furtive explorations

My Ionic Breeze (Model SI624) thhe original one I suppose just blinks and blinks when ever I turn it on. That is the "clean me" blinking light but I've done everything but bath with the stupid thing and it won't stop.

The rails are completely clean, the wires inside look intact and clean, the contacts at the bottom of the rails and down inside the machine look clean. I even took compressed air and spritzed out the entire interior of the thing.

Is there anything I can do to get it working? At all? Or should I just throw it away and kiss off all the money I spent on it?

BTW, my sister's (that I bought for her) makes a continual "ringing" noise when running. Can that be helped? I'd have given her my base (since I know it is the long wires ringing as the air moves past them) but my base unit is good for nothing but a faint green flashing in a dark room.

Emotional pain is a funny thing. It creeps up on you when you least expect it. A number, a date, a place, or a word and all the sudden you are deep into a fugue, tossed backwards to a time you'd rather forget. You wind up developing defenses to handle that effect.

Today I was reminded how old I was. That doesn't really bother me that much, I'm fully aware of the sun continuing to whirl the earth about and I don't fear the passage of time that much. What happened was that someone mentioned that their little brother was 23 today.

It occurred to me that I hadn't yet done what I do every year somewhere between March 20th and June 20th. And that is calculate how old my little brother would have been. 28, in case you are wondering. And three days, now. The number 20 is the real kicker there, in that he died on a 20, was born on a 20 and was 20 when he died of Leukemia.

For me, I defend against this fugue by telling someone his story. You are spared this because I already got it out of my system on that poor unsuspecting girl at work. "Would have been," was the question she shouldn't have asked, I suppose. Each year it gets a little easier to tell and I smile more while I think of the good bits and the odd ironies and extra time we were granted through various doctor's sheer competence. I still tear up, though.

The only thing I've gotten figured out after all this is that you can't just ignore these aches and pains forever. They leak out, demand attention, catch you off guard. You do have to put it behind you and move on, no matter how fucking stupid that sounds when you are in the middle of those first waves of loss. The trick is to let the last of the pain leak out a little at a time until only the good parts of the story remain.

We love them because they are clearly one of us. See these links, especially that fifth one: Bork, Bork, Bork!, Hacker, Elmer, and Pig Latin are hopefully just the beginning for the Translate Google! project. Sure, it is a little wonky still but worth trying out...

Right now, they have an experimental "translate this into your language" tinkertoy for you to play with. OrK, someone please translate Google into RedNek for those of us trapped in Kentucky. =)

Update: left off this article An interview with Henziger one of the top brains at Google!

• Snoop Dog mowing lawns on ESPN? wtf? This is me looking up and seeing a guy that looks like Snoop (and no, they don't all look-a-like, fuck you very much. This was one skinny, cornrowed, sharp templed, pointy chinned lawn-mowing fool.) Why would Snoop be mowing lawns on ESPN? What was that fucking commercial? It didn't seem to be a promo for ESPN directly...
• Insidious cue ball of evil! Whenever we play pool there always seems to be one pocket that is particularly annoying -- like it has a repulsion field, aka "Rodney Field" -- and one ball that is too stubborn to go into the hole when you shoot at it and happy to drop for you when you are on the other team. This time we spotted the hole pretty easy but no ball was standing out as the rotton one. Then, Steve, thinking out-side the metaphorical (and metaphysical) box pointed out that we had 16 balls to consider, not 15! Sure enough, we quickly came to the conclusion that we were dealing with evil, pure and simple, from the eight dimension in the form of the cue ball!

Of course let me remind you of my post from more than a year ago which has the graphing name distribution dingus.

There is this whole history that free software is developed often in the academic environment, where basically government money funded that work. And then commercial work is done. TCP/IP came out of the university environment. Now, 90 percent of the implementations you buy are commercially tuned and supported. *snort* 90% that you buy? Yeah, because the free software ones are fucking free And then the companies that do that commercial work pay taxes, create jobs, so the government keeps funding more research, primarily in universities. So that ecosystem where you have free software and commercial software, and customers always get to decide which they use, that's a very important and healthy ecosystem. Nevertheless, we want the government to turn off the sun and let us run the whole planet with M$ HeatSource.

So when someone says to you, "Oh, they added a new feature to Windows," you have to say to yourself, "Are they literally saying Microsoft can't add any new features to Windows?" No, we are saying you can use "adding new features" to crush competitors out of the market And how can that be a good thing? What are we supposed to do with our $5 billion-a-year R&D budget? Fix the bugs? Reduce the memory and processor bloat? Charge less?

But if you say to people, "Do you understand the GPL?" And they'll say, "Huh?" And they're pretty stunned when the Pac-Man-like nature of it is described to them. GPL: You can have my code for free. You can do anything you like to it. BUT, if you want to redistribute it to other people then you have to give it away for free, including the changes you wrote yourself that you want them to use. If you just link to the software and don't modify it, you can put it on a disk you sell and integrate your product with it so long as you make it clear that you aren't selling my stuff and don't subsume it into your product. And you need to give the source out that I freely gave you. How hard is that? Pac-Man? I can't even wrap my mind around that analogy. Always eating? Pursued by ghosts? Pills make it temporarily invincible?

Here is an idea, hang a little robot fish from a thin wire and just swing it about it a glass box. Much cheaper, same effect.

And there is your problem too. As Steve might point out, M$'s reputation for security isn't the best. In fact, I'd put it in the "fucking shitty" range, at best. But you can't stuff cats back into bags. I'm suprised more of the coderz out there haven't added a micro stack of their own to their code already. Enough vendors have had to do it when working on windows. And it is pretty tough on M$ who have been laboring under a very rare and long term "how come everyone else can do this" onus only to be dragged out into the street and beaten for starting to do that very thing...

Still, I think NTK said it best at the top of this week's missive.

Here is a fact I didn't get a chance to learn: What is the side-impact rating of a 85ish Plymouth Reliant K?

Fucking moron...

• C.Ulture Shocked added to Watching. (no different than Culture Shocked it seems but I got no idea which link to keep now. At least I got the name right, eh?)
• Strange Daze added to Watching.
• NekoNekoWai added to Comic Culture. You either get the joke or you don't, no explaining...
• Aniverse added to Comic Culture.
• Lethal Doses should rise up on your radar, cause the Soup is back!
• Maison Otaku also sneaks onto the Watching list. And after a full reading, up to MF in the Pick-A-Day section!
• Project Fanboy saunters into Watching with the rest.
• More minor tinkering. And some overdue link checking...
• And... moved Jackie's Fridge up to MWF since both Sklutch and I read it pretty regular. And I think I'll push Project Fanboy up to Occasional while I'm at it and add in JoBeth! in it's place down in Watching.

If, right now, you are thinking "Why the fuck is he adding that dross and not Xxxx which is the bestest damn comic in the world" then it is likely because you are too feeble and shy to mail me about a comic. Shame on you...

Lauren Ambrose. Yow.

Praise the gods below for making her legal (she's 24)! So she doesn't have a long and lusterous filmography...starring with Seth Green couldn't have helped...but she's still an amazing geek girl.

All praises to the ultra-mega-kick-ass-southern-fried-cool geek girl! Hooray! And watch her in 6FU.

• I finally noticed that Aford Turtle's seemingly extra irregular daily updating was caused by my own incompetence. It would seem to be a TRSa comic. Oops.
• In related news, am I going to have to openly chastize Ryan over at Hound's Home? It would seem so. I have no problem with artists taking time off, switching schedules, quitting for months to deal with school and life and such except for the terrible pit of blackness that wells up in my soul whenever something I love dies just a little bit while I'm watching. But seriously, if you aren't going to keep up with the luscious, intricate, happy-art at least change the title on your homepage to not use the phrase: "updated EVERY FREAKIN' DAY" because lying makes baby Jesus cry like... well never mind...
• I also moved a buncha stuff around and fixed every false abbreviation I could stand. Real names, whata concept. Also, if anyone has any idea what day any of the Clan Bob comics update I'd appreciate it. BTW there are more of them today. Looks like they wanna be another KeenSpot. More comics == more fun but comeon someone tell me if they have ANY regular updates... Oh wait, I got it, calendar mode is under "Archive"... sexy!

• Anime Turnpike Lots o links there baby!
• The Valkyrie Gallery Lots o tough ass women there, um, don't hit me if I say baby!
• Jakob on PDF. It is so rare that I agree with Jakob but I have to admit I HATE the PDF viewer. Open a random pdf and click on the "magnifying glass" icon. Now click somewhere. Now figure out how to UNmagnify. Yay! Did you guess right click and pick a view option or press-and-hold on the magnifying glass to get a demagnify icon or maybe hold down CTRL and then wiggle the mouse till it changes the icon? Any way you slice it, wasn't that shitty? Yay! I've become so jaded I can't tell how many layers deep that sarcasm was
• A CALL FOR THE COMPLETE ELIMINATION OF JOKE HAIKU PRODUCTION ON THE INTERNET That really is important enough to call for all caps...
• Blog Software from GreySoft
• The Velvetgirls Ahh, when the incompetent try and manufacture hype...
• EndEffect2k1 art site with blogging. Worth poking around on...

• Wall Street Journal snickers at M$ still using FreeBSD at Hotmail and Passport.
• MSNBC chimes in with a mangled! reprint of the WSJ article. Nicer formatting, more ads, fewer competitors mentioned, faster loading... you pick the trade-off!
• CNet gets a bit more in depth and actually does more of the "supposing" that you normally see from a WSJ article. =)

Personally, I say wait for Netscape 6.0Beta2 to come out in a few weeks and switch to that. It allows multiple mailboxes at the sametime, individual settings for each box, alternate SMTP servers, aliased mail addressing and it fucking prints e-mail correctly. And it is only about 8MB with a html composer (tho honestly I'd not wish that composer on my enemies right now) and a mail client and a browser and a newsreader (which is pretty damn good) and tucked away on the mozilla version is a budding IRC client. =)

And by all means, hostile crew, cross-post away! Of course that really only applies to Muad'Dib since all the rest are too lazy to set up personal blogs... =)

There's a new version of Internet Explorer (v. 6.0) available. I downloaded it last night (all 11 Megs of it) and I just uninstalled it. It screwed up my system in countless ways and added nothing new to my web browsing experience except unwanted headaches. Take my advice, stick with the 5.x you're running now.

And no commentary, please, about how I should be using Netscape because Bill Gates is the focus of all evil in the modern world. Netscape sucks.

Trust me on this. It ain't worth it!

The next big idea for the Fast-Food Franchises

The "Ecstatic Meal", a regular happy meal gives you a burger, fries, drink and small toy. The "Ecstatic Meal" provides a burger, fries, drink, small toy and you get to punch a clown in the face!!! Now tell me that you wouldn't pay the extra cash to relieve the frustrations of the day and get Ronald back for years of crappy commercials.

The reason I was almost late to that party (as covered in the last post) is that the dumb bitches that live above us ran out of dish-washing detergent for their dish-washer. So they, being dumb bitches, decided to use the dish-washing liquid they had next to the sink. The giant mounds of foam that poured from the machine quickly returned to the filthy water state and began dripping thru my ceiling.

And before you get on my case about the "dumb bitches" remark let me just point out that if you can get to at least 18 years of age and not wonder why you buy two types of soap for what is essentially the same task means you are a dumb bitch. I mean, you fucking noticed that, right? Plus my bottle says "not for use in mechanical washers". I figure you should read the label before trying something completely new like that.

In any case, I've met them and you haven't. Once you meet them, I'll bet you agree...