furtive explorations

I should amend that. Never fall in love with a Canadian if you're an American.

Or, more accurately, if you're an American...never fall in love with a Canadian artist, whose work is as unique and wonderful as she is.

And most importantly, if you ever find that person who makes your heart beat out of step...whose mere presence feels like home, warm apple pie, and a cool fall evening...who talked about children with you as if they were a forgone conclusion...who has stood by you through good times and bad...who may not understand, but accepts anyway...who has seen the darkness within you yet loves you none the less...who you love more than you ever felt you could love anyone...who you want to spend the rest of your otherwise miserable and trying life with...and whose absence makes you ill in every aspect...keep them. Do anything. Say anything. Do...not...let...them...go...EVER.

I let her go. I have never made a more stupid decision in all of my life, and I pay for it every waking day.

I need to destroy something...

1. don not pos thwen really really drunk.

B. try to remember to have a lexx party more often.

3. don't drink nearly somuch you fuckin gbastards.

d. Tkae off your shooues when you fet get warm.!

5. Dot'n post when drunk!>

It took me three tryies to get this fucker to post right. You don't wanna know how many tims I tried my password before it worked.

My problem that is taking the edge off my rant is that little nasty-gram I sent Sharper Image was met by a stony silence... Until today *dum dum da duuuum*!

Today, rather than the e-mail I was expecting I received in the mail two (2) postage paid merchandise return labels with RMA numbers and the whole works. What ever else bad you say about them catalogue companies and their wacky, wacky antics you can not fault service like that! Now we shall wait and see how they do with "the repairing and the fixing and working and the electrical wires she burns and oh the glaving..."

Of course, that headache is made worse by my needing to buy guns and food supplies since I clearly am going to have to take over a small uninhabited island and declare my own regime. This was made clear now that Support Ebs for the Frist Amendment. "The number of Americans who think the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which protects freedom of speech, goes too far in the rights it guarantees has doubled to four in 10 over the past year, a new poll says." One in five of my countrymen think not being told what we can say it too much. *hangs head in shame* Time to move, folks, it is time to move. (Did I say 1 in 5? Shit, I meant 2 outta 5! Pack yer bags folks!)

My next headache is Covad sucking it down in DSL. Hostile runs off of a Bluestar DSL circuit that is now run by Covad. And Covad is coming apart at the seams, or some other shedding of parts at high velocity analogy. What ever is going on, I only hope I don't have to do a frantic move over to the office to keep our various sites up. I like being independent and DSL is priced a lot cheaper than we would spend running a DS1 or moving into a data-center. Even our own.

Oh yeah, and Paula Poundstone was arrested. How the fuck does that happen? I still quote some of my favorite bits from her standup like 15 years later.

Now on to the next annoyance: County sued for firing colour blind traffic-light installer just pisses me off.

A former traffic-light installer is suing a Florida county for firing him because he is colour blind and couldn't distinguish between red and green wires. Quick, guess which county in Florida?

Cleveland Merritt, 54, claims in his federal lawsuit that Palm Beach County violated the Americans with Disability Act. ADA is both one of the best and worst pieces of law we have. So good when it is good, so bad when it is abused

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has already ruled that the county discriminated against Merritt. Yep, you now have the right to be unable to do your own job. Welcome to America, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, Litigator of the Nonsensical!

The county says it wasn't illegal to fire Merritt from his job for failing to do his work, which required discerning between some of the 19 differently coloured wires in a traffic light. *sigh* 19 colors? He should the phone company, they have 200+ colors!

A 2,300mph rail link from Britain across the Atlantic to the US could be built by 2030. By 2040 we should have the monkeies-out-of-the-ass thing down pat too! Only 82 miles of hollow tunnel per year, if we start in 2002. *snort*

He says boring a tunnel would be expensive and "old-fashioned". Not to mention infeasible thanks to the whole "continental drift" thing. See, out in the middle of the ocean is a huge volcanic ridge slowly chewing up the ocean floor. We can bore through lava now except for it being old-fashioned?

Instead the link would be a floating submerged tube anchored to the sea bed with cables. A 2,300 mile long tube pinned to the ocean floor is easy but drilling a hole is expensive?

Magnets would levitate the train and friction would be eliminated by maintaining a vacuum inside the tunnel allowing supersonic speeds. Sure, a 2,300 mile long, flexible, evacuated, floating, connected to the ocean floor tunnel full of magnets and 500mph trains. BTW, how do you define "supersonic" when the tunnel is a vacuum? See, no sound... Best of all what are we making these tubes out of?

He claims the link would be safer than conventional trains because there is no chance of derailment. Yeah, it would just rattle around in there, 1,650 miles from either shore, deep beneath the cool waters of the Atlantic, smashing into the sides of its tube at 500mph. Safer than conventional trains by a long shot, I'm sure.

He is now forming a consortium of experts to draw up more detailed plans. Meet over at his house, bring the extra crack pipe because he always hogs his.

Basically, from what I can tell you can style them with stylesheets directly or poke values into the DOM with JavaScript on the fly. And you can set up the scollers in your page to be different from the ones that scroll your page. Handy for those inset windows or forms you want to pimp out a bit.

Here are some good links, I'll try and get a real tutorial of my own up if I get the chance:

• Deviantart
• Microsoft (it has no Track example??? Thanks guys!) The reference site at M$
• WebSiteTips (also no Track example... and ohmigawd what colors!)

Better still a visit to the Butternut.com link leads you to *snort* Planet Twinkie. I now wonder if this gay thing is some sort of plan or conspiracy. Does white bread make you gay? =) =)

• Polymer City is building up a list of underappreciated comics... This is a reminder kids; If you like one online comic dig through the list of comics that author likes once in a while. Send Andrah your suggestions! I'll be adding links from there here, there is some good stuff in that list!
• Hosers was linked on Goats which is a high compliment in my book. Worthy of it too, it seems. For more than a year the top of the :) bookmark list in my browser read like this which should tell you how I rated it as a comic:
  • UF
  • G <- Number two on my "checkit" list, biatch!
  • DZ
  • The Onion
• Riboflavin came from PA, I think. But it seems to be completely dead so whatever...
• Bobbin (not Bobbins) came from god knows where at this point.
• Shamanic Princess isn't a comic but has da purdy art on dere site. MT hid that link on their page. Shiny!
• Sprite Show is a hookup from Eversummer Eve.
• Dragon Boy popped up on Schlock as a recommendation.

• Cascadia. No anthem yet? How about "Smells Like Teen Spirit"?
• NAVA Flag Survey. Also, read the chatter on MetaFilter here.
• Soft Pr0n or Fashion (or both?). I suppose I really should add "or neither" there too. =)
• Sex Trade Fiction written by an insider?

Yesterday we went to a fine dinner. Not only fine because of the food but because of the tasty waitress that served us. She is the same one we had last time and we asked for her specifically because she was so funny and cute. Making this task easier was the fact that she had such a memorable name. She had also told us her schedule so we knew when she'd be there (we'd promised to come back and see her.)

While chatting with her, and teasing her we had found out a few particular details about her life. Really specific things like what College she went to, that her parents lived here in Louisville but she tended to live near campus during the school year, she was in a sorority, she is a triple-major, she was going to Ireland in a couple of weeks, what bars and music she liked, and a few other details. One of her majors is "Psyche".

So after dinner we go see Swordfish (better than I thought it would be but there was no good reason for Halle to get naked, what a bullshit advo ploy that turned out to be!) Then, on the way back to the resturant to get my car we started talking about how our waitress was cute enough to be worth stalking. We looped through the parking lot to try and guess what car was most likely hers. We thought it was funny. Then wind up hitting a bookstore in the same open mall before heading home. While there the conversation turned to the Internet and how likely it was that we could get her full identity online. We laughed and then headed back to my place to watch Southpark. (New season is looking pretty darn good.)

So by the time we get to my place we have both decided to take a crack at netstalking. =) Her first name was completely unique to us and we figured that there couldn't be many people in the whole country with such an odd name. Oops, her name isn't that unique on the scale of a whole world since google sez "Results 1 - 10 of about 19,300"! Luckily we have some search terms to try and narrow it. Adding her college gets us about 10 pages, all crap. Adding Ireland gets us 30ish, all crap. Both gets us one page that is completely irrelevant. Darn.

Then we get smart and quit wasting time with general searches. See we have real data. Her School: Western Kentucky University. And what do pretty much all colleges have? Student Directories. And her name is pretty damn unique so we figure to have a better chance there. That is a "directed lead". Unfortunately their seach wants both names and we don't know the last name. BUT, if you try the search with just a first name you'll find that it says "You must enter at least 1 letter of the Last Name. Please Try again." Darn, looks like we will have to try 26 times. =)

2 minutes later, we have two names. (I still can't believe how many people there are with a name I've never heard of before. Two just at that college alone!) One of the last names is fairly uncommon. It is 34,100ish down on the Places Named list and the other is 1,300 ish.

So now we try and verify if the uncommon name has a household in Louisville (her parents live here). So we head over to InfoSpace's handy White Pages. We plug in the last name, city and state and give the old roulette wheel a whirl. One hit, pure jackpot. =) It is in old east-end, where parents with college age daughter are likely, near a Catholic school (Ireland, Sorority, embarrassed to admit she shops at Victoria's Secret), pretty close to the resturant and one of the initials her parent's name is a "V" like her name.

As a long shot, we plug her full name into ye olde tyme Google search again and get "Results 1 - 7 of about 8." Better still, the first hit is a sorority website with "Meet Vxxxxx Xxxxxxx" of the xxx chapter. The link mentions her two of her majors, her e-mail address, names 4 of her friends, and has a pretty damn bad picture of her. It also has more detail on her family history and hooks to more pictures of her and her friends.

At this point it ceased to be a challenge and became creepy so we went into the livingroom and watched really bad movies and drank and exuded smug for a while. The fun/ugly part comes in when we go back next week and show her the results of our snooping. Hopefully she just decides we are insane and not dangerous but I figure she'll get a kick out of it one way or another. Afterall, her two top majors are Psyche and Criminology. =)