The Warm Up

Not very long ago, I made three stickers from a photograph of yours truly. Because the original intent of making the stickers was never met, I decided to give away the stickers with a simple contest.

Sticker #1 has gone across the Atlantic Ocean an now resides in Germany.

Sticker #2 has traveled across the United States and now resides in Upstate New York.

Sticker #3: well this sticker is probably going to travel more than #1 and #2 combined (and then possibly doubled).

Wait, didn't the third postcard come from Switzerland? How can the sticker have such an unknown travel distance? I'm glad you asked.

allow me to spin a yarn....

A few weeks after sticker #2 was shipped off, I received a message from my buddy asking if I could fix his computer. I heartily agreed and five days later I was picking up the computer at the post office. Yea, the machine was so bad my friend mailed the computer to me.

The machine itself was a sweet little Asus netbook that was infected with Microsoft Windows XP. Asus really did a disservice to computer users everywhere by putting Windows on their netbooks. By itself, XP made the machine sluggish and all of the extra bells and whistles that were tacked on ( and tacky looking ) by Asus didn't help.

Aside from slowing down the machine significantly, XP made the machine vulnerable to the plethora of malicious code that seems to be floating about these days, and the machine had a few trojans and a rootkit. Damn, that machine was fucked up, and it took quite a while to clean; but clean it I did and it was time to send it back to my buddy.

My buddy rides bicycles and he goes on bike adventures. I'm not talking about pedaling 5 miles across town for a cup of coffee at a new café (now that is my kind of adventure). I'm talking about really really riding; packing camping gear on a bike and riding for days, weeks, months, and years. Right now, he's in New Mexico, having recently ridden the Continental Divide Trail.

Anyway, it was time to send the computer back to my buddy. Before shipping the machine, I added a few items to the computer bag:

• a stamped envelope addressed to me
• a stamped blank envelope ( he should write to someone else on his adventure)
• a sticker of me,to adorn his bike (AHA!, so that's where it went)

If you are interested, you can check out his blog at http://pocket-thunder.blogspot.com/ and I found out that the package had arrived safely when I read his blog post about it.

The Quandary

It had been a few weeks and I didn't think that anyone would send a postcard for the last sticker. As life would have it, three days after shipping the netbook to New Mexico I received a phone call from the bartender of a local drinking establishment who informing me that I had some mail at the bar. What do you know, it was a post card for the sticker contest thingy.

I must say, the newest postcard followed the rules of the contest to a "tee", which is awesome! Yet here I am with no more stickers. What is a Jez to do? Make more stickers of course! ( I should start numbering them)

It looks like I've got a busy week ahead of me.

Now quit reading, and go make more stickers than you think you'll need.

Now quit reading, and go make more stickers than you think you'll need.