furtive explorations

Of course, I know enough about webservers to set mine up so that when non-approved domain names resolved to my site I could send them to a "this isn't my domain, someone is goofing with you" page. Also, since I'm a non-money-grubbing bastard I don't have teams of lawyers that are just bored and wanting to bother innocent satirists. Hell, I'm the kind of bastard that sends money to satirists...

All initial vowels is a bitch. You fucking try it. Write a paragraph on what the government should do about Iran without using "to", "which", "that", "the", or "for".

Raising swaddle-pups who have experienced no pain, no disappointment, no failure, no ridicule, no emotional distress, no real fear, no challenge that might separate them into stratums of success, no denial, and no scars is sure to work out just fine. The kids will be able to adjust to the adult life at the age of 18 when they first step forth into the wavery light of reality and discover that the entire world doesn't in fact, care that their favorite color is lavender. The first smack of hand upon flesh when they unwittingly insult a normal human by assuming they will get their every little wish as soon as they raise their whiny voice won't lead to foetal curling and emotional annihillation at the hands of their assailant. They won't suicide or wind up a drooling inmate at your neighborhood "coddling-coop" when they are unable to cope with paper cuts and sexual rejection from tanned females looking for a boyfriend rather than a babysitting job.

They'll be fine, smother away, fools!

Too many people on the bus from the airport
Too many holes in the crust of the earth
The planet groans
Every time it registers another birth

Never been lonely
Never been lied to
Never had to scuffle in fear
Nothing denied to
Born at the instant
The church bells chime
And the whole world whispering
Born at the right time

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want He makes me down to lie.
Through pastures green He leadeth me the silent waters by.
With bright knives He releaseth my soul.
He maketh me to hang on hooks in high places.
He converteth me to lamb cutlets.
For lo, He hath great power, and great hunger.
When cometh the day we lowly ones,
trough quiet reflection and great dedication,
master the art of karate,
lo, we shall rise up,
and then we'll make the buggers eyes water.

It was a really good post, too.

I went on a little road trip today to install a piece of equipment for one of our customers. Overall, the trip was a bust, due to my not making sure that someone had not fsked up and included the wrong power supply...*sigh*.

On the other hand, I got to take a lovely drive through a section of the country I hadn't seen before on a day that turned out to be very nice...until I got back home and the mass of concrete in the city ramped the temperature up nearly 10 degrees.

I did, however, find myself trapped behind an elderly Indiana gentleman towing a fishing boat that was evidently waiting for the dark angel Azrazael to sweep down and scoop his soul to paradise. Unfortunately, it would seem that Azrazael can only maintain a top flight speed of 40 MPH, based upon the fact that the aged driver never exceeded that speed on a 55 MPH highway.

The basic upshot is that understimulating the immune system makes it hypersensitive later in life. This is the parallel to the theory that overstimulation of a child's mind may lead to focus disorders like ADD/ADHD. Perhaps I should count diet/cancer and diet/diabetes links as well.

We are turning out to be not just a product of our genetic heritage and our emotional/intellectual upbringing but also our environmental conditions. What do you bet they find ties to environmental extremes elsewhere. A/C has wrought major air quality changes in modern life, for instance.

My thoughts are pretty simple on this. She's going to lose. The key aspect of a photograph is instant, mostly untrained, identification. No other form of ID is so cheap, easy, quick, and simple. And, regardless of what people think, driving isn't a right. Your right to move about the country, your freedom to travel, your right to leave the country (under certain terms) are all guaranteed. But you can't hop into a giant steel killing machine without proving your capability to handle it effectively. And you can't prove that you've learned that without being able to show a license that can't easily be faked.

And don't tell me about other states, religion, or prior thru-crack-slippage. If she wishes to follow the strict tenants of her religion, then foregoing driving is her only choice. Before you talk of other states, recall that in other countries recall that she would be shot/stoned for daring to operate machinery at all.

I sympathize with her plight tho. This isn't a country designed for walking. Worse, for all of our "melting-pot-head" talk in the 70s, we're pretty fucking intollerant here. Still, if you look around, you find that the system bends more than most people think. Psychoactive drugs are legal to certain religions and some ill people, major concepts of property ownership are bent (Hawai'i had some interesting restrictions on land uses), and the power of the Mormon church is felt thru-out Utah.

Maybe she can get a horse drawn carriage. Works for the Quakers. Quakers who have fought for variant community rights where they have settled in numbers. Maybe she needs to find a community that will offer her the extra slack she requires. If other states allow the veil in photos, maybe she should look at moving to one of them. Part of living in a country where power is shared among Fed and States is that you can find/found a community that bends to your needs, religious or otherwise.

I'm starting to make modules now. I'm a bit more of a code hound than K-baby, so I'm doing things like unkillable gate guardians who ask riddles and won't get out of your way unless you answer them, simple cave beetles that when killed give you a million experience points so you'll have a fighting chance against the dragon in the next room, and more.

The scripting isn't that bad...rather much the feel of C/C++...but it feels Javascripty as well. All in all VERY WELL DONE.

My first project will be Kilroy's age-old Goblin caves. I figure that's about as easy a dungeon-crawl if I've ever seen one. I'll steal his maps and start work while I'm on vacation next week.

It's a mad, mad, mad, mad WorldCom (Nasdaq: WCOM). Or maybe we should just be mad, mad, mad at WorldCom. The number two U.S. long-distance phone company unveiled a whopper of an accounting scandal last night and today its market value declined to about $245 million from $2.45 billion on Tuesday. In 1999, WorldCom was a $248 billion company. It staggers the mind.

In three years, its value fell to 1% of its former glory. In one day, it fell to 1% AGAIN. Today, the company is worth less than 1/10,000th of its earlier value. No matter how you slice it, that is a shitload of zeros. Worse, their company is now worth less than their accounting error.

Folks, say goodbye to your friends there, some of them are going to jail and most of them are about to hit the job market. If they are smart, they'll list their employment as "MCI" or "UUNet" or "GridNet" and just forget about that last place.

Ooh! Ooh! Or maybe arm transplants (no wait, we have tha already.) Or how about laser surgery (wait, never mind, got that too.) Or maybe a world spanning, privacy sucking, video law enforcement system (oh, actually...)

Come to think of it, we are living in the future already... and fucking paper clothing is just stupid and nasty.

"I've Got You, Babe" took on new meaning at Monday night's Cher concert when a 400-pound, intoxicated, foul-mouthed female fan refused to vacate a seat and had to be forcibly removed.

Witnesses said the woman was morbidly obese, so large that she could not fit into her seat but had to sit on several armrests. So getting her OUT of the seat wasn't really the problem, then.

Three female and one male First Union employees, all wearing golf shirts with "Event Staff" emblazoned on the back, appeared in Section 102 as Cher appeared onstage astride a fake, life-size elephant, witnesses said. I don't see too problems, I see a solution!

"Why would you try to get a 400-pound woman out of her seat with handicapped people all around?" I ask that question just about every day.

On a positive note, Neverwinter Nights has to be one of the coolest games I've played in years. Not that I'm a huge D&D fan, I play just about every RPG BUT D&D...but this game is totally tits!

Someone, somewhere, is now owed a solid kick in the head from yours truly.

Also, the next game is in the wings since I bought Neverwinter nights yesterday. Gah.

More importantly, you need room for that thirty-third phoneme those idiots on the other side of town have started using in their new slang words. You know some of our root languages had a letter for "th" (it looked like a "y" in some scripts which is why you see "Ye Olde Tyme" where it should be "THe". The letter was a "thorn" like this: "þ" and this "Þ")

Like it or not, languages twist and change. They flex with the times and shift with the winds. You nail it down too tight and you just make it all the more likely that the whole thing is quickly broken. Grammar should be on the same plan, btw, or you'll just wind up with your panties in a bunch when the whole continent starts ending sentences with preposistions just to avoid stabbing the extra "which" or "that" in the sentence.

If you are going to invent a language, make it flexible, give it room to flex, and don't get too caught up in making it logical. Normal people are going to quickly fuckup logical, no matter how hard you try to prevent it. Or they'll start saying "You all", "yewl", "yuawl", "yawl", or "yull" in various places but will all want to spell it the same way.

I missed seeing Minority Report because I was too nice of a guy. I offered to give a buddy, "Q", a ride home. (We call him Q because... well it is pretty stupiud but the first time a bunch of us met him was at a Halloween party where was dressed as "Q". Sad. Plus there are already like 16,000 Mikes in our group.)

Unfortunately for both of us, dropping him off at his house to do dog duty was a horrible mistake. It made me late enough that the theater sold out after my friends got in and he couldn't even come to the show at all because he had forgotten that he had left his car elsewhere. Ooops.

Still, coming home and playing SSXTricky didn't really hurt me too bad...