I’m cruising through memepool and burst into laughter when I see:

It’s time to brush up on your knowledge of ass meats of the world.

If you’re one of those people that thinks they need to know everything, well, I bet you don’t.(though now maybe you can)

Man, it’s not my week. Or month. Or something.

Yesterday I settled in to watch the NFL conference title games. In observance of customs established while I was in college, I proceeded to cook a big vat of spicy chili. Shortly after slicing the fresh jalapenos and dumping them into the pot, I felt the urge to….ahem… perform nasal passage explorations. Purely as a precationary measure, I assure you. And what I discovered is that jalapeno juice burns like a motherfucker!. I can’t emphasize that strongly enough. To make matters worse, burning nostrils cause one’s eyes to water. What do you think I did next? Thats right. And guess what? Contact lenses are jalapeno juice sponges. So yes, I confess. I am the world’s biggest loser. Though I’ve the good graces to laugh at myself. And share it with others. And the chili was very tasty, so in the end it was all worth it.

Ran across glutinous in something I was reading today and I realized that for no particular reason I can discern, the word amuses me. Immensely. Sigh….my siblings are going to end up having to have me comitted

My new machine won’t post. I’ve now spent about 8 hours on my own and 2 with a friend who came over to double check my efforts to make sure I’m not overlooking something, and the new machine won’t post. All signs seem to indicate that it’s the motherboard, though there’s a small possibility that its the cpu. This is major suckage, I have been carefully planning the construction of this machine for about 4 months. To have it all fall apart on the finish line is very frustrating. Plus Jesse has to wait for his new machine since I am still using my trusty abit BH6 for now. I’ve had pretty good luck with abit mainboards but based on this one and the trouble my friend Paul had with his new abit this may be my last one.

So I’ve become completely paranoid about posting to this blog using one of the wireless laptops, from home or work, because it’s so pathetically easy to sniff wireless traffic. I know if I was in college and I could sniff the network so easily I would definitely be listening in on the stream to see what fun stuff I could uncover. The solution seems to be to encrypt the connection from the server end but it’s somewhat beyond me and Bandy is no longer around to advise me on this stuff so for now, no wireless posting, alas.

….and I cheer. So sayeth a wit on metafilter:

I don’t give a rat’s ass whether people choose to believe that the earth is 20 minutes old and *GOD* created everything pretty much as is/was, but to deny observable phenomena simply because the only book you can read hasn’t been updated in a thousand years is silly.

Here here! I got such an earful about god and the good book while I was in colorado, it was enough to turn my stomach. Or make me more appreciative of posts like the one above anyway.

Under $100 for driverless firewire portable storage. Note to relatives and signigicant other; I want one!

So, like over a month ago (look for the google heading, halfway down the page) I observed that you could use google as a sort of backup system for your site by inserting a bizarre combination of words into your content. Someone else has noticed the same thing, only they’ve taken a slightly different angle. And managed to get linked all over hell and high water as a result. Just goes to show, it’s all in the interpretation and presentation, observation alone isn’t worth the pixels it’s recorded on

Turn a jpg into asci art, automagically!. It’s very cool and an excellent hack.

It started snowing midafternoon today. One of my coworkers who has a 2 hour commute mentioned how much he disliked having to drive in the snow. I told him I didn’t mind it that much. So of course on the car ride home I almost splat myself broadsides into a Taurus.

It was snowing pretty hard when I left the office so I decided to take Route 1 instead of the highway because the roads were so bad and the highway turns into a turtle race in those conditions. As I came over the crest of a hill I noticed a car coming towards me flashing his lights. At first I thought….
(more…)

Today’s laugh, courtesy of the usually amusing metafilter:

thou chickenfucker!
Luckily, that chicken hath
teat, not testicle.

If twas the reverse?
Punishment would be meted
severely, farmboy.

from a thread about animal cruelty and other culture’s customs

Today I got a kick out of an email I got from amazon.co.uk (the british amazon.com) which informed me that my order had been proccessed and shipped using the Royal Mail. I suppose citizens of the UK would think I’m dopey but there’s something to ‘The Royal Mail’ that tickles my funny bone. I’m expecting it to be hand delivered by a lavendar scented fellow outfitted in purple velvet

the order was for a series of books by an obscure sci fi author. They’re not available in the US, so I used the UK amazon.com to get them

‘When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you- when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self- sacrifice- you may know that your society is doomed.’

The comparison to the RIAA is a little unfair, perhaps I should mention Enron and leave it at that ;-(

I’ve had this ongoing fascination with distributed computing projects and their commercial potential. Long ago I wrote a long piece about it which is now sadly lost. The gist of it was that it should be possible for a company to profitably exploit the vast sea of networked computers to use their computing power when their owners weren’t using it. About a year and a half ago I outfitted all of the machines in our lab at work with the Popular Power client, which was doing research on flu vaccinations, and served as proof of my earlier piece. Unfortunately the .com collapse brought down Popular Power and several other companies that were after the same goal.

But now there’s Ubero. Again promising payment for your unused cpu cycles (through paypal no less) and, at least for the time being, again focused on non-profit ‘for the public good’ research. If you’ve a win32, macosx or unix box, go get it and run it when you’re not using your computer. Help scientists save the universe…or at least cure the common cold. Or something.

Today’s cool link of the day is The coolest clock I’ve seen yet. Note that you’ll need flash to check it out.

Long before there was the world wide web there was Ted Nelson and Xanadu, a vision of a global two way hypertext system into which all the world’s knowledge would be poured. I happened across Ted’s writings while I was in college and actually applied for grant money to do research using Xanadu, which at that time was to be published by Autodesk. I wasn’t that great of a student and so my grant proposal was denied (it didn’t help that I was looking for roughly $50,000, at a time when the average grant was a few hundred dollars in stipend money to fund a visit to a remote museum or library), but I never lost my interest and ultimately it led to the career I now (largely) enjoy, so I was pleasantly suprised to run across this piece in the register today, covering the public launch of the new xanadu website which among other things has the source code for Xanadu. Amazing stuff, I wonder if it’ll actually lead to something tangible this go around or if it will be just another step in the long evolution of Xanadu.

I’ve got a new favorite gaming website, gamerankings.com. It comprises everything I love best about community websites, I wish I had thought of it first. You can quickly create an account and begin to rank and leave comments about games for most of the major platforms. The site tracks your contributions over time and each user is assigned a rank based on their contributions. It’s missing the sort of ‘per post’ karma stuff from the slashdot sites which I hope they add, but as a plus they link to external reviews of games and the users can then rank the reviews as well. All in all it’s a very slick system. It occurs to me that I should do the same thing for traditional boardgames, there’s a concept no one has done before.

I have been slowly upgrading my stereo system the past 4 years or so. I bought my speakers from Cambridge Soundworks because they have an excellent upgrade policy - if you bring in speakers you buy from them within a year of the purchase date they will apply the full purchase price towards the purchase of a model of speaker higher up in quality. So I have gradually been upgrading the speakers as cashflow permits.

In December Cambridge sent me a sale flyer and they had their top of the line center channel speaker on sale for $250. It normally goes for $400, so I decided to go for it. I get to the store and they knock the price down to $220 for me, I’m feeling even better about the decision. But when they haul the box out of the back I realize the thing is bigger than my tv. By a lot, I mean a lot. Becky is now convinced I’m a mental reject and my tv looks ridiculous perched on top of this monstrosity, but damn does it sound good.