January 30, 2004
The Winter of our, um, uh,..
Oh, never mind.
A brisk and bright twenty six below zero this early morning, as I trudged up the street to the bus stop. Thankfully the wind was a mere breeze. If it had been whipping, I wouldn't have left the house. A stout wind at that temp means DAMAGE. As it was, we've had plenty of cases of frostbite around the Twin Cities. Fer chrissake, put yer gloves on, people.
I'm looking forward to hearing how the walk home from Synagogue was for my boss tonight. He's an observant Jew, and walks to and from the Temple on the Sabbath, which started at sundown tonight.
It's a mile walk. And it's about fourteen below zero right now.
Yikes.
Anyway, we've apparently had our Arctic blast for the year, as it's supposed to poke its nose above zero tomorrow. Here's hoping. We do okay in the bitter cold, but we really don't want to stay here. If we did, we'd move to Yellowknife.
January 29, 2004
Back to suck
Ever have that sensation that you just want to throttle other people at work?
Arrrgh!
I won't go into details, as I believe in keeping my worklife (and my firm) off my private page. But I'll say this; there are many computer users that could benefit from a good beating.
Okay, back to muttering in the background.
January 28, 2004
Much better
Oh, the deliciousness of a day that doesn't suck. Suckitude has been sharply reduced. The Suck Index is at a three day low. Distinct lack of suck.
Did I mention that today didn't suck?
On the flip side of the coin, Minneapolis is damned chilly today. The high was around six below zero, and the last time I looked at the temp, it was on the cusp of twelve below. Easily into the twenties tonight. But it IS January, and one must expect that sort of thing.
I'm just glad that we finally have a decent snow cover, and that the plants have a measure of protection.
Did I mention that today didn't suck?
January 27, 2004
Bugger all
Another suck day at work. I dealt with the fallout from last night, I started the morning off slightly sick, and I now have a cranky spam filter/http scanner.
That damn scanner. It's now decided to shut down at random intervals. Three times this afternoon it went dead, which brings external mail to a halt and kills browsing.
I'm having an "I hate technology" day.
Except for my TiVo, of course. I LUURVE TiVo. It keeps me sane on days like this. So I just watched A Flock of Seagulls reunite on VH-1. It kicked ass.
January 26, 2004
Hate is such an ugly word
and yet it's such an appropriate feeling.
Minor virus outbreak this afternoon at work, which meant that I got home ninety minutes later than usual. This was a variant of the MIMAIL worm. Oh, joy. A strain that uses zip files. So it sneaks under the radar, and evades the executable blocker.
I nailed it quickly, and shut it down. And at five, our mail scanner received an update that made it aware of the worm. Much splatting of worms commenced.
No real harm, other than my sudden myocardial infarction. If I ever meet a virus writer face-to-face, I'm gonna punch him in the mouth. Fucking vandals.
January 24, 2004
Goddammit
(Having a Kevin Meaney moment there.)
We watched Lost in La Mancha tonight, which is a documentary about Terry Gilliam's gigantic train wreck while trying to film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Prophetic.
I tried to make Alton Brown's recipe for crab cakes. Disastrous. They fell apart in the oil. I ended up with a big smokin' deep fry.
After the crab cake debacle, I retreated to the living room to sulk. Fred made himself a lamb chop. Tasteless. It had been in the freezer too long, he thinks. He chucked it.
We made popcorn. That actually worked. So we enjoyed big bowls of popcorn during the movie.
Halfway through the movie, Fred got us some of the chocolate cake I had made. My piece had mold on it. Oops. In the fridge too long, I fear.
We settled for ice cream sandwiches.
Why is our kitchen cursed tonight?
January 20, 2004
100 Books
100 Books - Bold The Ones That You've Read
1984, George Orwell
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
The BFG, Roald Dahl
Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
Catch 22, Joseph Heller
The Catcher In The Rye, JD Salinger
Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
Crime And Punishment, Fyodor
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
Dune, Frank Herbert
Emma, Jane Austen
Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
The Godfather, Mario Puzo
Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
His Dark Materials trilogy, Philip Pullman
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas Adams
The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
Holes, Louis Sachar
I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
Katherine, Anya Seton
The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, CS Lewis
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
The Lord Of The Rings, JRR Tolkien
Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blighton
Magician, Raymond E Feist
The Magus, John Fowles
Matilda, Roald Dahl
Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
Mort, Terry Pratchett
Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
On The Road, Jack Kerouac
One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Perfume, Patrick Suskind
Persuasion, Jane Austen
The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
Pride And Prejudice, Jane Austen
The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
The Ragged Trousered Philantrhopists, Robert Tressell
Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
The Stand, Stephen King
The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Tess Of The D'urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
The Twits, Roald Dahl
Ulysses, James Joyce
Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
War And Peace, Leo Tolstoy
Watership Down, Richard Adams
The Wind In The Willows, Kenneth Grahame
Winnie-the-Pooh, AA Milne
The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
List courtesy of Carrie.
January 19, 2004
My take on the Margaret Cho deal
Sigh. I feel like I have to address this, as a Cho fan. (I don't really want to, but I can't help it.)
If you haven't heard, Margaret Cho has been blasted with crap email due to excerpts of her comedy routine being posted on the Drudge website. She did a bit at a Moveon.Org show. Drudge pointed to snippets at the FreeRepublic website. Freepers sent her hate mail.
My take: it's a frickin' comedy routine. People are getting all bent out of shape because she's liberal, she's a fag hag, and she's no fan of Dubya. Big hairy deal, folks. So what if she's all of those things?
Being a conservative fag myself, I am a fan of Cho and Dubya. It's not that big of a deal. Even though I don't agree with her politics, I still like her work. (I own both I'm the One That I Want and Notorious C.H.O..) I ignore her blog, because her hip-hop writing style makes me crazy and her politics are annoying. I suspect that if she knew I existed, she would return the favor.
Folks on the left; don't paint us all like the wacko Freepers. They're the oddballs out on the very edge of reality. Conservative does not equal Jackbooted NeoCon. Do you want us to assume that all Liberals are smelly radical hippies?
The fringes are the problems. They're the visible, therefore everyone seems to believe that they are the only forms of Left and Right.
Geez, people. Get a grip.
There. Piece said. Back to your normally scheduled search for internet porn.
January 18, 2004
My time is not my own
Yet another sinkhole has shown up in my life. Garageband, the new component of the Apple iLife suite. Imagine having a recording/mixing/publishing tool for music, all in one software module. Loads of samples, loops and effects. A linear timeline editor. The ability to record your own instruments, vocals, and MIDI controls. The tools to publish it to iTunes, and load it into your iPod. To mix it into your movies.
I officially have more toys and projects than I can possibly complete.
January 16, 2004
Georgia Houseboat
Someone finally found the houseboat that Acidman has been staying on during his vacation in the sunny Caribbean.
About what I expected, really.
January 15, 2004
January 14, 2004
Huffing
Just got done with an energetic round of household chores, including the ever popular clean-the-cat-boxes. My goodness, such a large quantity of turds from such a small selection of cats.
Tonight we watched Rides, a show about car customizers. The company was called Rad Rides by Troy (warning: mildly annoying flash intro,) a small town custom car shop. And holy cow, what cars.
They had a 62 Biscayne that had been redone into the Chicayne. They had an all-wheel drive deuce that could pull 0-60 in under three seconds. And they had...
The Fastforward Fastback. A 67 Mustang Fastback, rebuilt from the ground up and modified into a mutant version of the new 05 Mustang. It was thoroughly, utterly delicious to see. And if I could find a picture of it, I'd put it up here for you. Suffice to say, it was an amazing transition. A rusty, twisted 67 from Minnesota was transformed into an amazing show/street car.
The car will be auctioned off at eBaymotors.com, if it hasn't been already. I haven't found it on the eBaymotors.com site yet. But I would be very surprised if it's been and gone, as this is great publicity for the site.
Mmmmm. Makes me want to go to eBaymotors and look for my beloved 69 Mach 1.
January 13, 2004
History marches by, and I'm watching
Boy the Bear's Age Gauge says I'm:
45 years 4 months younger than Walter Cronkite, age 87
41 years 10 months younger than Pope John Paul II, age 83
37 years 9 months younger than George Herbert Bush, age 79
30 years 6 months younger than Barbara Walters, age 72
28 years 4 months younger than Larry King, age 70
22 years 1 month younger than Ted Koppel, age 63
18 years 8 months younger than Geraldo Rivera, age 60
15 years 8 months younger than George W. Bush, age 57
10 years 8 months younger than Jesse Ventura, age 52
6 years 5 months younger than Bill Gates, age 48
1 year 7 months younger than Cal Ripken Jr., age 43
4 years 3 months older than Mike Tyson, age 37
8 years 4 months older than Jennifer Lopez, age 33
13 years 9 months older than Tiger Woods, age 28
20 years 3 months older than Prince William, age 21and that I was:
39 years old at the time of the 9-11 attack on America
37 years old on the first day of Y2K
35 years old when Princess Diana was killed in a car crash
33 years old at the time of Oklahoma City bombing
32 years old when O. J. Simpson was charged with murder
30 years old at the time of the 93 bombing of the World Trade Center
28 years old when Operation Desert Storm began
27 years old during the fall of the Berlin Wall
23 years old when the space shuttle Challenger exploded
21 years old when Apple introduced the Macintosh
21 years old during Sally Ride's travel in space
19 years old when Pres. Reagan was shot by John Hinckley, Jr.
17 years old at the time the Iran hostage crisis began
14 years old on the U.S.'s bicentennial Fourth of July
12 years old when President Nixon left office
10 years old when Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace was shot
7 years old at the time the first man stepped on the moon
6 years old when Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated
3 years old during the Watts riot
a 1 year old at the time President Kennedy was assassinated
Link courtesy of Mary at Fresh Bed Goodness.
I hate the Internet
One of my coworkers ran into the hijacker that Steve caught. Oh my Lord.
It took me ninety minutes of digging and scraping to get it out of his machine. Of all the one's I've seen, this was by far the most virulent.
He caught it off a site that starts with "slot" in the domain name. I refuse to name it, because the bastards are not getting a google referral from my site.
It was horrible. And my normal tools didn't do the job.
I have a headache.
January 12, 2004
Moisten your dreams
Anybody see the new Space Ghost they ran on Sunday night? The one with Triumph the Insult Comic Dog?
They managed to out-gross Triumph. Imagine Space Ghost peeing in his coffee mug for charity. And then threatening to bang people up the ass.
Just imagine it. It boggles the mind.
January 10, 2004
Can't sleep
Wide awake. After an hour of laying in bed staring at the ceiling, I'm up. We'll see if I can get my brain to settle down.
It will eventually. But for now, I'm active. This just ain't right.
Elves twisted it
This evening's viewing pleasure: The Two Towers - Extended Edition. We're up to the part where Merry and Pippen have been lain down to sleep by Treebeard. We got a late start, so we'll be finishing it tomorrow.
It's the first viewing of the Extended Edition of TTT, as we've just not thought of it. Bought it, watched the extras, and then got distracted. So it's quite a nice pleasure to leisurely watch with bowls of popcorn.
But during the Dead Marsh sequence, I found myself getting pretty damned swept up in things. You know, I've read the books more times than I can count. I've seen the theatrical release of The Two Towers twice. And I still can't get through it all without getting amazingly tense. For chrissake, I can speak the dialogue before the characters do. You'd think there'd be no suspense.
So of course when Merry and Pippen are facing the wrong end of a boning knife, I get all wound up and wonder if they'll escape. Honestly. Well, DUH, Hopkins. Of course they'll escape. You know that quite well.
Talk about suspension of disbelief.
It's been a good day. Two separate naps, two loads of laundry, disposal of the old dead microwave, a pan of brownies made, a load of shirts and pants and a coat dropped at Goodwill, and now the chance to snuggle in bed with my Honey.
How'd I end up with it so good?
January 09, 2004
Haunted
I keep hearing it over and over in my head. "Suddenly, the wheels are in motion, and I-I-yah-hi-hi am ready to sail any ocean..."
I've been possessed by Olivia Newton-John. This is an earworm of major proportion. I can't dislodge it. I haven't had one this bad in a long time. Heck, not even Safety Dance was this bad. I'm sure more than a few of you know the deadly power of Safety Dance.
In lighter news, the day is half over. That means only five hours until steaks with my honey. Friday is steak night for the Susskins. Beautiful ribeye steaks, lovingly grilled. Fried taters. Corn. Lots of cold milk and apple juice. And candles and music.
We must be unique; we use our dining room most nights. While the occasional meal is taken on the couch with a television show, nearly every evening dinner is in the dining room. We love our dining room, and get a good deal of enjoyment out of having a nice sit-down meal in the evening.
And we share duties. One cooks, the other cleans. If Fred cooks, I take care of the dishes afterwards, and vice versa. A lot of arguments and whining are deflected that way. Some day I'll stop with the whining, but that's another story.
January 08, 2004
What's wrong part 2
It's worse than I thought.
I'm singing along with Suddenly. And I know all the words.
Help.
What's wrong with Keith
Pray for me.
I'm sitting here on my lunch hour, surfing the web, eating pizza and listening to the Xanadu soundtrack that I bought on iTunes last night.
Overwhelmed by Olivia Newton-John again...
January 07, 2004
CSS whipped into shape
And the buttons are right where I wanted them, thanks to Jenett:
"get rid of the following in the first button's attributes:
align="left"
that'll fix it"
And indeed it did. A simple (and completely unintuitive) fix. How do you people figure this stuff out?
(This from a guy who spends a good share of his working day adjusting spam filters to deal with the various methods of bypassing said filters. Not the easiest of jobs.)
Comments fixed
I've repaired the comments section. While banning some spamming dork, I managed to insert a blank field into the list of banned ip numbers. So basically I banned everyone.
Fixed. And now I think I know how to ban whole segments of the net, which should be fun.
Let me know if you still can't post. Unless you're a spammer. In which case, fuck off.
January 06, 2004
Help
I need a css nerd to set me straight. How do I get the Dead Pool and Achewood buttons to line up vertically, instead of lining up horizontally?
Anyone? Anyone? Buehler?
Dead pool
Okay, so we're six days into the 2004 Dead Pool over at Amish Tech Support, and there's already been a big score. Three people had Tug McGraw picked, and one of them picked up a whole bunch of extra points/prizes for first pick/first Mc/famous drunk.
I have a feeling that my ass is gonna be thoroughly kicked.
Seven bathroom things that make me shudder
This is from a guy's perspective. Ladies, feel free to add to the list. I'm sure you've got your own particular public toilet issues.
1. Sitting down on the pot and feeling the warmth of the previous occupant still on the toilet seat. Okay, that's just nasty. I don't want to feel some strange guy's ass-warmth against mine. Gak.
2. The people who take food and beverages into the can with them. Stop doing that. Gross. Do you lick your fingers after wiping, too?
3. That certain "heady fragrance" that suddenly sweeps over from the next stall. There's nothing more disconcerting than to discover that you're inhaling the noxious fumes from someone else's bran canyon.
4. The coworker who talks to you while he's on the john taking a grumpy. Shut up. No talking. Private time. I do not want to carry on a conversation while tending to business.
5. The guy that pees and leaves without washing his hands. Sir, you need a good beating. And then a good scrubbing.
6. Those three or four sticky spots just in front of the bowl, right where your feet are. And you know what those sticky spots are. Ick.
7. Those little wads of toilet paper that look like joints, sprinkled on the floor. Oh, how pleasant. Little reminders of your efforts to scrub your smelly butt. They're like snowflakes! Snowflakes covered in shit!
January 05, 2004
Soup
Fred's coming down with a cold, so tonight was soup night. Home made chicken soup, with lots of noodles. He's happy, and feels better. And Rose was desperate for chicken, but got none. (The cats are only allowed cat food.)
It's okay; she got lots of loving instead, which I think she likes much better than chicken.