furtive explorations

Also, please attach this leash to your own neck and make sure the FBI microphones are securely clipped to your ear so they can hear everything you do... And send me money, thanks.

Also, while I was at it I updated the header on the blog page just a little.

I delivered more than 3000 golfballs to my Dad

Yep, you read that right. In fact, I'd figure there were about 3300ish all told. With 10 balls to the pound that measures up as 330lbs or 150kg. That is 8 stuffed full copy-paper boxes or 9 pretty full ones. That came out to 5 in the trunk and 4 in the back seat.

Folks, that is a veritable shit-load of little white balls. I giggled the entire way there. I ran through many fine scenarios in my head. For instance, imagine me wrecked, knocked half out, with hundreds of welts all over my back, crawling from twisted metal of my car in a voluminous wave of dimpled balls right as the police arrive to witness it. Ahhh. The moments of sublime confusion as they try and puzzle out just what is happening.

I prayed for a busy-body cop to pull me over, stare stunned at the back seat and then, foolishly, demand to see what is in the trunk. Ahh, the half asked questions as his brain halts, backs up, tries again to encompass it all, fails and starts to ask the same question again. The sweet, sweet moments between him looking and deciding to touch, touching and finally picking one up, picking it up and disgustedly dropping it again. The sideways glances. It would have rocked.

Alas, the trip was entirely uneventful save for the lowered tone of the mcuh more heavily loaded than normal tires niggling at my attention. Made good time on the way there, even.

By this point, I'd guess you are pondering one of these basic questions:

1. Why does your Dad need 3300 golfballs?
2. Where did you get 3300 golfballs?
3. How did you wind up in the middle of all this silliness?
4. What size pyramid would all those golfballs make?
5. If I got a creepy homosexual vibe from all the cop and ball bits above, is it just me?
6. When are you going to start making puns?

1. Dad makes golfball animals. I'll try and get some pictures up later this week, I took a bunch with ye olde time digital camera. Dad makes lots and lots of golfball animals. He makes frogs and dogs and cats and deer and dragons and alligators and bears and ocelots and many more. He has also branched out into golfball vehicles, with golfballs as wheels. He makes them by drilling holes in them and screwing them together with double-pointed screws. He spray paints them and attaches all kinds of random hardware bits from old computers and cars and toys. Tire stems make good snouts, hard-drive motors make nice dog collars, serial port heads make cool car grills. Old computer mice make awesome cars and their spinning wheel guts make pretty dang hip truck engines. He gives them all away to kids, more than 2700 so far.
2. A friend of mine's mother happens to collect the balls on her thrice weekly walks around a golfcourse. She sorts them, counts them, washes them and saves all the cool ones as well as a representative sample of the rest. And as it turns out she hadn't got around to ridding herself of thousands of duplicates. She loved the idea of them finding a good home and was , I suspect, glad to get back some valuable room in the foyer where they were being stored.
3. I had dinner with my friend. We are all weirdoes. The conversation over sushi turned to perl code as almost all of us there use the language on a daily basis. My friend mentioned that his mother needed Perl to whack out a quick database application so she could categorize and describe her collection. Since she knew COBOL he was taking a stab at introducing her to Perl in hopes that she could learn enough to hack on after he returns to California. I stupidly asked, "What collection, again?" "Golfballs," he says, "She's got thousands of them. We're trying to find a charity or something to give them too once we sort them." I gape in sheer shock. Luckily, no food falls out. I stammer out an explaination of what my dad does with golfballs. He gapes a bit. Still, food conservation is achieved. We laugh, kind of hysterically, really. Numbers switch hands, we begin plotting the amazing conversations we are going to have later in the weekend with our respective parents.
4. A fucking big one. A solid tetrahedral stack of balls (aka brass monkey stacking) is calculated with a(n)=(n+3)*(n+2)*(n+1)/6 which nets us a 25th order pyramid at about 2.8 feet (85cm) tall with a base length of 3.5 feet (1.1m). A hollow one would be 47th order based on a(n)=3n(n-1)/2+1 and thus would be about 5.2 feet (1.6m) tall and have a base length of 6.6 feet (2m).
5. Yes, it is just you.
6. Never, I have way too much class for that. Plus it is actually funnier if I don't on some sophisticated level. Well, I at least I think so.

Once upon a time in a land not so far away there lived a prince named Dave. Dave was a wise prince and he foresaw the coming of a great time of prosperity. Excited by the future ahead, Dave decided to grab a piece of prime real-estate before anyone else did. Unfortunately, the Shyster he tried to buy the land from had horribly confusing forms and procedures which led Dave down a false path.

And so it came about that Dave, rather than snatching up the potentially cool domain of "dave.com" wound up purchasing a block of 256 permanent, mobile, reassignable IP addresses. Needless to say, this was kinda cool but not at all what he hoped for so he jumped right back into the fire and missed grabbing what he really wanted all along by a single day. And so he settled for less interesting much less travelled property.

Fast forward into the future and you discover that Dave is a landlord and is happily subleasing out the seemingly useless IPs to friends and family. Unfortunately, his mobile property requires a mooring point in the great ocean. The royal house that managed that mooring point recently merged in unholy matrimony with another larger family. The people in that house decided recently to reorganise their holdings since everyone is certain they are near colapse.

Since Dave is a special case and hardly no one else ever kept and used the almost useless property that he plays with, their reorganization left all his subleases in the unhappy posistion of being in working order and willing to take visitors but with all the roads repaved and none of the special signs that mentioned Dave's place put back up. In secret internet Real-estate Fixing Code, they switched from BGP4 to RIP2 and in the process only bothered to deal with CIDRs that were specifically SWIPed to them.

And so we all live unhappily ever after, hoping that the next time they fuck up, they at least remember poor Dave.

Of course, I don't say enough nice things about blogger. It has kept me happy for many an age now. I've been posting since Dec 1999 and rarely have I been unable to post or unhappy with how it all works. I'm mostly greedy and just want more and more features. It's going to suck if I have to parse all my archives and write my own on this crappy Pentium133 box with only 32MB of memory. I sure hope it's success doesn't kill blogger before I can get my own working. OTOH, if you are wanting to start blogging. This here blogspot is the best way to start if you don't have your own website or host. If you can keep it up for a few weeks and start to get comfortable and have something to say, then you you can move up to getting real hosting and using blogger or write your own.