furtive explorations

-- 
"Congress ... shall make no law abridging the freedom of sXXXch,    Joe
or the right of the people peaceably to XXXemble, and to            Bay
peXXXion the government for a redress of grievances."          Stanford
-- from the First Amendment to the US ConsXXXution           University

It's a shame that most of the article on him reads like a powerpoint presentation. There are maybe two paragraphs in the whole article with 4 sentences. Seriously, I wonder how old the author is. Maybe she should have asked for help from Sho. =)

At least DFA posted a good link or two about cheese and love and such... Heck dream boy sklutch even started posting rants and linkage. The other two? Well I dunno. They never call, they never write, they never rub up on each other on the couch when they think we aren't looking. *sniff*

I hope they aren't dead or worse actually employed or something. You'd think two people who don't even have jobs could say hey once in a while or Fucking Post Something. =P

The problem is, I no longer watch enough TV to care about the TV industry at all. I get my entertainment the modern way, I download pr0n from the net. =)

Last night we watched Conan on DVD and it was the first time in DAYS I'd watched anything other than security monitors and sports. (We flipped on the Olympics on one screen in our Network Operation Center.) Sad but true, I play video games and surf the net and work which is mostly surfing the net and playing code games. It would be pathetic if it weren't so... well... pathetic.

BTW I gotta recount a story here about D-Link. my boss Dave and I got stuck with the (un)envy-able task of going to Washington DC and and doing a fiber-video demonstration for our cruddy previous employer's booth in Las Vegas. Basically, it consisted of Dave goofing off in front of a glorified webcam shoving 320X200 video at 30+ frames a second using less than a T1. We rented studio grade lights, a mini video-mixer ops board and a giant "Kermit" cloth for "Green-screening". It was all shoved into a tiny, cramped, rented office full of neighbors who hated our very presence in the world.

All we had was Dave's digital camera, two laptops and 2 100MB connections straight out of a router thrown down from two floors above thru the wire ducts from the company's NAP. We shoved 4 boxes of videogear, a folding table, 2 chairs, a fan, 4 giant 4-up tube light panels with stands, 2 cameras, 4 computers, and three people into a 9.5 X 13 office.

The upshot of all this lead in is that we had one data connection for the online video gear and one for the laptops. 2 laptops. Thus we went out the night before the plane flight and grabbed the only 100Mb switch we could find (we thought at first all the equipment would be on one and didn't want the video delayed by our swapping pr0n and mp3s =). We grabbed a D-Link.

The D-Link died after approximately 8 hours of use. =( We were bummed and worse, since one laptop was providing the backdrop videofeed, for most of the day, we could do NO other surfing, e-mail, setting up of new displays, etc. At one point in our demo, we would drop out facade and show the kermit and the lights. I would alt-tab and check e-mail for both of us while Dave was waggling the screen and joking about being trapped in a oversized refrigerator box full of blazing hot lights.

Then, it happened. Dave spots, over the two-way video system, behind the people doing the demo on the other end, D-Link's booth! Dave breaks into the end of a demo to ask the people running our booth to go fetch someone important from their booth. While a coupla people wait, one of the booth flunkies runs over and comes back with... a major sales rep. We explain the woes of being D-Link less at a critical moment, he gets Dave's cell number and wham, we're on the phone, live over the internet with a VP and tech support.

As far as we know, that is the first ever Internet-full-stream-two-way-video-tech-support call. =)

D-Link, under threat of Dave sending everyone who visits our booth over to theirs to find out why they suck, sends us a new one, overnight express. We spend the third day of the conference bragging on D-Link =).

but wait you say... third day? Yeah, as a bonus to the whole affair, the hotel we were in LOST THE PACKAGE for a whole day. We think they propped a door open in the kitchen or something. (Actually, they stuck in someone's office thinking it was to one of their people but still, fucking stupid.)

Meanwhile I have to wait a week for mine since I don't have a large Vegas crowd to hang over their heads. =(

The escutcheon, or shield, consists of three parts. A gold six-pointed star, or tetrahedron, lies at the centre. Superimposed on the gold star is a silver cross. On either side of the cross is a silver scythe. Cross, scythes and star are encircled by an inner band of silver and an outer band of gold. All are set on a background field of purple.

Oh yah, uh huh. tetrahedron. That is from the Ufdalqwler dialect from the outer star system Djoivdsm. "te" meaning 6, "tra" meaning points (plural, the singular form is git), and "hedron" meaning moron. Oh, there is much more to this one:

The word "PAO" means "Peace and Inner Strength Through Unity". It originates from a galactic language that is spoken by a civilization of advanced land Cetaceans living in the Cetus star system. Composed of six planets, this star system is approximately 800 Light Years from our sun.

Luckily, the language of dolphin-like aliens from 800 light years away, which apparently became a galactic standard without ONCE asking the French what they thought, transliterates beautifully into spoken words. Disappointingly, their word for "This entire sentence is compressed into two syllables" turns out to be "welcome" which will make their first visit to Earth entirely too confusing.

I can't recommend enough visiting their Glossary. Time Lords, Council of Nine, Atlantis (fortunately, sunk), Lemuria (wow they heard of that one too? Equal time for both mythical ocean-based lost continents).

Oh yeah, StarSeeds ah to be enlightened into space-going meme-sperm. Self activation only takes 12 minutes! 150% of the time needed daily to improve your abs but we are talking your entire meta-physical mental being here!

No hats darn it all. Plus, you'll need to learn about the various galactic member species.

BTW, the layout and site desing of this page is exemplary! I may have to steal some of that mojo. The real magic here is the HTML. =)

50,000 battered women and I've been eating mine plain.

Whoot. That is a goood one.

And a fine link styled this week after TheOnion is TheSatyr which I snagged off of SA Good week for SA, damn shame he is gotta die now that I've seen the future and he turns into a evil nuclear weapons firing nut-bad President. Oh wait, I think I dreamed that, nevermind.

BTW. My brain hurts today. I couldn't remember the title "The Dead Zone" or Christopher Walken's name. So I tried seraching IMDB for Shreck, his character from Batman Returns. Yeah I can remember "Maximillian Shreck" but can't remember "Christopher Walken". Worse, I couldn't remember "Batman Returns" was part two. Holy shit he's been in a lot of films. Some damn fine ones. Some shitty ones.

must be good stuff, huh?

• See the Rules of Typography
• Which I leaped into from this fine article On Irony
• And then see others ideas about our English as She is Spoke
• No idea on this one, but great domain name
• Know the unknowing with Zen Koan's

In the geek's case, part of what she noticed is the lack of socialization. These are people who learned the language they speak from books usually without peers that spoke or read on the level they did. When you put geeks who have never been near other geeks, there is this wonderful shell-breaking moment when they "get" that they can cut loose socially. Most of the big words they delight in using they will have never heard spoken except in their heads. Most of their rules of pronunciation are from TV where they hear more big words spoken.

Put them in a group and this reinforces itself. I got burned on this by Alan Ginsburg, when I miss-pronounced the word "golem" as "gaul-um" rather than "gO-lehm". Getting called out on that by a beat poet and having him sneer at me for learning words by reading them rather than experiencing them leaves a solid memory. =) I seriously doubt half the people at any D&D convention game session would pronounce it right. They've never heard it right that often either.

Jargon is another signature of cliquing, most military people will show this as well as some interesting social variations, especially with other military types. Like the more important a thought, the louder it must be stated. That one always gets a few looks from the "mundanes".

Anyway, it happens all over, all the time. Keep your eyes open and watch. If you are around any group with a special or social overtone that is different, say vegans or Greenpeace types or business men watch them conform to invisible standards. Any social group will get an identity of these variations, even if it is just quirks of the most visible of the set.