I got tired of blogger, so I installed phpwiki and wrote more php code than I ever have in my entire life to migrate here.

I'll be moving everything over in the near future, but in the meantime, stuff lives in two places. C'est dur, la vie.

I've been monitoring the local grocery stores for kosher-for-Passover Coke for the past couple months, ever since the Passover displays started. I gave up on it today, as the supply has been almost completely exhausted. We grabbed a couple pints of ice cream and a couple 2l bottles of Coke from the regular aisle, and came home.

It wasn't until Kat said,"What does this Hebrew on the cap say?" several hours later that I discovered the hidden bounty.

I should have said,"Oh, that says,'Poison To Goyim,'" but I'm not the quickest wit.

I'd like Tom Clancy a lot more if his novels were as short and dense as this hypothetical Chinese invasion scenario.

We just got back from putting Pix to sleep. The "pushing herself around" status from earlier this week was a huge exaggeration, and she actually hadn't improved at all since last Friday.

I held her while the doctor injected her. The moment she died, she just relaxed and went limp against me. She felt completely different after the tension left her body. Even her ears felt strange. She didn't close her eyes, which was really tough to take.

All of us were crying uncontrollably, even the doctor. We had fought really hard and tried everything possible, but the tumor fucked us in the end.

Drink a cup of freshly-squeezed secks.

Kinda dead to the world today.

We are having great fun with our kitty neurologist. On Monday, it was made clear to her that, if Pixel were not able to regain control of her legs, we would consider it enough of a quality-of-life degradation that we would have her put to sleep. The doctor agreed that it was an appropriate decision, and that we would know one way or the other after the steroid treatment.

Yesterday, we started the steroid treatment. 24 hours later, there was no improvement, but the neurologist said that it was a little early, that we would know after about twelve more hours.

She then said we should start the first round of radiation therapy. The nearest oncologist with a linear accelerator agreed to take Pix, and said that she wanted to give our cat a larger initial dose than is usual, with a one-week refractory period before continuing. (Normally, it's once a day for three weeks.) This first burst should demonstrate immediately if it would be worthwhile to continue.

Oh, but when we called to make the appointment, it turns out this oncologist is out of town tomorrow and Friday. Luckily, there is an oncologist with an accelerator in Gaithersburg, MD, and one in North Carolina if that falls through.

Kat and I both got the feeling that we're being sold or conned. We don't care about the money at all, or we would have stopped before this point. (My best estimate is that this has cost about $10k so far, counting medical fees, last-minute airfare, and lost income.) What we care about is someone giving us what may turn out to be false hope. If she's not going to get better, tell us -- don't keep changing the story and saying that the next big test is what will give us insight into how she'll do.

They still don't know what the problem is, and I think it's confusing the neurologist. We know, with as much certainty that anyone ever has, that it's not FIP, which is a bad, bad thing to have. We _think_ with some confidence that it's a tumor. What kind, no one knows. It doesn't appear to be shedding cells, so if it is a cancer tumor, it's probably contained, unless another colony exists somewhere else, but we'd discover that independently, and I'm ok with that.

Pix is a real charmer, though. She's already won over everyone at the hospital, because everyone stops by or gets on the phone to tell us how sweet she is. It kills me that they spend more time with her than I can.

Less catatonic crying today, though. Mostly just "I have nothing in me and someone punched me in the chest with a bowling ball" bawling.

I went to visit Pix after the first couple rounds of tests. They don't really know anything, but they suspect certain things are not present. They suspect she does not have FIV, because of inconsistent symptoms. They suspect she does not have lymphoma, because the mumble spike is not present, and lymphites or some such are not in evidence.

They've taken spinal fluid from both ends, they've taken biopsies of her bone marrow, they've done multiple MRIs, and all they know is that a mass that they think is some kind of tumor is putting pressure on her spine. Her back legs don't work, and they've just put her on steroids (they waited to do this before now because it would skew the other tests) to see if it will alleviate the pressure on the spine and return mobility to her hind legs.

She has shaved patches all over her body, and she's so frustrated and confused about why she can't get around. She's tense and miserable, and she doesn't know why she can't go home with us.

One bright thing, that delighted me more than it should. When we gave up on getting her to go pee, I picked her up to cradle her, which I used to do around the apartment. I'd lift her up so she could bat at the little chain-pulls on the ceiling light/fan. She'd go nuts and wail on them, and any time I pick her up since, she looks for a ceiling light.

Except this time. She looked for the fan all right, then she started purring like mad, and I felt a wet stream running down my shirt and pants.

My kitty loves me so much that she feels safer with me than anywhere else, so safe that she can let a whizz go.

And tomorrow, I will probably have to have her killed. I have no capacity to deal with this.

So I was wrong about the "halfway point" bit. It turns out that it's a lot closer to the end-point for Pix.

Based on what the neurologist and oncologist say, I'll probably fly back to DC to put Pixel to sleep on Wednesday.

This is the worst day ever. I started out this morning thinking she probably had a torn muscle or possibly some infection that could be treated by an uncomfortable but surpassable series of antibiotics, and would probably be at home when I got home Thursday night, ready for love. Now, I just hope she can hold out long enough for me to fly home early tomorrow so I can say good-bye.

I won't say anything like "she's my favorite", because I have two other cats I love with all my heart, but she's definitely the one I'm most protective of, and I can't do anything to protect her from this.

The thing that makes it so difficult is that she does not appear to be in any particular pain at this point. She's lucid and affectionate, and purrs like mad when she sees one of us. Apart from the partial paralysis of her back legs, her mood is typical. She's not confused or agitated.

Because she seems so clearheaded and so much like herself, it feels like murder to have her put to sleep. I'm projecting onto her, of course, and I'm aware of that, but it seems cruel to kill her while she's unaware of what is around the corner for her, just so she doesn't have to suffer. I argue with myself that maybe she has a few more pain-free days, and who am I to steal those from her? It's possible that it's lymphoma, and a small percentage of cats go into a complete remission after chemotherapy, and who am I to be too cowardly to take that chance?

I hate that people execute animals for what feel to be specious reasons. I hate that people shoot horses with broken legs, and I hate the idea that I might be arbitrary in meting out death for Pixel. I don't feel as if I even know everything I could do, let alone, actually have done everything possible to fix her.

I want to believe in mutable disasters. Anything that can happen can be undone, and the barrier for a pet between mutable and immutable seems so low. Part of what pisses me off is that something that should be fixable comes on so suddenly and with such finality, and there's no one I can argue with, threaten, or bribe to make it go away, and rewind things back to the status quo.

Damn it.

It's so bad now that we're hoping it's a tumor.

They see something that looks like a tumor around the spine, in an inoperable location. They'll be doing the tap tomorrow morning and retesting the globulin levels, which will tell them if it's a tumor or a virus.

To keep me from holding out any hope that it's a virus (hey, viruses go away, right?), they said that it was probably FIP, so we could hope for a couple weeks at best.

I've never had to make the decision to have a pet put down before. I avoided having pets in adulthood because I can't stand death, and here I am. I expected problems in the fourteen-year-old range, not seven-and-a-half.

If it's a tumor, our options are some sort of therapy, probably involving radiation and/or chemotherapy, which will involve driving to the oncologist five days a week to keep our kitty alive, but very, very sick. All of this just to keep her alive for half a year, possibly a year. Everyone stresses the expense, but honestly, I would give anything just to have her the way she was last weekend, except without this thing lurking just over the horizon.

This sucks hairy goat ass.

We spent the weekend and a little over $2k so far on our middle child, Pixel. We noticed that she had been hiding under the bed Thursday night, and didn't come out as is her custom when I'm hanging out alone after everyone else is asleep. We marked her reclusion up to fear of the cleaning staff, because one set of our housekeepers (don't ask) is actually four people who play a sort of zone defense against filth, each tearing through a separate section of the apartment as quickly as possible. Large numbers of strangers freak out Peko and Pix, so we thought she was just afraid of big, noisy people in her home.

She did come out briefly Thursday and Friday nights, so we thought she was ok. Saturday, we decided that she had been hiding long enough, and we needed to drag her out, parade her through the apartment, and make sure she knew she was secure in her home. I combed out her coat, because that seems to calm her down, and her long hair was pretty nasty looking after cowering under the bed for a couple days. Then I took her in to eat.

That's when we realised she was hurt. She tried walking across the floor, and her left hind leg would twitch and dump her weight, so it looked as if it was sprained/pulled/whatever, and unable to hold her weight, causing a limp.

We packed her up and took her to the animal hospital down the road, which is conveniently staffed 24/7 by at least one DVM. He took a few x-rays from various angles, drew some blood, and tried to get her to walk around. Looking at the x-rays, he didn't think there was any spinal damage, and concluded that she had suffered some sort of soft-tissue injury. The leading candidates were a torn or pulled muscle, or a partially torn ACL. Since she's a big girl (not as big as she looks with all that long hair, but about 5-6# bigger than she needs to be.) these were pretty safe assumptions. He gave us some antiinflammatory pain reliever for her, and sent us home.

We dosed her and she limped back under the bed, where we left her until the next day, when we wanted to check on her again.

This time, she _dragged_ her hind legs, not even bothering to use them. She'd pull them away when you tickled her pads, but the walking, especially on the tile in the bathroom, was a full-front-leg activity.

A call to the hospital resulted in advice to "let her rest, because she's probably just sore, and give her her pain reliever on schedule. If she doesn't defecate (since she hadn't gone in a couple days, and the x-rays showed that she was full up) in a few hours, call and bring her in."

We took her back to the hospital, and that's when things got very scary. I had dismissed a lot of Kat's concerns because the DVM had answers for all of our questions up to this point. He ran the upper-body x-rays, and when he asked us to come into another room (and closed the door) to discuss the prognosis, I think I almost crapped my pants in fear. He said she was degenerating quickly, and he didn't know why.

The leading suspects are either a meningeal toxoplasmosis infection, which is inflamming the spinal lining and reducing its ability to communicate signals from one end to the other, or a ruptured disk. However, neither shows up on the x-rays, for various reasons, and apparently, they're both very rare in cats. Her size would increase the possibility of the rupture, but it would still be highly anomalous.

The infection could be treated with a sustained program of IV antibiotics, and the rupture would be treated by surgery, as long as it had not caused damage to the spine already.

In pursuit of clarity as to her injury or ailment, Kat has taken her to another animal hospital for an MRI/CT Scan series to get a better view as to her internal state. I'm here in MN, and waiting zealously by the phone for results.

This is by the way a long way of explaining that I'm not going to continue to build up to the climax of my April Fool's joke, in re the whole pr0nographer thing, but that I hope it provided scandalous entertainment for you people from my past googling for my name to see what I'm up to. You should have just emailed me and asked. For those of you wondering, I was going to offer video of a c-list "celebrity" (Daphne Zuniga was in the lead for this) that we convinced to walk through the middle of some bonky scene for the final three installments this week.

Oh, and this is also warning that if my kitty can't be made better, I'm going to be ten times more vicious and abusive and self-absorbed than you've ever seen me before. So fuck you.

Today marks a first for me. Today is the first time I was actually involved in something we taped. When I got the footage from late last week into Final Cut Pro, we noticed that the lighting was all messed up with one particular shot. I mean, totally unusable.

The shot is short in terms of time, but critical given what happens before and after. Because we still like to think we're making a better quality of porn, and not just high definition, we didn't just want to cut it, so we needed to reshoot.

However, the guy involved was no longer available. Well, we could have called him back, but it wasn't really worth the $250 it'd cost us for about five seconds of tape, and we didn't want to shoot random stock footage just to fill up the time. "OK, pretend to fix the car with your buttcheeks in case we need this later..."

As a result, I'll have my first non-credited role as a Penis Double. The two of us don't look anything alike down there, but who really cares? We're both whiteys, and don't all porn penises look alike anyway?

I was pretty nervous, because I'm sitting there with my best friend filming my shlong while I'm trying to thwack this girl (who we did get back for the shot, since we could use her for other stuff) in the face in a very particular way. I screwed it up a bunch of times, and I have the video online if you want to see it. I put it up because all three of us just about bust our guts laughing at it, and no one else would see it otherwise.

Now, as I said, the video is online. I'm going to be honest here: do not look at this if you don't want to see my penis. I'm serious. It's right there, big and veiny, right in the middle of the frame, just bouncin' around. Just visualise it if you have any discomfort at the idea of seeing me naked, rather than befoul your minds' eye.

With that said, enjoy video of my penis.

Bastages. We will of course have to pick one of these up when they're available, and I'll let you know how it goes.

If the new JVCs weren't so cheap, I'd cancel the order for the second camera and wait for this.

If you're going to make a digital camera that looks like a film camera, should you make it look like a Holga? At least Leica picked a decent model upon which to base their offering.

<Spoo> this is a very bad place
<Spoo> your daddy is an evil man
<Liam> no its fun
<Spoo> and we are evil too
<Spoo> you should go now
<frab> does liam know you're here?
<Liam> no im talking to reeses hes funny
<Spoo> oh jesus
<-- Liam has quit (Killed by Spoo (this is for your own good))

I kept expecting a Daily Show-type punchline with this documentary. It was way too hokey, especially when they carted out the Jungians. But no, they're serious. I think.

Just to clarify, for those of you emailing, this is not gonzo stuff. Much as I like anything described by the word 'gonzo', and usually work the theme into any business I start, that would have been so far over the line that I didn't even bring it up with Kat.

That should alleviate the concern some of you had with the possible sight of my porcine pallidity, I'm sure.

My father found out what I'm doing here, so it's inevitable that my mother will know soon enough. I figure, with that out in the open, I can blab about it here.

While Kat was in Budapest last summer, she found a motherlode if potential work for her. We were planning on moving overseas anyway after graduation, although I was planning on buying a place in Prague. It's cleaner, the language is about 1000x easier, and I could build a software company there with disturbing ease. However, there'd be little work for Kat, because Prague is a pretty small town and not actually all that important, due to their being pretty much a target of occupation for their stronger neighbors, and not ever actually developing anything beyond nominal political independence. So, we shifted our focus to Budapest.

However, all the good computer scientists from Hungary came to the US ages ago, and there's not much there beyond an export economy in programmers. So, that's out. However, there's something to recommend Budapest to a person of my inclinations. After all, it's the porn capital of Europe, right? Kat and I had a few of those uncomfortable discussions where someone asks you what you're really interested out of life, what things give you joy, and yet, when you answer truthfully, they really don't believe you, and in fact, think you're intentionally giving an answer leading to an impression of shallowness.

But, no, really, the only things that interest me are girls and sex, so I've become a pornographer. My childhood dream come true.

I kicked around the idea with a buddy, a tax attorney who used to work in "the industry" back in the 80s, and we decided to give it a year in the US, where we had the safety net of understanding the laws, having the connections, and having ready access to girls who would understand what we were telling them to do. We kicked around a business plan, and decided to focus on HD content. We're downsampling to 480p for DVD distribution, but also producing some DVHS at ridiculous cost.

So, I immediately started $20k in the hole for decent HD camcorders, and I've had a blast filming barely legal UofM students doing the most depraved shit imaginable for way too little money. The thing about seeing this stuff so often is that you definitely become desensitised to it. It's a rush to talk some girl into doing something really nuts when you are pretty damned objective about it. It's like seeing sex through a glass shower door, which you can do in beautiful HD for only $60.

The Mac has been fantastic for playing around with video. Final Cut Pro and Shake really help in cleaning up the _weeks_ of video we filmed in godawful lighting, and I think we're finally producing a really high-quality product. We've already managed to sell a bunch of completed footage to two of the major distributors, but we did it on a work-for-hire basis and won't be seeing the names of our studio or ourselves in AVN any time especially soon. This has not even come close to covering our costs, even discounting both of our time.

I have really enjoyed the entire "film"-production process. I shoot, chop, and score the entire thing, and we're at the point right now where it's all fun. We're not bothering to write scripts, because we both hate story-telling porn, and it's all about what kinds of debauchery we can catch on tape. I think one of my favorite parts is scoring the segments, because it's like playing around with the band I formed in high school, improvising everything. It's a blast to do it in real-time, while watching the completed cut.

Now that it's in the open, I'll be posting a few more introspectives on the pr0n-pr0duction pr0cess. I'll talk about why we picked this god-forsaken place (lax laws regarding the kinda shit we're into), the actual "creative" process, some of the tools we're using, and of course, the myriad names we've come up with for various parts of human anatomy. I'm still not sure if this will scale to Hungary, because most of our costs right now are not in terms of "talent" (that's why pr0n is all nasty cheap filmed-on-VHS standard definition that we all hate), but I figure that this is all throw-away money anyway.

My blog sucks, your blog sucks, every blog you and I read sucks.

58% (Dixie). Barely into the Dixie category.

Er, what?

Extremism is a crucible for annealing morality.

This has been getting overexposed everywhere, but it's great. It has the same rambling unfocusedness of dada. I would buy someone this book on Ruby just to see how they'd handle it.

...home reefer enthusiasts are so attuned to the life cycles of their captives...

reeses == m0r0n

So, let's say you address part of your problem with a shitty residential t1 loop by implementing traffic shaping on your router. You take some measurements with dslreports, and you cap your bandwidth at, say 240kbps. Yes, that bad. It enables Vonage to work slightly, and that's what you're after.

Fast forward two weeks. You (or, more importantly, your wife) gets fed up with the shitty network and inept administration, and you order cable modem.

Cable is installed. You rewire the network, and check your speed.

WTF??? 240kbps down? This is supposed to be three mbit!

If you find yourself in this situation, kindly remember to turn off shaping, or at least tweak the thresholds.

So, I got Goose pretty well, and that's a wonderful thing.

I have this concern, though, nibbling at the back of my head. It could be lice, but I think it's worry about what he's going to do to get even. I mean, I didn't lie, he really loves the cock, but I don't think most people are reasonable in that situation.

I picture a phone call to my home, going something like this...

"Hello?"
"Hi, this is Goose. I need to return your husband's expander butt-plug to him. Will he be around for me to drop it off?"

or

"Hello?"
"Hi, your husband borrowed $500 from me to pay the whores we gangbanged last week when he was out of town. I really need it, so if you can get him to get it to me ASAP, I'd appreciate it. I definitely need it before we tag-team the underaged twins next week."

or, even worse, an email:

To: mrsreeses@astrogoth.com
From: goose@cocklove.com
Subject: blog

http://www.astrogoth.com/~reeses/musing

-g.

If your browser supports alternate stylesheets (Firefox does, via the little palette icon in the lower left), put on your sunglasses and check out my homage to my first window manager.

Do you remember a time when you looked at something that ugly for 18+ hours/day?

Now I know why they had to invent pr0n, so people could stand looking at their screens.

Cleaning things up and replacing my four-hundred-year-old nested table mess with CSS. It looks fine in Safari 1.2 and looks OK in Firefox 0.8, although the line spacing is a little fux0r3d. Use the atom feed instead, if you don't like how it renders in your browser.

I can't do anything about the actual content with CSS, so you're skr00d there.

Tore through a few books recently:

The Great American Novel, by Philip Roth

I picked this up after Goose reminded me that Roth wrote like a mofo. I had read Portnoy's Complaint back when Hector was a pup, and figured that I missed most of what was interesting.

Let me lay it out now: Roth writes better than you, or anyone you know, or anyone you have ever read, ever has or ever will.

I hate baseball, and this book is nowhere near Roth's best, but there are stretches of this book that I wanted to lube up and get busy with. I wasn't so happy with the last half of the book, but the first half, especially the first fifty pages or so, is pure sexbutter. I started it on the way to the airport on Monday morning, and probably scared everyone in the Metro and the terminal with my stifled chortles and cannibalistic grin.

Eastern Standard Tribe, by Cory Doctorow

Now, as implied above, Cory Doctorow cannot write as well as Philip Roth. I shouldn't hold that against him, because no one else can, either. However, this book is thin. Really thin. There's not enough detail to engage the reader, and there's absolutely no willful suspension of disbelief possible with the absurdist premise.

There are three wonderful things about this book, though, and the only reasons to read this book:

1. It's a crazy quick read, at most an hour.


2. It's available in just about every machine-readable format.


3. It's available for free, if your conscience permits.

Sabbath's Theater, by Philip Roth

The only way to read something new that didn't disappoint in style was to go back to the well. Let me just say I started this in the airport on the flight back, and had to leave my coat on my lap to hide the boner. I'm sure as hell I creeped out the poor girl sitting across the aisle from me.

Beyond Backpacking: Ray Jardines Guide to Lightweight Hiking, by Ray Jardine

It's about lightweight backpacking, natch. I bought this upon a recommendation from Stewart Brand via Cool Tools, and it hasn't disappointed.

From http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Interviews/livschitz_qa.html, via Lambda the Ultimate (addendum: also on lispmeister):

Q. Jaron Lanier has argued that we cannot write big programs with a lot of code without creating many bugs, which he concludes is a sign that something is fundamentally wrong.

A. I agree with Jaron's thesis completely. The correlation of the size of the software with its quality is overwhelming and very suggestive. I think his observations raise numerous questions: Why are big programs so buggy? And not just buggy, but buggy to a point beyond salvation.

I think it is rather obvious why large software projects are inherently buggy. I can think of two reasons off the top of my head, one much, much more important. I agree for the most part with the article, in that understanding of components is essential, but I veer a little away from the problems and solutions enumerated as they feel autocratic, to be expected from a major vendor such as Sun. "Use our standard components, and this cool language we've developed to use them, and your problems will melt away!" Anyway, let me prate...

Software construction is a largely cerebral activity, and as such, requires the notion of a unit of conceptual work. Let's take an overly simplistic perspective on this, and say that individual velocity is constant. A given project will require the execution of a fixed number of these units. They can be executed in parallel to some extent, distributed across a team, but one person can only execute one unit at a time.

No matter what, the more of these units comprising a project, the larger the number of defects. It's like juggling an increasing quantity of balls, chainsaws, and flaming torches. Eventually, you'll have too many, and someone's losing a hand. It doesn't matter if someone juggles better than most, because the scale is so large -- good juggling might involve a dozen balls, and as far as I know, no one has solo juggled even more than fifteen. Now imagine juggling challenges routinely involving thousands of balls. The more lines of code, the more bugs, under our current paradigms of software development.

The solution that is most popular right now (other than overburdening specification, which I assert barely helps) is to reduce the number of units of work in any iteration (either by reducing scope or efficient design) and executing with small teams, distributing the work unit across 3-6 developers.

However, there is a limiting factor on the quality of code produced by groups of developers. Communication between all cognitive nodes is inherently lossy, and this is the source of all problems in software development in the large.

The least lossy communication is between two units of thought (separated temporally) in the same mind. If I think of something, I can build upon the thought with a decent recall fascia. This can be reduced proportional to recency, as quality of recall decays with time.

Lossier than this is communication between individuals of common background and shared experience. Pair partners are a good example of this. It's still lossy because of the burden of expression, but increased familiarity will increase contextual rapport, and reduce misunderstandings. Your pair partner knows when you're being sarcastic and not literal, and this maps to an understanding of intent when exerting conceptual effort.

Even lossier than this is communication between remote/estranged/unfamiliar individuals. Imprecision of verbal communication introduces errors in expression, and creates inaccurate constructs in the mind of the remote individual.

Lossiest is the communication between groups. This communication is often written, in the form of functional specs, api documentation, comments in code, etc. It's always poorly maintained, poorly edited, and written in a peculiar pseudo-academic style that is dry and pedantic, and from which all vitality has been extracted. As such, the eyes glaze over and the mind shuts off and merely stores motes of knowledge.

This poor communication is the result of all major defects not arising from individual programmer ineptitude, and, in fact, helps contribute to my second reason, harmonic propagation of complementary errors. I.e., aggregations of small bugs lead to big bugs.

Software is usually developed in a bottom-up fashion. One person builds a component. Another person consumes that component in another component. Another person adds a message-passing layer to that component, so that it can communicate with other components in the system over a common bus. All of these components, modules, and functions depend on an understanding of both the immediately-relevent components, modules, and functions, and an implicit understanding of the components, modules, and functions each of those depends on.

Lossy communication diminishes the accuracy of the impression of these dependencies. This loose cognitive binding between components results in code that is not adequately defensive, does not handle errors or boundary conditions appropriately, and creates defects within the system.

How would I solve this problem?

A couple ideas, all abundantly obvious if you've tortured yourself by reading to this point, all related to reducing aggregate loss in communication.

On one hand, increase expressivity of explicit communication. Teach verbal skills to programmers to raise the quality of communication. This is incremental, and no massive gains will be made.

Increase expressivity of implicit communication within code. Design by contract, checked exceptions, etc. Also incremental, but look at the lack of low-level bugs within java code. NPE's are well-represented, but there are very few pointer arithmetic bugs, a large number of the bugs are of a higher conceptual level. Bad business rules, faulty data, etc.

Alternatively, avoid the problem altogether by reducing the communication requirements within the system. This will shift the balance toward the higher-quality end of the communication spectrum. A larger quantity of the work will be done by individuals, and be more conceptually consistent. This can be done with the use of 4+ gen languages, although, again, those create a massive orb of lossiest communication, and a great deal of faith is necessary when developing in these environments. Is the environment sound, is the interpreter/compiler consistent, etc.?

I am an amateur linguist, so I tend to err in believing that the problem can be solved environmentally. I always tend to believe that the right language (whatever the representation, written, geometric, visual, acoustic, etc.) will lead to a massive increase in code quality. This language can and should be part of a holistic environment, either an IDE or image such as Smalltalk or Lisp use, and honestly, the use of better IDEs has been observed to increase code quality for reasons cited above. Intellisense in Visual Studio, and its like in other environments such as VisualAge, IDEA, etc., have enabled me to write code very quickly with a lower defect rate than previously possible, moreso than can be attributed solely to experience. I include refactoring support, etc., in this.

Obviously, automated analysis tools are massively useful. Checkstyle, lint, PMD, etc., will also greatly reduce the errors resulting from programmer ineptitude, by which I mean errors that always happen (fat-fingering constants, not knowing how methods on immutable objects work, etc.) but can be caught in a straightforward way with modern tools.

I was sitting there with my headphones on and that "I'm listening to my iPod" expression on my face, i.e., blank stare forward. I had the reading light out, and apparently, the earphones weren't visible.

"Sir, is your reading light inopportune?" saith the flight attendant.

It took me asking her to repeat herself three times to realise she had no idea what "inopportune" meant, and that she probably meant something along the lines of "inoperative".

Don't believe everything you read on Orkut.

Here it is, via lispmeister. A suitable replacement for changedetect, which, we all know, sucks the goat arse. Web Secretary is a vast improvement on my elisp hack.

From the project page:

Web Secretary is a web page monitoring software. However, it goes beyond the normal functionalities offered by such software. Not only does it detect changes based on content analysis (instead of date/time stamp or simple textual comparison), it will email the changed page to you with the new contents highlighted!

One q: is it "highlighted" or "highlit"? Suffer me the sloth preventing me from looking it up myself. I like "highlit", because I'm that type of person.

We moved into a new place yesterday, finishing up a lot of the unpacking today. We moved because Kat wanted a larger place, as the difficulty of storing things in the last place was getting to her. When things get to her, she gets to me.

This place is just slightly bigger, about one room, one bathroom, and 350 square feet. It's smaller than our place in SF, but it feels capacious after our tiny hovel in DC.

Obviously, with the increase in size, there's an increase in price. One of the absurdities of the District of Columbia is that I can move three miles and save $2k/month in "state" income tax. So, whilst I hate moving, (Hate) moving out of DC is like Kat getting a job. A badly-paying job, but a job nonetheless.

There are two bloody awesome things about this place. One, is that we have literally 200 restaurants within about six blocks. The second is that this county is as non-smoking as California. It's bloody glorious. We sat at the bar and ate foie gras tonight, and were actually able to taste it.

reeses == moron

So, I'm happily sitting here at 5:20pm, and I looked at my ticket to see what the boarding time was.

The boarding time was an hour ago, because I bought the ticket for a 4:45 departure instead of 6:30. 6:30 was the time for every flight I've taken in the past three months, so why would it be anything else?

Because, two weeks ago, I thought it would have been a good idea to go home a little early.

Fux0r. I had the brief concern that I'd be stuck in Minneapolis longer than I wanted, and I was willing to pay whatever it cost to get out. Luckily, elite status is good for one thing, and that's bailing your stupid ass out of predicaments such as this.

Jesus.

Best fuckin' video ever.

Fathom is one of the few software companies in the world created specifically and exclusively for developing enterprise solutions on component based�platforms (J2EE and .NET), emphasizing specifically the use of SOAP, XML and Web Services.

Has someone redefined "few" since I last checked a dictionary? Has it joined "bad", "wicked", "stupid", and "nasty" in the ironic argot of our time, and taken on a new meaning, completely opposite from the literal definition?

Just checking.

Yet more evidence that one of the defining characteristics of Sofitel is "crappy wifi". Do not stay there, unless a bidet is worth giving up high speed access. Yes, it's a tough call.

Note to self: read this later.

<MonkeyButter> reeses has been drunken blogging again

Jesus Christ you fucking pussies, you're missing the fucking point of circuitbending.

"Ooh, I'm afraid!"
"Waah, how do I...?"
"Where do I start?"

If you say any of the above in that thread, you're a worthless waste of spunk and should go back to sucking ass in the subway for spare change.

FUCK

-20F

FUCK

Fast Food Nation was bad enough, and turned me off of meat for a while, but this was a scoop I either missed in the book (probably when I stopped reading at "Here Be Socialists"), or the author missed.

Chicken feces? In cow food? Wuddufug?

<Duck> im listening to police radio
<Duck> some guy radios in to the seargent, says he has a question, should he ask over the radio or call in
<Duck> seargent says he just "sat down on the zero", which i am guessing means he's taking a shit
<Duck> the guy radioing in asks for the seargents cell #, and he gives it to him
<Duck> and now I have the overwhelming urge to call this man and heckle him for taking a shit

If you read about an angry Irish cop killing a dumbass from West Virginia, now you know why. I changed the name so I won't be the one leading the Boston police to Goose's house.

sexptacular! sbcl next?

Of all the Mac retrospectives that have abounded in the past few weeks, this is the only one that has actually been interesting. And a bit of a vacu-time-suck. Beware.

Shark is the shibnibble. I discovered this last night at Ranchero, and played around with it to optimise some Objective C/Foundation Kit stuff I had written.

Easiest. Profiler. Ever.

Admittedly, it doesn't give you all the information a profiler would. However, if you're concerned primarily with opportunistic optimisation, cpu utilisation, and hot spots in your code, literally five minutes with this baby will melt that stick of butter in your pocket.

How easy is it?

1. Install Shark, which you will probably have to do because, if you're like me, you're afraid of letting anything called CHUD onto your machine. It's on the XCode CD.


2. You'll probably have to run the CHUD updater, in /Developer/Applications/Performance Tools/CHUD, to get everything brought up to speed.


3. Close all your other apps, if you want. Or not.


4. Start Shark, in the same directory, and click "Start".


5. Start your app. Play around with it, doing the stuff you're interested in speeding up.


6. Click "Stop" on Shark.


7. Click "Tree" mode and find your hotspots. Double-click to see the code.

No, I didn't leave out the part where you recompile your application with profiling flags. No, I didn't leave out the part where the app was insanely slow while profiling was going on.

I suspect it's a shame, however. While I've been working primarily in Java for five or more years now, I've been doing all of my Mac coding in Objective C. I realised the silliness of it, as all of the AppKit/FoundationKit stuff is exposed to Java. I like my Java IDE* better, I like Java gc better, and, honestly, except for dynamic code, I like Java better than *C.

The reason I suspect it's a shame is that I'm not at all sure how well Shark will work with Java, and Shark is just...so...nice.

*Speaking of which, IDEA 4.0 doesn't look all that impressive from an upgrade perspective. I can't recall if I bought the maintenance when I bought my license, either. If I did, I'll upgrade, but otherwise...probably not.

If you're going to steal the names Kat and I have carefully considered and reserved for our offspring, please give credit!
In the meantime, here are a selection of names you may consider, for a small royalty:

• Death Spike Smith


• Barbara Coast


• Anil Fisher Robert


• Xarkow, God of Flatus


• Rectum Stretcher


• Judas

Find a date to take on this vacation.

If I had known I could buy one, I wouldn't have made mine!

586 on this new version. The old one went away. :(

The best thing about Garage Band is the proliferation of bad electronic music THAT ALL SOUNDS THE SAME.

Please, keep making the same songs with the same four loops, I really like them! It's like 1989 all over again! Did I just hear a 303?

Of course, I'm sitting here trying to decide what the best on-the-road keyboard is now that Edirol has the tiny PCR-1, but that's different. I won't enter my bad music with a mouse. :-)

In other news, I didn't think it was possible, but Showtime killed my interest in seeing Jennifer Beals in hot girl-on-girl action. The show's like lesbian kryptonite.

As a lesbian, I am deeply offended, and think they need to focus more on beautiful naked women and less on personalities and contrived, superficial drama.

Boobies, good, kvetching, bad.

321.1

Oh, and while I participated in the nationstates thing last year or the year before or whatever, I held off on buying the hardcover Jennifer Government because I'm a cheap bastage. I stubmbmbmbmbled on the softcover release among the other ten books in the airport newsstand tonight, and picked it up. It's a wicked fast read, lasting just under the duration of the flight (supposedly one hour forty minutes) and is basically a Carl Hiaasen version of Snow Crash without the tech. Not highly recommended, but if you're caught in the dilemma of Jennifer Government or Dr. Phil, let me nudge you toward this book.

Bleep is eggsackly what an online music store should be, in so many ways. They have music I can't find on iTMS because it's not major label, it's mp3 without DRM (although, that doesn't really bother me at all), and most importantly -- it's cheaper than the CD!

That's right, you get the mp3s of the album you order, and rather than pay $16.99 for this, you pay $11.99. It makes perfect sense. It comes from the label, doesn't go through the cd pressing process, doesn't go through the distributor, all they pay for is production, promotion, and properly sending that bad boy through the ether to me. You don't get the jewel case, the cd, the uncompressed audio, the liner notes, or the liner art, so you don't pay for them. It's cheap enough that, even if you have the cd, it's worth your time just to pay the $12 and not spend the ten minutes to rip it and encode it.

I know "albums" on iTMS are $9.99. But all the big or good ones are more, because Apple calls them "partial albums" so you have to buy the component songs instead, at $.99 per.

The other thing is, while I'm on the road making sekrit movies, I don't want to haul stuff around between trips home. If I don't buy music online, I do without.

Oh, and I finally got fed up with the Sony noise-cancelling NC-11 earphones (and how they've almost completely destroyed my appreciation for portable music) and bought a pair of Shure E2s. I wanted the 3s or the 1s, but the store was out (after arguing even the existence of the E3s) so I had to settle for spending $100 less. :-)

With the foamy tips, they're glorious, and instantly my favorite portable earphones/headphones. They don't need a headphone amp, and the iPod is more than sufficient to drive them. I haven't tried them with MiniDisc yet, because the iPod and its universal library are just too compelling, despite the weight and horrid battery life. They don't have the same problem as the Etymotics, which have been relegated to home earphones worn when someone else wants to watch tv or just make noise. That is, there is no conveyance of sound when the cord is moved. The Ety's have these stupid little cord support things you stick on to keep the scrapy noise down, but I'm awful with accessories.

I'm honestly really, really pleased with how good some cheap audio gear is. My three sets of earphones/headphones that I use most often are much closer to the low-end of the spectrum than the high end. I have the Shure E2s which are now my portable earphones, my Grado SR80s which are my listening-to-music-while-someone-is-asleep headphones, and the Etymotic ER6s, which fill the aforementioned role of stationary-ambient-noise-blockers. Two of them were just under $100, and the other, not much more.

I love progress.

My hair looks like the shaggy. It's actually long and unkempt enough that I'm ashamed to go to my client's office with it. I'll fly in tomorrow morning, and immediately attempt to make an appointment for Monday night to get shorn.

And this, right after they extend the contract. D'oh!

I had tentatively decided, after several abortive attempts at a protracted unemployment, that this project was it. Once I was done, I was going to coast until Kat was out of school. Play bad music, write bad novels, and paint bad pictures while not thinking about writing bad software. Since I didn't know when the Geldbrennschluss would be prior to this week, we had hesitated to move away from our current apartment. I wanted to coast for a year or two, but I didn't want to be broke at the end, after paying for rent, food, law tuition, and h00rs. It would stink if, when we move back to SF, as we intend to do once Kat wraps up her post-JD MA, we had to start all over in saving for a house.

With the recent extension, sentencing me to at least another five months in Siberia, it's apparent that we can handle upgrading our digs, and moving to a new building in Bethesda, without peril. Much as I hate moving, I hate hearing about the lack of closet space in our current place more, and the idea of free rent, due to the disparity in local income tax rates between MD and DC, makes it tolerable, if not almost desirable.

Of course, the fact that I won't actually have to do any of the moving is the sweetest idea. I'll be out of town while Kat calls the movers, and all I have to do is fill the hopper that they'll be draining. Whoohoo!

Late night blog entries are the stupidest.

reeses = dumb4ss.

fux0r.

So, less than one month ago, I bought two iPods, one 40gb, one 20gb, for just under $1k. I had looked at them for a long time, obviously, and held out for two reasons:

1) Battery life = teh sux
2) They're too big

You see where I'm going with this.

So, Tuesday, Mr Jobs announces the new iPod mini. That solves problem #2. I don't care about the 4GB issue or the price, and anyone who is complaining about the price is a complete and unmitigated moron anyway. It's still competitive with the market, and 4GB is enough for most or all of the music I'd listen to on a daily basis. I wanted a tiny capacious player, something to replace my MD with, since NetMD doesn't work with the Mac as of yet. (Hi, Sony! Blow me!)

What's that, did you say MD?

So, I could have bought a new MD player for the same price (probably) as my iPod, continued to use my existing Minidiscs, and still had the glorious 50+ hours of playback on a single AA battery? Sure, so I'd have to use it with a PC, but hell, I have so many of those, I leave Thinkpads in out of the way places so I don't have to carry them from point to point.

1GB!

After you get done blowing me, Sony, you can kiss my squirrel-lovin' ass.

Anyone want a 40GB iPod, cheap?

Back from the third world.

Good things:

• latinas
• slightly-pudgy cute american girls with nice boobies in bikinis
• mexican food
• no intarw3b
• plastic money
• obscene exchange rate (11p/usd) coupled with overloading of the "$" symbol led to ATM Receipts of Croesus (will post a photo once I edit.)

Bad things:

• no intarw3b?
• no gsm coverage (hey, I didn't know "tri-band" meant "anything you want, as long as it's gsm!")
• being tempted by all those american girls on vacation and latinas while visiting with a wife. Go to Mexico, THEN get married. Not the other way around. Better yet, forget step two.

I hate to say this to those of you looking to understand Judaism through Christian analogy, but Hanukkah is about as important as Valentine's Day. i.e., it's important to Hallmark and other people wishing for a faith-based merchandising tie-in. Your "Happy Hanukkah" signs and greetings are about as vapid as our "Happy Jesus not really being dead after getting nailed to some logs and stuck in a hole in the ground, because that's really a stroke of luck, as I don't know how I'd take it if my father forsaked or forsook me and let me get stuck in the side by a spear, a crown of thons stuck on my head, nailed to a cross, hung around until I was dead, and then thrown into some nasty, musty, cave somewhere and had a big rock rolled in front of the doorway, especially since you idiots still blame us for being the ones to do it all to him and call us 'jesus killers' a couple of thousand years later, you morons day."

But, if you want to be helpful, instead of "Happy Hanukkah," you can at least say,"Chag Hanukkah Sameach."

Don't be surprised when we say,"Is it that time already?"

You ever wake up and have one of those days when you realise all that stuff that you've been thinking was due to skill or wisdom or smart choices, not only including a lot of positive things, but also the avoidance of any major negative things, including getting all the girls you really wanted, and getting out before things were bad, or getting jobs really easily and almost persistently, and all that stuff, isn't really related to talent or perspicacity, but an amazing run of sheer, dumb luck that should have run out ten years ago?

Yeah, me either.

I did, in fact, seriously think this was created in response to this article by Virginia Postrel, and thought, wow, Flash is speedy!

People who put up silly reviews on Amazon should be shot.

Ahem. ;>

    From: "Courtney Crowell"

    Subject: Fight Impotence

Err...

With phones such as the Nokia 3650 in the world, Google needs more than two hits for "gay keypad". I'm just trying to help balance the universe.

Khan's Mongolian Barbecue, 500 E 78th St, Minneapolis

I'd never had mongolian barbecue before. The idea of piling up a bunch of meat in a bowl, taking it to some guy who throws it on a big hot-table and stirs it around, and then scoops it into another (I hope) bowl -- it ain't my cup of meat.

But, Choadbite said that it didn't suck completely, and that this place, Khan's, was "tolerable".

After last night, I know that if he had to, he could eat the raw ass of a german shepherd and call it tolerable. That's not a rimming reference.

Let's start with the smell of the place. Actually, let's not, because it's too nasty.

Let's start with the shaved meat. This was one thing that was pretty cool. You went up to this demon's salad bar, and chose from big containers of shaved sheets of frozen meat. It was bizarre to see the crisp rolls of lamb, pork, beef, almost as if it was cuisine a` la Damien Hirst.

I went through once, modestly piling up a little lamb, a little pork, a little beef, chinese cabbage, pineapple (!!), vermicelli, chinese parsley, and sliced mushrooms into my little bowl. Topped with a little "ginger water", it was ready to go. The cooks threw it on the hot table, dumped something from a teapot (their "special sauce", according to a sign) onto it, and stirred it around with cooking chopsticks for a minute or so. Then, they swept it off onto a place and handed it back to me with a paper towel.

Bleaugh.

According to Choadbite, I didn't use enough sauce, that the secret of mongolian barbecue is in the proper and prodigious application of sauce, but that the local sauce selection was too watery to help anyway. I choked down my cheap meat and made one more pass, with an eye to globbing on lots of sauce.

It didn't help.

Looking for the proper name and address of this place, I saw scores of declarations that this was their favorite restaurant. They offered lots of advice such as,"Always get the peanuts," referring to the option of having peanuts added to your pile of frying food on the hot table.

The peanuts are not so good, which should have informed me as to the reliability of the rest of the advice, and the ministrations of love for the cuisine.

If you just like eating meat to eat meat, and don't really care about the taste, this might be the place for you. It really would be possible to eat pounds of stir-fried meat for $12 or so, but you're not going to have a positive taste experience.

For all-you-can-eat, I'll stick with Indian.

Oh, and I'm looking for a PDA in the next week or so, so it'll hit this year's tax return. I'm looking for something in the Sony UX-50/Toshiba e450 price range, but I like slim, Mac'able, and a decent battery life. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.

We were in BestBuy yesterday, and I decided on a whim that we needed iPods. So, I got a 20GB model for Kat, and a 40GB for myself. Now that I have a device capable of holding possibly all, but definitely most, of my CD collection, I've been ripping the stuff that I almost never listen to, or haven't listened to in years, just because it'll fit.

I'm using mine with my PowerBook, and it's good, and it works well. The firewire port is powered, so I don't need to get fancy with cables. iTunes is (obviously) integrated very well with the OS and the iPod, and it's very speedy with its Altivec optimisations to encode the CD to MP3/AAC.

On Kat's PC, it's less lovely. The firewire card for her T40 is not powered, so the iPod needs to be plugged into the wallwart to get juice. I guess the iPod will only be plugged into the laptop for short durations to transfer songs, so it's not as if there will be a lot of cable juggling anyway. It's just less clean. Coupled with the less elegant integration, in which it takes iTunes longer to rip and encode, longer to recognise the iPod, longer to transfer the songs across firewire, and it's not as nice an experience.

Also, had I thought about it at all, I probably would have bought the 20GB iPod for myself, as well. I don't _need_ all of those songs with me, because, honestly, I will never, ever listen to the bulk of them. I'm the poster boy for "hear a song on the radio, buy the CD, listen to none of the other songs more than once," but that could possibly be because most CDs have one or two good songs and lots of contract-driven filler. I've been using ITMS more anyway, and just buying singles as I'm interested.

Anyway, the 40 is a little big and heavy (no, I'm not joking -- it's right at the "I'm not going to carry it with me, because it's too bulky" cutoff point that my phone and other electronics are at) and I probably would have been better off with the 20. The 40 gives me the ability to use it as an external drive, which, of course, means that, instead of costing me $500, it really only costs about $380, since it'll be deductible.

The funny thing is, in the 36 hours I've had the iPod, I've listened to it for all of about forty-five seconds, just to verify that yes, I transferred songs to this little box, and yes, it can transfer them out over the audio port.

I also figured out how to shoot video with my elph, so I'm stoked on that front, too. When I'm in Mexico next week, I'll try to get nekkid video of Kat.

You may begin sending me $$ via PayPal at your convenience.

I'm in DC right now, trying to stay out of Kat's hair whilst she pounds out a 20-page MA paper. It's easy as milking snot from a duck for her, because she's the paper-writing machine and it's only a paper for her master's program, but I still have to stay out of the way while she converts outline to paper.

As a result, I bought the Battlestar Galactica box set, because the season 2 Alias DVDs are a family pack, and I'd be a heel to taunt her by watching them without her. Yes, I'd be a heel anyway, because that's my nature. My ass is here for you to kiss.

I had vague concerns that BG was bad, and that I actually remembered it from my feverish sci-fi fueled childhood as being somewhat sub-par. BG was on right around the time when I gained partial sentience, so I don't remember when it first came on, only that it informed much of the play of my youth, along with Star Wars, although I do remember when I first saw SW in the theater, because I had no idea what was going on.

I had no idea, though. Every possible shortcut you could take, or corner you could cut, (yeah, that's the same thing -- I like redundancy, and saying the same thing more than once.) they did. It's like the new BG -- "Cylons in human form" == "cheap costumes"! The matting was obvious, which is forgiveable in the era, but the incessant reuse of boring spaceflight sequences was not. They'd even repeat the same dogfight sequence within the same episode, without doing anything clever like flipping the print. "Viper from E to SSE, pursued by Raider. Off-frame viper shoots, destroys Raider. Repeat."

Was it really cool enough in 1979 to have ships just sitting there on a starfield? Admittedly, the models are fun, especially the colonial fleet ships that really do sell the "whatever was at hand" thing. (although, would there be manufacturers of starships, where you have the equivalent of a bunch of k-cars, rather than a bunch of hand-built one-offs?)

I have watched one episode, the first 3-hour movie, and I don't see how I can watch the other 900 DVDs. I might have to rip them, splice in pr0n, and work through it that way.

"Do you remember the one where Boomer and Starbuck put Athena on the spit while Cassiopeia rimmed out Apollo?"

Now THAT's a remake.

This is a guest post from Brian -----, at least until he gives up the sister pr0n he mentioned at dinner.

I don't know if other people are this way, but occasionally, it takes me a really, really long time to make certain connections. I think I've blabbed about this before, but I'll only figure that out at some point in the future, if at all.

I suppose this is a good thing, because I have a pretty good memory, at least before the age of 28 or so, which is, coincidentally, when I had my last E, shroom, and who-knows-what binge. I'm sure there's no connection between these two facts. I'm still putting things together from before this period, like the current subject of perplexity.

People from or in Seattle who aren't completely square or old or too young or all of the above are aware of a bar called "Neighbors", on Capitol Hill. Those of you from the Eastside or North or South Seattle, will say,"Oh yeah, that gay bar!" and you'll follow that with "hur hur hur, fags," or you girls from the Eastside will titter and act the cosmopolite MTV lesbitasters and claim that you danced with one of your girlfriends there, but it's really no different from you dancing with her at the "jazz" bar, ie., completely asexual apart from the fact that you did actually want to go for a close look at her axe wound, as it were, but she doesn't know that.

Anyway, Neighbors is basically a gay-friendly club in the reach-around-and-tickle-your-boys sense, with probably a 70% queer population on the rare occasions it's not overrun with suburban kids. It's a good starting point to the evening on weekends, or a good ending-up place in the middle of the week, after dinner or whatever, when you just need to get sweaty and drunk, and your friends need to get bumps in the bathroom.

So, I was there with a buddy one night, probably on a Thursday because that's when it's most packed, and he disappeared to score coke or cock, which of those I am not sure, so I basically tried to keep from falling over until my friend got back. I half tried to dance because I was technically on the dance floor, and it was important to me that no one know HOW inebriated I might have been. I'm sure I did a great job.

So, I boogied around, with a drink in my hand, I believe, which was probably not a good idea anyway, and I found myself dancing in the corner of the floor, not really paying attention where I was facing.

Those of you who know me know I like tall chix0rs. I was sitting there boogying away with this really tall girl, who was giving me the Andrew Dice Clay,"Do I know you?" look, because I believe I was dancing with my eyes closed and not at all dancing to whatever 70s-disco remix the DJ was playing. I'd like to say she was hot, and this is my story, so I'll go with that. Truth be told, well, let's say that she would be hot if you drank a bottle of wine, two or three cosmos, and were working your way through your second bottle of beer.

So, I was there, implicitly dancing with this tall girl, who, come to think of it, might have been on 9" heels or something, because I think my head was at about boob level, and whilst I am not a tall man, that would make her about 7' tall, unless she had tits where her chin would be, and that would be an entirely too perfect girl that wouldn't have stayed single that long.

We were dancing, and at some point in before this I had opened my eyes and thought,"whoa, chick, not running away, cool," because I remember being pretty jazzed in that,"it's on," way that we guys have. I'd like to say we danced for a couple songs, but I'm really not sure how many. After those few songs, or one really long song, we were dancing pretty close, and I remember doing the horribly, horribly embarrassing thing that drunk guys do, grabbing the girl's hands while dancing close, probably to put your arms out to the side so you can rub boobies with them or something. I don't know the reason, I only know I've done it a couple times in my life, and known later it was a thing for which I should feel embarrassment.

I noticed through the haze that this girl had kinda big hands. Then again, she was 7' tall, so hey, she's gonna be bigger all over. And I have very soft hands that haven't done any real work in decades, so the fact that her hands feel rough isn't a big deal. I had done the same embarrassing hands-out-dancing thing the last time I was faced, and that girl had really rough hands, like she'd been quarrying stone for the past year. So, slightly chapped-feeling hands weren't really a big deal.

At some point I got my hands free, because they ended up touching other places on this girl. Mind you, this wasn't as obscene as you might think, because it was a very crowded floor, and shit like that happens at this club. It's where people go to hook up or to run into their friends hooking up. I've had my hands up more girls' shirts there than I did in my bedroom at my parents' house. Or, come to think of it, any other single room.

Now, when I drink, I get really forward, especially if I've drunk a lot. I got _really_ forward that night, and I believe I might have reached...down there, only to get my hand slapped away. I felt chagrined and admonished, and went back to innocent groping of the ass for all of another thirty seconds before trying it again. Hey, maybe the first time was a mistake, and there was a bee flying by, and that's really what she was swatting at, right?

Swatted again. Probably a yellowjacket nest was disturbed nearby, and the little fuckers were all over the place. But, it wasn't that big a deal, because suddenly, there were two tongues in my mouth, and only one was mine. This took a second to sort out, but I figured out pretty quickly that I hadn't grown a second tongue out of the roof of my mouth, nor did someone throw a beef tongue down from the balcony into my mouth. Despite the yellowjacket swarm, it was still on. I am dead sexy.

Not only that, but she was a great kisser. Forceful, rather than the dead fish crap that's vaguely nauseating. You know the kind. You go to kiss them, and it's like they think you're happy just that they're there. They open their mouths, and...well, and nothing, because their lips have no tone, and let's just say their osculatory skills would be left back in junior high school. I think it's actually more disappointing to discover a girl is a fishkisser than a starfish, because at least with a starfish, you can make yourself happy.

Not this girl. It was a battle royale, and god damn it if either of us was going to back down, although she had leverage, with those cantilevered chin-tits in her favor. That went on for a while until I lost balance and started to sway, when she abruptly disengaged, spun around, grabbed my hand, and started walking towards the bathrooms.

My concern rose again, because I thought,"Shit, I can't go into the ladies' room!" but she steered me into the men's room. Truth be told, I was kind of disappointed, because I'd much rather have a bunch of disgusted, annoyed chicks watching me make out with a hot 9' tall amazon than a bunch of doughnut punchers. The group sex that would result in the men's room would be the sort that has you watching your back, which is really hard when you can barely focus on a spot 4" from your nose.

Some people had apparently had the same idea, because not only were the two stalls taken, a couple was in the corner, snogging, waiting their turn. By couple, of course, I mean two guys, who actually stopped, looked at us, and gave me a huge grin. Yeah, I'm gonna get some, and everyone is cheering me on. If you're a guy, you know that this isn't a huge conceptual leap to make when you're anywhere in public with a girl who wants to make the beast with two backs.

Amazingly enough, when one of the stalls freed up, these guys were so motivated by my awesome feat of dragging chicks into the men's room to bump uglies, that they let us have the stall.

Those of you who are grossed out at this point, realise that probably no human being has actually taken a shit in the men's room at a gay club since 1940, and then, it was just a case of IBS. So, there's a lot of piss residue, but at least no brown matter floating in the toilet. Stalls are just a semi-private place to get high or get it on, which is what we were about to do.

Apparently, there were more fucking yellowjackets in this stall, though, because every time I tried to touch her naughty areas, whether it was the twat or the boobs, she had to swat away another of the stinging blighters, keeping me from my task. I did manage to cop a little bit of a feel, and I realised that her tits were pretty hard, so she probably didn't want me to touch them because they were pretty sore from a recent boob job, or just one gone awry. They moved kind of strangely, too, like they were just glued onto her chest. I hate fake breasts, but I hate not getting action more, so I let it go, since it looked as if I wasn't going to be touching them much anyway. I am nothing if not deep and considerate.

Again, the topsy-turvy night of liquor took hold, and the next thing I remember is getting the most amazing blowjob of my life, right there in the stall, and I don't even remember my pants coming down. This is one of those times when my mouth makes weird sounds, and I don't know where it gets these things, but it's like I'm channelling some rough trade porn actor, and the most fucked up shit comes out. It was apparently pretty moving, because I heard appreciative laughter and "amens" from outside the stall. If you want to know what sort of things I say, ask your mom, but I won't type them here.

When I say best blowjob, that's precisely what I mean. I've had good ones before, and have experienced probably every technique from the vacusuck waste of time to the three-handed-monster. I swear, this woman had two mouths, eight hands, and god knows what those other things were. Balls were moving one way, slurpy things were happening another way, and things were getting pressed and rubbed in nice little circles until I wasn't sure if I could stand.

Anyway, it was only due to massive desensitisation from the alcohol that kept me from blowing a rope in the first ten seconds. This girl knew her way around a guy's plumbing like the back of her hand, from the shlong to the prostate. (ahem)

Finally, I couldn't focus at all, and I blacked out as I swear, someone stuck a roman candle up my ass and lit the fuse, and the damned fireworks shot out the end of my pecker. I was afraid to open my eyes, as I expected to see blood everywhere from exploding and taking off this girl's head. At the very least, I expected to see gallons of semen dripping from the walls and ceiling and the world's worst case of milk moustache.

Finally, I mustered the courage to open my eyes, and, instead of seeing vast carnage and destruction wrought by my high-pressure ball juice, I just saw this woman turning away from the toilet. I'd still like to think she had to spit three gallons in there, but it was probably just the usual cup and a half. She daintily wiped her lips on a folded piece of TP, and huskily asked if I was all right, and if I needed help, indicating with her eyes my pants bunched around my calves and ankles. I think I mumbled in the negative, and while I was no longer the least bit drunk, I was really, really impaired cognitively, so it took a couple seconds of ham-handed groping to pull my underwear and pants back up, and god knows how much longer it took to fasten my belt. I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me today that I forgot to zip, and walked out of there with my boy hanging out of the front of my pants.

As it was, we got the obligatory polite applause while I staggered out, and my three-minute girlfriend went to the mirror (in the men's room, still!) to reapply her lipstick. I waited outside the men's room for her, because in all that time, we spoke about three words, other than the river of profanity that came from my mouth before I came from my other end, and I felt a certain level of chivalry was called for. If nothing else, I should probably offer to buy a drink and give her my phone number.

This was the even cooler part, though, because in my post-coital clarity, I was actually dreading this. I realised that she definitely wasn't hot, and was, in fact, just a little, umm, big-boned, for me. Stout might be a better way of putting it. In a wrestling match with her, I'd definitely get my ass kicked. And, while I like tall women who can handle themselves, I like them to be just a tad more...feminine.

So, the cool thing she did was, well, relieve me of any masculine responsibility. I tried to come up with something to say when she came out, but she stopped me with a (rough) hand to the mouth and said,"Don't say it, it was fun, and that's all it was," shook her head like a mildly admonishing mother (don't go there!), and left me there, sort of swaying in the foyer.

Of course, the only thing nearly as good as getting action in a public place is telling all your friends that you just got action in a public place, so I tracked down my buddy, and proceeded to tell him what pieces of the interlude I actually comprehended. It was all very impressionistic and disjointed, and frankly, it was mostly,"Dude, she sucked dick like she was on death row and I was hiding pardons in my balls," and I don't think he believed me at all. I tried to find the girl in the club to point out to him, but I couldn't find her, and eventually gave up.

Every subsequent visit, I tried in that furtive way to see if she was there, both to indicate to my friend that she did exist, and, honestly, to avoid her if she did happen to be there, but this never came to pass. It was the shortest bathroom tryst I had ever had, and, honestly, the most unidirectional, unless you count the "Hey, I mean it! No sex in the men's room!" girl, but she had a weird michigander accent, so I pretend that one didn't happen.

This is the thing, though. I mentioned earlier that I'm a little slow to put things together, but that the facts stick around for years, and eventually, all click together. So, I was just thinking about this today, and the various things just made me realise something -- the height, the size, the weird fake boobs, the aversion to touching boobs or crotch, the lack of discomfort in the men's room, the very forceful kissing, the deep voice, and the unparalleled knowledge of male sexual anatomy --

OK, I'm not really sure what it means. She was french or something?

So, maybe the Mac isn't taking. I've been thinking about buying either the new Sony X505 (no bloody wireless net built in, but look at the size of the motherboard!) or the slim Panasonic W2 with the flippy DVD drive, and just doing RDP.

I basically want a tiny pIII-class machine that can accomodate Office/Project/Visio without a problem, because, honestly, working with PC-generated data on a 1.25Ghz G4 laptop stinks, even with scads of RAM and an "ultra fast" disk. I've been thinking about swapping out the HD and putting in a really fast notebook disk, say 7200 rpm instead of 5400, but I'm not sure I'm up to that task right now, without "accidentally" scrambling the innards with the screwdriver while it's open, and throwing it in the trash.

I am the suck.

Magnetic sweater taco disgruntle miswire three camels bring grotty pimpslap heuristic for green life. Nick throw factotum on garter uitgang. No? Pellucid mirth change free sherpa dawn.

The amusement de la semaine is friendster. With eight simple links, (ok, basically, three, and the other five are frickin' deadweight) I have almost seventy thousand people to browse through and see if they're people I know. So far, I creeped Zamf out by showing him that an already creepy mutual acquaintance was just that little bit more creepy, and more open in that creepiness, than we had feared. Eww.

I've been fortunate so far in not finding any ex-girlfriends or whatever linked to me. This is all part of my grand plan of not ever dating anyone who was technical, in order to avoid the boring conversations that technical people inadvertantly have. Blah blah, c++, blah blah, Unix, blah blah, best place to download pr0n. Being married to a non-technical person has of course stoppered the stream of new girlfriends anyway. But seriously, of all the women I've dated whose names I can remember, only two have ever shown up in google searches -- one in race results, and one in a PhD award list. Of course, subsequent marriages and surname changes would make googling more difficult, but I'd say I'm pretty safe.

So, if you're there, and you know me, rather than you googlespawn browsers, add me, so I can go through your friends and see if there's anyone there I need to avoid. Unless you found me by searching on "mumble mumble bastard back child support", where 'mumble mumble' is my name.

In that case, I'm not the mumble you're looking for. Move along.

Does this imply that GDI is out of the kernel in Longhorn?

>|<

How's that for the worst ascii magen ever? I was going to use * instead. Anyway, the link's for me, not for you.

I must be getting old and mature. I'm finding myself amused, rather than irritated, at stupid, misdirected aggression. I'm noticing a lot of this particular kind of whine lately -- people who either fly infrequently enough that they don't get upgraded (what do you care, anyway?) or people who feel that their needs are greater than the people around them, but not quite great enough to pay more for the biz/fc fare.

Sure, I would understand hating jerks who just throw the seat back as soon as possible, right after the beverage service, spilling your 4oz of cola into your lap. However, if you're really upset that the seat reclining in front of you does not give you enough room to wiggle your legs, it's not the fault of the person in front of you. Look to where the real problem is -- the airline that hasn't provided ample seat pitch to accomodate normal behavior, or yourself, the cheap loser who buys a ticket based solely on price.

OMFG. So, I ate a bit of meat tonight. Maybe...too much meat. I don't know if places like this adhere to the concept of the clean plate club, but I do. If I leave food on the plate, I feel guilty. (Yes, guilt is a constant thread in my life. It's what my people get in exchange for our foreskins.)

So, I have a big spinach salad. A meal-sized spinach salad. Then, a 24-oz porterhouse, with the hugest bloody hash brown on earth. Easily 14" in diameter, and 2.5" tall. I didn't even try to finish the potatoes. Then, some "strawberries and whipped cream", which consisted of a bowl of whipped cream (probably about a cool-whip-sized tub of) and a pint and a half of strawberries.

My gut is HUGE. It's swollen, I'm afraid to lie down, and I can't walk fast. The only thing saving me at all was that my stomach was so stuffed, there was no jiggling. It was solid as the ripped six pack it replaced.

If I fast all week, I'll still gain weight. I'd have to go on the Blaine Suspension Diet to offset this culinary debauchery.

I wish it had been tasty enough to be worth it.

One of the defining characteristics of blogs is that they're exposed privacy. If I'm nancying about in frilly lace panties and garter in my living room, and you espy me through my open curtains, that's a blog. I'm not strutting my stuff down the street, I'm not advertising the location of said living room, in fact, I do what I can to tell you to piss off, and not look at my sausage (big sausage, of course -- the size of your arm, like Sade's Bum Cleaver from 120 Days, without as much of a pronounced bent) falling out the leg of the very-unsupportive ladies' undergarments.

Most blogs are the same way, bent shlongs aside. They're usually vapid, because guilt is felt if one falls behind on updates. Little is sadder than a crappy, boring blog that was updated rigorously for years, then left fallow for six months. Unless crippled kids, anorexic teenage girls, or animals in zoos strike you as sad. So, we fill them in with the events of the day, whether we chronicle our effluent, our lunches, or the stupid thing some stupid person said during something stupid at the stupid place I spend every stupid day.

But they're ours. For us. Your seeing them is a curious comment on your empty voyeurism, not our exhibitionism. Sure, we do things for attention, and we like getting a little attention, but not too much. When we worry, we censor, so our boring lives become even more boring blogs.

However, in the past year or two, blogs have grown this crepuscular corpuscle (ok, I just wanted to write that, it doesn't have to make sense) in the form of comments. Comments are not for the author. They're explicitly for a foreign reader. There's a responsibility incumbent upon someone writing for another person. What they write doesn't have to be interesting, but it should be suitable for some audience. If the best you can come up with is an AOLian "ME TOO", or "uh-huh", or "you got that right!" or worse, mere contribution to an avalanche thereof, you're wasting everyone's time. Correcting someone's erroneous facts is mild edification, pedantic tho it may be, and has some value. (Proactive self-justification? I call it self-awareness, you boor.) Make people laugh, and I'll defend your right to comment. Waste my time, and I'll piss your name into the ice in the bar urinal just to watch it melt.

I've said it once, and I'll say it again...and again...and again...

People in Minneapolis are, pound for pound (and pound and pound...), the dumbest people on earth. You thought Newfies were bad.

Holy crap. Kill Bill v.1.

Stuff...happens to me. Especially when I'm sitting alone at a hotel bar, and drinking many glasses of wine and macallan (because there's no Lagavulin, natch*), and someone mentions something random like "anguilla", and I have to (have to!) butt in and say they had a murder there last week, because ct apparently reads the Anguilla news every morning.

Anyway, push comes to shove, and I have this actually quite interesting couple showing me around the bar district, pouring way too much alcohol into me, and I can barely stagger back to my room.

More stories later about Macchu Picchu. And big fuckin' piranhas attacking steel boats.

I love being me, because I have poor impulse control and no concern for that voice in my head that tells me not to do something. Except the h00rs -- I don't do them. But I did duct-tape a squirrel to a tree and shave my name in his back on the fourth of July.

*Does anyone say 'natch' outside comics?

Ahem.

So, hotel bars are good. They fuck your shit up, and you drink more, because there's no fear of reprisal. I'm here for another ten days or so (unless I just can't leave the plasma), and then, pff. Gone.

So, I drink more than usual, and especially more wine, because I'm dining out every night.

You can see where this is going.

I got a little pickled, came back to my room, was browsing around on metafilter or my portal, and I came upon the stupidest, most banal crap I've ever seen someone post to a blog comment, and I lost my shit. I wanted to bitch-slap this stupid effete cocksmurf who really needs to tie some barely legal girl to the kitchen table and roger her senseless, or have her do the same to him, if that's his kink.

Wastes of gonads shouldn't bother me, because it's his own life, but I'm married and old, and if you're not going to lust after the tail with vim and vigor, you might as well curl up and die. What gets your heart beating?

Normally, I avoid profanity after being burned with the dejanews/google news cache, and on the off chance that my mother will stumble on this. Apologies, mom, but this has to be said. I wish there were a javascript:momGoAway("yahoo.com");, but there isn't.

What the holy fuck?

Guys, you need to start thinking with your dicks and balls. That's why they're there. You're too fucking pseudo-cerebral, in some half-assed cowardly attempt to avoid actually experiencing life. Use your fucking balls, and women, use your fucking cunts. Christ. I'm sick and motherfucking tired of people overthinking what they write. If I stumble on another blog that has an unironic phrase like,"the thing you said forced me to project tea from my nose," I'm going to chain you to an oceanliner and have the entire male population of Jamaica gang-rape you until you start making some fucking sense.

Everything wrong with the world is based on a lack of getting your knob off. Get nasty, the nastier and dirtier the better, but don't fucking subject me to your eunuch blather.

You're here for another forty years. Do you really want to be a cocknard? Pussy, pussy, pussy.

Frickin' killer bees.

So, it was really dusty outside. Really, really dusty. So dusty that I had to go out with a hose and wet down the road outside so that the dust wouldn't completely fill the air when cars drove by.

Unfortunately, the road outside was huge, three lanes in either direction. I didn't have to hose it all down, thankfully, just the bit in front of the house, and, more specifically, just the upwind parts. If I had to do much more, it would have dried and became dusty again before I finished. I think Sysiphus had the wrong metaphor.

I turned around after finishing the far side of the road, and this bee was hanging in the air about six feet from me. When I say,'bee,' I mean,'huge frickin' yellowjacket,' but I may have been exaggerating a bit out of fear. He was definitely pointed at me, and started creeping toward me. Ever one to be afraid of bees, I backed away.

And fell down, driving my elbow into the soft earth at the side of the road. I rolled over and stood up, looking down at the hole I left in the ground. From which rose another frickin' yellowjacket.

Bastards.

The second bee (yes, I know, yellowjackets are hornets, not bees) kind of flew up to flank his buddy. I had read that squished yellowjackets release a pheromone that drives nearby yellowjackets into a stinging frenzy. This generally affects yellowjackets within about 15'. If there were a nest nearby, I really didn't want to smush either, or both, of these.

But, I did have a hose, so I tried to knock them out of the air with the stream of water. Not only did it not finish them or dissuade them, but the bloody things kept flying toward me, creeping really slowly in the air. I don't think I've ever seen bees fly that slowly, and in that controlled a fashion. I was backing away, concentrating on hitting them with the stream of water, when I had the strange notion that they were backing me into something. They weren't after me, but were trying to get me to walk into a big swarm of their buddies, or, as became very, very obvious to me, into the road, in front of a bus.

I turned around to see what I was backing into, and promptly woke up.

I hate bees.

One more I just discovered: Safari isn't HTTP/1.1 compliant. No gzip.

One more PowerBook complaint:

I fidget. A lot. I'll burn calories (yeah, that's what it is) by bouncing one or both of my legs while I sit at a desk and type. On my ThinkPads, this isn't a problem with twitching that doesn't register on the Richter scale. However, the screen on this PB is bouncing like mad. It's almost enough that I'm worried about doing damage to the hinge or screen.

Maybe my mother built this Mac, and it's her way of saying,"Sit still!"


Dang it, Ma!

I'm a Mac owner in his third day now, and I have some issues.

You have this great metaphor, derived from two great houses of computer interface design: Macintosh, and NeXT.

So, with this great metaphor, you have the problem that you see with Windows and Weenix all over the place: application inconsistency. It's not as bad as the random Gnome app, but it's annoying in little ways. Mostly because there's this expectation that things will work in a certain way.

Take Transmit, for example. It's apparently one of the elite (S)FTP clients for the Mac. It has cute icons, and the two-pane thing is pretty familiar. You can drag things back and forth between the panes.

One thing you cannot do, as far as I can tell, is drag something from the remote pane to the desktop. You have to retrieve it to the right pane (which, admittedly, could be your desktop), and then drag and drop to the desktop.

The more I use this, the more I want to take the next couple years off and write Mac software. I'd say "again", because it's basically NeXTSTEP 2003, but it's been so long, I'd have to learn all over again.

There are these great NS metaphors that are woefully unexercised by the seeming majority of Mac software I've snarfed so far. No one seems to expose Services, for one. I'm dealing with the inevitable TNEF/Winmail.dat issue with a nice little piece of shareware, and I have to save the attachment, THEN drag and drop the file onto the application, which will do the conversion. WTF? Slap that baby in a Service, and let me pipe it over directly. It'd be even cooler if you could rewrite the message in place, but I'm not sure how the abstracted store would handle that.

It's almost like the Macintosh community is much happier integrating applications with AppleScript (which, admittedly, works pretty darned well) than using Services or judicious NSProxy intervention.

I still frickin' love this thing, though.