Oh, now that's just evil.

I pulled out an Oral-B toothbrush that I bought a few months ago, because my current one is beat up and needs replacing. However, the blue "indicator" bristles that are supposed to tell you when to replace it, that were SOLID BLUE when I bought it, are now completely faded at the top.

What kind of shady ass planned obscelesence is that? It has nothing to do with you actually using the goddamn thing, it just fades automatically, so you'll buy another one.

Those swine.

Reason #17 why it's astonishing that Tobin got promoted:

I can't help myself, I like pushing people's buttons. Besides the fact that I needle Europeans at work when they get pretentious, to the point that I expect to get a call from HR any day now, I get a lot of pleasure out of throwing a curse word into normal engineering discussions.

I like seeing people's eyes widen just a little bit when instead of saying that our floor's DHCP server started malfunctioning at a meeting, I'll say that it "went apeshit". Or I'll say something about having to "un-fuck" some code before I send it out for review. It keeps people a little off balance around me. Being surrounded by 40 year old married engineers means that sometimes the environment needs a little spice.

Side note: It's really weird that the spell checker on my blogger software didn't tag "un-fuck" as a misspelled word. Or maybe it's really cool that they added that to the dictionary.

I think I've experienced a shift in the way I look at food. Cooking is for chumps.

I was at the grocery store just now, getting all these ingredients for meals that I've gotten recipes for. I've never really enjoyed cooking very much, it always feels like a lot of time just to eat. I just made my own meals because I figured it was cheaper and better for me.

But I was looking at the frozen meals, and looking at their prices, and checking the nutritional content on them, and I'll be damned if they don't have a bunch of great pre-made meals that are as cheap as making your own food, and better for you than most of the stuff I make for myself.

So I put all my ingredients back on the shelf, and filled my cart with frozen stir fry, orange chicken, sweet and sour pork, chicken pot pies, pizzas, and lots of other stuff. The chinese food, I can just make a batch of rice, and it will feed me for like three meals. Oh, and I got a big jug of strawberry milk, because it's the shit. And then I threw in some plums and pears and apples to snack on.

I ended up getting about two weeks worth of food, all easy to make and healthy and tasty, and it cost me about $65. So yeah, cooking is for chumps. I'm done with it.

So this is interesting. There's a new website called www.parkingticket.com that claims to be able to fight and beat any parking ticket.

I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who tries to use this service. It could very easily be a scam, because if you are found guilty, you still pay a $5 administrative fee, so they could just have everyone found guilty, and still make money. If you get off, you pay them half the parking ticket price.

They don't give any stats on their site about percentage of guilty/innocent, or why they're so positive they can fight these tickets for you.

Oh, you have GOT to be kidding me.

www.ready.gov

The nonsense with duct tape and plastic was bad enough, but this is downright irresponsible. This whole cover your ass approach to terrorism is making me sick. Just because after 9/11, everyone went around screaming "WHY DIDN'T WE KNOW" doesn't mean that we should keep every American in abject terror 24 hours a day from now on.

Just in case any of you are confused, let me run you through some very simple laws of driving. If any of you find that you're breaking these rules, stop being an asshole.

1) You should drive as far to the right as possible. The road is arranged in what we nerds call a "bubble sort", which means you only move to the left in order to pass a slower moving object, and you end up arranged in order of speed. This is true on a two lane road or an eight lane superhighway. Default behavior should not be to enter a road and move all the way to the left.

2) If anyone EVER has to pass you on your right side, and the road is open ahead of you, you've done something wrong. Period. There are no exceptions to this rule. You are not a policeman, and you don't have "every right" to drive in the left lane if you're going the speed limit. Don't be an asshole. If you're slow, read this one again.

These are the two major rules. Follow those, and every road will work many times better. If you don't, people will hate you and tailgate you, and your dumb ass will have no idea why.

Some secondary rules follow:

3) Driving is not a contest. When you pull over into a slower lane to let someone pass, you don't have to speed up to pretend that you're not a slow bastard. They already know you're a slow bastard, that's why they wanted to pass you.

4) Let people merge. When people are coming onto the highway, let them in. When someone puts their turn signal on to pull in front of you on a highway, let them in, don't immediately gun it to fill the space. You're really not going to get there any faster if you cut off three people from merging on your way home from work. Lots and lots of accidents are caused by people being assholes about not letting others merge.

5) Drive a consistent speed. One of the major causes for traffic jams is simply inconsistent driving speed, which causes delays in braking and accelerating. If you ever want to see something impressive, go on a major highway and put your cruise control on. You'll find that for some reason, people will regularly change their speed in a 20mph window, even if there's no one in front of them.

Riddle me this, Batman.

Every year, we run up against our arbitrary "debt ceiling". Right now it's at about 6.4 trillion dollars, and we're set to slam up against it in a few days.

Depending on the issue of the day, either Republicans or Democrats will rail against raising it, this time it will be the Democrats, but we always, always end up raising it again.

So what's the goddamn point? A debt limit is supposed to curb spending. If you raise it every time you hit it, you're just being an idiot. You might as well not even have one at all. The whole point is to SPEND LESS. American citizens can only spend what they make, and their allowed debt is usually a small percentage of their yearly income, even if they open several credit cards. Our debt is now at something like three times the annual budget of the US, and growing by leaps and bounds.

People like to point fingers and say "oh, it's the tax cut", but they're missing the point. If we collect LESS money because of lower taxes, we should SPEND less money. If your boss cuts your pay, you have to spend less. Our politicians absolutely refuse to cut spending, and that's absurd. We should set a cap on spending, that we are NEVER allowed to spend more than we bring in in a given year, and we should shoot to spend less than that, so we can pay off some debt. But continuing to spend more than we make is absurd, and it should be against our laws.

Here are some offensive dolls to buy for your politically correct friends.

Honestly, I could have thought of some much more obnoxious phrases for the dolls to say, some of them aren't even that funny, but as long as it supports the principle of offending people that need to lighten up, I'm in favor of it.

If you people don't know about the wonder of Space Moose yet, you should get acquainted with it. Now.

Warning, it's one of the most thoroughly offensive, raunchy, and fantastic comics ever created. I see myself in many of the comics. If you're easily offended, then don't read it. Course, if you're easily offended, why are you reading my blog?

Space Moose

Below are some of my favorite strips

Look at me!
Antlers of the damned
Take back the night
Feminist midterm
Poli Sci
Fat fuck
You'll go to hell for laughing at this one
This one just rocks
Get horny in your ass
I AM THE MASTER OF TIME

And you thought I was a nerd. Some guy is going through and doing a line by line annotation of Pattern Recognition (by William Gibson) on this website.

I heard a strange thing on the news just now, someone called some show on CNN or something, and said "Didn't we learn our lesson in Korea last time when we got our asses kicked there?"

Strangely, I've heard this sentiment often lately, and I'm not sure where people are coming from. This is totally false. Setting aside the issue of whether we should be attacking Korea now, lets look at the outcome of the Korean War.

Basically, communist expansion into S. Korea was halted after years of bloody fighting, ending with the same situation as where we started. We weren't really fighting N. Korea, though, we were fighting Russia and China. Millions of North Koreans died during the fighting, but a huge number of those were civilians. The US lost about 50 thousand troops, and the UN forces lost some smaller number, and the Chinese lost over half a million troops. Russian losses are classified, because they were hiding their involvement in the war.

So what it comes down to is that even with China being willing to throw 10 of their lives at every American life, they weren't able to advance, and we finally called a stop to it because it was just a horrible slaughter over there. Between Ike getting elected and Stalin dying, we were able to call a truce, and leave the lines where they were originally.

We certainly didn't "lose" the battle of Korea, and in the sense that we stopped communist expansion, it can be said that we won at least that aspect. Most of the wars we've lead against other countries have only lasted as long as they did because of the strange swarming quality of their leaders' attacks, seeming to value the lives of their troops very little. This is very different from the way we approach war, but we've almost always had informational, technological, and stratetic superiority.

So I was watching a show that debunked or proved urban myths, and for the edification of all of you, I'll recap their findings:

Poppy seeds, even in doses as small as one bagel, can indeed make you test positive for morphine/heroin.

There are no documented cases of gangs driving without their headlights on, and then killing people who flash their headlights.

Toilet seats actually have less germs than common items like cell phones and doorknobs, so there's no reason for people to be as paranoid as they are about them.

WintOGreen lifesavers do indeed make sparks in the dark when you chew them.

The White Stripes, a band, claim to be brother and sister, but they're actually ex-husband and wife. (Which is pretty weird)

Walt Disney didn't freeze his head. He died before cryogenics even worked, and they tracked down where his ashes were buried.

I'd never heard this one, but apparently some people think that you can avoid pregnancy by douching with soda after sex. It's not true, of course, but people's ideas about pregnancy terrify me. One girl was interviewed on the show and claimed that if you had sex while standing up, you couldn't get pregnant. Good lord.

And last but not least, after measuring the erect penises of men, and comparing it to their shoe size, it turns out that men's penises are NOT tied to their shoe size.

Even though this should be common sense to everyone in the world, all of those emails claiming that you can get money from forwarding emails, or any claim that companies are tracking email forwards are all totally and completely false. This wasn't on the show, but I've had some of my more intelligent friends actually fall for this crap, and it blows my mind.

Due to my fuxxored schedule, I woke up at 6pm. I've got a new theory that I'll never get any work done at my house, backed up by lots of experimental evidence, so I decided to get showered and head to work.

Now it's 1:30 am and I'm here at work, and I really like it. The whole place is empty, like my own little ghost town. There's a huge skylight outside my office, and I can hear the rain pattering down on it. Since we have those power saving movement sensors, most of the building is dark, but whenever I walk down to get coffee or a soda, the lights flicker on around me, like I'm in some space ship that's catering to me. I've found some old CDs that I used to keep here at work, so I'm playing Nevermind and Cibo Matto's "Stereo Type A" at top volume, and they're echoing down the hallways.

If I walk down to the first floor, I can hear that strange polka sounding mexican music coming from somewhere else in the building, but I've not seen any other people here, it's kind of like they're just invisible, and running around out of my sight. I keep hearing little snips of sounds from other parts of the building. I'm surprised that they're here this late cleaning, normally I see the cleaning people show up at like 7pm when I'm working, and there's not that much to clean around here. Maybe there's some sort of party scene in the bay area where people show up in empty buildings and dance to hispanic music in conference rooms.

Or maybe I'm just blurry with caffeine and fast food.

I can't believe there aren't any 24 hour chinese joints in the bay area. God damn it.

Random AIM exchange. My buddy was sending me macintosh characters over AIM to see which ones would break and not show up on my AIM client, and the following occurred:

Tobin00: because the fourth character you typed showed as an 8 on my side
Tobin00: but i got no warning
freston0: Aha! It's this one: 8
Tobin00: yes, that is an 8 :-)
freston0: No, it's an infinity symbol.
Tobin00: awww
Tobin00: that sucks that i can't see infinity
Tobin00: i should meditate more
freston0: hahahahaha
freston0: Asshole.

Proving the point that porn will ALWAYS be the largest motivator in adoption and evolution of new technology, I had a realization tonight.

As soon as DVD burners are about as cheap as CD burners are now, maybe a little more expensive, I think guys will start sending the DVD equivalent of "mix tapes" to their friends - A DVD full of a grab bag of their favorite porn.

Good collections might get passed to friends, or mixed and matched, just like people do with mix tapes and mix CDs these days. I can see it now. Course, it's probably already happening, since blank DVDs are like a buck or two.

I knew four dollars a month for two gigs of storage was too good to be true.

I apparently stumbled upon the only web hosting company in the world with morals. Turns out that because I put some MP3s on this new domain I'm using as a "dumping ground", they decided to wander through my domain with a blowtorch, and randomly hack and slash at will. One of my friends PGP'ed all of his personal information and put it up on my site as a backup, and they deleted his account and all his files, along with some other files, and the MP3s I had up. There's no rhyme or reason, they just picked about half of my stuff, and deleted it.

This, of course, is unacceptable. I've written them a "what the fuck?" email, but I assume that I'm going to have to switch hosting companies, because these people appear to be the Spanish Inquisition of web hosters. I would like to see what their deletion process is like.

"He has two MP3s on his domain! Torch the sinner! Leave no one alive!"

Bastards. After I settle this with them, and transfer my domain to somewhere else if necessary, and hopefully get a refund out of them, I'll release the name of the sons of bitches, so you all can avoid them like the plague. Till then, I'd prefer not to, because they might show up at my house in white robes and nail me to a cross.

Right now, coziahr.com is hosted at digitalspace.net, which has great service, but is kind of a ripoff, since they only give me 50 megs of space for seven dollars a month. What I'd like to find is a cheap, reliable hoster that gives me a reasonable amount of storage, and stays the HELL out of my business. Unfortunately the only real way to do this is some sort of colocation server, which runs like 100 a month. If anyone has a cheap, reliable service to recommend, that'd certainly be appreciated.

This is about as happy as I get:



For those of you who don't recognize the man on sight, that's William Gibson, who's been my favorite author since I had zits and my voice was cracking. I met him at a book signing on Wednesday, which is pretty obvious since I mentioned it two entries ago.

It was fantastic, he read from Pattern Recognition, he answered some questions, and he signed books. I had him sign my 1984 copy of Neuromancer, and he signed it "To my favorite fan, Tobin". That pretty much made my month, or possibly my year.

Anyway, I made a gallery of the pics I took, and you can find it here.

It will be part of my "pictures" section of the site, as soon as I actually get around to making it. I honestly can't stand editing HTML and doing design work, I want this whole thing to be automatic. But I'll get around to it.

Oh for crying out loud.

I was listening to an oldies station today, the kind that plays the Everly Brothers and the Temptations and what not, and they played Michael Jackson's Thriller.

Don't get me wrong, Thriller rules, but a song written after I was born is NOT AN OLDIE. I am NOT OLD, goddamnit.

So I'm sitting here in Barnes and Noble, waiting for William Gibson to show up for a booksigning.

First off, this new wireless card that my buddy Chad hooked me up with is pretty sweet. It works through Verizon's wireless network, and it regularly hits 30kps. Connectivity everywhere. I love it.

Secondly, they just had to drag a crazy woman out of the store. I was sitting here in the cafe, doing work and reading a book, when this older asian woman approached a man sitting next to me. What follows is part of the conversation:

"Are you a mexican?"
"Partly" (This guy was completely white, from what I could see)
"I can't handle that!"
"I'm also a monk, let me give you a prayer card."
"If you're a monk, where is your monastery? How many wives do you have?"
"None, I'm celibate."

Then she started pacing the floor of the cafe, yelling about "how many girlfriends do you have?", and every time he tried to say something she would scream that he was interrupting her. Finally, he said that he was going to get a cup of coffee downstairs (we were in the coffeeshop), and she screamed "Why are you leaving me?"

After this, she got up and wandered around the floor for a while, until the cops showed up. The cops were asking her to leave, and she was saying that they should carry her, because she couldn't walk. (This was while she was walking the floor). It just got weirder and weirder. To make a long story short, two cops and three employees later, the woman left the store. I'm just waiting for her to show up again.

I should go sit in bookstores more often, I had no idea they would be this entertaining.

As a small addition to the investing how-to I put up on the site, I added the chart that I've been using to see how everything is doing. Most of you will be bored by this, but enough of you have asked about investing advice after I put it up that I thought it'd be interesting to you, since I update it myself anyway. About halfway down the page you'll see the graph. It's not very pretty right now but that's because a) there's not much data yet, and b) the market's been shit lately (different kind of ugly).

You'll find the page on the sidebar, or here.

I've developed a new method of corporate promotions. I'm calling it Predatory Advancement.

First, a little backstory. I work at Sun, and like many other tech companies, we've been devastated by the dot com fallout. More so than many, actually, because we happen to sell computers to other companies, and other companies aren't into spending much money right now. So anyway, we've not had promotions for a long time. Since I started there, actually.

However, lots of people have really been busting their asses and deserve promotions, while others might not have been working so hard, or might have been hired during the midst of the boom, where you got a job if you had a pulse.

In my new system, you would be allowed to "challenge" anyone of a higher rank than you. You would then be assigned some sort of test involving your knowledge of Sun's processes, programming techniques, your awareness of how Solaris works, etc. It might even be like the old duels where you chose a weapon, where the challengee got to choose what kind of challenge it was, maybe you could have a test, or a programming challenge. If you defeated them, you switch positions, you get a promotion and they get demoted.

That would be fantastic, people would be prowling the halls, trying to smell your fear, deciding who to challenge. People would be scared to death of slacking off, or someone would call them out for a duel at high noon. There would have to be some sane limits about how many challenges you were allowed to make, maybe one a quarter, or two a year.

Anyway, yeah. Once I'm in charge, that's the new system. Bring it.

It really weirds me out to see so many references to Hans Moravec in all the science fiction that I read, and in newspapers and magazines.

My freshman year of college at Carnegie Mellon, I was in a program called University Choice where you got to take a special lecture series. My group was assigned to Hans Moravec. I had never heard of him or anything about him. He would talk to us about his ideas, about the future of humanity, and the possibility of downloading people's minds into machines. We toured his robotics labs, and just sat around for hours and shot the shit with him about anything and everything. He's kind of a renaissance man in a sense, the topics would range all over the place, and he was always well informed about anything that came up.

Overall, it was a fantastic experience, and I really agreed with damn near everything he had to say. Every once in a while, before I graduated, I would be walking across campus alone at night and run into him, and we'd stand and talk awhile, and it was always enjoyable. He was one of the cooler people I had met while at CMU.

Then later on, I started seeing him mentioned in nearly every copy of Wired, and in the "thanks" sections of science fiction books, or offhandedly in even comic books. About half the references you see refer to him as some sort of crazy nutjob, and refer to his ideas as "robots taking over the world", while the other half refer to him as a visionary who has been talking pretty accurately about the advances of science and AI for a long, long time.

Anyway, I just saw another reference today, and I got the usual little jolt of oddness. If you've not read any of his stuff, I'd recommend picking up Mind Children, or his more recent one, Robot. It's fascinating stuff, very practical and realistic projections of the next couple decades of robotic development, and covers ideas such as how to realistically put your mind in a machine, and the rise of superintelligent robotic beings.

Aside from the tragedy of lost lives, the last thing we need now is a set back in our space program. It's already a mess as it is. We landed on the moon six times during the Apollo program, the last being about 30 years ago. Then nothing since.

Thirty freaking years ago. Compared to today, the astronauts of 30 years ago were cave men, in terms of technology. And what do we have to show for it? No more manned planetary missions, and a rickety space station that has had its funding cut 20 times, until it's two tin cans strapped together. Imagine what we could be doing with THIRTY YEARS worth of technological improvement aimed at space travel.

Hell, we developed the Space Shuttle 20 years ago. Where's the innovation since then? Do we honestly need an enemy to motivate us to explore the cosmos? Will our space program sit in stasis until the Chinese land on the moon? Are we only capable of acting under competitive pressure? It's no wonder that we have an accident, we've been flying the same shuttles for years and years. You can retrofit and repair, but it's still an old shuttle, and we should be innovating and making new ones, not patching up something that we made a decade or more ago.

There are so many reasons for developing space travel. If nothing else, people should see that the "all our eggs in one basket" idea is dangerous as hell. A comet could come on a collision course with the earth, we'd have about four or five days warning, and then we'd be gone. All known life in the universe, extinguished. We regularly are missed by comets coming from behind the sun, where we can't see them. One day, it might not miss.

It's highly improbable that we're the only life out here, but it's possible. So in our infancy, we could be eliminated, and all life would cease. It's so tragically shortsighted that we get congressmen so focused on being re-elected that they pump every penny back to their own state, in order to ensure another election in 2 years. That's all that happens, over and over. Any space money is of course being taken from the programs that it "belongs to", or from school programs or the elderly. Never mind the fact that if we get hit by a comet, all the schoolchildren and elderly will be dead, too. It just makes me sick. Our race is incapable of working for its own best interest.

The moon is the closest and easiest target we have for practicing colonization. We should be experimenting and learning about what it takes to build a colony that can survive with as little outside influence as possible. We have an unusually large moon, many astronomers consider it to be almost a binary planet arrangement. It's our backyard. We need to get people living on the moon, we need to learn how to make the human body survive in little to no gravity, we need to learn how to make closed environments that can sustain themselves for huge amounts of time without supplies. The number of things we could use the moon to work on is limitless. Some of our best innovation comes when we strive toward the unknown.

But now, we'll put our space program on hold for who knows how long. And even when we start sending people up again, the program will limp along with not enough funding or ambition, as usual. We'll stay on our own planet, and worry about our petty day to day lives, and not enough of us will dream about going to the stars.

God damn it.