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Because malevolent is too hard to say!

And you can't tell me the alien ain't CUTE!

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Saturday, September 01, 2001
1:05:03 PM by mark *
The second half of the circus story is up. Go read and be horrified.
Friday, August 31, 2001
5:22:08 PM by mark *
Umm, that is quite a hack. I'm pretty sure they should have been a bit more proactive in letting their customers know there was a problem that might have cost them their private passwords. Most people tend to keep just a few passwords around. I personally use one or two just for secure and insecure websites and a few others only for higher security. Now I have to go knock an entire series of passwords down because I used one of the more secure ones for EQ. =(
3:22:17 PM by mark *
Civilization was -- and still is -- one of my top-ten all-time favorite games. I can close my eyes and imagine unit movement, icons, sounds and more. This interview at CGOnline is quite the eye-opener. They pretty much just faked up the technology paths and then tweaked them a little. We used to debate those things and what was missing endlessly. We argued that adding "X" would cause an entire cascade of really ugly "Y"s and "Z"s and so they must have decided not to do "X". But no, they just faked it. =)
Thursday, August 30, 2001
9:55:09 PM by mark *
I rarely post stuff that is also on /. but these High-Speed Photography shots are worth remembering. Wow.
5:34:23 PM by mark *
Well, I gotta remember to read the second part of this article about CircusCIA on good ole Salon.
5:03:17 PM by mark *
This is basically the word for word advice I gave a friend who is jobless and got sucked in by a fancy piece of spam:
  • You'll never make back the money they will con you into spending on your "training". Training that will consist of a video tape and some folders full of photocopies.
  • The first "order" will be mostly stuff to get you spend more money on the "professional" package.
  • They say they are listed on the NASDAQ, did they give you a company name or stock code? Nope, probably not.
  • They say you can make $15-50 an hour, well, $15 a day is more likely.
  • If this was a legitimate business, they wouldn't be trolling the desperate for cash, they would be paying you to take the training.
  • Look for a real job and ignore this crap. It is designed to suck in people in your jobless state.
  • I've looked at bunches of these scams from college papers and later when I was outta work and they are all the same sorts of bullshit. Some want you to door-to-door their crap before they break down and sell it national to K-Mart and it gets buried and forgotten. Others want you to do scut work like envelope stuffing and newspaper clipping and you make pennies per job. You'd have to stuf 10,000 envelopes a day to get anywhere near $100 bucks a day and they don't send you that much work. The worst kind have a pretend product that isn't worth selling and just want you to find other suckers to take the "training" and buy the first round of crap so they can move it off the shelves.
  • Honestly, how many people do you know that would become regular buyers of healthfood or vitamins from you vs. getting them from the grocery store or a real healthfood store?
  • You are better off not spending money and time on this dead end. Sorry but it is true. I wasted enough time on these scams to know.
Wednesday, August 29, 2001
5:59:50 PM by mark *
Today we wandered out to lunch at Garrett's and had an engineering meeting. Being the pathetic geeks that we are we actually talked about work for more than 2 hours while eating. Yes, that is sad.

Now, you have to understand that Garrett's is what I think of as semi-upscale. That means the place is nice and the prices are on the top side of reasonable and they will let reprobates like me in with a ball cap on with out saying a word. The girl at the front door today was like an extra sexy version of the current favorite witch. Our waitress wasn't that cute but everyone was well dressed and polite. And half deaf... she had a double ear kit that was clearly professional and long-term. Nice girl, good service, talked real quiet.

Except that right when she decided to take our order she had an invisible booger fight.

This IBF included all the elements of you standard fight plus a couple bonuses. Basic elements included: clutching at the nose with thumb and fore-finger, looking at hand, rubbing fingers together, talking about the side orders, more swipes at the nose, finger flicking out over the carpet, and nose writhing. Not wiggling or twitching, you are thinking Bewitched there still, I'm talking writhing where the lips and eyes get involved in the nose grind.

Bonus elements included the invisible string pull, and a nice subtle pants wipe. The IBF is a grand thing on the most usual of days. To be treated to one of epic proportions at a fine dining establishment while discussing our food choices is something altogether special.

9:54:01 AM by mark *
So I just spent a couple minutes and was able to work out the mathematical properties of whining.

Let us presume that + stands for normal conversation and that -> is the whine operator. As you will not likely recall from your maths, conversation is commutative and associative. Thus, A + B is the same as B + A and A + (B + C) and (A + B) + C are equivalent.

Now, interestingly, the whine operator turns out to be directed and irreversable (unless we postulate %> sarcasm as well) and as such it is not commutative. It isn't associative either. There turns out to be a cumulative effect in (A -> B) -> C that isn't equivalent to A -> (B -> C). Given all that, whining suprisingly turns out to be distributive across conversation! Thus A -> (B + C) and (A -> B) + (A -> C) are exactly equivalent.

Later this week I'll try and prove that the operator + conversation and the function TV() form a closed system over the real human knowlege space. If I have time we will also discuss * shouting and - lying and maybe even take a stab at / public highschool teaching. =)

9:17:51 AM by mark *
Well shit. News.com has word of my nemesis. A damnable pda/flip-phone. All in one, ear-piece is the flip cover, palm compatible. If the damn thing turns out to be color I'm going to be getting a new phone...
8:45:33 AM by DFA *
The furor over the fucking kitty cooking video makes me fucking sick.

PETA and other nut-bars are all up in arms and want Stile prosecuted because he posted a movie showing the cooking of a kitten. Nevermind that he explicitly states his intentions are to force people to review their own convictions...nevermind that he does not advocate animal cruelty and in fact advocates an animal-free diet. HE IS THE FUCKING CRIMINAL BECAUSE HE IS SHOWING PEOPLE A VIDEO OF A KITTEN BEING CUT UP AND COOKED!

Where the FUCK have we gone wrong that we accuse those who are not criminals?! Why is forcing people to think about their own hypocritical notions of the world WRONG?! Of all the disgusting things going on in this world...all the killing...maiming...fighting...these fuck-heads get up in arms over a fucking KITTEN?! If I had to choose between world-peace-through-a-diet-of-cute-cuddly-kittens and our present fucked up world where we don't eat kittens...then the KITTENS ARE GOING TO FUCKING LOSE...EVERY FUCKING TIME!

Fuck PETA...they should be brought up on charges of encouraging treatment for animals that is better than the treatment of most of their fucking countrymen, much less that of the rest of the world's inhabitants.

Tuesday, August 28, 2001
11:26:55 PM by mark *
On and off the air three more times tonite just trying to get the last post to actually publish. Turns out it was 3 things, my computer, my router, and the DSL connection. Yep, an accursed night of attempted surfing...
7:44:49 PM by mark *
My stupid firewall/router at home keeps freezing up. I am going to HAVE to deal with getting a newer computer in its place. I can't figure out if it is F00F bugged or if the network drivers are flakey. It is such a decrepit old box that throwing newer and newer versions of the Linux kernel at it isn't helping.*sniff* Maybe I'll just hit a website and buy a couple of computers...
10:00:08 AM by mark *
OK, Rank People is an "Am I attractive Or Not" style site and not a place to celebrate the smelliest people. How disappointing. Of course, if the fad was still running high I'd set up AmIRankOrNot but now is just seems trite...
9:19:45 AM by mark *
Hmm, I'll have to add PHPNuke to my little black book of interesting website code...
9:07:13 AM by mark *
If you are a Gnu-geek or even a BSD-geek you are quite likely to wind up using BASH as your login shell. And since you are going to wind up using it, you might as well learn a few tricks to make your life easier.

Of course, if you have no idea WTF I'm talking about you should probably ignore the previous paragraph. Heck, go get a sandwich and donate a dollar to help out the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. That would be nice.

Monday, August 27, 2001
5:29:45 PM by mark *
Hmm, a new IMAP server for when I upgrade the poor, eldritch hostile.org server.
5:28:41 PM by mark *
Today, at work we got spammed by a "competitor". We all got a hearty laugh out of it. In the computer industry this rates right up there with trying to hack the BOFH's box to install IIRC egg-droppers. For the non-internet types I suppose it equates to trying to sell Chevy's to Ford.

A little note to the desperate companies out there: No matter how bad things are, it can only get worse if your competition hears you scream.

10:28:31 AM by mark *
I may spend the day pornolizeing my favorite websites. That rules...
9:54:38 AM by mark *
"Punctuality is the virtue of the bored." - Evelyn Waugh
12:13:17 AM by mark *
Links to bitch at tomorrow (well, why not now...):
  • CIPA used to block judge Grrr... fricking snoops. We are losing our freedoms folks. It is a grim time. =(
  • IBM invents a new key layout for palms. They used real science to weight locations vs. neighbors to find a layout with minimum distance moves for the most common letter sequences? Man are they working too hard. Putting the space in the middle and the "eiostn" around it got you 90% of the savings. Figuring "mahp" moving farther out horizontal isn't much harder. Still, proving it mathematically is way cool. =)
  • WWW tilts from Electic to Mundane: Web Page Author Buys Thesaurus. Heh. Still I thrive on the eclectic and if everyone stops rewarding such behavior the web will begin to suck more. Plus, since I'm pretty much officially an eclectic choice to read that means my already sparse readership can only drop lower. *sniff* Of course, since I'm doing this for me nothing will actually be different here. It isn't like I'm going to take my eclectic ball and send you back to your mundane homes. =/
Sunday, August 26, 2001
8:26:14 PM by mark *
I started blog-hopping tonite for a little bit and stumbled into Harrumph (great fricking logo... *envy_talent*) and Anil Dash (who's spam rant was linked over at Maud'Dib's blog.) There are a buncha other blogs I should link up that I read from time to time like Urticator who's essays aways spark an odd thought in my head.

I've been a bad blogger over the past couple of weeks. Less surfing and more navel gazing threatens to turn this site into a damnable diary rather than a web-log. Somehow, even adding the tagline "Come smell my Diary Airs!" won't make that shift pleasing to me. Luckily for me this relationship still holds: moth:flame::me:internet! Luckily for you there are now a fuckload of places you can go find better blogs. For instance, the Aortal is still having the intended effect on bloggers, E/Ns, diary arses, and other random "communities" on the net.

Speaking of finding better blogs, go visit coolstop and enjoy. Just don't think I'm ever going to do something as crass and annoying as link all my favorite blogs with anonymous little iconic boxes. Grrr. Remember kids, a littlebit of art-fuck goes a long way. Remember the jewelry rule from L.A. Story? After getting all dressed up, look in a mirror and swing back and forth. The first thing that catches your eye, take off. Still, overall, I like the site; I just wanted to bitch rather than go back to shitty data-entry slavery on the new database tables I just set up. =)

6:06:18 PM by mark *
So I'm digging through the data bases that hold our tracking and customer service data here at work and I come across the abbreviation they've chosen for "Docking Number" which is "DCKING_NUM"! Why drop the "O" and not the "I" too? Why drop one letter? You can't say to prevent confusion with the number "0" because you left the capital "I" in there to get confused with the number "1". Grr.

Also, I just did a google search for furtive.explorations (note the dot) to find out where others use my blog title as a phrase. I really should ego surf more often. And actually work at ego surfing since I'd never thought to look for my blog title before. I've always looked for my domain name with one of the "link:" tricks at AltaVista so I never thought to look for my own site with its "proper name" this way. Turns out a few other sites have linked it that way and I'm on most of the major weblog lists. Of course since I added myself to most of the lists over the past (almost 2 years?) all the blurbs describing the site are completely useless and weird. Basically I see a description field as a chance to goof off. This probably hasn't helped people find me over the years.

The reason those two things are interrelated is that I just finished reading this short story that happened to contain my words and is rather adult in nature. Drop in there seeking after an amusing reference to a favored phrase and find that fellatio is the freak of the week. Ooops. Overly written I suppose, but properly so since the protagonist is a college professor. Still you can't read about such rude things and then look at "DCKING_NUM" and not see "other words" there. =)

4:00:04 PM by Dodd *
Algebra for Adulterers - if a "congressman wants to keep his chance of discovery down to 5 percent, the number of girlfriends he can afford should vary in proportion to the square root of the number of eligible young women in his district."
4:20:36 AM by Dodd *
History of the World, part N+1 (I should probably confess to reading/posting this while wearing a DeCSS protest t-shirt).