Beating hipsters, krazy koreans, and a hungry Panther

At last a hobby I can approve of. Apparently people are starting to beat the crap out of hipsters on sight in New York. Something about being thrown out of your neighborhood by skyrocketing rent and watching people walk around in $200 "ironic" outfits must have these people a little annoyed.

After all this time, still no one can pull off organized fantacism like young asians. Here's a video of young North Korean schoolgirls chanting and marching. Watching it made me feel like I was watching WW2 propaganda. Oh, speaking of, here's some modern anti-US propaganda fresh from North Korean television. They're nuts!

Ouch. Apple's new Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) is eating people's files, and then going onto their firewire backups, and skull fucking those too. Allow me to cackle with glee, as I mentally file items like this the next time some dumb ass mac zealot starts telling me how buggy and unstable Windows is. They've got Windows knowledge circa 1999. God help me, Microsoft is driving my company out of business, but they make a rock solid OS these days. I've had this machine for over a year, I put it behind a firewall, and I've never had a single crash or virus. And it didn't erase my shit when I upgraded, either.

Oh, and I found this. Man, how can you beat 70's pornography that combines young girls and Nazis?

Rumsfeld unsure of missing 'mojo'

I'm going to bed now, so I'm going to post this with no comments. It pretty much stands alone. CNN reporting on Donald Rumsfeld losing his "mojo". That's real news, ladies and gentlemen.

Rumsfeld unsure of missing 'mojo'

level retarded

For some reason I got a really huge kick out of this-

The phrase "Level retarded" still has me giggling.

prostitution

You know, I was just thinking about prostitution.

It's illegal damn near everywhere in this country. However, making porn movies is legal.

If I picked up a hooker, paid her $200, and then filmed us having sex and called it an adult film, where do you draw the line between that and prostitution?

I mean, this has to have occured to someone before. Adult films are people getting paid to fuck.

If the argument is that porn movies are done for entertainment, then you could argue that bringing your buddy along to watch you have sex with a hooker is also entertainment.

I don't see how the two are different enough that someone hasn't challenged this in court.

Dark energy, the end of the world, and my future girlfriend Asia

Dark energy confirmed. So now apparently we know that 70% of the universe is dark energy, and 20% is dark matter. But we have absolutely no idea what either one of those things are. That bugs the crap out of me. Apparently this is the first time that the effects of dark energy have been observationally confirmed.

This poor son of a bitch got fired from Microsoft for blogging a picture of them buying Macs. It wasn't on their machines or anything, he was on a third party site, but they fired him anyway.

This guy needs to be checked out for obsessive compulsive disorder.

Here's a funny shockwave movie about the end of the world. By the voiceover, I would say it's by the same guy who made that movie about the Mario Brothers that still cracks me up. Shiggidy SCHWA!

Nokia is making a phone with a fucking TV IN IT. I swear, my dream can't be that far off. For those who haven't heard my rant, my dream device has web browsing, email, chatting, text messaging, PDA, GPS, qwerty keyboard, all in one. Soon, soon.

I love Asia Carrera so much. Seriously, a hot asian porn star, who happens to be a member of mensa, and runs a website where she posts pictures of herself fixing her computers, topless? What's better than that, really?

Don't walk away from your house in the woods. Someone might rob you. And steal the whole house.

Every Playboy Centerfold

Gulkis sent this to me, I think it's pretty cool.

It's a digital average of every Playboy centerfold across the decades since the 1960's.

It's fascinating to watch as the taste in women shifts toward blond and the idea of being tan gets less and less attractive. As we approach today, the women are a (in my opinion more attractive) pale woman, compared to the tanner girl in the 1960's. Not a big fan of blond hair, personally, but apparently everyone else is.

I assumed I'd see a markedly thinner girl too, but those pictures don't come across that way to me. It's hard to tell with the forms as blurry as they are, but the figures seem pretty similiar. Playboy has always liked thin girls.

One really bizarre thing is that the background of choice has been getting more and more blue over time as well.

I find it interesting that when I look at these four pictures, even though I can't see any detail, the most recent one gives me the strongest pleasure, IE I'm tuned to think that the presentation these days is more attractive than in the past. It's really true though, if you watch porn from the 70's and 80's, it's flat out disgusting. People are unshaven, they have terrible hair, awful makeup... we really do find our present times much more attractive, just from conditioning.

Just think, it wasn't that long ago (relatively speaking) that people thought it was attractive for a girl to have a pot belly.

Jason Salavon - Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades

The Elegant Universe

There's a really interesting looking program tonight on PBS called "The Elegant Universe" that I'm going to check out, and I thought I'd recommend it to the rest of you as well. It's a two hour special about string theory, covering what the theory predicts, how it describes elemental particles, etc. A lot of really smart physicists are thinking string theory might help us create a single unified theory, and I don't know anything about it, except that it predicts eleven dimensions and involves everything being made out of "strings", but it doesn't make much sense described that way. Heh.

Anyway, it's on at 8pm on whatever PBS station is in your area.

There's a webpage for it here: The Elegant Universe

Congressmen want NASA to ax space plane

Could our space program be any more of a fucking mess? NASA runs around without any sort of good long term planning, and has awful bureaucratic administration, Congress is always trying to cut funding or scream about safety.. everyone has their heads up their asses and no one has any sort of vision about the United States' future in space, and it really pisses me off.

Congressmen want NASA to ax space plane

Napster

Napster is back, folks. I just got my email because I pre-registered, so I'm gonna check out the interface and see how it is.

If you want five free songs, you have like two days to sign up and get the deal, apparently.

I'll write more about it after I see if it's any good.

Napster.com

BTW, their little shockwave movies are actually pretty entertaining. The first two are kind of slow, but it's relatively clever and oh so full of attitude.

http://www.napster.com/bits/

Edit: The indy rock one is especially clever, I hadn't seen it before tonight. It makes fun of those annoying indy glasses. Nice.

beatbox, digital toilets, and the legendary Larry

Wow, this is the coolest beatbox I've ever seen in my life. You must check this out - a beatbox and a harmonica at the same time.

Do any of you Apple zealots know if this has any truth to it? Is Apple, the champion of the underdog, stealing people's ideas left and right?

I challenge you all to tell me which is more weird and disurbing:

A russian website dedicated to pictures of bathrooms and toilets in dozens of video games

or

Whatever the hell this is, with a little plastic infant grinning and crawling out of a really high res vagina

Don't be mad at me for getting you fired for looking at these things at work, though. I found you an old copy of Leisure Suit Larry, the original. I'm going to go play now.

yummy

Okay, any girl that can eat like a champ and be this incredibly thin and hot at 36 has my heart on a plate. Someone hook me up with her.

Seriously. She weighs 105lbs, and she ate 65 hardboiled eggs in less than seven minutes.

This means she's more badass than COOL HAND LUKE FOR CRYING OUT LOUD.

http://www.ifoce.com/profile.php?action=detail&sn=20

The International Federation of Competitive Eating. That cracks me up.

free online game site

I just signed up for a free game service called "itsyourturn". It's pretty cool, you can play a variety of turn based games against your friends for free - chess, checkers, backgammon, Battleship, Othello, Connect4, Go...

You start a game and wait for people to join, or send invitations to your friends. When you make a move it emails your opponent, so you can play whenever you have time. Make one move a week or 10 moves a day.

Anyway, I'm on there now, as "shalifi". If you join, let me know. I'm not very good at any of these games, but I still enjoy playing them. Challenge me to a game of something. I don't know how to play othello or backgammon, but I've always wanted to learn.

ItsYourTurn.com

desperate celebrities, SSNs in the sky, and the "pecking order" of Google

Got twenty bucks sitting in your pocket? You can have some loser B-list celebrity call you or a friend. Some of the names on this list are surprising. John De Lancie (Q from Star Trek) really needs money that badly? Or how about Rick Searfoss? I didn't know his name either, but he's a Shuttle Commander that's been on three missions to space. And he's whoring himself out at $20 a pop. God, that sad.

Speaking of space, since we just had that big solar flare a few days ago, here's a story from NASA about a super space storm that blasted the earth 150 years ago, and could happen again any day now. The yellow eye burns! And she's a fickle ball of burning gas over a million times the size of earth.

Here's a weird invention. The Knee Defender. Protect your knees on a plane flight by basically locking the guy in front of you into an upright position. If they sold ball gags for screaming infants, I'd buy one and use it forcefully.

A privacy group, unhappy with Citigroup's efforts against consumer privacy, wrote part of the CEO's Social Security number in the sky above their headquarters. They got his SSN on the internet for $26. Maybe he'll rethink his ideas on consumer privacy.

VAMPIRE COOKIE BEARS!

The Author's Guild is challenging Amazon's right to have fully searchable book results online. I really don't see this as being a problem, if anything it's going to help book sales. I guess they're scared of some sort of weird book Napster where people trade the digitized Amazon pics online. That's really not how people work with books though.

Who's your daddy? It's never been more evident that a country has been Westernized. I certainly wouldn't kick her out of bed for eating cookies.

Here's a really hilarious article from Google on how they achieve such great results. Turns out they have thousands of pigeons doing the work for them. I swear to god, they're going to get protests from PETA idiots with their heads up their asses, just like the people at Bonsai Kitten did. When you're really dumb, you need to have your computer taken from you, for the safety of the rest of us.

Watch a crazy 3 year old genius go apeshit on a xylophone.

And finally, any of you who need Halloween ideas, let me make a suggestion. This priest outfit still rocks:

Cruises

My Grandmother wants to take a trip on the QE2, one of the most famous cruise ships on the planet. She asked me to take a look at the web site for her and see what kind of options there are.

Were you people aware that you can go on a 108 day cruise? I had no freaking clue you could go on cruises that long. Look at this schedule:

Voyage of the Explorers - QE2

Florida, Columbia, Panama, Mexico, LA, Hawaii, Samoa, Fiji, Caledonia, New Zealand, Australia, Guam, Japan, China, Thailand, Singapore, India... this cruise sees the whole freaking world. The fares start at $23K, and range up to $375k.

Man. What I wouldn't give to be that rich. Taking off for almost four months, and just cruising all over the planet.

Too bad a trip like this is out of my Grandmother's reach too. That'd certainly be something, she's always wanted to see the world, and she's coming up on 90 now.

YARRRRR, pimped out pooters, and Far Side

Allow me to start by saying that this man is the most stupendous badass that I've heard about for a long, long time. A fishing captain, seeing a 660 lb fish swimming toward his crew, dragged it ashore with his BARE HANDS AND KILLED IT WITH A KNIFE. God that's cool. At least everyone in this world isn't turning into a simpering pussy.

Also, fans of the Far Side will be pleased to hear that there's a two volume, 1250 page Far Side anthology coming out containing every single Far Side ever made, along with a lot of really cool extras from Larson.

Are you a nerd? Jealous of all those ghetto rides with the neon underneath? Well, cry no more, now you can get LED lit legs for your PC. I really wish my apartment was more stylish and my PC wasn't stuck under a desk so I could take advantage of all these cool addons they're making for cases.

Sure, the idea of storing something with blue lasers is cool, but I don't understand what the market is. You get a burner for $3300, and then the disks are $45 for 23 gigs. Just as a comparison out there, my DVD burner was about $250, and for $45, I can buy about 135 GB worth of storage space on *good* DVDs. Where is the market for this?

And, by the way, if you think that God wants you to go around carving Jesus's face into pumpkins, and making analogies between spooning pumpkin guts and christ dying on the cross, you're an idiot. Religious arts and crafts are so weird. "The supreme being that created all the universe and all matter that exists wants me to MAKE A CROSS OUT OF MACARONI! THAT IS HIS DIVINE WILL!"

Well I'll be god damned.

I was poking through some shit about old skool hacking, and I found a list of "every BBS that ever was".

Dubious, I went to my old stomping grounds, the 619 area code, and searched for my old phone number.

And holy shit, there it was. Madrox BBS, 619-789-9941.

I swear to god, I got tears in my eyes, because it was so nostalgic. Those were some really incredible times in my life, and some of my fondest. I was truly, insanely happy back then, meeting all these hackers, doing illegal shit, and my head was exploding from the power of computers.

I've looked around in the past to try to find some of the stuff I wrote back then, but a lot of it is fuzzy. I know I wrote a hacker magazine called "LaMeR" for a while, and I worked on some other stuff, but for the life of me I can't remember. I went by Havok, and my good buddy was The Mentor, and we freakin owned 619 for a while. Or that's how it seemed when I was 14.

Here's the list, for the curious: http://bbslist.textfiles.com/619/

searching all published books, concentration camps, and binary accessories

Today Amazon released a new feature, the ability to actually search the content of books. They have more than 120,000 books scanned in, and it's growing at a rate that only Amazon could accomplish. This is fucking incredible. It addresses one of the concerns that I've had for a long time about the narrowness of my generation's information field. Most people think of everything being available on the Net, but it's not, so we're ignoring everything published in books and treating the internet as God. There's a really good Wired article that just came out about the Amazon project, and some other book digitizing projects.

Anyone who hasn't heard of the Sony QRIO, check it out. I want one so bad. The movies of what it can do are stunning. They're way beyond any other robotic prototype I've seen. I love Sony.

Apparently both the House and the Senate have voted to lift the travel ban on Cuba. This is a pretty big deal. I'm curious to see if Bush will sign or veto. Personally, I don't see any reason to keep it up. We allow Americans to travel to all kinds of other countries that abuse the shit out of their people and have no freedom of press. Might as well be consistent.

Concentration camps are alive and well in North Korea, according to a new report. Apparently there are 150,000-200,000 political prisoners in lifetime labor concentration camps in North Korea. Especially charming is the report that policial dissidents are tossed into camps with several generations of their families, and first hand accounts of babies being tossed into boxes in bulk to die, immediately after birth.

To cheer you up, here's some fun stuff. Ever wonder how pencils are made? Me too. Also, for no apparent reason, binary wristwatches.

Christina Blogs for Jesus

Can this be a real blog? Or is it a joke?

"Hi my name is Christina and I am a 14 year old home school student and I am going to blog for our lord and savior Jesus Christ since he is in heaven and there is no internet in heaven since internet is mostly filthy porn and athiest places that dont get into heaven. "

Christina Blogs for Jesus

Arabian Random Insult Generator

May 256 special-ed Spice Girls buy 100 shares of stock in $240 worth of pudd'n above your hotdog.

May 69 tanked Fidel Castros taser Satan after waxing your swimming trunks.

May a harem of mammoth maniacs entice dust mites inside your fake secret lover, Roseanne Barr.

Arabian Random Insult Generator

Photos Prove Iraq Violated U.N. Weapons Ban

This is interesting. Newsmax.com has obtained photographs proving that Iraq has been importing a variety of illegal weapons as recently as 2001.

They found 13 bunkers filled with missles and cluster bombs from France, South Africa and Russia, directly disputing Saddam's claims in November 2002 that he had no such weapons.

The boxes were labeled as being created in 1985, to trick inspectors, but the weapons were dated 2001. These weapons were discovered just last month, September 2003.

Here's the article:
Photos Prove Iraq Violated U.N. Weapons Ban

Here are the pictures of the weapons:

Weapons pictures

plant movies, IPv6, terrorist profiling

Really cool time lapse videos of plants in different situations.

Why are we powering fans and battery chargers off of USB now? That seems absurd.

For the next six months, the U.S. Department of Defense will operate the largest multivendor IPv6 network to date. This is a GOOD thing. People have been way too slow to adopt IPv6 because they're lazy and cheap, and having really delicious government contracts with IPv6 requirements will get everyone off their asses to start converting.

I'm pretty mixed about this ruling about X10. They have to pay millions to people they stole "pop-under" from, apparently. I hate X10 and would love them to hurt badly, but no one should be rewarded for that pop-under nonsense. Luckily google blocks all popups for me now.

Gulkis should like this. Bruce Schneier wrote a pretty good editorial on why terror profiles are ineffective.
"I have an idea. Timothy McVeigh and John Allen Muhammad - one of the accused D.C. snipers - both served in the military. I think we need to put all U.S. ex-servicemen on a special watch list, because they obviously could be terrorists. I think we should flag them for "special screening" when they fly and think twice before allowing them to take scuba-diving lessons."

Steve Ballmer is funny. Of all the things to try to sell Windows as, and there are plenty, saying it's more secure than unix is really just the wrong approach. Easier to use, more intuitive, easier to install programs, sell those things, yes. But for the love of god stay away from security as a selling point.

link problem solved, I think

I was thinking last night about this link page problem, and I realized that Livejournal had most of the things I wanted to read on a regular basis anyway, provided as feeds.

So I got a paid Livejournal account, and added a ridiculous number of feeds. We'll see if I trim them in the future, but the point is, I have ONE source where I can read all the things that interest me, and add new ones as I see fit, as long as they provide RSS (which almost everything does).

I'm going to list all the feeds that I'm watching below, because people might be looking for good feeds, but also because I want people to recommend feeds to me that I might have missed that provide something funny, or interesting, or worth reading.

I've added:

Metafilter
Penny arcade
PVP (the comic)
The Register
BoingBoing
Die Puny Humans (warren ellis's blog)
Irregular Webcomic
kuro5hin
salon feed
user friendly
red meat
something positive comic
wired news
slashdot
memepool
thinkgeek
bbc news
savage love
mega tokyo
wil wheaton's blog
word of the day
doonsbury
non sequitor
the onion
penny arcade
sinfest
foxtrot
dilbert
neil gaiman's blog

So yeah, I'm watching a lot. Livejournal is basically going to become my one stop for news and entertainment. We'll see how it works out. In the meantime, recommend anything I might have missed.

My group makes the Register

W00t.

There's a project that my group did called Fireengine, and it made the Register:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/61/33440.html

That's really cool to see something so close to me make global press.

I really hope that Greenline, when we finish it, makes some noise in the press. I'd be really excited to see my own project making the news.

Looking for a good web tool

I'd like a links page.

I often find cool sites, and bookmark them, and say "Hey, I should look at this site sometimes, it's interesting", and then forget about it.

I want to put a page up on my site full of all the pages I've found interesting, so I can check back on it from time to time. I'd like to be able to view and edit this page wherever I am, at work or at home.

Does anyone know a utility or a script or anything that could do this? I know it's got to be a common thing, lots of people want to keep links in this day and age.

I'd just like a page, divided into columns or some useful viewable format, that I can enter new pages into without telnetting to coziahr.com and editing HTML. I want a web editing interface. There has to be a WYSIWYG HTML editor, or link managing script, or SOMETHING out there.

Anyone?

Sports Night

Well, I just spent most of the last three days watching Sports Night just about every minute that I wasn't working. All 45 episodes.

Now I'm all depressed. Everything turned up at the end of the second season, Jeremy and Natalie were back, Rebecca came back and surprised Dan, the show was saved...

And then it all came crashing down. No more Sports Night.

It's kind of creepy, I've had more interaction with those people than I've had with most real humans for these last few days, so it feels like someone took my friends away from me. If you can't tell, I really, really liked that show.

Damn.

Croats attempt mass breakfast record

When do you know you have too much free time on your hands?

"Thousands of Croats took part Sunday in a mass, nationwide breakfast in hopes of breaking a Guinness world record held by Taiwan."

Yeah, that's probably when. What an incredibly retarded world record.

CNN.com - Croats attempt mass breakfast record

Final Fantasy XI

I can never get a feel for how many of you guys that read this are hardcore gamers, but I figure I'd ask.

I haven't been keeping up on news about Final Fantasy XI, but it comes out in like 10 days, so I figured I'd ask.

What have people heard about it? Does anyone know any beta testers, or have beta tested it themselves?

I love the Final Fantasy world so much, but I'm kind of sick of MMORPGs, because they're all pretty similiar and not nearly as powerful as I want them to be yet. I'm tempted to try it out, though, because it's Squaresoft.

So what's the word?

Pioneer DVD Recorders - DVR-810H-S

Oh my lord.

I just pooped my pants.

Tivo with DVD burner. So delicious.

Pioneer DVD Recorders - DVR-810H-S

TRACHTENBURG FAMILY SLIDESHOW PLAYERS

Wow. I really want to see these guys live, dammit.

But they're not playing anywhere near me anytime soon, except ONCE, where they're opening for Guster, which is some MTV one hit wonder, and I'm sure it will be totally jam packed. Shit.

"The Trachenburg Family Slideshow Players are an indie-vaudeville conceptual art-rock pop band. We take vintage slide collections that have been found at estate sles, garage sales, thrift stores, etc, and turn the lives of anonymous strangers into pop-rock musical exposes based on the contents of these slide collections."

It's an actual FAMILY of people, the Dad plays piano and guitar, and the 8-year old girl plays drums and sings. Damn, I wish I could see them.

TRACHTENBURG FAMILY SLIDESHOW PLAYERS

Another nation breaks the bonds of gravity

Following in the footsteps of Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard, China has launched Yang Liwei into space.

I'm so happy about this. If it lights a fire under our ass to make our space program more ambitious and respectable, all the better. But in a simpler sense, I'm just so happy to see other nations pushing for greater heights and achievements.

Fuck yeah.

What's amazing is that we apparently have taken satellite shots of their spacecraft. Check this out:



Isn't that crazy? The damn thing has only been in space a few hours, and we already have pictures of it.

China has been talking about putting a man on Mars in the next decade. If they pull that off, that will blow my mind. They will have raced right past us, while we've had our thumb up our asses for thirty years, sitting on our laurels and past achievements, letting our space fleet rot and wither. I wish we would get our act together and realize that achievement and innovation are goals in and of themselves, and worth more than the pittance we spend on them, and we should tear NASA down, fire all the administrators, and make it a modern, vibrant organization, like it used to be.

packing peanuts

I'm shipping off my broken Tivo today to the guy who bought it on ebay, and I went to buy packing materials, and was surprised to see that they only had styrofoam packing peanuts.

I'm no environmentalist, but it seems silly that now that we have those cheap corn-based packing peanuts, and have had them for years, that they would have become standard by now. Even I don't like the thought of filling landfills with huge piles of styrofoam when the corn-based ones would just melt in the rain.

Does anyone know why they didn't? When I bought some a few years ago they were really cheap, I'm surprised that the cost would be the reason.

random thought

Here's something I'd like to do.

I'd like to be in a bathroom with some people, take a piss, and then go to walk out the door. Someone says "Aren't you going to wash your hands?", and I respond with, "No, don't worry about it, I washed my dick really well this morning."

For some reason that really amuses me. I'm sure it has nothing to do with being at work all night.

Election 2004

You know, the way things are going right now, and based on people's reaction to the California recall (the desire for change, and thinking that a new face will solve current problems), I'm starting to think that in 2004, Howard Dean will be our new president. (Or whatever frontrunner the Democrats pick, they seem to have arbitrarily chosen Dean, just because everyone else running is such a bunch of losers)

All the financial elements are pretty similiar, except the problem that our national deficit comes from reduced taxes and increased spending. So what is Dean going to do? He's either going to have to promise to reduce spending, which Democrats don't do, or increase taxes, which is an unpopular platform.

Most likely he'll just scream about fixing our deficit, and Americans will be so stupid they won't ask "How are you going to do that?".

But of course it all comes down to Iraq. That's going to be the Democratic issue of 2004. They probably won't say that we shouldn't have gone at all, they'll just pussyfoot around and say that it was "done incorrectly" and "cost too much" and a bunch of other non-constructive complaints that will resonate well with current American sentiment.

So that's my prediction. I may change it as we get closer to the election, but right now, it seems to me that we're heading for a Bush loss in 2004.

I'm not even sure how I feel about it, because I'm pissed about this huge Homeland Security thing, I'm pissed that we didn't cut our spending, and I'm pissed about the anti-abortion and gay marriage stance that Bush has. The only thing he's done right is cut taxes, and I'm still pretty neutral about the Iraq war, although I think that we should pull out and let them rebuild themselves.

But I can't help but think that I'd hate living under Dean, because he's not going to slow the growth of government, and I'm sure he'll raise taxes. We'll just slowly creep closer to socialism, as usual.

Fuck. Both parties are awful.

BUBBA HO-TEP

Oh hell yes.

Bubba Ho-Tep was all I dreamed of and more. Bruce Campbell as a 60 year old Elvis in a retirement home, old and cranky with a filthy mouth, always talking about his dick, with a black guy that thinks he's JFK as his sidekick, fighting a 2000 year old Egyptian zombie who sucks people's souls out their assholes. And it was super low budget. That was more fun than I've had at a movie for a LONG TIME.

Go find the independent theater in your area that's playing it, and go see this film. You will not be disappointed.

Ebay

Sweet, my busted Tivo is already bid up to $107 on ebay.

That's enough to cover all the stupid impulse ebay purchases I've made in the last week or so.

Ebay is a really dangerous place for me. In certain conditions, I tend to be really competitive, but in a personal way, not like "I have to show that guy", but more like "I will NOT be beaten". You can see how this is not good.

So I'll be sitting at home, and I'll get an outbid notice on a book that I've bid on. Now, I put down $15 (for example) because this is all the book is really worth to me. But then I see that someone outbid me, and through my head will flash "How DARE he?". So I'll hop onto Ebay, and end up bidding more than I really thought the thing was worth, just because a) I'm impatient and I don't want to bid and wait again, and b) because there's no way I'm going to let that punk-ass beat me to something I want.

I've even caught myself saying "How you like that, BITCH?" when I outbid someone who has tried to snipe me. It's quite sad.

However, I am now the proud owner of Final Fantasy Tactics, Final Fantasy 8, and a copy of The Codebreakers by David Kahn, which is a 1200 page history of cryptography that looks really interesting.

Politics junkie

I'm willing to put $10 on Davis getting ousted today.

Anyone want to take that bet?

OH MY GOD NO PLEASE NO DEAR GOD NO

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

Half Life 2 delayed to April 2004.

http://money.cnn.com/2003/10/07/technology/vivendi_code.reut/index.htm?cnn=yes

insanity

This is exactly why I really hate unions.

where did my answers go?

I just tried to load answers.google.com, and it doesn't seem to work. I'm not sure if it's temporarily down or if they've discontinued it.

That's a damn shame, because I was actually going to try using it.

I've always had a dream of building an LED clock, with 60 LEDs for seconds, 60 for minutes, and 12 for hours. I think it'd be really cool looking, and I've never seen one for sale. I did two years of electrical engineering in college, so I could build it just fine, but I don't remember enough to DESIGN it, without spending a lot of time and effort.

So I figured I'd offer someone $20 to design it, and tell me where to get the parts affordably (generally that many LEDs in a store will cost you a hundred bucks). It would be a perfect use of answers.google, because the right person, skilled in component design, could do it in half an hour, and make a quick 20 bucks.

But alas, I'm fucked. Or maybe it will come back. They still list it on their products page. In the meantime, anyone want to make 20 bucks? :)

edit: Crap, one of my buddies just loaded it successfully, so I must be having some weird DNS issues. The offer still stands, though.

Who would have ever expected football on my blog?

For any of you idiots running around laughing that Rush Limbaugh lost his job for "racist" comments, think again.

Here's a great article explaining how all Limbaugh did was state something that was absolutely true, and that most followers of football already knew, but didn't want to really say out loud.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2089193/

It's unbelievable how far political correctness can go in this country when you can lose your job for pointing out that people are giving someone more credit than they deserve for being black.

Whoring my Ebay sale in a public forum

If anyone's looking to pick up a Tivo Series 1 fixer-upper, I've put my old tivo up on Ebay. It needs to be fixed by Philips (or someone), but it's got a lifetime subscription, which costs $299. I was basically too lazy to deal with it, and I used it breaking as an excuse to get a Tivo 2, so now I'm selling it.

eBay item 3051491877 (Ends Oct-12-03 13:01:22 PDT) - 80hr modded Philips 112 Tivo w/lifetime as is

Also, as an experiment, I put up two of my "apartment spirits" that I made. I'm not going to go into business selling them or anything, because they're a pain to make, but Ebay is addictive, and I was really curious what a hand-made item would fetch, if anything at all. I also used the experiment as a chance to see how different prices/descriptions/options affect people's bidding. I even put in a little item about asking people to request poses from me, because I want to know what people will ask for. Heh. I'm mean.

Spirit 1
Spirit 2

I made up a new word?

I was talking to a friend online a few nights ago and suggested that Halmark should make mean cards you could send to people celebrating your "dumpiversary" (anniversary of being dumped). We both had a laugh over it, and out of curiosity, I did a google search... apparently I'm the first person to use this word on the net. I rule!

Google Search: dumpiversary

guessing game

As evidenced by my previous drooling post, I'm obsessed with getting my hands on Half Life 2 as soon as humanly possible.

The interesting thing here is that the publisher is refusing to give a release date.

This is apparently leading to retailers simply guessing on the release date. That pisses me off, because I have no idea when I'll get the damn thing.

Amazon.com says December 1st

Interestingly, Amazon.fr says November 21st. I find this highly unlikely that Amazon in France would get it first.

Electronic Boutique is the most optimistic, saying November 14th. I'd like to believe them, because that's a sooner date, but I don't believe they'd get it two weeks before Amazon.

I just want it NOW. Right NOW.

records

Are there any music snobs out there that can explain to me this oddly pervasive belief among snooty music-o-philes that a record produces "better sound" than a CD?

I mean, they always use weird vague words like records have better "body" or "depth" or "character". Are you seriously telling me that there are sounds that can't be reproduced digitally? That you couldn't digitally reproduce the EXACT sound that a record makes when it plays? Because I find it impossible to believe that.

Is this something backed up by any sort of science, or just people's experiences with their ears?

interrupters

I don't know if I'm getting old and crotchety or what, or just having a particularly unlucky day, but it seems to me that I'm dealing with more and more people that interrupt while I'm talking.

Now, I personally never do this, because I find it incredibly rude. If I happen to accidentally interrupt someone, I STOP TALKING and we usually find a way to resume conversation politely.

But my god, I've been running into people lately that will just glaze over if they're not speaking, wait a few seconds, and then just start talking. Or they'll wait until you say something that reminds them of a story that they can tell, and then just begin telling it, not giving a flying fuck about what you're saying, because it's not THEM talking. I pause, politely, because my mental engine says that two people shouldn't talk at once, and they just continue on.

This makes me so angry I want to tear their throat out, and I usually lose interest in talking to them. This one woman at my work did it to me twice today, and I just turned around to my computer and started typing, and let her talk at my back until she walked away. It's so fucking RUDE. Nothing will make me lose interest in you as a human being faster than you interrupting me when I'm talking. You stupid, annoying, bitch.

I just can't imagine being one of these people, you'd think eventually they'd notice that people stop wanting to talk to them. I certainly do.

So if you're one of those people who finds themselves talking over people, and raising the volume of your voice until they stop talking, cut it the fuck out. The rest of us hate you.

The sharks are nipping

Well this is just charming.

As if things weren't bad enough for my company, now Hewlett Packard is offering our customers $25k to switch from Sun to HP. Bastards.

Master of the back-handed compliment

This amused me, also. On talking about mortality with Kevin this evening, and he said this, which I'm not sure if it's a compliment or not, my friends comment on my forgetfulness and obliviousness so often that I have to assume that it's true:

freston0: You're Tobin. You can't die. I'm telling you, there's something so oblivious about you that it seems like you could quite possibly forget to die.

Damn you people, I remember SOME things. I just have different priorities than other people. Okay, well, most other people. Maybe all other people. I just happen to put a low priority on anniversaries, birthdays, my own clothing, remembering to eat, sleeping, and other things that don't seem very important.

The most beautiful thing I've ever seen...

Okay, I've just watched the new movie for Half Life 2.

Go to www.gametrailers.com, scroll to the bottom under Vivendi Universal, and get the trailer called "Half Life 2 - Volume 1". I just watched this trailer, and now I'm downloading the 580 megabyte version available from here. It's still got a few hours left to go, but it's TWENTY FIVE MINUTES LONG.

So even if you don't really care for video games, you have to see this. It's like nothing I've ever seen before. The people move and act like real people, the environments feel completely real. You can interact with everything. Throw a grenade under a box, and it will fall off a building and land on people. Running from bad guys? You can run into a building, and drag a table in front of the door, and they'll try to kick the door and not be able to get in. Seriously, my words cannot do this thing justice, it will blow your mind. It's light years beyond any game I've seen up to this point. You can distract enemies, who will behave like actual people, looking in different directions and intelligently reacting to their environment.

Go watch it. Now.