Preference Personnelle
gack. i'll be back online on, i hope, tuesday.
i'm very much in the middle of moving. this weblog will probably go down for a while, then go up again at a different address. hasn't happened yet, though.
1" hail! booming thunder! this storm started almost five hours ago, on the other end of the state. i'm thrilled.
downside of this storm: it's virtually certain that either my electricity or cable modem connection will, at some point, go out.
ooh, hot damn, it looks like the area i live is getting a tornado. like, as i write this. 'tornadic activity'? is 'tornadic' even a word? much rain and lightning, but no funnel cloud as yet. i have, like, every window in the house open. hail, and massive downpours, say the weatherman. gusts to 50 mph. awesome.
tara grubb, a 26-year-old real estate agent, is running for congress in north carolina. the link's to her weblog. worth watching, that's for sure.
so i needed this driver, for my outdated linksys network card (for chrissake, don't buy a linksys network card. i believe i've mentioned this before). the only place i could find one was
driverguide.com. but they insist on memberships. so, here's the login/password they gave me: the name is
drivers and the pw is
all. use it, if the opportunity arises.
back from another trip to columbus--this moving is going to kill me.
i have at least seventy-five board games. shouldn't there have been an intervention at some point?
ashcroft suggests internment camps for american citizens. i can safely say it just keeps getting worse.
librarian uses books as toilet paper. bullshit, and isn't there enough bathroom humor in the world?
first slashdot runs a story about diamonds, and now
kuro5hin tackles the
meaning of life (or, as the author titled it, 'the search for meaning'). among other things, people mention
solipsism,
library work,
bicycling (
trackstands, actually),
interpreting poems and the
archos jukebox, which, oddly, makes me feel like i'm doing pretty well with this meaning-of-life thing (and i've read halfway down the thread without seeing a gratuitous monty python reference--oops, there's one). geeks are aging. future youngsters will resent me even more than i resent baby boomers.
ooh, z-words. the last time my parents were in my house, my father said 'what the hell is that eye chart thing?', referring to the posterboard of two-letter words on my wall.
i just saw a frankly disturbing commercial. the kid's friend was over visiting. he and the kid were playing playstation (and it wasn't disturbing because, as is so common in teevee and movies, they had psx controllers, a snes console and the sound effects from space invaders (for a while, drew carey had a saturn--it's the only time i've ever seen one on a program)). and mom says, 'hey, kid, you set the table. friend, will you get the mac'n'cheese?' and so the friend goes to the pantry, and kid says 'oh, it's not in there. we've got the real stuff.' the real stuff being
stouffer's frozen. my mother made macaroni and cheese with elbow macaroni and
velveeta. it's only lately i realize how lucky i was.
one of the promos for that movie '
blue crush,' which people make fun of me for wanting to see, includes a reviewer who calls it 'the perfect summer movie.' as is so often the case, i wonder if that remark is taken far out of context. we are, after all, talking about a movie featuring courageous girl surfers who bond with each other and challenge gender roles while rocking baggy shorts and bikini tops.
here's a salon article about elvis fans. there's tons of elvis crap on salon, in fact, including a 2000 greil marcus article comparing him to clinton--timely, and original.
wow, the morons at abc seem to be suffering some whose-line-related disaster. first they ran the first couple seconds of one episode, then they started another, then it appeared they were fast-forwarding the second one, and now there's a technical-difficulties screen and some clearly-harried-sounding guy doing a live voiceover about technical difficulties which they'll be correcting 'almost immediately.' wow, now they restarted the first episode. no wonder they're losing so much money. ooh, a film noir scene set in a bike shop.
hmm. comments.
haloscan. i'm giving it a try.
update: not only is it fairly ugly, it also made my archives javascript quit working. i can solve both of those problems, but hmm... on one hand, i'd just as rather ditch the javascript-powered archives links, but if the page will still depend on scripts, why bother?
update, pt. 2: i am an idiot. i had javascripts and pop-ups disabled. no wonder it didn't work.
update, pt. 3: well, commenting works with opera and mozilla. that's about all the testing i'll be doing, so if it doesn't work w/aol or ie or on a mac or something, let me know. in unrelated news, i'm not looking forward to moving this thing to a new host.
well, i got dinner with rachel, and actually read the article. it's funny, if cutesy-poo. and fascinating.
ooh, a
winnie-the-pooh lawsuit. i'd love to see disney lose that franchise--i could start liking it again. now, if only those 'tao of pooh' books had never been written.
some bozo wants the world to pay off her credit-card debt, and it looks like it might be crazy enough to work. it's hard to find free email without ads in it, people are starving in the street, and people are giving money to some twentynothing (i'm guessing) broad who spends her money on
kate spade handbags. here are people who are bigger suckers than people who rack up five-digit credit card debt. insane. oh, and somebody put up a
parody site. so
save karyn, or
don't. the parody page is high in the daypop rankings, too. either way, you're taking part in something that could only have happened right now.
and speaking of daypop--also high in the rankings is this twenty-year-old article from the atlantic. why is this article so popular? well, someone referred to it in a slashdot posting. memes are being created, and you are there. wow. hasn't there been a better article about diamonds written in the last twenty years?
i kinda want to add comments to this weblog. what's a good way to do that?
people sure do hate ohio. they, like, apologize for living here. i know a lot of very self-conscious hipsters, i suppose.
some coworker just said "you're leaving--and you're the guy that knows everything." wow.
chuck d, on vanilla ice: "actually, we tried to sign him. 'cause i said, 'if there's gonna be an elvis in hip-hop, i wanna own it.'"
ice-t: "i've got a phone, answering machine, tv set, computer, hand grenade--everything you need to do business in los angeles."
it wasn't supposed to be, but for some reason it felt like a day of conclusions. first i went to the village thrift store, where some girl (on the infinitesimal chance ol' girl's reading this--short black hair, black skirt, duct-taped slides) browsed the record stacks with me. we talked a bit about the thrift-store ubiquity of things like
herb alpert,
henry mancini and that board game,
kensington (always in the record section). we made fun of
donny osmond and that
travolta/
newton-john album. i bought, among other things,
suzi quatro and a
diana ross 12-inch from the '
thank god it's friday' soundtrack. on her way out, ol' girl ran up to me and said 'i hope you have a really nice life.' lovely. it's too bad 'it made my day' is, like, a silly cliche.
then, later, i went to the subway, where i was waited on by michael, my old best friend joe's cousin. joe's working on a dig in new mexico. i ought to write him an email. michael asked me if i ever saw another old pal. alas, i don't. i wish i did. also, michael lives, like, right down the road from me. 'it's a small world' is an even bigger cliche than 'it made my day.'
i wish i were better at keeping in touch with people. i wrote down some quote a long time ago about people moving in and out of our lives like busboys at a restaurant, the entrances and exits going mostly unnoticed. entropy. things fall apart. it's too bad. i miss people. (note to whomever: if you're some old pal of mine, look me up.)
do you have realplayer? then watch this
psa about libraries.
wow, a traficant one-minute speech archive. wow. there's a geek quiz on that site too, but who cares?
it's great to finally see mullet humor getting played out, isn't it?
go after the file-sharers, say congresspeople. $600/second, say anti-drug-war types. way to prioritize. bush rolls back medical-record-privacy laws. surprising. here's a bizarre and topical comic series. incidentally, sage francis' 'makeshift patriots' is really goddamn good.
what the hell happened to soulseek? they sent a message about a patch. i blew off downloading it, since i was about to leave town anyway. now, it seems like it's operating in stealth mode or something. weird.
update: as is so often the case, a simple web search (thank you google cache) seems to have solved the problem. i'll make sure when i get home.
i just lost the lengthy pennsylvania-visit-related post i was working on. i don't even feel like reconstructing it. a few things, though:
my grandmother remarked early in the visit as to how, like, i seemed so promising as a younger person, and what happened? i am rather upset.
a business in greensburg, pa: touch of class taxidermy.
i think my aunt candace outed my cousin alicia to me. she definitely referred to alicia's 'girlfriend' and to her feelings that alicia's job at ms. magazine 'screams gay.' these facts do not a lesbian make, but i think i'm going to email alicia. suddenly i feel like we have a lot more in common.
on the jiffy lube's signboard: if you love her, lube her.
my father told a story about when he was working in west virginia in the late '60s and early '70s, bringing telephone service to rural farmers. some of his buddies had seen 'blazing saddles' the night before. and he and his coworker pals were standing in a field, measuring telephone poles or something, when a horse ambled over to see what was going on. one buddy said to the other, a big strong hulking dude, 'i'll bet you can't punch that horse in the face and knock it down.' dude said, like, 'nobody can do that.' 'i saw somebody do it last night.' so the big strong hulking guy (must've been six-six, three-fifty or something) rears back and punches the horse in the head. the horse doesn't even blink. dude breaks three fingers and his wrist. and he fills out a workmen's comp claim. so their supervisor was asking my dad, 'okay, so you were there when the incident happened?' my dad says, 'yes, i was.' 'well, what happened?' 'i can't tell you.' dude got his claim paid. and he was back to work a couple days later.
someone has a crush on you! we've all gotten the junk emails, and figured that every time we're sent one, our email address goes on some sort of gullible love-starved suckers list. we've even concluded, repeatedly, that someone who reveals their crush through spam from some
crappy banner-
ad-
packed website is, uh, unlikely to be the love of our lives. but did we ever think that those crush emails are entirely fake, sent out by companies who have even falsified their
domain-
name-
registration information? well, here's a
wake-up call. (and what's with the first-person plural? incidentally, '
bright lights, big city' is a better book than '
anthem.'
"As the 1990s went on, Clear Channel came in, and things started getting real crazy, real quickly. I looked up one day and said, 'Who are these guys doing 11 of my shows?' Then it was 19, then one year it was 38 of 42 gigs. But the money wasn't good. I'm not talking about profits; I'm talking about where it was coming from. I don't like the way they run their facilities, and I don't like the way they treated me as an artist. Their lack of a sense of humanity is shocking."--Steve Miller
how can i deal with a computer lab user who responds to the machine freezing up by yanking out the power cord?
"it sounds like she's beating a baby with a cat."
"you have to listen to the notes she's not playing."
"i can do that at home."
i got the simpsons second season dvds today. odd, because the release date is tomorrow. time traveler, in cuyahoga falls, if anyone's interested.
now, daypop is also tracking amazon
wishlist items. only 799 wish lists indexed, though, which makes me wonder how hard it would be to intentionally skew these results. here's a hint: a few blogging-related titles are rated seemingly disproportionately highly.
wow. i want to put up a page with the entire contents of my
house.
so this company,
neonapster, released an
mp3 ripping program,
neoaudio. but neoaudio is just the highly-regarded (and open-source)
cdex with some new logos and, as one might expect,
adware and
spyware. the
neonapster developers pulled an identical stunt with their file-sharing program. they say it's 'similar to
morpheus,' which means, in this case, 'runs on
gnucleus code.'
slashdot had a link to neoaudio user comments. read it
here. there must be big money in taking open-source programs, adding spyware and foisting them on unsuspecting chumps. the
joezilla web browser, enhanced with
cometcursor and
aureate, will be available for download soon.
i took a nap after work, and i really should've set the alarm. now, it's 5 am and i'm wide awake. oops. wow, this cop on 'all in the family' is sam the butcher.
so, driving up 71 on our way home, we noticed a bunch of traffic and police cars and whatnot. we all wondered what it was. now, however, i know that it was a standoff between this gentleman and the police. they shot him. he's still alive.
so laura and kat and brad and i were on our way back from this movie yesterday night. and they were talking about some ex-police offer who... first, while pursuing a shoplifter, he shot into a closed car and killed some innocent person. then, later, he killed his wife, took his kids and went to some truck stop. later yet, he left the truckstop, two guns blazing, and stole a sheriff's suv. i hadn't heard any of this.
holy shit, that linkin park album sold almost 5 million copies in 2001. maybe rachel's on to something.
dig this
true porn clerk stories weblog. ah, timing.
00:47:13 aretha: oh, so here's one of the better tidbits of my day.
00:47:15 aretha: I like those combos cracker thingies... and when I get some and bring them to work, they all get eaten. so today I bought some combos, ate them, and then filled the bag back up with combos looking dog treats. the box said "now with more marrow!" hahahaha. 3 boys ate them and I saw them spitting them out in the back room. one got angry when my boss and I laughed at him.
