furtive explorations

She really over-reacts whenever she catches me wearing her underwear.

Think about this if anyone tells you English and German cultures are fundamentally the same... Last Saturday, during an evening visiting friends, we were arguing (Spook!) and she said - I need quotes here - she said "Well, you're weird because you didn't see your mother naked often enough." Hello? Hello?

Shortly after every single time Margret touches my computer, for any reason whatsoever, I have to spend twenty minutes trying to fix crashes, locked systems, data loses, jammed drives, bizarre re-configurations and things stuck in the keyboard. There then follows a free and frank exchange of views with, in my corner, "It's your fault" and, in hers, "It's a curious statistical anomaly".

Whether her cutting our son's hair comes under 'money-saving skill' or 'therapy in the making'.

Look, if you don't understand the rules of Robot Wars by now then I'm just not going to continue the conversation, OK?

The morning of Thursday 20th of April 2000. I squint into semi-wakefulness, roll over to face Margret and yawn "Last night I dreamt you had head lice." She's drowsily replies "Well, you're going to be really mad when I tell you what I dreamt." Do we hit the ground running or what?

If I say "I think I've got a cold coming." Margret will reply "I've got one coming too. And it's a really bad one." I'll say "I have a headache." She replies "I've had one for days." Me; "Ouch, I've just banged my knee." Her; "I banged mine yesterday - chipped the bone I think." If we were both flung from a disintegrating aircraft, I'd scream "I'm going to die!" and Margret would scream back "I'll hit the ground first!"

But it's not just the vasectomy thing per se that gets me primed for the approaching row. First is the fact she tries to sell it by saying "Well, [one of her idiot friend]'s [stupid husband] had it." - like that's going to carry any weight. I have a fair number of female friends who're up for two-women-one-man, three-in-a-bed romps - but I'm not going to make much headway with that argument, am I? In fact, I may never, ever head into a hospital for a vasectomy under my own power, but simply mentioning the three-in-a-bed thing to Margret would be a fast lane to the front of some triage queue.

Just for reference; if Margret returns from having her hair cut and says "What do you think?" and you reply "I'd love you whatever your hair was like.", well, that's very much The Wrong Answer, OK?

'No, it's not that.' I bluff, 'I just want to add some extra ham. They never use enough ham.' Margret taking on a frozen pizza is a chilling enough prospect under any circumstances, but when you remember she's flying blind here - no cardboard box bearing cooking instructions to light the way - well, I'm sure you can imagine my terror. I take the pizza from the oven. I add extra ham. I return the pizza to the oven.
On a whim, I amend Margret's arrangement by removing the polystyrene base from under the pizza before continuing to cook it.

What a fabulous read. Really. Cathartic, even...

The geek speak or elite speak spellings are mostly for social identification since the web has long since shown that filters are a poor protection. There are a number of sub groups who use the spellings in different ways. Some of the more complex multicharacter forms came from ascii art and various text-based iconographic movements.

These days emoticons are done in a variety of styles like :) >:{ or (-; or even 0_o and */^ Beyond the emoticons were textual graphic signatures like "BatBoy /\/0o\/\" and "Blade137 0==][/////////"

After a while, the need for uniqueness moved the odd characters into the names themselves like "B100D" and "|3aud|=ather" (Blood, BaudFather). This old BBS signature tradition was still around when Compuserve, AOL, and Prodigy all attempted to reign in various forums, news systems, and chat rooms. Many, many people took the occasional odd character substitution and semi formalized them. Generally, "S" becomez "Z" or "5" ; "Z" become5 "2", "E" b3com3z "3", "L" -> "1", "i" -> "!", "2" => "?", T -> "7" and many more. There is a great deal of variation in how far this is taken, where it isn't used, where characters are also transposed to beat simple filter "improvements" that take into account these basic transforms, and how far one goes in constructing letters out of multiple symbols.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.  Isn't that elite?
7#3 2v1(|< |3r0vv/\/ |=0>< Jv/\/\|>5 0u3r 7|-|3 1@zY |)0g. !5n'7 7#@7 31337?

Mr. Geek Language person is now going to bed. =P

Now, I could be way off on this. I haven't asked him directly, so there may well be some obscure but completely understandable geek reason for this odd construction. Why he'd want to avoid a proven hit generation scheme like that is quite beyond me, but that's my guess.

I did a test of the power of dirty words in search engines once. I put this page up one night, added it to AltaVista and waited. I got 14,000 hits in less than 24 hours. The count, a few years later, is up to 148,000 and change (yet I haven't resubmitted it to a search engine in at least two years). And that's entirely on the basis of the title bar alone, since the page itself has no prurient content. So, there you have it.

Interestingly, these stats don't seem to include either the direct to video pictures or pr0n stars which keeps poor Ron out of the top 20. The number one actor? Mel Blanc with 795 which beats Ron handily anyway. He'd be number two AFAIK since the next man has less than 500.

Bess Flowers *shrug* is the winner on the women's side with 379. Sadly, there are only a couple of names on there I even recognize. For directors, it is the not so suprising Dave Fleischer with 612 followed by D.W. Griffith a good ole boy from here in Kentucky. Scan Fleischer's "movies" and some of the other top directors before you ask why it isn't so suprising that he is top dog.

Hey Mark.... I am going to give you some needless information, but important to me....

Today is my 1/2 birthday.

So I responded: "Cool, if you look directly at the sun, in addition to going blind, you will be looking directly at where you will be on your birthday..." Gosh I think I'm funny.

The show was "King of the Hill" which is still safely tucked between "Futurama" and "The Simpsons". Being between two of the most liberal shows on television today (though being willing to beat down anyone in a pinch helps me forgive the shows of their bias) throws its now sadly uncommon middle American values into sharp relief. In this particular episode the title character Hank Hill is uncharacteristically against the town turning an old quarry into a land fill. He even goes so far as to join the nightmareishly uber-vegan ultra-nibmy teacher who is warping his son in "protesting" the plan. As it turns out, as teenagers, he and two of his friends (who are still his friends and neighbors) accidentally dunked their fourth friend's car into the quarry (with their letterman jackets from high school on the back seat as incriminating evidence) and never told "Boomhower". When Hank decides to join the protest, the other two do also and one of them, Dale Gribble, shouts out the now immortal line.

Man those links to FOX tv up there for the shows really suck. Here are better ones:
Alien Language Institute, Futurama! at! Yahoo!
Maximum Homerdrive, The Simpsons Channel,The! Simpsons!
KOTH, King! of! the! HIll!

Keep in mind that FOX isn't too friendly to fan sites so that there are so many out there and thriving is a real tribute to how well they are doing...

Bonus fact! The name for Futurama in Japan is the easily mistyped "Futuraman". Try it out on your favorite search engine. I'm thinking that that link is the coolest you'll find. Those Finns beat the American sites by quite a bit.

In her honor, here are some damn fine Tech Support SUPPORT links:

• Tech Hell pretty much says it all.
• Phone Losers is more phone hell organized
• Tech Tales is classy and placid enough to show your boss tech.
• Tech Comedy made me laugh quite a bit.
• TechnoGirl And if you hit a real winner on the phones tonite, send it in to TG and she'll make sure that you get the sympathy you need by awarding the very best the un-coveted "Duh" award.

Also, in case you missed it, Check out Dodd's blog. If you are confused when first you visit there from here, keep in mind he is a great deal better at writing clear prose than I shall ever be. Ya kno? OTOH, if you want to look up the essays he mentions in one entry, you'll have to use this link to get to his older site since he borked the link in his blog. And oddly, blogger or something is borking the archive links on his blogger pages too. =) On the third hand (OTTH for you Martians out there) I will likely steal his trick of linking the post time as the archive link rather than hiding it on the random underscore like I have been doing. I so like the date to be blue though so I will think about it first...

Once upon a time, I feared that my domain would keep popping up as the example "attacking" server in various security bullitins. Or worse, as the example "how to block a bad domain" web example. Now, I kinda wish for the traffic, if only for the ego boost and bonus whining I could do.

OTOH, if you have just had a lobotomy, you might also be interested in this stupid HotBar idea that adds a useless ad-drenched-links tool-bar widget to your browser and "skins" your browser toolbars with a handy background. If you like both of those go to MegaCGI's Perl course and then just use your new-found elite-hacker skills to send me $15 for the trouble I took to tell you about all these valuable and exciting programs. Also, please wear a hat from Target that has big red and white circles on it so I can spot you in the crowd and send my congratulations back at ya...

Best of all, as I see it, is the combining of the blog system with a larger web site management system. The way blogger works now, with ftp and such, leads to it being a full-page bolt-on style application. Now, maybe, they can tweak out its temporal content management and focus it on various sub styles of blog. They can tweak out a variation that is more full-site tricked out and allows you to create essay/journal/diary style entries that are multiple paragraphs, simple paragraph blogging that it already excels at and maybe a more headline-y type system that could do content boxes on other pages or simple flying link lists like RobotWisdom's headline section. I'd love to have a newest 5 headlines box on the front page, easy one-shot essay/rant/journal pullouts to their own pages, and move the oneliner/quick-link stuff into a sidebar on multiple pages.

Heck, I'd send the team $20 bucks if they'd just add an optional headline field to the template system and database. And another $20 if they'd add either a spull-chucker or an (X)HTML verifier to the submission system. I'd be ever-so-greatful if you guys could just pick a few things off my various and sundry wish-lists

• Levitating Frogs is an almost irresistable link title. It is like the computer is making you click on it...
• Art link... You have No Rights Under APE-Law! No I don't know what that means either but I'm going to find out.
• Job Stories is pretty cool but this story on Clerk Hell is the best. Always a good link or two hiding on some comic page or other.