status report

I'm in Seattle.

Kevin and I woke up at 11pm. We wandered out for hearty breakfast involving piles of meat and being surrounded by leather wearing bulldykes.

It is now 4am.

We're about to hop in my car and drive to Vancouver, because we're bored and I've never seen Canada before, eh?

There has been lots of drinking and debauchery. Luckily I have my camera and believe in total coverage. I have pictures of me climbing on a giant stone troll, Kevin's completely empty ghetto apartment, and an all night goth diner.

Pictures and details to come.

As you were.

ghost dog

Now, that was just truly bizarre.

I'm sitting here in my office at Sun, it's about 9pm, and pretty much everyone has gone home. I'm writing code, and I hear a faint panting. When I turned around, a little white dog with no collar came trotting into my office, did a lap or two, and then stared at me. I petted its head, and it trotted back out the door. I wandered out in the hallway to watch it, and it broke into a sprint, and disappeared around the corner. When I walked down to the corner, there was no sign of it.

I kind of like the idea of packs of stray dogs roaming the hallways of my campus at night. We should bring in some wolves, too. I could sit here with my door locked and the lights out, hacking away, hearing the echoing howls coming down the hallway.

the fall of western civilization

Yesterday, I went to The Great Mall in Milpitas, to pick up a birthday present.

Let me tell you a bit about the Great Mall. It claims to be the largest mall in California, which I wouldn't doubt. The circumference of the inside of the mall is 2 miles. There are approximately 8000 parking spots, according to the website. It has a skate park, Dave and Busters, a huge movie theater, and well over 200 stores.

Guess what it doesn't have.

A fucking bookstore. Not one. There is a store that sells JUST JELLYBEANS. A store that just sells beanbags. I couldn't believe it. I wandered around a bit, then looked at the directory, and finally asked the woman at the help desk.

"What bookstores are in this mall?"
"Uhhh... I don't think we have any bookstores. Oh, wait, MediaPlay sells some books."

So I went over to MediaPlay, and they had a couple books shoved away in the back. Awful, inane tripe like Anne McCaffrey and Anne Rice, and a full set of fan fic books about Star Trek.

This blew my mind, and still does. Do people read so little in this day and age that having even ONE bookstore in the state's largest mall is unprofitable? What the hell is wrong with the savages in this state? I just wanted to grab some hip little skater kid by the shoulders and scream "READ A BOOK!".

Unbelievable. When I asked the woman for a bookstore, you would have thought I'd asked here where the store that sold records was. Or the abacus store.

kill yourself for love

MTV is promoting some weird morals these days.

I just saw a video where it starts out that a guy had died, falling off a bridge in his car. But his ghost is still wandering around, even though no one can see him. So his girlfriend goes out and gets in her car, runs a red light, and is killed when she's hit by a huge truck. Then she walks out of the wreck, and goes over and hugs him, and the video ends.

The moral of the story, kids, is if a loved one dies, you should off yourself immediately to reunite yourself with them. Suicide is the only way you're going to be happy again.

television battle

I'm watching a really interesting battle going on right now on television.

Viacom is threatening to raise their rates on the popular stations of VH1, MTV/MTV2, Comedy Central, and a few other stations.

In response, Dish Network is threatening to drop those channels.

Now, if you watch any shows on those networks, there's a scrolling bar that keeps coming across the screen, saying "Dish Network is going to take the channels you paid for! Call them and tell them to stop!", which is obviously being sent out by Viacom.

However, within a few seconds of that scrolling on the screen, a black bar is coming up and covering the scrolling text. So Dish Network literally has some guy sitting at a computer somewhere, watching these channels, and sending out a black blocker bar every time they put up their scroller.

It's hilarious to watch. I'm predicting that Viacom is going to start scrolling text at the top of the screen, so the Dish Network guys will have to move their black bar. It's like watching two little kids fight. Except these kids are multi-billion dollar corporations.