furtive explorations

FYI you car is likely about 7-9 ft long. If you do the two second rule where you make sure there are 2 seconds from their back tire crossing something to it disappearing under your hood-line then you are keeping about 90ft between you. 100kph, 2 seconds gets you 28 meters

My other great pleasure today was having someone yell at me for talking on the phone while driving. I sure enjoyed them swerving around near my bumper whilst they craned their head around to lecture me at speed on the highway. I enjoyed their panic braking when I suddenly looked forward, acted startled and braked hard. Which is worse, me keeping a hand off the wheel to talk or them getting all bent out of shape over what I do in my car?

Oh well, I wound up spending the odd Friday off running errands and eating dinner and watching movies. Of actual blog note I did send off my Sharper Image made Ionic Breeze air filter off to be serviced today. As I mentioned before both mine and my sister's are in various states of suck. I was a bit annoyed after a final attempt to clean and repair mine failed and I considered the prospect of chucking a couple hundred dollars of my money into the dumpster. Much to my surprise my snotty little e-mail netted me two postage paid return stickers to send them in for repair. Given that the warranty was 60 days long and expired more than a year ago, that really impressed me. Now, one has been cast off into the postal system where I'm sure it is in good hands and we shall see how they do.

• Wiggles Who does that art remind me of? Grr, crappy memory...
• Jeremy How did I forget this one? Grr, again...
• Friend Bear Is a pure Pokey style weirdfest. This is one people either love or hate.
• Dex Lives Might be worth a check out too.
• When I Am King is WAY worth your time. Wordless comic that has slightly adult themes and fairly funny plots and fricking fabulous art! I just read the whole fricking thing and I'm waiting for more, this just got moved to Weekly!
• Few And Far Between is mighty worth the look, too.

I'll give it a try tomorrow and let you know how it goes.

The two lines to paste into your prefs.js file are:

user_pref("capability.policy.default.Window.open", "noAccess");
user_pref("capability.policy.trustable.Window.open", "sameOrigin");

From Flutterby comes World's Smallest Wankel Engine and Gas Giant Bong which features this quote: So don't hollow out the fucking Gas Giant, O.K.?

From MetaFilter comes Linux Kernel Fuck Trends. Just go look, damnit... Oh yeah, Justinspace.com has a StarWars Makeover up along with the original Obscene Interiors and the new OI part 2

I think the real problem is that cult is too close to a really dirty word that is deeply perjorative and hurtful to anyone it is applied to: culture. What? What were you thinking?. Worse, getting stuck with a label like "Sect" is just an invitation to juvenile puns and cheap humor. Like if the Christian Scientists are considered a Sect then their only medical care would be Sectual Healing. See what I mean, it only can go downhill from something like that. And I'm not even going to touch on "deviant"... at least not without rubber gloves, beef tallow, and three ripe bananas.

On top of the list of the top 10 stupid things the producers of Lord of the Rings asked was, I shit you not, "Can we do this WITHOUT the Hobbits?"

David McGuire

I suppose as long as I'm quoting comic artists I might as well point out how happy this still makes me weeks later. Also, I added Plugin Boy to the watching list. Worthy of a peek, folks...

Sort of along the same lines, thank goodness someone finally sorted out a good tutorial on how to make tentacle hentai! Before you click on that link understand that we are talking about pr0n here, giant tentacles, naked chicks, pr0n... do I have to draw you a picture here? If I do, I now know how. =)

Kristian, Slater? Why God, why?

• Jeffrey's Kanjii Lookup is pretty damn cool.
• Quit /. Today! Or not, see if /. cares...
• Pine/Pico aren't "Free" enough matters only to those who get too bent outta shape about such copyright issues. Since I like mutt/vim for my mailer/editor compbo under various unixes I just grin smugly.
• The Great Computer Language err... SlashHoling Shootout amused me. The project has been on for a while but the sudden wave of attention slowed things down a bit. Notable for the amusing use of Google's cache to get to the site while it was down.
• MSNBC's Copyrights and Copywrongs gets the issue of the DMCA exactly correct. Greedy global corporations have been stealing your heritage. The books you loved as a child should be public domain already. Hell, MSDOS should be free by now under the original rules!
• SAG Contract Signed means more movies being made and more actors getting more money. And hopefully it will lead to fewer re-run commercial promotions from last year making my occasional TV watching seem surreal. Seeing a logo that a company abandoned a year ago pop up in a commercial is a weird thing...
• Hot time in the City *snort* in the oven???

I think we children of the 80s need to rise up and take power from the boomers before they give it over to these mindless drones they've raised on years of television, social-normalization drugs, consumerism, and modern-day (nowhere close to) punk where rebellion is merely working for the man with more metal and ink in your skin.

Rise up, Children of the 80s, and take what is ours before it is given to the drooling idiots that follow you. There has to be enough non-slackers in our generation to make that crucial difference. Right? Right? Hello? Shit...everyone my age is as lazy as I am...

*sigh*

Nodwick, ODDJOB and Dorktower may need adding to my list, (if they aren't already on there...)

Basically "sorry" in the original sense is becoming an idiom and only means "shared sorrow" in certain phrases and the new meaning of regret is taking over. And of course when you call something else sorry like "that sorry sack of shit" you tend to mean the person or item described is pitiful or pathetic (thus, they make others feel sorrow) rather than meaning they are regretful. Only if you say "They are sorry" or "I am sorry" do you mean "they regret" or "I regret". Interestingly, this leads to problems where you say "I'm sorry" to express sympathy and wind up being yelled at for excepting blame or blaming yourself.

Of course, most of my friends are neither prone to sympathy or regret so this rarely is a problem for me personally. Nevertheless it is fascinating to watch the language change, huh?

And this one is amusing rather than serious till you read a little deeper.

Hmmm. Click a random blog link, then pick a random link on that page. Repeat 9 more times and note where you land. And no, the answer isn't always Elephant or Carrot. I picked Eels and Squash. Fucking e-mail chain letters...

No, I have no idea what happened there. Some sort of stream of conciousness thing that broke down a levee or something.

The frightening thing is that a remarkable number of common variations of that have been snagged as domains too. asdf.net, asdf.org, asdf.cc, asdf.tv, and asdf.ws are all gone, e-asdf.com is taken, and iasdf.com is even interesting. Creepy...

Honestly, it might be about time for a another anti-icon purge of the christian religion. It can't be healthy for all these people to be playing with Jesus and Angel imagery. I'm pretty sure there is a commandment that edges on this sort of thing. Plus, the one angel just earned 2 minutes in the box for high-sticking...

Here are the other words I've made up in the last few days:

dialation

This is like dilation only it is the widening of telco channels specifically.

wackoness

The state or condition of being wacko.

liuke

no idea. I think it might be a smaller form of a ukelele or something.

jut (adverb form)

This modifies an action to include the sticking your head out like a turtle sense (rare)

fue

A group or collection of items that are boring.

nagry

Annoying or bothersome in an animated way.

hse

Foreign loan word meaning potentially lost love. (speciallized pronoun)

womeens

Plural slang term for harem, usu. where no possibility of a harem exists.

sme

Foreign loan word meaning potential loser of lover. (speciallized pronoun)

ize

Graphical shape seemingly designed to throw off the layout of your page by being just the wrong width.

sleek

Smooth in the manner of a leek nut that has been soaking in hot-n-sour soup for 8 hours. (rare)

Yat!

Amazing Only to Yurt Drivers!

pos

Variant spelling of "pause"

thwen

Noise made by a propeller beanie in a high wind.

gbastards

Nagry government employees who keep yelling "Yat!"

tkae

A form of martial art that can only be taught to womeens.

shooues

The main weapon used by the tkae masters. It hurts when it hits your head.

fet

Where shooues are carried when not being hurled at heads.

tryies

A series of tests performed to prove that you can't spell.

Words are fun. =)

Tipsy Topless Dancer Can Sue And yes, "Can Sue" is a fucking funny name for a dancer or porn star but in this case we are actually talking the lawsuit form of sue here. "Salazar contended that she was impaired when she left work because her employer, Giorgio's Mens Club in San Antonio, urged the dancers to drink with customers so they would buy more drinks at inflated prices." Isn't that nice! If I fall asleep on the way home and kill five people can I sue work for making me stay late and drive home tired? Shit, I'm thinking more and more about that island nation I should be out setting up...

Researchers Solve Firefly Mystery tells us that Nitric Oxide (chemical name is NO, why it isn't ON is left as a project for the readers, I'm tired) is specially used by the flies for signalling their own ass to flash. "Cells that line the airway of the firefly (actually a beetle) make nitric oxide. A signal from the insect's brain releases the chemical and the nitric oxide, or NO, causes an adjacent cell structure, called the mitochondria, to briefly shut down. This releases a pulse of oxygen which triggers an enzyme in another cell to turn on the light. It all happens in a millisecond, said Trimmer." Remarkable! NO turns out to also control our heartbeats and is useful for brain activity and blood vessel dialation. And we all thought that Nitrous Oxide (N2O) was the real talent in the family, what with all the dental work and whipped-cream squirting and huffing going on...

Cyberstalking Garnering More Serious Response should be worth a worry. "There are lots of things you can do with the Internet to destroy someone from the comfort of your own home," Gordon said. "The cyberstalking statute gives us a better tool to work with." Remember kids, you have no privacy online and only a thin veneer of civilization between you and all the wackoness in the world.

And the connection between all three? It is all about Sex, Signals and Side-effects, baby! Whether it is the break down of society that allows a girl to sue her pimp for "forcing" her to drink with the men she teases out of money, Beetles making love signs in the night and keeping their signals from crossing or poor people on web who can't help but signal the wrong person over and over. (What? You thought I was all cussing and drinking and geeking?)