Anyone near the fires? Anyone have to evacuate, although if you did you may not have Internet access. Hope no one lost their home, the situation looks really bad and may only get worse.

This has always bothered me, but it seems to be worse these days. I don't know if it's because more people are on cell phones, or there are just more stupid people on the road. The problem is people and the turn arrow. Usually it's the left hand turn arrow. So there I will sit, maybe 3-5 cars back from the intersection. For me to get through the light I am depending on the people infront of me stepping on the gas and making their turn when they get the turn arrow. How is it than more than not only 1-3 people make it through the light and I get stuck? I will sit and watch the turn arrow go green, and then I will wait and not see anyone turning! WTF! MOVE! Finally they slowly start to make their turn, OMG! At this point the light is going yellow, going out, etc. One or two lucky people maybe are able to make it through after the first person. Or the first person will quickly turn and the people behind them slowly start their turn. For example, the turn arrow goes green, the 1st car takes off and is through the intersection and on their way down the other road, meanwhile cunt face in car number two has yet to enter the intersetion! WTF! Moron #2 should have been a few feet behind proper driver #1.

Another problem is the righ turn arrow, a lot of people don't see it! They just sit there thinking they have a red light while the right hand turn arrow is green. "HONK!!! HONK!!!" still they sit, wondering why I'm honking. Really bugs me.

The one good thing is if you just miss the turn and are the 1st car for the next cycle you can just pull way out into the intersection and when the light goes red, and oncoming traffic stops, you can legally finsih your turn since you were in the intersection before the light turned red. Some fools don't realize this and they pull out into the intersection (over the white line) and when the light goes red they don't finish their turn and they just sit there! In some situations this blocks traffic. To make matters worse, some people will pull out real far and other people will be behnd them, also in the intersection, and if they don't go, the other people are also stuck in the intersection cursing at the idiot who didn't finsih their turn so they could also finish their turn.

Learn to drive people!

I want a bumper sticker with a turn arrow on it that says "THIS MEANS TURN NOW!"

My wife has had this "cactus", it's actually not a cactus, sometimes called a false cactus, or more commonly Candelabra cactus. Anyway, she's had it since like junior high. So I decided to bring it down from our attic window and put it in the kitchen window. The whole I'm I'm moving it I'm getting poked, etc. Then I broke off some pieces to stick down in the dirt to form more chutes.

A couple hours later I start feeling funny. I start itching, everywhere. My scalp was the worst, thought I was going to tear it off from sctraching. Something wasn't right. I then see what loks like a bug bite on my left forearm, strange since I had on long sleeves. So I took some benedryl because I figured it was some kind of allergic reaction. Turns out it was the cactus! Things got worse though, I broke out in nasty hives, something I can never remember happening to me. They were worst around my pelvic area, har har, and around my neck, lower back, and my arm pits. My ears felt really hot and they were red. WTF!

The Benedryl may have helped, but it slowly went away. For awhile I was freaked out because I didn't know it was the cactus and thought it could have been from something I ate, or some strange bug.

So if you have one of these in your home, they are a some what common house plant, don't let it poke you, or don't let the milky latex sap get on you! Especially not your eyes!

Oh yeah, it gives you the shits too, and could make you vomit.

Not bad for a single LED flashlight eh?

Over a year ago Verizon brought it's fIOS Internet service to my area. That's fiber optic, and I get 15mbps down, 2mbps up, hooray. So anyway, I've been waiting for their fIOS TV service to be available, and today got a call that it was finally ready to go. Cool! However, the guy, who I could barely hear because of a bad connecton (way to go Verizon, this was on a land line btw), was trying to sell me on a $99 a month package which would include the Internet, TV, and phone. The thing is, the Internet would be 5/2 and I want 15/2. I told the guy I had 15 and want to keep the 15 and he told me that I wouldn't notice the difference! OH REALLY?! WTF! So if I download a 100MB file which takes me about 1 minute now, I won't notice it taking over 3 minutes after the down grade to 5mbps? Or a 1GB file going from a little over 10 minutes, to over 30? He kept assuring me I wouldn't notice the difference and kept giving me bull shit reasons why. Holy shit! I guess they can fool the majority of idiots out there, but they weren't fooling me. I was insulted they'd try and bull shit me like that and when I call back to talk to another rep, hopefully not this douche again, I'll let them know I was not happy with the way they tried to BS me.

Normally I've had good experiences when dealing with Verizon customer service and I have a feeling they outsourced some firm to handle these Verizon TV sign ups.

Just thought it was kinda funny that they'd try to tell someone there is no difference between 15mbps and 5mbps. For most people it probably wouldn't matter much, but if you regularly send large files around, like batches of family photos, MP3's of your favorite radio show, or whatever, it matters.

Some of you may have noticed I've been a bit quiet around the site since the redesign. There was a reason for this. When the redesign happend the majority of our admin tools no longer worked. So I have been patiently waiting for the team to work out the bugs and fix some of the admin tools. We recently got back review mod tools, but just in the past couple days we now can once again delete user accounts. So ever since the redesign we were not able to terminate user accounts! We kept this quiet as we didn't want anyone to take advantage of the situation. However, we kept a list of accounts that needed to be cleared out.

So this is a warning to anyone who has or is thinking about violating our guidelines. We've seen a lot of hateful racist crap, pornography on user blogs, tons of crap entries spamming the Portal, etc. This is the time to turn over a new leaf, remove any content that violates our terms, etc, before you get caught! I'm constantly being tipped off to abusive behavior by users of Newgrounds.

Anyone who wants to throw a fit and bitch about their account being removed, such as an alt, whatever account they bitch from will also be removed. We don't remove accounts without good reason. Stolen content, pornography, child porn, racism, etc, will not be tolerated.

I'm starting to get my Halo skills back, what little I had of them from before. I like the way you can replay your games, move the camera around, and take screen shots. Here's a screen shot of me sticking some moron on a mongoose with a spike grenade.

So who got Halo 3? Thoughts?

We have tried to stay quiet about this, but ever since the redesign the review mod tools were down, even for me. So some people were getting away wth a lot of spammy reviews, abusive reviews, etc. However, they will no longer be getting away with it! The tools are fixed and the review mods are back at it. So keep flagging those abusive reviews! The review mods currently have a big back log of abusive reviews to sort through and judge, over 26,000 at the moment!

So a lot of users will be getting PM's from M-Bot informing them they had reviews deleted, were banned from reviewing, etc. The review mods have a big job ahead of them so please deal with whatever judgments they make. If you feel your review wasn't abusive, try to resubmit it, but try to be extra careful to follow our review guidelines. If you feel strongly that your review wasn't abusive you can PM me a copy and I will review it.

I guess I should post something new. So has anyone been following the exciting break throughs they are making with LED's? At some point they should start replacing all of our street lights, parking lot lights, and some home lighting. The great thing about LED's is they can now put out a lot of light and use far less power and materials than current light bulbs, sodium vapor lights, mercury vapor, flourescents, etc. For those concerned with our energy consumption, replacing all our lights (someday) with LED lights, nationwide, would result in a major reduction of energy use. Did I also mention LED's last 50,000 to 100,000 hours, or longer?

The first place many of the latest and greatest LED's are showing up is in flashlights. It seems every few weeks there is a more efficent LED hitting the market and soon after some company is putting them into a flashlight.

So who here has any of the newer LED based flashlights?

Here's a shot of a standard old 3D Maglite (3 brand new D batteies installed) next to a much smaller LED light with the new Phillips Lumileds Luxeon Rebel 100lm LED: