it, though I admit that it’s not a shooter for everyone. It’s far more difficult in that you really have to think and use your parters else you get quickly wasted when you go busting through doors. Your character can’t take much damage before he goes down.
•  Evil Andrew tried to open up a new credit card, but he was foiled by the fraud alert I put on my accounts. Stupid bastard. Some guy called me from Capital One and asked if I had tried to open up a credit card anytime recently. The only dissappointing thing is that when I called to update the Las Vegas PD, they didn’t seem to know what was going on (couldn’t find my case) and the guy who would have an idea was, of course, out for the day. That’s my luck though. Oh well; at least this idiot can’t open up any more cards under my name.
• The neighbors continue to get progressively worse…or it’s really just that since I decided to write about it, I’m now even more painfully aware of them. We’re thinking about purchasing scary masks, going down there in the middle of the night and banging on their windows…specifically the kids’ windows. Is that evil…?
• I am addicted to a place called ‘The Pita Pit”. Holy crapola, Batman…it’s so tasty.  Its about 3 blocks up from my new office, and they have some of the most ridiculously good wrap-style food I’ve ever had. I seem to have found a superior combination of flavors in mixing a little bit of wing sauce with tzatziki sauce, the ensuing tastebud effect being a spicy sensation mixed with the mellower cool cucumber taste of the tzatziki. Mmmm…I think I just like using that word…tzatziki…
• I’m gonna’ go see ‘Horton Hears a Who’.  It loos like it’s freakin’ awesome.
• Today I knew I was getting old when I was picking up coffee and the friendly counter girl asked me if I had any weekend plans. I thought for a moment, initially said no, thought more about it, and then decided to say that I had just gotten my “Planet Earth” HD-DVDs (for the bargain basement price of $25.00) and was really looking forward to watching that this weekend. She looked at me as if I had just sprouted a third eye and was getting ready to pour the hot coffee directly into it. I walked away…mildly ashamed…but still oddly excited about watching “Planet Earth”. Screw the Seattle’s Best counter girl. Hmph…
• In the house buying process…or rather…the loan acquiring process. Got a sweet huge packet of junk that we get to fill out so we can get a large sum of cash to fund aforementioned house purchcase. I’m excited about that.
• Deliberating whether or not it’s worth it to purchase an XM Radio subscription. It has been really nice having it since I got my new car, but I don’t know that it’s worth the $13.00 a month for it. There are quite a few awesome channels though…

That’s all I gots. I’m sooooo sweeeepy……..

Friday @ 11:55. Wow. I am  pathetic…

It’s time for a post filled with vitrol and gasoline fire scorching hatred…brought to you by me.

I happen to be fortunate enough to live in a very nice “apartment community”. Whatever the hell that means, I’ll never know because I certainly don’t feel any kind of urge to belong to “the community”. Especially when you have downstairs neighbors like we have.

Lightly put, these people are some of the most foul, putrid, rotten dirty and disgusting people I think I’ve ever encountered. I think their foulness is emphasized by the fact that this is indeed a nicer place. They seem badly out of place.

Now…I’m not trying to sound elitist or anything; I’ll befriend anybody just as long as they are cool, nice and considerate. And these people seem nice enough…but they are absolutely NOT not cool…and they are NOT considerate. At all. And…worst of all…they are simply…dirty. Like…the kind of dirty where if you were to potentially set foot in their house, you’d want to hold your breath because you’d be expecting a foul odor, or perhaps a cloud of acidic funk that would envelop your head and eat your skull.

But really, it’s the inconsiderate stuff they do/allow that makes this vision of them in my head seem more of a reality than it probably is. Here are a few examples of the things they do:

• They have two hellish children that…no kidding…scream at the top of their lungs approximately 96.4% of the time they are awake. We’re talking all.hours.of.the.effing.day. too. Morning (when I’m up around 6-ish AM, one of them is screaming), afternoon (Christy works from home, and I generally get an e-mail or two from her where I have to talk her down from tossing a grenade through the vents into their humble abode), and evening (well into around 11 or so on the weekends). Screaming children are understandable; it’s a part of life. However, parents that do nothing about it…ever…now that’s a different story. It has to get particularly bad in order for one of the parents to actually do something to stop them.
• They trounce around slamming doors, knocking shit around, and yelling at each other. Dad also seems to enjoy bad music and video games…which is fine…except for the fact that they have it all running through a sub-woofer’d stereo system. You can only hear “Brick House” and “Wind of Change” and tracks from “Guitar Hero III” so many times before you want to gouge your eardrums out with a spork. Football season was quite exciting in that household. You’d think that the sweet baby Jesus was being born everytime the Cowboys would score a touchdown. Likewise, it was almost as if Al-Quaeda had dared show masked faces in the McDirtyson household when the opposing team wold score. Dad wold get quite irate.
• They have a little stupid dog (a pug) named Beevo that barks at just about everything. I admit that I’m a little racist against the pug breed; I find most of them pretty gross (except my friend James’…they are actually kind of cool). So…needless to say…them owning a pug does not exactly enhance the image of these people I have formed in my head.
• Here’s the real kicker. Not only do they have a nasty, foul, fat little snorting barky dog…but they actually allow it to poop and pee on their porch. The two of them are too lazy to just take the damn thing out for a little walk, so they just let it out onto the porch to befoul it. What. The. F. Mate. And then, every couple of days or so, she sweeps the turds off of the porch and into the little quaint ‘bush’ area in front of it. When it gets warm and humid here….*wretch*…you can only imagine how wonderful it smells.
• She smokes. Note that I have absolutely nothing against smokers…but it doesn’t help when you have all of the above stacked against you. And she sometimes throws the butts onto the sidewalk out in front of their place.
• They don’t care for their stuff. For example, Mrs. McDirtyson drives a really beat Ford Taurus around. I’ve intentionally avoided parking next to her to avoid the potential door ding or a small disgusting hellspawn child running up against my car.

I tell you all of those things because I want you to understand where I’m coming from when I make the next statement (which is going to sound pretty mean). I don’t judge people on appearance…but having experienced all of the above, physical faults tend to be…enhanced. The imperfections I’m speaking of would happen to be those of the maxillary/mandibulary (I think I just made up a word) type. These people have THE WORST TEETH I think I’ve seen in a while. It makes me shudder to think of how bad they really are. We’re talking teeth of the decaying sort…brown, dirty, and looking as if perhaps bolweevils have decided to take sanctuary there. We’re talking hot looking receeding red gums that have small lumps of white nastiness on them. We’re talking about, when these people talk, they have little pockets of coagulated spit forming in the corners of their mouths because their grilles are so damn jacked. Oh god…I’m actually starting to feel a tiny bit vomitous just thinking about having to talk to them…

So…in summary…we dislike these people very, very much. They are inspiration for us to really start looking at buying a house. I don’t want to have to live with people like this anymore.