dego

I just came from Tucson, which is like a museum for ugly people. Screaming children, tired white trash, various disgusting dregs of humanity sitting around waiting for flights.

Then I roll into San Diego. I used to live here in my early teens, but I was apparently too young to appreciate it. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE here is hot. Someone remind me why I don't live here.

I'm sitting outside in the middle of December in short sleeves, surrounded by palm trees. The girl that I let use my cell phone is waiting for her friends to arrive, playing a song for me on her guitar. The air smells like Seaport Villiage, where I used to fly kites and buy magic tricks from small shops. Coming in over the port, I could see people riding bikes along grassy paths, aircraft carriers sitting in the water, and long public beaches. People who meet my eye pause and smile. Somewhere in this city my buddy Chad is probably sitting, drinking pearl tea, typing on his laptop and picking up insanely hot SDSU girls. I might give him a ring, but my layover is only an hour.

Ah well. Back to San Jose soon.

things that amused me tonight

Strip typing flash game. The girl is ugly, the concept is funny.

It's sad what desperate women will do for very little money.

OPEN SOURCE LIGHTCYCLE GAME. Splooge. Tron is still the shit.

Some porn site left their galleries open on accident.

A website dedicated to the unibrow. Well, they call it the monobrow. But it's still hilarious. Check out this guy:

whiskey for my men, beer for my horses

You know, country music really isn't that bad.

I couldn't listen to it all the time, but when I come home to visit in Tucson, I end up hearing a LOT of country, since my mom and brother have started listening to it in the last few years.

Honestly, it's really entertaining a lot of the time. Most of the songs are stories with a catchy tune, and the stories and/or sentiments are pretty good. A lot of them are about drinking, or women, but you also get some good tales.

And I know a lot of people were up in arms about that Toby Keith song with the "we'll put a boot in your ass" line, but if you listen to the whole song, I like it. I'm glad that we still have a section of the American public that isn't a bunch of whiny shitheads, who actually get angry when someone attacks us. Thank god for those people. I get so used to living with the spoiled assholes in California that I forget that we have a large section of the American public who haven't accepted political correctness, and have held onto the spirit that is the heart of what makes this nation great. I need to remember to leave California more often. Or just move. Soon.

Granted, I've had about enough of it now. Like any genre, they have about 15 songs that they play over and over again. I'm looking forward to getting back to my MP3 collection and listening to some Radiohead, Four Tet, and Amon Tobin.

merry christmas, one and all

Last night, my brother and I stayed up till 2:30am making jack cheese. It's air drying now. It looks pretty good. Tonight we made beer. It's out on the patio cooling off to 70 degrees so I can add the yeast. That's the more normal part of our christmas.

Let me tell you a little about my grandmother. Always batshit, she's gone even battier since my grandfather died. She told us that when she turns 100, she's going to buy a couple cartons of smokes and go to town. She quit smoking about 10 years ago because her health was so bad.

Tonight I showed up at her place, right on time, when I was supposed to, and she was sitting in her living room, watching the weather channel, in her bra. There's a first. I won't be horny for weeks, now. She started puttering around in the kitchen, until I told her somewhat politely to put some clothes on.

On the way to my mom's house, she pointed out the window, and told me that there were too many people moving to Tucson, because of all the new housing developments. "That's okay," she said, "because those will all be gone soon anyway. They'll probably be taken out by nuclear war." Yeah, my grandmother is convinced that we'll all die soon in a horrible blaze of fission.

I haven't even gotten to the parts about her being confused about what day it is, and yelling "Merry christmas, everyone!" when it's Easter. She's honestly not crazy in the bad, helpless way, but in a clueless way that is shocking in its irrelevance. I think her bloodline is what has given me the touch of obliviousness that my friends love to kid me about.

But yes, this is my Christmas. I hope yours is similiarly entertaining!

some random crap

While I'm not a fan of Howard Dean, I have to give the man a lot of credit for his innovative marketing. Besides his blog and several other sites, he now has a (repetitive, crappy) shockwave game where you can run around in the fake snow and recruit fake supporters. That's pretty slick.

Oh lord do I want a Sony QRIO so so so badly.

This is some seriously, seriously bad math. See if you can spot where the reporter failed 6th grade math class:

"Where Apple was once one of the most profitable companies in the category, its operating profit margins have declined precipitously from 20% in 1981 to a meager 0.4% today, just one-tenth the industry average of 2%."

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/78/jobs.html

Oh, and my brother and I made cheese tonight with a make it yourself kit. Well, we set up the curd, which has to sit for 12 hours, and then dry for two days, and then age for two months. But we did the effort intensive five hour baking and preparation thingy tonight. That was fun. Tomorrow we brew up some beer.

damn

Another reason why we will never be as cool as the Japanese. They out-crazy us every damn time.



It's from this page, but I can't read any of it, being that it's in japanese. However, it's an anti-penis spring to put in your vagina.

That's amazing.

laptops

The cheapest brands seem to be eMachines and Medion.

Any opinions on those?

impulse buy

I need a laptop.

Okay, I totally don't. But the one that Sun gave me is 6 years old, nonfunctional Pentium 2, and I WANT a new laptop.

I was inspired by a friend of mine who found a 2ghz Intel laptop on Bestbuy for $600 (after $250 mail in rebate).

So help me. I'm going to look at Best Buy, and a couple more stores and see if they have any xmas sales going on that would make this a good idea. Preferably I won't spend over $800. I want as much as I can get for that, the more stupid features the better.

I also don't want a "random asian built this in his basement" laptop, I'd like a brand name that will actually perform, and has a warranty. I know this is possible, because PC hardware is dirt cheap.

So if you see any amazing laptop deals while you're doing last minute xmas shopping, PLEASE let me know. I'd like to buy this before xmas, because that's when I assume the best deals will be. Tell me what brands you've had good experiences with too, please. I know nothing about laptops. Absolutely zero.

Thanks!

crapo

So, my DSL was taken down by hostile action by Earthlink this week. I've taken actions to fix this, but I'm totally fucked in terms of internet access. I have to go over to Sun to read any mail, and this hasn't left me much time for posting, or reading news, or doing much of anything online.

I'll be heading off to visit family in Tucson for the holidays this weekend, so I'll be mostly incommunicado until the New Year, barring me getting really bored at my mom's house, and posting something before then.

So everyone have a good holiday, and I'll see you back here in 2004, once I get my internet back.

Being without my DSL is like having a damn limb missing.

Saddam pictures

Crowds celebrate the capture of Saddam:



Saddam in custody:


The hidey-hole:

I was surprised to see it was basically a coffin with air holes:


Ironically, stashed along with the weapons in his coffin, was $750,000 in US dollars:


It's a strange end to capture a mass murderer in a hole full of weapons, without a fight. He sent his soldiers to die for him, murdered his own sons in law, tortured and killed tens of thousands of people, and he wasn't willing to fight or kill himself to evade capture.

Saddam Hussein 'arrested in Iraq'

Well I'll be god damned.

They're reporting now that they have Saddam in custody. He was found hiding in a cellar.

BBC NEWS | Saddam Hussein 'arrested in Iraq'

God is a sock.

A pale imitation

This is kind of an interesting idea, but mostly because it reminds me of Majestic, that wonderful, engaging game where you'd get random phone calls, emails, and IMs. That was wonderful. I miss it so much.

Anyway, these people are presenting a story where you actually watch the emails and instant messages of people, happening in "real time" in their lives. It's basically a new form of internet fiction that would never have been possible in book form, which I find fascinating. I just downloaded it, and I'm going to try it out now.

Welcome to DEN!

James Howard Kunstler: Eyesore of the Month

I fully support this site, because any page with the phrase "exercise in hyper-entropic avant garde faggotry" is okay in my book.

James Howard Kunstler: Eyesore of the Month

a modest proposal

(Thanks, John!)

dumber than a box of hair

I just worked all night, and finally sent out about 900 lines of code to my peers for review. Now, this is a pretty big deal, if you send out bad code, they'll think you're an idiot, and your peers review you when it comes to promotions, etc. Besides that, it's a matter of pride, and I don't want to ever send out crap.

Just after sending it out, I went into the bathroom, noticed that the toilet roll was empty, and I was so tired that I just took it off the dispenser, and then threw the cardboard roll in the toilet. Then I stood there and stared at it, realizing that SOMETHING was wrong with this picture, if I could only figure out what.

Now I'm starting to wonder if I should have gotten a full night's sleep and looked at my code again tomorrow afternoon before sending it out. God knows what I put in there. I might have left comments in the code insulting the ancestry of my co-workers, or ascii art representations of the visions I'm starting to see out of the corners of my eyes.

stuck in my own head without cigarettes

Shockwave fest!

First - Gollum rapping.

Next - A surprisingly addictive little game, "fan and ball".

This site isn't in english, but it has some pretty crazy videos of things happening in slow motion. Most surreal are videos like this one, which appears to be a chunk of tofu slowly dropping and splattering. Stuff is just cooler in slow motion.

Some guy cut together sound and video clips to make a very convincing trailer for The Hobbit. Now if only Peter Jackson would actually MAKE the damn thing.

I have to give some SERIOUS respect to EA for this billboard. What a great way to catch geek attention:

smile through the pain

A naked, samurai sword-wielding martial arts expert screaming, "I'm God! I'm immortal" hacked his wife to death yesterday in a blood-soaked Bronx rampage, police said.


"You know, son, when I was in Nam, I fucked gooks like your daddy right in the lung tissue.", mutters Wesley Clark.


"When boarding a plane, dropping off the kids with the nanny or watching a 10-wheeler careening down the highway, the last thing you want to worry about is whether the pilot, nanny or driver has been imbibing something stronger than coffee ... The wireless patch is placed over four tiny holes made in the employee's skin, through which small samples of fluid are continuously tested. The test results are then transmitted to a receiver."

Welcome to the future, people. Every right you surrender brings you closer to the brink.


Gore fucks his old running mate Lieberman and hops in bed with another man.


And finally, for your surreal tech gadget of the day, a portable USB storage device shaped like a freaking rubber ducky:

The Zone

I was in the Zone today at work. I haven't had that feeling for a while.

There's something about everything snapping into place, and realizing that I'm really GOOD at what I do, when I love what I'm doing. Because of understaffing, people's personal issues, and the fact that my boss is starting to realize that I'm someone who gets things done, I've been assigned the work of roughly three people.

Today, I worked for about 13 hours straight. I didn't surf the web, I didn't read the news, any of the stuff I normally do. I didn't even notice the passing of time. I wrote 800 lines of professional, functional, debugged, error checked code. I basically finished an entire command line utility that is going to ship in Solaris 10. And I did it all on 4 hours of sleep, five cans of soda, and three double espressos. Heh.

And the thing is, even though I was tired, and wanted to just pass out, I still loved it. I have friends who sit at desk jobs, and surf the web all day, and chat with their friends, and they talk about how great it is. That kind of mind-numbing monotony would drive me insane. Work has been killing me for the last few months, as we drive toward unrealistic and looming deadlines, in the mad rush to make the last build before they slam the Solaris 10 gate closed, leaving us shivering in the cold, clutching our precious project.

There was a moment around the middle that everything just clicked into place, and I blew away hundreds of useless lines, and everything became clean, and streamlined, and beautiful. God damn, that felt good. After a while, you get a feel for what really works. I never got that in school, but I've been writing so much code in the last few months that correct form is really starting to congeal in my head. It used to be that I would think about a problem and try to figure out how to solve it. Now, solutions come immediately, and the hard part is picking the best one.

For a long time at Sun, I felt outclassed by the experience and knowledge that these people have, their years of experience and their in depth grasp of networking, and coding, and operating systems, and algorithms. And I still ask a lot of questions. In fact, I ask them all the time. But I don't feel outclassed anymore, because even though a lot of these older engineers know more than me, I can design and implement right up there with them. I can solve problems intuitively, and match patterns from elsewhere in the operating system. And I can do it quickly, and efficiently, and without supervision of any kind.

So forgive me if this was a bit of a weird post, I'm still buzzed from the day, and a bit drunk, not ready to sleep because I've not gotten to relax yet. It was just a pretty amazing day, and it's difficult to explain. Ah well. Shortly, I'm going to blast you all with some offensive links I've just found, and then I'm going to go sit on my couch, open a beer or four, and watch Cowboy Bebop.

dial-a-lesbian, five inch nails, and big boobs

Looking for christmas gifts for your family and friends? Here are some ideas, from me to you. That's right, Tobin looks out for you. Tobin loves you.

Have a lesbian call your loved one. You can choose from several popular themes, including "bull dyke", and "transgender lesbian". You can't lose with this one!

http://www.lesbianphonecall.com

Also, nothing says tasteful quite like your very own Jesus Nail Ornament! How better to savor the love of your lord Jesus than to send one of your friends a memorative five inch nail, something like the ones that impaled Jesus to the cross? Tacky? I think not!

You could also buy your loved one some shares in a drug company. No, I mean a real drug company. Some guy is trying to start a publically traded medical cannabis company. He should try to get the symbol POT. There's only a few little things standing in his way, like the fact that what he wants to do is still illegal.

I found another amazing gift online, but I can't freaking post it because I'm getting it for my brother. You hear that, Rusty? Oh yeah.

So I leave you with this. Women with big boobs are smarter.

Damn you amazon!

They killed the Michael Jackson link I just sent out.

George grabbed it for his blog here:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/goshen/114650.html#cutid1

Just in case you missed it, it was a list of recommendations for people buying a Michael Jackson album, and it was full of links to anti-pedophilia books, etc. Check it out.

Amazon

Check out the user recommendations for this item on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/music/B0000DJE9R/advice/104-7509311-8871927

Also, this is a really interesting read. It's a story in the first person about applying to work at the NSA and all the craziness that they make you go through.

Angry Naked Pat: Ice Cream Fantastic

A long time ago, I posted a link to a video of a fat kid rapping for about five minutes, and it was damn near the funniest thing I'd ever seen.

What I didn't know was that there's an ENTIRE WEBSITE OF HIS VIDEOS. I've been watching these movies for like an hour now, and I've wet my pants, and my stomach is killing me from laughing so hard.

Just trust me. Start watching these videos. You will not be disappointed. Some of them are rap, some of them are just songs, or him fucking around. None of them make any sense. It's absolutely brilliant. I'm in heaven, there are like a billion movies on this page.

Angry Naked Pat: Ice Cream Fantastic

"i like to call myself wayne or sometimes brady, i'm a black old lady"

"you got big ears like dumbo so let me bust a nut in it"

From "The Superbowl is Gay" - "orange juice raped my father, so that makes him gay"

WATCH THESE RIGHT NOW.