furtive explorations

• I'm lumpy.
• I'm balding.
• I'm bitter.
• I'm bitterly sarcastic.
• I'm not charming enough to overcome my more obvious faults.
• My arm makes this weird clicking noise when I bend my wrist back to fast.
• Indigestion.
• My feet smell. Right now they smell shoes and socks.
• I don't even take introspection seriously.
• I kinda wonder what my own eyeballs would taste like.
• I insult all my closest friends... almost always to their faces.
• Too much caffeine.
• I'm absent minded.
• I refuse to take easy joke setups, instead I simply announce than an easy joke setup just occured.
• I believe in exosolipsism, all existence and reality is a lonely dream, and it isn't me dreaming this shit.
• I respect you for having faith in higher power(s) but I enjoy making fun of what silly things your faith believes in. This is directly the opposite of most people who have little respect for believers but take great pains not to insult the beliefs.
• I hate eating in booths at resturants.
• I constantly force other people to backseat drive since I hardly ever know where I'm going.
• My inner muse likes long lists and bad jokes. Also, she has a shotgun. Help.
• I personify my emotional and psychological flaws.
• I have lots of emotional and psychological flaws.
• I vest my neuroses with personalities and voices too.
• I like to pit my neuroses and flaws against each other in debates and arguments. My inner dialogue is cross between the highschool in 90210 and MASH.
• I love dogs. I love cats. I think mice and lizards are awesome. They all love me. Yet, strangely, I hate pets.
• I blog from work without (much) shame.
• I've long since given up worrying what people think, I curse often and loudly.
• I'll ask almost stranger almost anything since I don't care what people I don't know think of me.
• Farts make me laugh.
• I love trying to fix things. I love breaking things to find out how they work. A lot of stuff I own is broken... go figure.
• I tend to write in casual, conversational tones. Even on resumes.
• I doodle on everything yet I have almost no art skill.
• I steal jokes.
• I wear hats indoors.
• I work too hard.
• I bite my nails.
• I forget important things like what day loved ones were born but I can easily memorize strangers phone numbers and the names of pretty waitresses.
• If waiters or waitresses give me their name, I use it, constantly. Even when I can tell it creeps them out.
• I'm smart enough to be really good at reading people yet I hardly try.
• No really, I honestly don't really care what you think.
• Most people bore me.
• When I'm bored I have trouble following conversation and tend to just listen to the inner hallway arguements betwixt recent imaginary emotional proxies.
• I've had my ADD demonstrated to me via testing by a psychiatrist.
• If you add my boredom and the ADD together sometimes I spend entire days waiting for the buzzing to stop so I can communicate.
• I still get zits... at fucking 35 that should stop.
• I strongly believe that 10% of the human race strives so hard to fix things that aren't broke yet that we can transcend any problem thrown our way. I don't believe you when you say we're digging a hole we can't get out of.
• I also strongly believe that 10% of the human race are so shitty that your gloriously simple plan to fix the world will fail miserably just like the past 8-10 thousand years of attempts at utopia. I don't believe you when you say we can fix ourselves.
• I tend to quote too many movies and song lyrics. Don't... Don't you want me? You know I don't believe you when you say that you don't need me.
• I think it is funny that you have songs stuck in your heads, my absent mindedness saves me from that affliction. It still happens but I forget to be annoyed by it.
• I set almost all my jokes up in threes.
• My desk is really messy.
• My room is worse.
• I had to pay for storage space for all the crap I don't have and won't take the time to sort through.
• It amuses me that you are still kinda disgusted by the eyeball tasting bit at the beginning. If they had a creamy center like chocolate cordials there would be a lot more blind people. Tasty, tasty blind people.
• I'm really, really smart.
• I hate being smart because it makes me stand out even more than being big but I come off even worse when I try and fake normal.
• I still try and fake normal once in a while, anyway.
• Hardly anything bothers me, but when it does, it really, really does. But it goes away just as quick too.
• Still, I wind up apologizing for my temper occasionally.
• I don't shave often enough.
• I hate almost all vegetables. I like green beans, pickles, tomato sauces, some beans, small, small amounts of corn in other things, fried onions, and potatoes. Peas in the form of humus is a recent exception.
• I read magazines backwards. And many websites.
• I love it when my nose does that weird whistling thing. I try and play tunes on it.
• I pick my nose (when not whistling).
• I pick at scabs.
• I once bit a toenail off.
• My car is a complete mess. My last car had a dent in the side from where stuff slid around in the trunk.
• I speed too often.
• I rarely spellcheck.
• I stratch my crotch whenever it itches. And I think people are stupid for not doing the same.
• I am willing to admit when I am wrong or ignorant. Once I call down. Seriously, that is something wrong with me... look around, hardly anyone on this planet will do that.
• I surround myself with smart friends so I don't feel weird using big words.
• I mispronounce a lot of words because I've only ever read then.
• I think if you know what I meant you shouldn't fucking interrupt my train of thought to inform me how you last heard the word said.
• I can focus on reading a book so deeply that I don't hear people yelling my name, in the same room.
• If it is over-engineered or useless, I love it. If it is both I _must_ have it.
• I have too many pens on my desk.
• I'm actually excited by the thought that this post is too long for Blogger to handle.
• If I had super powers I would probably abuse them for my own gain.
• I sometimes get pee on the rim.
• I think that if you don't look where you are sitting you deserve to fall in the toilet. A few more cold-wet-ass-days might just teach you a little lesson about life.
• I like hot food, but I'm not into stupid hot, just flavor hot.
• I've probably made fun of you, your favorite things, or your deepest desires more than once.
• If you aren't at least passable at math, I've seriously degraded my opinion of you.
• I'm running out of patience. All the time.
• I rarely have a strong opinion about where to eat but I have strong feelings about the hassle of picking a place to eat.
• I'm generally passive about almost everything and willing to go along with someone else's plan but if no one else will pick something to do, I'll almost always break the tie or force a resolution.
• Basically, I hate mexican standoffs so violently I'll take over and bark orders.
• I consider the dithering other people do in emergency situations to be a standoff. Even bad decisions are better than not doing anything.
• On the other hand, I despise people who just start changing things without having a plan for solving the problem. Random number generators don't solve problems for individuals, evolution requires grand scale to fix things, you need to think first and then act. But think faster... I'm fucking tired of waiting on you already.
• I'm proud of almost everything I've done in my life that is technically illegal.
• I like aggressive women. And they hate me. Yay.
• I have more unfinished projects than most people have ideas.
• My entire life is littered with notes of great ideas, funny things I heard/thought, and weird shit. And I forgot to write all the best ones down.
• I day-dream while driving.
• I put my cell phone in my mouth just to see if the whole thing would fit. (It did, BTW. Nokia 6590s are small.)
• I hate to throw out old magazines but I never, ever fucking read them again.
• I like booze but I don't hardly drink anymore. I know too many people in AA and NA to really throw myself into the bottle... I feel guilty enjoying something that nearly destroyed good people. Thank god I don't know a bunch of people in Onanists Anonymous, huh?
• I like pr0n. Also, I spell it pr0n.
• I masturbate. (A: like you don't. B: people actually think this is what is wrong with other people so I felt I should include it.)
• I think freedom is more important than feelings or even unfounded worries. I even think most of what people call child pr0n shouldn't be illegal.
• I think people who violate others freedoms should be dealt with swiftly and violently. For instance I support the death penalty for child molestation, especially recidivists.
• I love my country, I love my government, I love its peoples. I wouldn't trust any of them farther than I could spit an eyeball. One way or another, almost everyone out there thinks one of those things is something the hell wrong with me.
• I use too many big words.
• I use too many words. Succinctness is something I shouldn't eschew.
• I often tell the punchline before I've finished the joke.
• I recite too many tall tales. Also, I make shit up.
• All my best anecdotes are true, but I tell them too often and never remember who has heard them already.
• I'm still not a touch typist but I use most of my fingers these days.
• I really like shiny things and shit that lights up.
• If I could get a fingerbone replaced with a watch that lit up and was readable through my skin I would get it done tomorrow.
• I really want a tatoo but in 35 years I've not found anything I'm sure I'd still want on my body at 70.
• Seriously, it would even be cool to kick over the watch when I was picking my nose... because it would make my whole nose glow.
• I wear no jewelry. Hate the shit touching my skin.
• I firmly believe that my ancestors invented pockets so they could stop poking holes in themselves to carry valuable gold around all the time.
• I have no sense of personal fashion but I love clothes. (Especially on the floor next to my bed. Ba-dump dump.)
• I'm really, really clumsy. I break shit all the time. Like couches, lamps, desks, bits of protruding plastic, artwork, vehicles, glasses, bottles, etc.
• I sing along to the radio in the car, horribly out of key. I carry tunes in a sieve.
• My nose and ear hair are already turning grey. Also, nose and ear hair, period.
• I still play with silly putty.
• I need to do laundry, perennially.
• My butt sweats.
• My teeth are really cold sensitive some days.
• I had so many nose-bleeds as a child that I am afraid to sneeze properly. I hold em back.
• This list isn't nearly long enough.

 >   DC> Key extractors will always cache.
 >
 > so this is a key extraction feature about caching.

Yep. Perhaps I should have said:

         Key extractions will always be cached.

Yeah, that is pretty harsh.

• Assigning blame is not troubleshooting. Troubleshooting is determining what the problem is, not who the problem can be dumped on before the weekend starts.
• If you blame someone straight to their face and then they cheerfully allow you discover that you are wrong you should look sheepish rather than imperiously blame that someone for confusing the issue in the first place.
• If someone tells you what some diagnostic lights say and you come down to see them because you don't believe they say that, only to be so baffled that you have to have the labels under the lights explained to you, you can no longer expect any respect whatsoever from that person.
• Faster is not always better... ask a woman if you don't believe me.

If you want to cover politics without looking biased, you actually have to refer to President Bush as, well, "President Bush" rather than "W". Either that or you need to start nicknaming all the principals. Dave doesn't overdo it and it is a blog afterall so I'll give the chiding a miss. He digs up good links when he's on the hunt... I used to live and die by his weekly tech column since it kept me in the non-slashdot part of the loop.

Here's the report from Engineering. Someone put it in the bathroom: I want to wipe my ass with it. They don't tell me what to invent—I tell them. And I'm telling them to stick two more blades in there. I don't care how. Make the blades so thin they're invisible. Put some on the handle. I don't care if they have to cram the fifth blade in perpendicular to the other four, just do it!

• ...must be the smog!
• ...well sure, now that the Governator is in office!
• ...how do I get out of Compton?
• ...are brown outs still news?
• ...what, are you saying it still seems awfully "Grey" here?
• ...damn you Atkins!

First, the easy one...Disney buys Henson. I can think of nothing more horrific than this announcement. Henson was always the DIY breath of fresh air in the miasma of the corporate entertainment whorehouse. And now they will be owned by one of the most gutless feckless whorish companies in existence. Forget ever seeing another quality piece of Muppetry, because there will be absolutely zero guts or inventiveness left in Henson once Disney fucks it in the ass for a few months. No more Muppets Take Manhattan. No more Muppets From Space. No more classics like Muppet Treasure Island. From now on you'll get Muppet Ass-Leakings From The Anally-Raped Subsidiary of The Great Mediocre Sodomizer Formerly Known As Disney. (Oh, and go ahead and scratch Farscape from ever existing again in any recognizable form...at best we'll see some battered, bruised, and raped version of it escape from the dark land of the Big D.)

Second, on a recent Ask SlashDot discussion regarding employment gaps you will find some of the most choice reasons why our economy sucks and why your job sucks (because I know that most of you reading this think your job sucks). The most choice post of all sums up just about everything wrong with corporate America:

Work only for big companies with deep pockets and ask for very high compensation. You won't get a good compensation if you don't have the opportunity to screw it big. So, as you can see, you will likely fail, but they won't admit it because they are paying you the big bucks.

Admiting that you are a failure is like admitting that they are a failure. You just go to work everyday with a smile and do things so-so... Eventually the project will fail, but you stayed late many days and you always were there to help, you just failed because you are incompetent, but they won't admit it.

I've always been excellent on my jobs and I always lost my job when I finished. Now I always EXTEND... my job by delivering not so good stuff and therefore they always need me to fix it. Also I always orgaqnize meetings to resolve issues and force people to stay in meetings even if they don't need to. I say the opposite of course, but I always ask them to participate and let them know *how important they are* to define things. The result is always poor, documents are reviewed endlessly and my job is so secure now...

Sorry guys, that's just the truth, I have a family to feed and property to buy. If being proficient and fast were profitable, that would be where I would like to be, but now I prefer the easy life of having a job for life, even if that means I have to do overtime every single day of my fuckedup life.

Doing overtime is a sign that the company is not doing the right thing. Who am I to change that? If I could sell what I do and not my time, things would be different. I can do in 15 minutes what for others takes months if not their whole lifes, but they pay me by the hour. All software engineers are replaceable, go figure where did they learn that.

The end is nigh, motherfuckers. The end is nigh.

• CSS Zen Garden is just really shiny.
• A nice rollover trick for the graphic artists in the hizzouse. I, zadly, have no skillz whatzoever when it comez to photozhoping zome frezh graphicz.
• CSS Destroy is mooserific and also amazing. Does the word "mooserific" bother you? Be glad I didn't go to moozerific.
• The Layout'o'matic is handy. A nice place to start building new stuff.
• Mark Schenk (Marks of the world, unite!) has some sexy links as well.

I also switched to FireFox and Thunderbird as my primary surfing/mail, since I haven't figured out which of the frigging office packages to install and all the fun stuff is passing Mozilla by these days for the younger cousins. Even as a "preview" FireFox is a sexier browser than most and is well worth your time even as a secondary. So small, so fast, so wiley, you can't help but hope it one day outruns the big dog.

Addendum...It gets SCARIER!

AND SCARIER!

So, instead I offer up a collaborative effot I put together with Nemo original hack for generating good passwords. Check out the PassGen utility I started tinkering with. Right now it just makes 8 character passwords and doesn't have any sexy filters to dodge bad characters for special needs but if you want a nice, completely random password this is a handy place to stop. Every password it generates has at least one number, one symbol, one upper and one lower case letter. If you are a regexp geek it matches /a-z/ && /A-Z/ && /0-9/ && /[^0-9a-zA-Z]/... and who doesn't love regexp?