I love you internet

You know, every time I suspect that the Internets may be swirling in to a homogenized gray porridge of corporate sites, pay-per-use subscriptions, and left-right yelling matches, a delicious raisin of pure weirdness coated in the sweet sweet brown sugar of wonderful pointless effort bubbles to the top.

WITNESS!

Rantings

I was playing this game on my walk in to work this morning. There's one house that always, every garbage day, has at least two big clear garbage bags of empty cartons of skim and 1% milk. What's going on there? Bakery? Crazy cat lady? Sinister plot to kill the lactose intolerant? Then there's the sad house that has the 14 identical nested TV-dinner trays. I feel like I should leave a basket of fresh fruits and vegetables on their stoop in the dead of night, like a baby at a nunnery. Also, I am forced to ask what conclusions others draw about me from my recycling.

Oh my

Are you a gentleman between the ages of say, 27 and 35? If so, you should probably see this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bonniegrrl/515645459/

Oh Dear

I am 75% Addicted to Coffee

Probably a bad idea

I've added a feed of my recently played musics from last.fm over on the right there.

Something odd

I downloaded a pre-release version of Spiderman 3, but something about it doesn't seem quite right, check it out.

I am worried that I have not been paying enough attention to the issue of single cup systems in the workplace, and cartridge based solutions.

http://www.amonline.com/print/Automatic-Merchandiser/As-Specialty-Coffee-Grows--Single-cup-Follows-in-Japan/1$18769

Free idea for a program

Someone should write a program where you can put in all your passwords, then it watches all your windows, and if one of your passwords starts appearing on the screen (because you thought you were typing in one window, but on-accident you were typing in another), and warning siren would sound.

Ttossers

I am literally angry with rage.

Notes

Notes from a 2 hour over-lunch presentation on some new program we have to use, transcribed from my notebook.

• I think this presentation is going to kill me. Seriously I'm worried I might die in this room looking at text animations in a power-point presentation. Oh God, I could be eating a hamburger right now, or running through a field.
• I should fly my kite more. I found it when I moved, but I have taken it out yet. there might be too many trees in the park near my house.
• ISO 2001 compatibility!
• If I die in this room, are my financial affairs in order?
• Streamlined channels of internal and external communication
• I saw a robin on the way to work this morning
• I'm so excited that we're going to see how tech support used to enter tickets, but won't anymore.
• There sure are a lot of boxes on this slide
• Oh, there's not enough boxes, he needs to draw some more on the easel.
• Things that would get me out of this meeting:
• Fire in building
• boss comes grabs me for emergency work (no good, boss and boss' boss in meeting)
• laptop failure (but he might have the presentation memorized)
• Emergency call from relative
• self-injury
• 1, 5 or even 20 service calls will be related to a single problem ticket!
• 1 change request
• 1 incident report
• oooh, fight fight fight fight fight! Linux vs. Windows. vs. Mac.
• Windows wins
• No one else is taking notes. I hope no one important asks to look at my notes
• D. brought his laptop. Why didn't I bring my laptop? I guess that's why he's a director.
• Presenter's got MSN open and connected. Hope he gets an IM
• "Hey sexy bear!"
• "r u still in the dum meeting?"
• I don't want to sound like a snob, but after using a Mac for a while, looking at this circa 2000 Windows app, it feels like it's cutting my eyes.
• I really hope no one asks to look at my notes
• He keeps saying that he's going to send us all this info later
• Tabs:
• General
• Assignment
• History
• Relations
• Hee hee, 'relations'
• Mr President, did you or did you not have relations with this software?
• Ha ha ha, office humor
• Assignment, relations, General, History: A.R.G.H.
• Oh, so that's how email works, you send it and someone else gets it. Now I know
• Ha ha ha, physical abuse is HILARIOUS
• Actually, right now physical abuse would be hilarious. Physical abuse would be frickin' Eddie Murphy in the 80's right now
• Oh I get it, the whole thing is an elaborate system for departments to c.y.a. and have an excuse for not doing anything
• The phone on the table here can connect to any other phone in the world. I could be talking to anyone in the world with a phone. That is amazing
• A. is trying to claw his own eyes out
• Pizza break! Now that I've had one slice of pizza and some caffiene, my previous notes seem mean and petty
• This application has hundreds of screens. Every screen has at least 20 options. Every button goes to another screen, every drop-down has 700 options
• It must have taken 200 developers just to type in this much UI text
• [diagram of software quality vs number of developers. It peaks at 'Excellent' at 6, then drops off rapidly. It is below 'Bad" at 200.]
• The entire screen is now filled with sub-sub-sub-sub-menus
• Presenter
• cell phone calls received: 2
• Complaints about slow laptop: 18
• Yeah, that's right, I'm writing a lot. So what? Big deal! You want to fight about buddy? Yeah, that's what I thought.
• I made a joke, everyone laughed
• Holy Christmas! We're going to be modifying this application ourselves while we're using it in production. What could possibly go wrong?
• D. left during the pizza break, I didn't even notice he was gone until just now. crafty!
• A sales guy just came in, took a slice of pizza and left! Right in the middle of our meeting! Why can't I live my life with balls like that?
• Change = death
• I wonder what the least amount of physical movement is I can do that would make A. crack up?
• raised eyebrow at exactly the right time
• spit on someone (not practical)
• write, look at him, write furiously
• eyebrow didn't work
• Boxes!
• Can you get high sniffing white-board markers?
• Ah, so this is what it sounds like when doves cry
• Everyone that walks by this room looks in and pities us. We are the damned.
• Guy in the corner looks close to tears
• 4 minutes left on the official clock. Will this game go in to overtime?
• Abandon ship! To the escape pods!
• I wonder if I could coordinate, via subtle hand signals, a big simultaneous sigh.
• That's the buzzer! the ref is consulting with his linesmen...
• A. is reading a page of Emacs short-cuts and commands. I wish I'd brought something to read. book, magazing, ingredients list from a chocolate bar.
• O. is drawing a picture of A. looking frustrated and tired. It's pretty good.
  
• The ref says two minutes of extra time. someone else has the room booked. Manna from heaven.

Perhaps a coup, with indie rock

I'm really not sure what to make of Amazon's latest recommendations for me:

Interesting

Arthur Conan Doyle
Scott Bakula
Donald Rumsfield
Arthur Rimbaud
Benito Mussolini

What do all these people have in common?

10 Books: Substitution

I dragged my feet through the first chapter and a half of Uncle Tungsten and came to the conclusion that it would be enough of a slog to possibly derail the project, I ate up The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, but I just wasn't gripped by Sacks' descriptive prose about his family and childhood home. So this weekend I went to a local bookstore and picked up a ringer, The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon.

I tells ya, book marketing... the text BY THE PULITZER PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR OF THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALLIER AND CLAY takes up more room on the SPINE, the SPINE I tells ya than the title of THIS book and the author's name.

I'll need to consult my charts and graphs and adjust page counts and such.

It's incredible what they can do these days

Have you seen the latest Spiderman 3 trailer? It's amazing!

10 Books: 1 down, 9 to go

Current Book: A Long Way Down
Pages to go: 3894
Percent done: 7.8

Well, I think the experiment is working, herr doktor; this morning, I had around 30 pages to go in A Long Way Down. I didn't want to quit, but I had to get to work, so there I was, walking down the sidewalk, nose buried in a book,
a danger to myself and others.

Onward Sacks-ward!

I am glad that this exists

It's International Workers Day

Happy May Day comrades.click it... CLICK IT