I've been with my new HP laptop for work for a while now, and thanks to it's huge increase in processing power, memory, and hard drive platters' rotation rate over my old Dell laptop which is not only slow by today's standards, but has also accumulated 3-years-worth of software detritus and e-barnacles, the turnaround time between finding an error, fixing it, and then testing the fix, is significantly faster. In fact, it's made the excuse of 'compiling' a (unfortunate) thing of the past:

This was possible when 'compiling' was a 10 minute wait

One thing I used to do between compiles (besides jousting and sword play on office chairs) was to browse websites like any other non-programmer would. No I wouldn't go to Facebook - I don't have enough active FB friends to create a long list of activity on the Live News Feed so I like to let it build-up over the work day so I have something to go through when I get home - but rather joke sites (eg: Cracked, Digg - yes Digg is just one big joke), comic sites (eg: XKCD, Cyanide and Happiness), or blogs (waaay too many to list). One blog which I've been directed to recently thanks to a referral from my brother, is the site Stuff White People Like - http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/

You don't have to be non-white to appreciate the humour that went into the site - although, like myself, being some sort of ethnic minority in a white-dominated society really helps (lol, who would've thought that could ever be an advantage) - but just going through the list, I've found so much that is funny, because it is all true.

With almost every link I could find at least 1 person I knew who would fit the stereotype presented in each blog post, and I would proceed to post the link on their Facebook wall.

I'm only half-way through the list right now (no thanks to the faster work laptop for reducing the amount of time I have to slack off... damn double-edged sword of having a faster work computer!), and I must've posted way too many links because my friends (read: white friends, the 'white' is assumed as I'm often the token ethnic for their group) have noticed my pattern and are starting to retaliate.

The comments on each post are sometimes lol-worthy, but most of the time it's either someone admitting how white they are (regardless of the colour of their skin) or someone saying just how racist the site is. Odd that last one, because each post is written by a twenty-something white male who admits that he's selling-out his race and writing all of those posts in jest. I guess those 'OMG-this-is-racist' people are just pissed that they're now being subject to stereotypes, and to those people I advise they develop a sense of humour and get over it, but only after I point and laugh at them while rhetorically asking how it feels to be on the receiving end for once.

Ego surfing; it's something we've all done before. Whether or not the results work in your favour, well, that's a different story.

A combined first and last name isn't as rare as it used to be. You'll likely meet someone during your school years with your first name. (I don't know what assumed statistic to throw at you for meeting something outside your family with your last name.) And as for finding someone with both? That's where the Internet can help fill-in the gaps; it's only a matter of time before Google spiders find your name-based doppelganger and make the results available to all.

So with a little spare time at work and a lot of curiousity, I started throwing, not only my name, but the names of several others into Google, and taking a look at what it gave me in return. Old friends, new friends, Facebook friends... everybody was fair game.

I'm still the only Emanuel Rabina on the Internet with Google giving me up to 2 pages of results on myself before going awry. Only a few others were just as unique, providing up to a page of accurate results before going on first-name/last-name tangents. As for the rest though, that's when the lols started.

Those with 2 first names gave the greatest variety of results, but a few honestly surprised me. For example, I found-out I have friends who share names with: a hand-crafted furniture maker, a canoeist, a doctor of medicine, a wrestler, a dentist, an illustrator, an actress, a singer/songwriter, a professional trainer, a scientologist, and a porn star.

So I was walking home with one of my neighbours last night, and quickly learned that work has turned me into one helluva boring person. Maybe my line of work (IT / computer programming) has something to do with that; I don't imagine my spiel about web services and the politics behind each company's interpretation of the spec would be classified as scintillating dinner conversation. And maybe all of my other high school / university / pre-full-time-work friends are getting that too.

With all the differences between our jobs, talking work lingo to one another would be like talking different languages. I can still talk computers and stuff to some of my pre-full-time-work friends, but we've all scattered to the four winds and found ourselves in different companies, different states of mind, different dimensions, or Germany.

So, outside of work, I look for the common ground in conversations. That neighbour I mentioned? I talked to him about the new pants I bought that day. That's right; pants.

Although there was that one time at a birthday party, where I didn't know anybody besides the birthday girl, I was talking with somebody else who works as a programmer. Once we both learned that fact about the other, it was pretty easy for us to let the geek subjects flow. But then we discovered we were on opposite sides in the ongoing civil war that is Java vs .NET, and we were practically at each other's throats after that.

So maybe it is just my line of work. Maybe why us programmers have so few people to talk with is because fanboy-ism causes us to murder one another.

So it was a bit of a slow day at work: I had read and responded to all the e-mails specifically addressed to me, and I had finished all my assigned tasks. Then I looked at the clock and saw it was 9:30am :(

So what does a bored office-worker trying to kill time do? Hit the Internet.

No, I wasn't looking for anything like Hold The Button, but in my search for nothing in particular, I found my way back at the blog of John C. Wright. I've mentioned him before - something to do with one of his books about some guy named Phaethon and a wallpaper I made, and I liked his critique of Jumper - and after reading some of his posts, you start to get a distinct impression about him which I will just describe as 'weird' because adjectives fail me and I can't seem to get to thesaurus.com right now. I started to wonder if his style of blogging (which happens to be similar to what I've read on other writers' blogs/sites) is something indicative of a writer, some sort of writer's disease, or is some prerequisite to becoming a writer. Lo and behold, Mr Wright himself provided the link to answer my questions:

• Maureen Johnson's blog - How To Be A Writer In Ten Easy Steps

Suddenly, it all made sense.

So Guitar Hero 3 is either out, or up-and-coming (depending on where you are in the world), and while I'm not a fan, I was directed to a YouTube video of someone attempting Dragonforce's Through The Fire And Flames. If you know that song, or know power metal in general, you'll know that it will be impossible to get 100% for that song on expert level.

Continuing on the YouTube trail, I went and watched the actual music video for that song, as well as another of their songs, Operation Ground And Pound. In that video I think the band is on some sort of post-apocalyptic Earth, surviving the onslaught of the alien race that has destroyed it. I don't know if my words can evoke the right kind of imagery, but damn it looked cool.

So I don't know what everyone else's version of armageddon looks like, but my one has been slightly altered to have the 4 horsemen riding in not to the sound of the screaming masses, but being greeted by a synth orchestra, double-kick drums, and humankind's most ridiculously over-the-top electric guitar solo ever.

It'll be our finest hour :D