So, I'm sitting here, typing away on my newly-reactivated PC, and I just noticed, after 4 hours of working, that either the blue gun is getting all hyperactive, or the red and green ones are sleeping on the job. Every couple of seconds, the color on the monitor washes all blue, then goes back to normal.

So, as a request for comments: I'm now on the lookout for a new monitor. The one I've got is an aging 19" CTX VL90. I'd like to get a 19" flat panel, wide-format if possible. Any suggestions?

The hook, of course, is that I've got exactly €3.50 in the bank.

My bestest little buddy went on a trip today. He's never been out there on his own before, so of course I'm worrying myself sick, hoping he's OK, and that the people at the Apple Repair Center are taking care of him. That's right, at 9:02 this morning, the UPS guy came by and picked up my Powerbook. He wasn't feeling well. The Powerbook, I mean. Thanks to this problem, he's going on vacation.

Now I'm working on my Windows PC. First day today. So far:

• Virus update notification that couldn't be clicked away
• ZoneAlarm popped up while I was playing Doom 3; machine frozen between video modes
• Windows blue-screened for some inscrutable reason (rebooted before I could read the error message)
• Upon restart received "Windows Critical Error" dialog, without specifics on which application it was
• Weird window-management feature, where a window was off-screen, and could only be seen when maximized. "Tile Windows" didn't bring it back
• Font-management bug where a Type 1 font couldn't be substituted in Macromedia Flash

It's going to be a long week.

As if reading my mind, michael say:

Going to a place that's far, so far away and if that's not enough Going where nobody says hello, they don't talk to anybody they don't know You'll wind up in some factory that's full time filth and nowhere left to go Walk home to an empty house, sit around all by yourself I know it might sound strange, but I believe You'll be coming back before too long At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care if you're not here with me 'Cause it's so much easier to handle All my problems if I'm too far out to sea But something better happen soon Or it's gonna be too late to bring you back It's not as though I really need you If you were here I'd only bleed you But everybody else in town only wants to bring you down and That's not how it ought to be I know it might sound strange, but I believe You'll be coming back before too long

In no particular order:

• The comical 'Boing!' sound in Whammy! by the B-52s; 1983; Athens, GA
• The last 2 Space is the Place-minutes of Bugman by Blur; 1992; UK
• My putting Upside Down by The Jesus & Mary Chain right in the middle of a make-out mix tape; 1989; Woodstock, GA
• Peter Buck selling his distortion pedal; 1989; Los Angeles, CA
• 

Poking around Little Green Footballs (no link, because I don't want y'all Bitch-dotting Charles' nice little blog there), I came across this little gem of a page.

Looking at that cheered me up for a number of reasons. First off, Charles is absolutely right about the Valentine's flash banner. Priceless; an absolute masterpiece of medieval Muslim romantik. Xenophobia begins at home, kids. But mostly, I just have to giggle when I see a URL that has "ShowFatwa.php" in it.

Awesome! You guys are nuts...

Just in case any y'all was looking for a good dildo-party this weekend.

Just sayin'...

Click here for the story...

It's Monday again. How do I know this? Well, first of all, I'll be inebriated in just a few short hours. My liver's already quivering --quivering!-- with anticipation. Secondly, every Monday afternoon there's a little parade that marches past my office window. Far from being a celebration of my own glorious acts, it's actually a sad little group of about eight freeloaders protesting Hartz IV, the German social services reform bill.

I don't really know much about Hartz IV, having Googled it for the first time just a minute or two ago, and I don't really care what's in it. Often, I'll eschew informing myself about an issue and simply base my decision on who's marching against it. The bongo-beating, rhyme-chanting mouth-breathers that just limped past my office window have just made me a huge fan of Hartz IV, even if it reads like a Jonathan Swift treatise. Beat those bongos, slackers; I'm going shopping for fava beans.

Just a factoid for the stream:

In typesetting, you generally want to avoid leaving a line of a paragraph by itself on a page. When it's the first line, it's called a widow When it's the last line, it's called an orphan. In German, you called the first line a Cobbler's boy (Schusterjung), and the last line 'son of a whore' (Hurenkind).

Carry on.

[This is a book review I've written for next month's Die Neue Szene, the local scene-rag, in case anyone feels like reading it.]

€16.90
"Digital gestalten: Der Erste-Hilfe Kurs in Typo, Farbe und Layout" (Günter Schuler)
Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2005

In this compact volume, author Günter Schuler attempts to cover almost all aspects of modern electronic typographical design and layout. As the subtitle suggests, the book is arranged like a course on design basics, with long stretches of raw information about design and layout, culminating in a detailed example showing its application.

Starting with the evolution of movable type, and tracing the histories of various typefaces, we learn for what purposes many familiar fonts were originally developed, and by whom, and what it is about them that has kept them alive into the digital age. Next, we move on to how one goes about using them. The classic techniques of layout are covered, and are analogized to workflows of modern programs like InDesign and QuarkXPress. This is attractive to budding designers; learning the principles of layout, instead of the tools and tricks, allows the reader to apply this knowledge to any design process.

Unfortunately, Mr. Schuler wastes large portions of the book with endless lists of examples that contribute little to the reader’s experience. The lists of typefaces in the opening chapters, for example, are overwhelming, not to mention boring to page through. Also, many examples of bad design are subtly made, and not clearly marked, giving the reader an uncomfortable impression that the guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, after all.

Despite the occasional glitches in writing style and organization, this book offers an excellent entry point into the world of professional design. It is brimming with the kind of information and concepts one needs to rise above the Web-monkeys and Photoshop-jockeys that saturate the field today.

Every now and then, me and the old lady sleep late, work up an appetite, then get up and enjoy a nice breakfast together. I'm happy to say that today was one of those days. Unfortunately, they don't have Waffle Houses over here, so your options are limited. It's either head over to the coffee shop for a $10 breakfast of yogurt and oak leaves, or do it yourself.

It just so happens that the old lady and me enjoy practicing the culinary arts, and brother, we produced. I'd like you all to meet someone very dear to me, the Small Southern Breakfast:

Let's see, what we got here?

• Hot coffee
• Fresh-squeezed orange juice
• Homemade biscuits au Rube
• One double-sized, spicy-hot Augsburg-style omelette
• Cheese grits (made with Gouda, which is surprisingly good, even for a cheese-grits purist like myself)
• Assorted cheeses (Gouda, swiss, emmentaler)
• Butter, honey, peach jelly, and red-pepper spreads
• Peanut butter, a rare commodity in these parts
• One hungry Rube
• One hungry Augie

Yuuuuuummmmmmm-mi!

Then came the nap, but I forgot to take pictures. Y'all over there living in the Land o' Plenty have no idea what a rare joy it is over here to stuff yourself like a peanut farmer before getting out of your pajamas.

TrustedReviews: IBM, Sony, Toshiba to acCELerate Processor Market?

After three years of co-development between industry giants IBM, Sony and Toshiba the fruit of their labours has finally been detailed to the public. The Cell processor, which among other things will power Sony’s PlayStation 3 games console, is a multicore chip that its designers boast has the potential to run 10 times faster than current PC chips.

They don't mention it in at the end of that article, but in this one (German) they make it pretty clear that this cell processor thing is a 64-bit, multi-core, scaled-down Power5. It's a similar manufacturing scheme as the current Power4 machines from IBM and the Apple G5 line of Power Macs. Can you say 'Power Mac G7'? I thought you could.

There are a couple of things that are interesting in these articles. Apparently, they're already being fabricated. IBM will be introducing them in a workstation line later this year, and the PlayStation 3 is already under development, so prototypes probably exist. Secondly, the price of the chip will be less than those in Intel's line-up. The introduction of the G5 lagged behind the Power4 by just over a year. That means if Apple opts for the cell, and if reports are accurate about its performance they should definitely consider it, we could see the new processor wearing something stylish sometime next year, and with a lower price-tag than the G5s.

So, wonder what Motorola's up to these days? Probably somewhere ordering rubber dicks with Tom Sizemore.

So, I booted up my WIndows computer yesterday, for the first time in a while. What a patronizing, pedantic little shit that thing is. First of all, I get about 50 little things popping up in my system tray, telling me my virus definitions are outdated, that this or that program is trying to contact the Internet, then some pop-up window trying to sell me Half-Life 2, which I already bought about 3 months ago, and that there are approximately six relevant system updates I really, really need to install (I already installed SP2 on this dick thing here, wasn't that just last month?). It also found a "New USB HID Device", which it finds every single time it boots, and can't seem to remember. The signal-to-noise ratio in Windows is rapidly approaching zero.

But I'll be damned if a little pop-up didn't come up at the end and tell me that my Desktop has too much stuff on it, and maybe I don't think I should maybe get off my ass and run the Desktop Cleanup Wizard for once. What is this thing, my mother? Can't try to do anything around here without some little window popping up at you and telling you you're doing it wrong. I'm not trying to make excuses here, but there's only like a baker's dozen things on my desktop. I run my monitor at extra-big resolution and believe me, I've seen worse. I mean, check this out:

It's not exactly bursting at the seams, now is it? But, I figure, what the hell, I'll spend a little time wiping Windows' ass for a change. So, I grab the Quicktime Player icon and drag it over to the trashcan. Easy, one step operation, right?

You might not be able to read German, but that's a dialog telling me that, despite what I probably think, throwing away a link doesn't un-install the application. Now, I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but honestly I wasn't even expecting it to un-install the application. I was throwing a link in the trash. The observant among you may have noticed two suspicious things about this dialog:

1. There's no "Do not show this again" checkbox. I cannot fathom this.
2. There's no option to un-install the program in this dialog.

Every single time you throw a link away from your desktop, you get this dialog saying you're doing it wrong. Don't believe me? Ok, here's one for Ad-aware:

Aaaand, here's one for iTunes:

Aaand here's one for QuickBooks:

Huh? QuickBooks just got deleted, and there's no dialog? What's up with that? Hmmm...maybe he's figured I know what I'm doing. Ok, I'll just throw away Trillian:

What the fuck? Hmm...maybe it doesn't say anything about deleting quickbooks because it actually DID uninstall the program? Nope. More likely because it's a competitor with MS Money.

You piss-ant little fucker. Who the hell came up with this workflow here? First, he tells my desktop, MY DESKTOP, is too cluttered. Did I mention that it is, after all, MY FUCKING DESKTOP? Then he bitches and moans about every single little fucking thing I do, that I'm not doing it right.

Windows, you whiny-ass little bitch. If I had half a choice I'd de-rez your ass.

When deciding what to have engraved on your iPod, please try to be sober.

Jesus, that's one huge fucking pile of crockery.

Back in the good old-to-middlin' days, I was an avid user of OS/2. It had a lot of technical trickery you could entertain yourself with. Shadows, for example. Shadows were like the links you can make in Windows, except they actually worked. In Windows, a link isn't much more that a text file with the path of a document or program in it and the .lnk suffix. This means, of course, that if the document ever moves the link doesn't work any more. It's not a link at all, really: It's a bookmark. Not so with shadows; once made, you could move the document to wherever you wanted, and the shadow would always know where it had gotten off to. Incidentally, Mac OS X is the only operating system I'm aware of that has this functionality today, eComStation excepted.

OS/2 wasn't perfect, though. It was ugly, even by the standards of 1994. It also had a weird interface to it. Sometimes, dialogs were arranged in tabs along the right, sometimes along the top, and they hardly ever had OK buttons. Presentation Manager, the OS/2 version of Windows' Explorer, also had some quirks when viewing things in tree fashion. The multimedia subsystem sucked, frankly. You couldn't reliably changed things like screen resolution, or color depth. The on-screen fonts were powered by some weird, mutated version of Adobe Type Manager, which wasn't compatible with any other version, so you had to convert your Windows ATM fonts over with UNIX tools, just in case you had an SGI sitting around (we did, fortunately). And, compared to DOS and Windows, it was slow and memory-intensive to do anything with.

Probably the only things I miss about OS/2 now are the applications I used with it. You see, kids, back then, when you said 'Office', you just as likely meant Lotus Smartsuite or WordPerfect Office as Microsoft Office. Smartsuite/2 was a combination of Ami Pro, Lotus 1-2-3, Organizer, and Freelance, all distributed on about 40 3.5" diskettes. The very first word processor written for Windows, Ami Pro was a nice environment to get stuff done in. Then Lotus bought it. Then they bought Harvard Graphics out, I think. Then Paradox, the database. While they were busy buying and ruining the pieces they didn't have, and suing people like Borland over competing products (the Lotus lawsuit over Quattro touched off a couple of years of "Look & Feel" paranoia), IBM was getting ready to buy their asses and return the favor.

There were also some pretty innovative programs you could play around with. DeScribe, for example, was the first word-processor that included as-you-type background spellchecking. Clearlook tried really, really hard to be all frame-y like Ami Pro/Word Pro, but was more like KWord than anything else. Galactic Civilizations was a kick-ass Civilization-in-Space game. Then there was OpenDoc. I was really excited about OpenDoc, seeing as OLE sucked ass back then, as it still does today. That functionality is actually worse today than it was back then! OpenOffice is about the only spreadsheet/word processing combo where you can still 'Paste Link'. That doesn't even work with Office anymore. I guess I was the only schmoe that thought it was useful. Ah, the fruits of Taligent, doomed by market forces and the absolutely grisly OS/2 typography engine.

Between IBM and Corel, the roadkill and also-rans of computing history have finally found a home. Kind of like the Island of Misfit Toys, or some'n.

The Dirty Ashtray » Whoever Said Age is Only a Number and Only a State of Mind Can Kiss my Ass.:

I never realized I was old until one day, when I was laying down to go to sleep, I made this long sort of, 'arrrrrrrrrrrr' grunting sound. If I'd then added, "boy, my dogs are a-barkin'" at the end, I would've been my dad. That's when I noticed that pretty much no matter what I do, I make some sort of grunting sound to accompany it. When I sit down, when I stand up, when I reach over to turn on the nightstand-lamp.

And every action has its own distinct sound. I think two old men could always tell what each others doing, even while blind-folded. "Put down that remote, I'm listening to that!" "What remote?" "Don't you try to fool me, sonny, I recognize the reaching-over-to-the-coffee-table groan when I hears it!" I think it starts at 30. You stretch your back and, for the first time, it just doesn't feel right without that, "rrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh" as punctuation.

Well, that, and those weird ear-hairs that I've got going on.

QuickSilver is an interesting thing.

Take a look at www.blacktree.com (as far as I can tell, the blog plug-in doesn't support HTML, nor, by extension, real links).

(click to play)

Obligatory Parentary Advisory:

Mac Mini: The Emperor's New Computer:

So is the mini a maxi value? For me, clearly, no. When I consider that a good deal of my time is spent running applications like Disk Defragmenter, Scandisk, Norton AV, Windows Update and Ad-Aware--none of which are available for the Mac platform--it doesn't make sense for me to "switch" to a Mac at this time.

via WizBang

(Click to View)

We're back from Vienna now, and we were greeted by even more hospitable German weather:

I'm having to catch up on work, so there's not much time to be blogging, neither passively nor actively, at the moment. But here's some more pictures in case anybody's wondering just what the phrase "cold as a witch's titty" looks like in the implementation phase.

Tagged at Thundernose's. A coward's tag, but tagged nonetheless. So, figuring what better time to try out the Amazon function of my blogging software, I decided, why not?

Rube's Random 10

"Parklife" (Blur)	"Hank Williams - 40 Greatest Hits" (Hank Williams)	"Alice" (Tom Waits)	"Good for Your Soul" (Oingo Boingo)	"The Downward Spiral" (Nine Inch Nails)
"Red Headed Stranger" (Willie Nelson)	"Candy Apple Grey" (Hüsker Dü)	"Chips from the Chocolate Fireball" (The Dukes of Stratosphear)	"Darklands" (Jesus and Mary Chain)	"Reckoning" (R.E.M.)

1.) What is the total amount of music files on your computer?
I just spent about a week sucking all my music into iTunes, along with cover art and what-not. The final damage?

2.) The last CD you bought is:

"Excursions in Ambience 1" (Various Artists)

That was well over a year ago. I already seem to have everything I need.

3.)What is the song you last listened to before this message?

Live with Me, Rolling Stones from Let It Bleed

4.) Five songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you:
I'm a sentimental goon, and tend to get all weepy if the right song comes on at the wrong moment.

Three Days, Jane's Addiction

Prodigal Son, Alison Krauss & Michelle Shocked

Mother Nature's Son, The Beatles

Streets of Baltimore, Bobby Bare

Oh, You Pretty Things, David Bowie

5.) Who are you gonna pass this stick to (five persons and why)?

I'll be passing this one along to:

• My Brother, no link, but I'd be interested to hear what he's listening to these days
• Augie, even though, being German, she'll probably just list a bunch of Kraftwerk CDs
• The Hetzfresse, just to irritate him
• Andy of "XOR", for pretty much the same reason
• And, finally, to Rappinhood, because I'd like to see if he puts his own records on there...

Well, that was entertaining. Damn you, Zonker. Damn you to HELL! I'll get this one back at the Wreckyll, if I remember to reserve a room...

(click to play)

Gut Rumbles: the guitar face:

What a hoot; Acidman got me there. I don't even play guitar all that good, but when nobody's looking I stick out the tongue and squint my eyes like the guy from Uriah Heep, "Magicians Birthday"-style. It's all pretty ridiculous anyway when all you can play are a couple of sappy old Beatles tunes; I mean, it's not like you have to jump around the room and bash in your amp after Norwegian Wood, now is it.

While we're on the subject, I know that some of youse that drop by every now and then are musicians. I'm looking for a better way to guitar into my computer. I'm thinking of setting myself up with some sort of guitar synth, but I really have no idea what all I'll need. Any suggestions? All I've got right now is a jangly old western acoustic and a Mac. Well, it was enough for Matthew Sweet to get started...

What kind of rock was I under last week to make me miss this beauty:

With Moore sitting in the audience, the Dirty Harry star said, "Michael Moore and I actually have a lot in common - we both appreciate living in a country where there's free expression.

"But, Michael, if you ever show up at my front door with a camera - I'll kill you. I mean it."

Jeeps, I can't think of many things that would fill my pants quicker than Gunny Highway telling me he was going to kill me, then adding 'I mean it' just to make sure I knew he wasn't joking.

A man's got to know his limitations, Mike.

Via Evil White Guy

Acidman is looking for somebody to blame. And, as my old boss at UPS was wont to say, nobody's gonna be getting anything done around here until we find a scapegoat. Let's play!

Gloria Steinem

She didn't invent feminism, but she certainly became the poster-girl for it. The two-income, latchkey family is at the root of a multitude of problems in America, both economically and socially.

Tom Freston

The founder of MTV. Freston's behemoth is the reason the music industry, traditionally one of America's most innovative areas, has become the sole province Gangstas telling kids not to do drugs and digitally tone-corrected dotards and dotardesses like Cher.

Bob Saget

That's right, fucker, I said Bob Saget. Goddamn Canadian bastard was actually a very funny stand-up comic at one time. But then, he turned his sights on a network job, and hit the big-time with America's Funniest Home Videos. He turned into an unfunny, maddeningly-smug little camera mugger. This opened the floodgates for 20 years of sappy, horribly unfunny television 'humor', undoing decades of hard work by the likes of Redd Foxx, Carroll O'Connor, and the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. See also, Dave Coulier.

George Lucas

How the fuck can you make Star Wars suck? I mean, farting ewoks?

Paul Allen

This no-good sonofabitch was a co-founder of Microsoft, the guys who brought you Bob. Paul, being one of the co-founders of Evil Itself, is a shoo-in for this list. I would've put Gates in there, but c'mon, how could you hate that cute widdle face of his?! Paul, however, knew what Gates was up to when they founded that company, and didn't shoot him. Adding to this infamy, Paul is also directly response for MS-DOS using the backslash (\) to separate directories, instead of the forward slash as God and AT&T intended. Although I suspect most of you mouse-jockeys have never noticed such a thing, I assure you it's diabolical.

Tim Berners-Lee

As you probably know, Berners-Lee invented the World-Wide Web, and is therefore directly responsible for comment spam. Fuck you, Tim.

John F. Kennedy

I know he died before I was born, but he was responsible for the entire bad part of the 60s. He got us into Vietnam to save the French(!), and gave Generation IX something to bitch about until the present day. Inexplicably, his babies in Vietnam and Cuba are thrown into our faces every time America tries to do something good in the world, and yet every pampered playboy candidate from the Democratic side of the fence tries to waltz into the White House with his mask on. Go figure. Maybe he actually did some good by keeping the Democrats effectively out of office for 40 years? Naah.

William S. Burroughs

I liked Burroughs' first couple of books, Junky and Queer. They were gritty, gripping, and entertaining to read. But after that, he spent 50 years showing people that you don't need to be able to write to be a writer, and you don't need to be able to think to be an intellectual. Once he got his thinking cap on, all he did was bastardize literature with pop vapidness, and utterly destroyed American philosophy with hate-filled, nihilistic crypto-elitism. His material was the prototype for celebrity pseudo-intellectuals like Timothy Leary, Oliver Stone, and Noam Chomsky. Through his association with one-hit wonders like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, he installed the backdoor through which intellectual thought slipped out unnoticed in the 60s.

Lou Gerstner

Rounding out our trio of technical goats is this sack of shit. Lou is the reason you're probably reading this page with a Microsoft browser, on a Microsoft OS, after clicking a link with an overpriced, ergonomically baffling Microsoft Mouse. You see, Lou was in charge of IBM back when they were developing my beloved operating system, OS/2. They'd successfully wrenched it from the jaws of Microsoft Perfidy (actually, Microsoft Perfidy sounds like a great name for a new product, doesn't it? Then, when you called tech support, they'd ask you, "So, do you have the latest Perfidy?" And you could respond wryly, while watching a little hourglass run out sand and turn itself over for an eternity, all because somebody else's fucking computer crashed across the office while you had a drive mapped to it, "Yes, Mr. Tech Support Guy, I do indeed have the latest Perfidy, you soulless, soulless cur."), and it was developing into an advanced, beautifully architected system which was superior in every way to its competitors from Microsoft and Apple. It should have been the OS that the computer revolution ran on. Gerstner didn't have the vision to keep OS/2 advancing, and, waiting until I'd spent about, oh, $2000 on various OS/2 versions and programs which are today about as useful as 1990 Sugar Bowl Tickets. But Gerstner didn't want to stop there! He also arranged to buy Lotus, the guys who were Office before Office, and drive them into the ground, just so the Microsoft Applications Division could sleep at night without worry that there might have been some competition out there or something. If I can figure out how Gerstner managed to destroy Novell, I'll have his ass in a cell with Martha Stewart for shady corporate skullduggery.

Jesse Jackson

I'll just let Acidman explain that one. My thoughts exactly.

Well, now, that was fun. Maybe we should reduce it to 5, though. 5's a meme; 10's almost like work.

If you think you've got some good search-engine placement, just lookie what Rube's got.

Yeah, buddy, send in the horny mexicans, there be room for evvabuddy here in El Rube's Rancho de Amore.

I would think I'd get more hits over that one. My top ten searches?

There is style, there. I'm not saying I'm disappointed, just a bit confused. Oddly enough, it looks like Apple's G5 intro got google-bombed into the #5 spot. I guess the number 3 spot on the world-wide supercomputer list is just not enough for some people.

Over at A Small Victory, they've started the ol' fat-chick/skinny-chick theoreticals up. Why in the world does anybody debate this point? The cool thing is, the extremes are out. There's people over there dredging up stories about that 300-lb. gorilla-woman they bagged in college who really wasn't that bad in the sack, and had a good heart to boot, not that I asked and oh, don't worry, I always wear my dinner on my shirt. I'm sorry, guys and gals, but if fat-mouthing gets your goat because your chick's a whale...sorry, I can't think of a good animal metaphor to end that sentence, but still, you're the one with the problem.

I wouldn't date a fat girl. They're not attractive to me, and therefore it would be silly for me to date one. I also wouldn't date this Teri Polo chick because she's a fucking actress! Have you ever talked to an actress? Jesus, it's like holding a conversation with your hand after jerking off, I mean really, thanks for the amusing lay, honey, but I've got a book to read. I need a bit more intellectual grab-ass than that. I need a girl who can talk about something that's not written in all-caps on a piece of paper after her name and a stage direction. I mean, really, up until the 1970s actors and actresses weren't even considered polite company.

So, will I be considering my possible future with Teri Polo, spending late nights drinking cheap wine and discussing with her the theological implications of the theory of relativity, and the destabilizing influence of voice recording on the natural evolution of human language? No, I doubt it.

Will I be masturbating vigorously over the upcoming Playboy spread? Yes. Yes I will. At least until the cashier at the gas station catches me.

UPDATE: Get a load of this guy at Michele's

My theory is that guys who go for girls with bodies like 11-year-old boys actually would prefer to be with 11-year-old boys.
Posted by Dirk on January 18, 2005 07:24 AM

Yes, "Dirk", because all 11-year-old boys have 36-inch hips and perky, pouting breasts with well-defined yet subtly protruding nipples, as well as expertly-manicured vaginas. My theory, Dirk, is that men who have trouble telling Playboy models from 11-year-old boys better just stay the fuck away from my nephews, that's all I'm saying.

I can't go on, just kill me now, god and sonny jesus.

Via Augie, and I don't even wanna fucking know what she was doing surfing around for MS-Pr0n, jesus, my eyes, it may well take me a while to get over this one, in fact I may just have to break into spontaneous grown-up straight-mail non-teen-beat oriented good ol' surfing for tits after this.

My eyes, to repeat. Good god-a-mighty, my eyes.

So, I'm sitting here, typing away on my newly-reactivated PC, and I just noticed, after 4 hours of working, that either the blue gun is getting all hyperactive, or the red and green ones are sleeping on the job. Every couple of seconds, the color on the monitor washes all blue, then goes back to normal.

So, as a request for comments: I'm now on the lookout for a new monitor. The one I've got is an aging 19" CTX VL90. I'd like to get a 19" flat panel, wide-format if possible. Any suggestions?

The hook, of course, is that I've got exactly €3.50 in the bank.

My bestest little buddy went on a trip today. He's never been out there on his own before, so of course I'm worrying myself sick, hoping he's OK, and that the people at the Apple Repair Center are taking care of him. That's right, at 9:02 this morning, the UPS guy came by and picked up my Powerbook. He wasn't feeling well. The Powerbook, I mean. Thanks to this problem, he's going on vacation.

Now I'm working on my Windows PC. First day today. So far:

• Virus update notification that couldn't be clicked away
• ZoneAlarm popped up while I was playing Doom 3; machine frozen between video modes
• Windows blue-screened for some inscrutable reason (rebooted before I could read the error message)
• Upon restart received "Windows Critical Error" dialog, without specifics on which application it was
• Weird window-management feature, where a window was off-screen, and could only be seen when maximized. "Tile Windows" didn't bring it back
• Font-management bug where a Type 1 font couldn't be substituted in Macromedia Flash

It's going to be a long week.

As if reading my mind, michael say:

Going to a place that's far, so far away and if that's not enough Going where nobody says hello, they don't talk to anybody they don't know You'll wind up in some factory that's full time filth and nowhere left to go Walk home to an empty house, sit around all by yourself I know it might sound strange, but I believe You'll be coming back before too long At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care if you're not here with me 'Cause it's so much easier to handle All my problems if I'm too far out to sea But something better happen soon Or it's gonna be too late to bring you back It's not as though I really need you If you were here I'd only bleed you But everybody else in town only wants to bring you down and That's not how it ought to be I know it might sound strange, but I believe You'll be coming back before too long

In no particular order:

• The comical 'Boing!' sound in Whammy! by the B-52s; 1983; Athens, GA
• The last 2 Space is the Place-minutes of Bugman by Blur; 1992; UK
• My putting Upside Down by The Jesus & Mary Chain right in the middle of a make-out mix tape; 1989; Woodstock, GA
• Peter Buck selling his distortion pedal; 1989; Los Angeles, CA
• 

Poking around Little Green Footballs (no link, because I don't want y'all Bitch-dotting Charles' nice little blog there), I came across this little gem of a page.

Looking at that cheered me up for a number of reasons. First off, Charles is absolutely right about the Valentine's flash banner. Priceless; an absolute masterpiece of medieval Muslim romantik. Xenophobia begins at home, kids. But mostly, I just have to giggle when I see a URL that has "ShowFatwa.php" in it.

Awesome! You guys are nuts...

Just in case any y'all was looking for a good dildo-party this weekend.

Just sayin'...

Click here for the story...

It's Monday again. How do I know this? Well, first of all, I'll be inebriated in just a few short hours. My liver's already quivering --quivering!-- with anticipation. Secondly, every Monday afternoon there's a little parade that marches past my office window. Far from being a celebration of my own glorious acts, it's actually a sad little group of about eight freeloaders protesting Hartz IV, the German social services reform bill.

I don't really know much about Hartz IV, having Googled it for the first time just a minute or two ago, and I don't really care what's in it. Often, I'll eschew informing myself about an issue and simply base my decision on who's marching against it. The bongo-beating, rhyme-chanting mouth-breathers that just limped past my office window have just made me a huge fan of Hartz IV, even if it reads like a Jonathan Swift treatise. Beat those bongos, slackers; I'm going shopping for fava beans.

Just a factoid for the stream:

In typesetting, you generally want to avoid leaving a line of a paragraph by itself on a page. When it's the first line, it's called a widow When it's the last line, it's called an orphan. In German, you called the first line a Cobbler's boy (Schusterjung), and the last line 'son of a whore' (Hurenkind).

Carry on.

[This is a book review I've written for next month's Die Neue Szene, the local scene-rag, in case anyone feels like reading it.]

€16.90
"Digital gestalten: Der Erste-Hilfe Kurs in Typo, Farbe und Layout" (Günter Schuler)
Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2005

In this compact volume, author Günter Schuler attempts to cover almost all aspects of modern electronic typographical design and layout. As the subtitle suggests, the book is arranged like a course on design basics, with long stretches of raw information about design and layout, culminating in a detailed example showing its application.

Starting with the evolution of movable type, and tracing the histories of various typefaces, we learn for what purposes many familiar fonts were originally developed, and by whom, and what it is about them that has kept them alive into the digital age. Next, we move on to how one goes about using them. The classic techniques of layout are covered, and are analogized to workflows of modern programs like InDesign and QuarkXPress. This is attractive to budding designers; learning the principles of layout, instead of the tools and tricks, allows the reader to apply this knowledge to any design process.

Unfortunately, Mr. Schuler wastes large portions of the book with endless lists of examples that contribute little to the reader’s experience. The lists of typefaces in the opening chapters, for example, are overwhelming, not to mention boring to page through. Also, many examples of bad design are subtly made, and not clearly marked, giving the reader an uncomfortable impression that the guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, after all.

Despite the occasional glitches in writing style and organization, this book offers an excellent entry point into the world of professional design. It is brimming with the kind of information and concepts one needs to rise above the Web-monkeys and Photoshop-jockeys that saturate the field today.

Every now and then, me and the old lady sleep late, work up an appetite, then get up and enjoy a nice breakfast together. I'm happy to say that today was one of those days. Unfortunately, they don't have Waffle Houses over here, so your options are limited. It's either head over to the coffee shop for a $10 breakfast of yogurt and oak leaves, or do it yourself.

It just so happens that the old lady and me enjoy practicing the culinary arts, and brother, we produced. I'd like you all to meet someone very dear to me, the Small Southern Breakfast:

Let's see, what we got here?

• Hot coffee
• Fresh-squeezed orange juice
• Homemade biscuits au Rube
• One double-sized, spicy-hot Augsburg-style omelette
• Cheese grits (made with Gouda, which is surprisingly good, even for a cheese-grits purist like myself)
• Assorted cheeses (Gouda, swiss, emmentaler)
• Butter, honey, peach jelly, and red-pepper spreads
• Peanut butter, a rare commodity in these parts
• One hungry Rube
• One hungry Augie

Yuuuuuummmmmmm-mi!

Then came the nap, but I forgot to take pictures. Y'all over there living in the Land o' Plenty have no idea what a rare joy it is over here to stuff yourself like a peanut farmer before getting out of your pajamas.

TrustedReviews: IBM, Sony, Toshiba to acCELerate Processor Market?

After three years of co-development between industry giants IBM, Sony and Toshiba the fruit of their labours has finally been detailed to the public. The Cell processor, which among other things will power Sony’s PlayStation 3 games console, is a multicore chip that its designers boast has the potential to run 10 times faster than current PC chips.

They don't mention it in at the end of that article, but in this one (German) they make it pretty clear that this cell processor thing is a 64-bit, multi-core, scaled-down Power5. It's a similar manufacturing scheme as the current Power4 machines from IBM and the Apple G5 line of Power Macs. Can you say 'Power Mac G7'? I thought you could.

There are a couple of things that are interesting in these articles. Apparently, they're already being fabricated. IBM will be introducing them in a workstation line later this year, and the PlayStation 3 is already under development, so prototypes probably exist. Secondly, the price of the chip will be less than those in Intel's line-up. The introduction of the G5 lagged behind the Power4 by just over a year. That means if Apple opts for the cell, and if reports are accurate about its performance they should definitely consider it, we could see the new processor wearing something stylish sometime next year, and with a lower price-tag than the G5s.

So, wonder what Motorola's up to these days? Probably somewhere ordering rubber dicks with Tom Sizemore.

So, I booted up my WIndows computer yesterday, for the first time in a while. What a patronizing, pedantic little shit that thing is. First of all, I get about 50 little things popping up in my system tray, telling me my virus definitions are outdated, that this or that program is trying to contact the Internet, then some pop-up window trying to sell me Half-Life 2, which I already bought about 3 months ago, and that there are approximately six relevant system updates I really, really need to install (I already installed SP2 on this dick thing here, wasn't that just last month?). It also found a "New USB HID Device", which it finds every single time it boots, and can't seem to remember. The signal-to-noise ratio in Windows is rapidly approaching zero.

But I'll be damned if a little pop-up didn't come up at the end and tell me that my Desktop has too much stuff on it, and maybe I don't think I should maybe get off my ass and run the Desktop Cleanup Wizard for once. What is this thing, my mother? Can't try to do anything around here without some little window popping up at you and telling you you're doing it wrong. I'm not trying to make excuses here, but there's only like a baker's dozen things on my desktop. I run my monitor at extra-big resolution and believe me, I've seen worse. I mean, check this out:

It's not exactly bursting at the seams, now is it? But, I figure, what the hell, I'll spend a little time wiping Windows' ass for a change. So, I grab the Quicktime Player icon and drag it over to the trashcan. Easy, one step operation, right?

You might not be able to read German, but that's a dialog telling me that, despite what I probably think, throwing away a link doesn't un-install the application. Now, I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but honestly I wasn't even expecting it to un-install the application. I was throwing a link in the trash. The observant among you may have noticed two suspicious things about this dialog:

1. There's no "Do not show this again" checkbox. I cannot fathom this.
2. There's no option to un-install the program in this dialog.

Every single time you throw a link away from your desktop, you get this dialog saying you're doing it wrong. Don't believe me? Ok, here's one for Ad-aware:

Aaaand, here's one for iTunes:

Aaand here's one for QuickBooks:

Huh? QuickBooks just got deleted, and there's no dialog? What's up with that? Hmmm...maybe he's figured I know what I'm doing. Ok, I'll just throw away Trillian:

What the fuck? Hmm...maybe it doesn't say anything about deleting quickbooks because it actually DID uninstall the program? Nope. More likely because it's a competitor with MS Money.

You piss-ant little fucker. Who the hell came up with this workflow here? First, he tells my desktop, MY DESKTOP, is too cluttered. Did I mention that it is, after all, MY FUCKING DESKTOP? Then he bitches and moans about every single little fucking thing I do, that I'm not doing it right.

Windows, you whiny-ass little bitch. If I had half a choice I'd de-rez your ass.

When deciding what to have engraved on your iPod, please try to be sober.

Jesus, that's one huge fucking pile of crockery.

Back in the good old-to-middlin' days, I was an avid user of OS/2. It had a lot of technical trickery you could entertain yourself with. Shadows, for example. Shadows were like the links you can make in Windows, except they actually worked. In Windows, a link isn't much more that a text file with the path of a document or program in it and the .lnk suffix. This means, of course, that if the document ever moves the link doesn't work any more. It's not a link at all, really: It's a bookmark. Not so with shadows; once made, you could move the document to wherever you wanted, and the shadow would always know where it had gotten off to. Incidentally, Mac OS X is the only operating system I'm aware of that has this functionality today, eComStation excepted.

OS/2 wasn't perfect, though. It was ugly, even by the standards of 1994. It also had a weird interface to it. Sometimes, dialogs were arranged in tabs along the right, sometimes along the top, and they hardly ever had OK buttons. Presentation Manager, the OS/2 version of Windows' Explorer, also had some quirks when viewing things in tree fashion. The multimedia subsystem sucked, frankly. You couldn't reliably changed things like screen resolution, or color depth. The on-screen fonts were powered by some weird, mutated version of Adobe Type Manager, which wasn't compatible with any other version, so you had to convert your Windows ATM fonts over with UNIX tools, just in case you had an SGI sitting around (we did, fortunately). And, compared to DOS and Windows, it was slow and memory-intensive to do anything with.

Probably the only things I miss about OS/2 now are the applications I used with it. You see, kids, back then, when you said 'Office', you just as likely meant Lotus Smartsuite or WordPerfect Office as Microsoft Office. Smartsuite/2 was a combination of Ami Pro, Lotus 1-2-3, Organizer, and Freelance, all distributed on about 40 3.5" diskettes. The very first word processor written for Windows, Ami Pro was a nice environment to get stuff done in. Then Lotus bought it. Then they bought Harvard Graphics out, I think. Then Paradox, the database. While they were busy buying and ruining the pieces they didn't have, and suing people like Borland over competing products (the Lotus lawsuit over Quattro touched off a couple of years of "Look & Feel" paranoia), IBM was getting ready to buy their asses and return the favor.

There were also some pretty innovative programs you could play around with. DeScribe, for example, was the first word-processor that included as-you-type background spellchecking. Clearlook tried really, really hard to be all frame-y like Ami Pro/Word Pro, but was more like KWord than anything else. Galactic Civilizations was a kick-ass Civilization-in-Space game. Then there was OpenDoc. I was really excited about OpenDoc, seeing as OLE sucked ass back then, as it still does today. That functionality is actually worse today than it was back then! OpenOffice is about the only spreadsheet/word processing combo where you can still 'Paste Link'. That doesn't even work with Office anymore. I guess I was the only schmoe that thought it was useful. Ah, the fruits of Taligent, doomed by market forces and the absolutely grisly OS/2 typography engine.

Between IBM and Corel, the roadkill and also-rans of computing history have finally found a home. Kind of like the Island of Misfit Toys, or some'n.

The Dirty Ashtray » Whoever Said Age is Only a Number and Only a State of Mind Can Kiss my Ass.:

I never realized I was old until one day, when I was laying down to go to sleep, I made this long sort of, 'arrrrrrrrrrrr' grunting sound. If I'd then added, "boy, my dogs are a-barkin'" at the end, I would've been my dad. That's when I noticed that pretty much no matter what I do, I make some sort of grunting sound to accompany it. When I sit down, when I stand up, when I reach over to turn on the nightstand-lamp.

And every action has its own distinct sound. I think two old men could always tell what each others doing, even while blind-folded. "Put down that remote, I'm listening to that!" "What remote?" "Don't you try to fool me, sonny, I recognize the reaching-over-to-the-coffee-table groan when I hears it!" I think it starts at 30. You stretch your back and, for the first time, it just doesn't feel right without that, "rrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh" as punctuation.

Well, that, and those weird ear-hairs that I've got going on.

QuickSilver is an interesting thing.

Take a look at www.blacktree.com (as far as I can tell, the blog plug-in doesn't support HTML, nor, by extension, real links).

(click to play)

Obligatory Parentary Advisory:

Mac Mini: The Emperor's New Computer:

So is the mini a maxi value? For me, clearly, no. When I consider that a good deal of my time is spent running applications like Disk Defragmenter, Scandisk, Norton AV, Windows Update and Ad-Aware--none of which are available for the Mac platform--it doesn't make sense for me to "switch" to a Mac at this time.

via WizBang

(Click to View)

We're back from Vienna now, and we were greeted by even more hospitable German weather:

I'm having to catch up on work, so there's not much time to be blogging, neither passively nor actively, at the moment. But here's some more pictures in case anybody's wondering just what the phrase "cold as a witch's titty" looks like in the implementation phase.

Tagged at Thundernose's. A coward's tag, but tagged nonetheless. So, figuring what better time to try out the Amazon function of my blogging software, I decided, why not?

Rube's Random 10

"Parklife" (Blur)	"Hank Williams - 40 Greatest Hits" (Hank Williams)	"Alice" (Tom Waits)	"Good for Your Soul" (Oingo Boingo)	"The Downward Spiral" (Nine Inch Nails)
"Red Headed Stranger" (Willie Nelson)	"Candy Apple Grey" (Hüsker Dü)	"Chips from the Chocolate Fireball" (The Dukes of Stratosphear)	"Darklands" (Jesus and Mary Chain)	"Reckoning" (R.E.M.)

1.) What is the total amount of music files on your computer?
I just spent about a week sucking all my music into iTunes, along with cover art and what-not. The final damage?

2.) The last CD you bought is:

"Excursions in Ambience 1" (Various Artists)

That was well over a year ago. I already seem to have everything I need.

3.)What is the song you last listened to before this message?

Live with Me, Rolling Stones from Let It Bleed

4.) Five songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you:
I'm a sentimental goon, and tend to get all weepy if the right song comes on at the wrong moment.

Three Days, Jane's Addiction

Prodigal Son, Alison Krauss & Michelle Shocked

Mother Nature's Son, The Beatles

Streets of Baltimore, Bobby Bare

Oh, You Pretty Things, David Bowie

5.) Who are you gonna pass this stick to (five persons and why)?

I'll be passing this one along to:

• My Brother, no link, but I'd be interested to hear what he's listening to these days
• Augie, even though, being German, she'll probably just list a bunch of Kraftwerk CDs
• The Hetzfresse, just to irritate him
• Andy of "XOR", for pretty much the same reason
• And, finally, to Rappinhood, because I'd like to see if he puts his own records on there...

Well, that was entertaining. Damn you, Zonker. Damn you to HELL! I'll get this one back at the Wreckyll, if I remember to reserve a room...

(click to play)

Gut Rumbles: the guitar face:

What a hoot; Acidman got me there. I don't even play guitar all that good, but when nobody's looking I stick out the tongue and squint my eyes like the guy from Uriah Heep, "Magicians Birthday"-style. It's all pretty ridiculous anyway when all you can play are a couple of sappy old Beatles tunes; I mean, it's not like you have to jump around the room and bash in your amp after Norwegian Wood, now is it.

While we're on the subject, I know that some of youse that drop by every now and then are musicians. I'm looking for a better way to guitar into my computer. I'm thinking of setting myself up with some sort of guitar synth, but I really have no idea what all I'll need. Any suggestions? All I've got right now is a jangly old western acoustic and a Mac. Well, it was enough for Matthew Sweet to get started...

What kind of rock was I under last week to make me miss this beauty:

With Moore sitting in the audience, the Dirty Harry star said, "Michael Moore and I actually have a lot in common - we both appreciate living in a country where there's free expression.

"But, Michael, if you ever show up at my front door with a camera - I'll kill you. I mean it."

Jeeps, I can't think of many things that would fill my pants quicker than Gunny Highway telling me he was going to kill me, then adding 'I mean it' just to make sure I knew he wasn't joking.

A man's got to know his limitations, Mike.

Via Evil White Guy

Acidman is looking for somebody to blame. And, as my old boss at UPS was wont to say, nobody's gonna be getting anything done around here until we find a scapegoat. Let's play!

Gloria Steinem

She didn't invent feminism, but she certainly became the poster-girl for it. The two-income, latchkey family is at the root of a multitude of problems in America, both economically and socially.

Tom Freston

The founder of MTV. Freston's behemoth is the reason the music industry, traditionally one of America's most innovative areas, has become the sole province Gangstas telling kids not to do drugs and digitally tone-corrected dotards and dotardesses like Cher.

Bob Saget

That's right, fucker, I said Bob Saget. Goddamn Canadian bastard was actually a very funny stand-up comic at one time. But then, he turned his sights on a network job, and hit the big-time with America's Funniest Home Videos. He turned into an unfunny, maddeningly-smug little camera mugger. This opened the floodgates for 20 years of sappy, horribly unfunny television 'humor', undoing decades of hard work by the likes of Redd Foxx, Carroll O'Connor, and the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. See also, Dave Coulier.

George Lucas

How the fuck can you make Star Wars suck? I mean, farting ewoks?

Paul Allen

This no-good sonofabitch was a co-founder of Microsoft, the guys who brought you Bob. Paul, being one of the co-founders of Evil Itself, is a shoo-in for this list. I would've put Gates in there, but c'mon, how could you hate that cute widdle face of his?! Paul, however, knew what Gates was up to when they founded that company, and didn't shoot him. Adding to this infamy, Paul is also directly response for MS-DOS using the backslash (\) to separate directories, instead of the forward slash as God and AT&T intended. Although I suspect most of you mouse-jockeys have never noticed such a thing, I assure you it's diabolical.

Tim Berners-Lee

As you probably know, Berners-Lee invented the World-Wide Web, and is therefore directly responsible for comment spam. Fuck you, Tim.

John F. Kennedy

I know he died before I was born, but he was responsible for the entire bad part of the 60s. He got us into Vietnam to save the French(!), and gave Generation IX something to bitch about until the present day. Inexplicably, his babies in Vietnam and Cuba are thrown into our faces every time America tries to do something good in the world, and yet every pampered playboy candidate from the Democratic side of the fence tries to waltz into the White House with his mask on. Go figure. Maybe he actually did some good by keeping the Democrats effectively out of office for 40 years? Naah.

William S. Burroughs

I liked Burroughs' first couple of books, Junky and Queer. They were gritty, gripping, and entertaining to read. But after that, he spent 50 years showing people that you don't need to be able to write to be a writer, and you don't need to be able to think to be an intellectual. Once he got his thinking cap on, all he did was bastardize literature with pop vapidness, and utterly destroyed American philosophy with hate-filled, nihilistic crypto-elitism. His material was the prototype for celebrity pseudo-intellectuals like Timothy Leary, Oliver Stone, and Noam Chomsky. Through his association with one-hit wonders like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, he installed the backdoor through which intellectual thought slipped out unnoticed in the 60s.

Lou Gerstner

Rounding out our trio of technical goats is this sack of shit. Lou is the reason you're probably reading this page with a Microsoft browser, on a Microsoft OS, after clicking a link with an overpriced, ergonomically baffling Microsoft Mouse. You see, Lou was in charge of IBM back when they were developing my beloved operating system, OS/2. They'd successfully wrenched it from the jaws of Microsoft Perfidy (actually, Microsoft Perfidy sounds like a great name for a new product, doesn't it? Then, when you called tech support, they'd ask you, "So, do you have the latest Perfidy?" And you could respond wryly, while watching a little hourglass run out sand and turn itself over for an eternity, all because somebody else's fucking computer crashed across the office while you had a drive mapped to it, "Yes, Mr. Tech Support Guy, I do indeed have the latest Perfidy, you soulless, soulless cur."), and it was developing into an advanced, beautifully architected system which was superior in every way to its competitors from Microsoft and Apple. It should have been the OS that the computer revolution ran on. Gerstner didn't have the vision to keep OS/2 advancing, and, waiting until I'd spent about, oh, $2000 on various OS/2 versions and programs which are today about as useful as 1990 Sugar Bowl Tickets. But Gerstner didn't want to stop there! He also arranged to buy Lotus, the guys who were Office before Office, and drive them into the ground, just so the Microsoft Applications Division could sleep at night without worry that there might have been some competition out there or something. If I can figure out how Gerstner managed to destroy Novell, I'll have his ass in a cell with Martha Stewart for shady corporate skullduggery.

Jesse Jackson

I'll just let Acidman explain that one. My thoughts exactly.

Well, now, that was fun. Maybe we should reduce it to 5, though. 5's a meme; 10's almost like work.

If you think you've got some good search-engine placement, just lookie what Rube's got.

Yeah, buddy, send in the horny mexicans, there be room for evvabuddy here in El Rube's Rancho de Amore.

I would think I'd get more hits over that one. My top ten searches?

There is style, there. I'm not saying I'm disappointed, just a bit confused. Oddly enough, it looks like Apple's G5 intro got google-bombed into the #5 spot. I guess the number 3 spot on the world-wide supercomputer list is just not enough for some people.

Over at A Small Victory, they've started the ol' fat-chick/skinny-chick theoreticals up. Why in the world does anybody debate this point? The cool thing is, the extremes are out. There's people over there dredging up stories about that 300-lb. gorilla-woman they bagged in college who really wasn't that bad in the sack, and had a good heart to boot, not that I asked and oh, don't worry, I always wear my dinner on my shirt. I'm sorry, guys and gals, but if fat-mouthing gets your goat because your chick's a whale...sorry, I can't think of a good animal metaphor to end that sentence, but still, you're the one with the problem.

I wouldn't date a fat girl. They're not attractive to me, and therefore it would be silly for me to date one. I also wouldn't date this Teri Polo chick because she's a fucking actress! Have you ever talked to an actress? Jesus, it's like holding a conversation with your hand after jerking off, I mean really, thanks for the amusing lay, honey, but I've got a book to read. I need a bit more intellectual grab-ass than that. I need a girl who can talk about something that's not written in all-caps on a piece of paper after her name and a stage direction. I mean, really, up until the 1970s actors and actresses weren't even considered polite company.

So, will I be considering my possible future with Teri Polo, spending late nights drinking cheap wine and discussing with her the theological implications of the theory of relativity, and the destabilizing influence of voice recording on the natural evolution of human language? No, I doubt it.

Will I be masturbating vigorously over the upcoming Playboy spread? Yes. Yes I will. At least until the cashier at the gas station catches me.

UPDATE: Get a load of this guy at Michele's

My theory is that guys who go for girls with bodies like 11-year-old boys actually would prefer to be with 11-year-old boys.
Posted by Dirk on January 18, 2005 07:24 AM

Yes, "Dirk", because all 11-year-old boys have 36-inch hips and perky, pouting breasts with well-defined yet subtly protruding nipples, as well as expertly-manicured vaginas. My theory, Dirk, is that men who have trouble telling Playboy models from 11-year-old boys better just stay the fuck away from my nephews, that's all I'm saying.

I can't go on, just kill me now, god and sonny jesus.

Via Augie, and I don't even wanna fucking know what she was doing surfing around for MS-Pr0n, jesus, my eyes, it may well take me a while to get over this one, in fact I may just have to break into spontaneous grown-up straight-mail non-teen-beat oriented good ol' surfing for tits after this.

My eyes, to repeat. Good god-a-mighty, my eyes.

So, I'm sitting here, typing away on my newly-reactivated PC, and I just noticed, after 4 hours of working, that either the blue gun is getting all hyperactive, or the red and green ones are sleeping on the job. Every couple of seconds, the color on the monitor washes all blue, then goes back to normal.

So, as a request for comments: I'm now on the lookout for a new monitor. The one I've got is an aging 19" CTX VL90. I'd like to get a 19" flat panel, wide-format if possible. Any suggestions?

The hook, of course, is that I've got exactly €3.50 in the bank.

My bestest little buddy went on a trip today. He's never been out there on his own before, so of course I'm worrying myself sick, hoping he's OK, and that the people at the Apple Repair Center are taking care of him. That's right, at 9:02 this morning, the UPS guy came by and picked up my Powerbook. He wasn't feeling well. The Powerbook, I mean. Thanks to this problem, he's going on vacation.

Now I'm working on my Windows PC. First day today. So far:

• Virus update notification that couldn't be clicked away
• ZoneAlarm popped up while I was playing Doom 3; machine frozen between video modes
• Windows blue-screened for some inscrutable reason (rebooted before I could read the error message)
• Upon restart received "Windows Critical Error" dialog, without specifics on which application it was
• Weird window-management feature, where a window was off-screen, and could only be seen when maximized. "Tile Windows" didn't bring it back
• Font-management bug where a Type 1 font couldn't be substituted in Macromedia Flash

It's going to be a long week.

As if reading my mind, michael say:

Going to a place that's far, so far away and if that's not enough Going where nobody says hello, they don't talk to anybody they don't know You'll wind up in some factory that's full time filth and nowhere left to go Walk home to an empty house, sit around all by yourself I know it might sound strange, but I believe You'll be coming back before too long At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care if you're not here with me 'Cause it's so much easier to handle All my problems if I'm too far out to sea But something better happen soon Or it's gonna be too late to bring you back It's not as though I really need you If you were here I'd only bleed you But everybody else in town only wants to bring you down and That's not how it ought to be I know it might sound strange, but I believe You'll be coming back before too long

In no particular order:

• The comical 'Boing!' sound in Whammy! by the B-52s; 1983; Athens, GA
• The last 2 Space is the Place-minutes of Bugman by Blur; 1992; UK
• My putting Upside Down by The Jesus & Mary Chain right in the middle of a make-out mix tape; 1989; Woodstock, GA
• Peter Buck selling his distortion pedal; 1989; Los Angeles, CA
• 

Poking around Little Green Footballs (no link, because I don't want y'all Bitch-dotting Charles' nice little blog there), I came across this little gem of a page.

Looking at that cheered me up for a number of reasons. First off, Charles is absolutely right about the Valentine's flash banner. Priceless; an absolute masterpiece of medieval Muslim romantik. Xenophobia begins at home, kids. But mostly, I just have to giggle when I see a URL that has "ShowFatwa.php" in it.

Awesome! You guys are nuts...

Just in case any y'all was looking for a good dildo-party this weekend.

Just sayin'...

Click here for the story...

It's Monday again. How do I know this? Well, first of all, I'll be inebriated in just a few short hours. My liver's already quivering --quivering!-- with anticipation. Secondly, every Monday afternoon there's a little parade that marches past my office window. Far from being a celebration of my own glorious acts, it's actually a sad little group of about eight freeloaders protesting Hartz IV, the German social services reform bill.

I don't really know much about Hartz IV, having Googled it for the first time just a minute or two ago, and I don't really care what's in it. Often, I'll eschew informing myself about an issue and simply base my decision on who's marching against it. The bongo-beating, rhyme-chanting mouth-breathers that just limped past my office window have just made me a huge fan of Hartz IV, even if it reads like a Jonathan Swift treatise. Beat those bongos, slackers; I'm going shopping for fava beans.

Just a factoid for the stream:

In typesetting, you generally want to avoid leaving a line of a paragraph by itself on a page. When it's the first line, it's called a widow When it's the last line, it's called an orphan. In German, you called the first line a Cobbler's boy (Schusterjung), and the last line 'son of a whore' (Hurenkind).

Carry on.

[This is a book review I've written for next month's Die Neue Szene, the local scene-rag, in case anyone feels like reading it.]

€16.90
"Digital gestalten: Der Erste-Hilfe Kurs in Typo, Farbe und Layout" (Günter Schuler)
Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2005

In this compact volume, author Günter Schuler attempts to cover almost all aspects of modern electronic typographical design and layout. As the subtitle suggests, the book is arranged like a course on design basics, with long stretches of raw information about design and layout, culminating in a detailed example showing its application.

Starting with the evolution of movable type, and tracing the histories of various typefaces, we learn for what purposes many familiar fonts were originally developed, and by whom, and what it is about them that has kept them alive into the digital age. Next, we move on to how one goes about using them. The classic techniques of layout are covered, and are analogized to workflows of modern programs like InDesign and QuarkXPress. This is attractive to budding designers; learning the principles of layout, instead of the tools and tricks, allows the reader to apply this knowledge to any design process.

Unfortunately, Mr. Schuler wastes large portions of the book with endless lists of examples that contribute little to the reader’s experience. The lists of typefaces in the opening chapters, for example, are overwhelming, not to mention boring to page through. Also, many examples of bad design are subtly made, and not clearly marked, giving the reader an uncomfortable impression that the guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, after all.

Despite the occasional glitches in writing style and organization, this book offers an excellent entry point into the world of professional design. It is brimming with the kind of information and concepts one needs to rise above the Web-monkeys and Photoshop-jockeys that saturate the field today.

Every now and then, me and the old lady sleep late, work up an appetite, then get up and enjoy a nice breakfast together. I'm happy to say that today was one of those days. Unfortunately, they don't have Waffle Houses over here, so your options are limited. It's either head over to the coffee shop for a $10 breakfast of yogurt and oak leaves, or do it yourself.

It just so happens that the old lady and me enjoy practicing the culinary arts, and brother, we produced. I'd like you all to meet someone very dear to me, the Small Southern Breakfast:

Let's see, what we got here?

• Hot coffee
• Fresh-squeezed orange juice
• Homemade biscuits au Rube
• One double-sized, spicy-hot Augsburg-style omelette
• Cheese grits (made with Gouda, which is surprisingly good, even for a cheese-grits purist like myself)
• Assorted cheeses (Gouda, swiss, emmentaler)
• Butter, honey, peach jelly, and red-pepper spreads
• Peanut butter, a rare commodity in these parts
• One hungry Rube
• One hungry Augie

Yuuuuuummmmmmm-mi!

Then came the nap, but I forgot to take pictures. Y'all over there living in the Land o' Plenty have no idea what a rare joy it is over here to stuff yourself like a peanut farmer before getting out of your pajamas.

TrustedReviews: IBM, Sony, Toshiba to acCELerate Processor Market?

After three years of co-development between industry giants IBM, Sony and Toshiba the fruit of their labours has finally been detailed to the public. The Cell processor, which among other things will power Sony’s PlayStation 3 games console, is a multicore chip that its designers boast has the potential to run 10 times faster than current PC chips.

They don't mention it in at the end of that article, but in this one (German) they make it pretty clear that this cell processor thing is a 64-bit, multi-core, scaled-down Power5. It's a similar manufacturing scheme as the current Power4 machines from IBM and the Apple G5 line of Power Macs. Can you say 'Power Mac G7'? I thought you could.

There are a couple of things that are interesting in these articles. Apparently, they're already being fabricated. IBM will be introducing them in a workstation line later this year, and the PlayStation 3 is already under development, so prototypes probably exist. Secondly, the price of the chip will be less than those in Intel's line-up. The introduction of the G5 lagged behind the Power4 by just over a year. That means if Apple opts for the cell, and if reports are accurate about its performance they should definitely consider it, we could see the new processor wearing something stylish sometime next year, and with a lower price-tag than the G5s.

So, wonder what Motorola's up to these days? Probably somewhere ordering rubber dicks with Tom Sizemore.

So, I booted up my WIndows computer yesterday, for the first time in a while. What a patronizing, pedantic little shit that thing is. First of all, I get about 50 little things popping up in my system tray, telling me my virus definitions are outdated, that this or that program is trying to contact the Internet, then some pop-up window trying to sell me Half-Life 2, which I already bought about 3 months ago, and that there are approximately six relevant system updates I really, really need to install (I already installed SP2 on this dick thing here, wasn't that just last month?). It also found a "New USB HID Device", which it finds every single time it boots, and can't seem to remember. The signal-to-noise ratio in Windows is rapidly approaching zero.

But I'll be damned if a little pop-up didn't come up at the end and tell me that my Desktop has too much stuff on it, and maybe I don't think I should maybe get off my ass and run the Desktop Cleanup Wizard for once. What is this thing, my mother? Can't try to do anything around here without some little window popping up at you and telling you you're doing it wrong. I'm not trying to make excuses here, but there's only like a baker's dozen things on my desktop. I run my monitor at extra-big resolution and believe me, I've seen worse. I mean, check this out:

It's not exactly bursting at the seams, now is it? But, I figure, what the hell, I'll spend a little time wiping Windows' ass for a change. So, I grab the Quicktime Player icon and drag it over to the trashcan. Easy, one step operation, right?

You might not be able to read German, but that's a dialog telling me that, despite what I probably think, throwing away a link doesn't un-install the application. Now, I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but honestly I wasn't even expecting it to un-install the application. I was throwing a link in the trash. The observant among you may have noticed two suspicious things about this dialog:

1. There's no "Do not show this again" checkbox. I cannot fathom this.
2. There's no option to un-install the program in this dialog.

Every single time you throw a link away from your desktop, you get this dialog saying you're doing it wrong. Don't believe me? Ok, here's one for Ad-aware:

Aaaand, here's one for iTunes:

Aaand here's one for QuickBooks:

Huh? QuickBooks just got deleted, and there's no dialog? What's up with that? Hmmm...maybe he's figured I know what I'm doing. Ok, I'll just throw away Trillian:

What the fuck? Hmm...maybe it doesn't say anything about deleting quickbooks because it actually DID uninstall the program? Nope. More likely because it's a competitor with MS Money.

You piss-ant little fucker. Who the hell came up with this workflow here? First, he tells my desktop, MY DESKTOP, is too cluttered. Did I mention that it is, after all, MY FUCKING DESKTOP? Then he bitches and moans about every single little fucking thing I do, that I'm not doing it right.

Windows, you whiny-ass little bitch. If I had half a choice I'd de-rez your ass.

When deciding what to have engraved on your iPod, please try to be sober.

Jesus, that's one huge fucking pile of crockery.

Back in the good old-to-middlin' days, I was an avid user of OS/2. It had a lot of technical trickery you could entertain yourself with. Shadows, for example. Shadows were like the links you can make in Windows, except they actually worked. In Windows, a link isn't much more that a text file with the path of a document or program in it and the .lnk suffix. This means, of course, that if the document ever moves the link doesn't work any more. It's not a link at all, really: It's a bookmark. Not so with shadows; once made, you could move the document to wherever you wanted, and the shadow would always know where it had gotten off to. Incidentally, Mac OS X is the only operating system I'm aware of that has this functionality today, eComStation excepted.

OS/2 wasn't perfect, though. It was ugly, even by the standards of 1994. It also had a weird interface to it. Sometimes, dialogs were arranged in tabs along the right, sometimes along the top, and they hardly ever had OK buttons. Presentation Manager, the OS/2 version of Windows' Explorer, also had some quirks when viewing things in tree fashion. The multimedia subsystem sucked, frankly. You couldn't reliably changed things like screen resolution, or color depth. The on-screen fonts were powered by some weird, mutated version of Adobe Type Manager, which wasn't compatible with any other version, so you had to convert your Windows ATM fonts over with UNIX tools, just in case you had an SGI sitting around (we did, fortunately). And, compared to DOS and Windows, it was slow and memory-intensive to do anything with.

Probably the only things I miss about OS/2 now are the applications I used with it. You see, kids, back then, when you said 'Office', you just as likely meant Lotus Smartsuite or WordPerfect Office as Microsoft Office. Smartsuite/2 was a combination of Ami Pro, Lotus 1-2-3, Organizer, and Freelance, all distributed on about 40 3.5" diskettes. The very first word processor written for Windows, Ami Pro was a nice environment to get stuff done in. Then Lotus bought it. Then they bought Harvard Graphics out, I think. Then Paradox, the database. While they were busy buying and ruining the pieces they didn't have, and suing people like Borland over competing products (the Lotus lawsuit over Quattro touched off a couple of years of "Look & Feel" paranoia), IBM was getting ready to buy their asses and return the favor.

There were also some pretty innovative programs you could play around with. DeScribe, for example, was the first word-processor that included as-you-type background spellchecking. Clearlook tried really, really hard to be all frame-y like Ami Pro/Word Pro, but was more like KWord than anything else. Galactic Civilizations was a kick-ass Civilization-in-Space game. Then there was OpenDoc. I was really excited about OpenDoc, seeing as OLE sucked ass back then, as it still does today. That functionality is actually worse today than it was back then! OpenOffice is about the only spreadsheet/word processing combo where you can still 'Paste Link'. That doesn't even work with Office anymore. I guess I was the only schmoe that thought it was useful. Ah, the fruits of Taligent, doomed by market forces and the absolutely grisly OS/2 typography engine.

Between IBM and Corel, the roadkill and also-rans of computing history have finally found a home. Kind of like the Island of Misfit Toys, or some'n.

The Dirty Ashtray » Whoever Said Age is Only a Number and Only a State of Mind Can Kiss my Ass.:

I never realized I was old until one day, when I was laying down to go to sleep, I made this long sort of, 'arrrrrrrrrrrr' grunting sound. If I'd then added, "boy, my dogs are a-barkin'" at the end, I would've been my dad. That's when I noticed that pretty much no matter what I do, I make some sort of grunting sound to accompany it. When I sit down, when I stand up, when I reach over to turn on the nightstand-lamp.

And every action has its own distinct sound. I think two old men could always tell what each others doing, even while blind-folded. "Put down that remote, I'm listening to that!" "What remote?" "Don't you try to fool me, sonny, I recognize the reaching-over-to-the-coffee-table groan when I hears it!" I think it starts at 30. You stretch your back and, for the first time, it just doesn't feel right without that, "rrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh" as punctuation.

Well, that, and those weird ear-hairs that I've got going on.

QuickSilver is an interesting thing.

Take a look at www.blacktree.com (as far as I can tell, the blog plug-in doesn't support HTML, nor, by extension, real links).

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Obligatory Parentary Advisory:

Mac Mini: The Emperor's New Computer:

So is the mini a maxi value? For me, clearly, no. When I consider that a good deal of my time is spent running applications like Disk Defragmenter, Scandisk, Norton AV, Windows Update and Ad-Aware--none of which are available for the Mac platform--it doesn't make sense for me to "switch" to a Mac at this time.

via WizBang

(Click to View)

We're back from Vienna now, and we were greeted by even more hospitable German weather:

I'm having to catch up on work, so there's not much time to be blogging, neither passively nor actively, at the moment. But here's some more pictures in case anybody's wondering just what the phrase "cold as a witch's titty" looks like in the implementation phase.

Tagged at Thundernose's. A coward's tag, but tagged nonetheless. So, figuring what better time to try out the Amazon function of my blogging software, I decided, why not?

Rube's Random 10

"Parklife" (Blur)	"Hank Williams - 40 Greatest Hits" (Hank Williams)	"Alice" (Tom Waits)	"Good for Your Soul" (Oingo Boingo)	"The Downward Spiral" (Nine Inch Nails)
"Red Headed Stranger" (Willie Nelson)	"Candy Apple Grey" (Hüsker Dü)	"Chips from the Chocolate Fireball" (The Dukes of Stratosphear)	"Darklands" (Jesus and Mary Chain)	"Reckoning" (R.E.M.)

1.) What is the total amount of music files on your computer?
I just spent about a week sucking all my music into iTunes, along with cover art and what-not. The final damage?

2.) The last CD you bought is:

"Excursions in Ambience 1" (Various Artists)

That was well over a year ago. I already seem to have everything I need.

3.)What is the song you last listened to before this message?

Live with Me, Rolling Stones from Let It Bleed

4.) Five songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you:
I'm a sentimental goon, and tend to get all weepy if the right song comes on at the wrong moment.

Three Days, Jane's Addiction

Prodigal Son, Alison Krauss & Michelle Shocked

Mother Nature's Son, The Beatles

Streets of Baltimore, Bobby Bare

Oh, You Pretty Things, David Bowie

5.) Who are you gonna pass this stick to (five persons and why)?

I'll be passing this one along to:

• My Brother, no link, but I'd be interested to hear what he's listening to these days
• Augie, even though, being German, she'll probably just list a bunch of Kraftwerk CDs
• The Hetzfresse, just to irritate him
• Andy of "XOR", for pretty much the same reason
• And, finally, to Rappinhood, because I'd like to see if he puts his own records on there...

Well, that was entertaining. Damn you, Zonker. Damn you to HELL! I'll get this one back at the Wreckyll, if I remember to reserve a room...

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Gut Rumbles: the guitar face:

What a hoot; Acidman got me there. I don't even play guitar all that good, but when nobody's looking I stick out the tongue and squint my eyes like the guy from Uriah Heep, "Magicians Birthday"-style. It's all pretty ridiculous anyway when all you can play are a couple of sappy old Beatles tunes; I mean, it's not like you have to jump around the room and bash in your amp after Norwegian Wood, now is it.

While we're on the subject, I know that some of youse that drop by every now and then are musicians. I'm looking for a better way to guitar into my computer. I'm thinking of setting myself up with some sort of guitar synth, but I really have no idea what all I'll need. Any suggestions? All I've got right now is a jangly old western acoustic and a Mac. Well, it was enough for Matthew Sweet to get started...

What kind of rock was I under last week to make me miss this beauty:

With Moore sitting in the audience, the Dirty Harry star said, "Michael Moore and I actually have a lot in common - we both appreciate living in a country where there's free expression.

"But, Michael, if you ever show up at my front door with a camera - I'll kill you. I mean it."

Jeeps, I can't think of many things that would fill my pants quicker than Gunny Highway telling me he was going to kill me, then adding 'I mean it' just to make sure I knew he wasn't joking.

A man's got to know his limitations, Mike.

Via Evil White Guy

Acidman is looking for somebody to blame. And, as my old boss at UPS was wont to say, nobody's gonna be getting anything done around here until we find a scapegoat. Let's play!

Gloria Steinem

She didn't invent feminism, but she certainly became the poster-girl for it. The two-income, latchkey family is at the root of a multitude of problems in America, both economically and socially.

Tom Freston

The founder of MTV. Freston's behemoth is the reason the music industry, traditionally one of America's most innovative areas, has become the sole province Gangstas telling kids not to do drugs and digitally tone-corrected dotards and dotardesses like Cher.

Bob Saget

That's right, fucker, I said Bob Saget. Goddamn Canadian bastard was actually a very funny stand-up comic at one time. But then, he turned his sights on a network job, and hit the big-time with America's Funniest Home Videos. He turned into an unfunny, maddeningly-smug little camera mugger. This opened the floodgates for 20 years of sappy, horribly unfunny television 'humor', undoing decades of hard work by the likes of Redd Foxx, Carroll O'Connor, and the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. See also, Dave Coulier.

George Lucas

How the fuck can you make Star Wars suck? I mean, farting ewoks?

Paul Allen

This no-good sonofabitch was a co-founder of Microsoft, the guys who brought you Bob. Paul, being one of the co-founders of Evil Itself, is a shoo-in for this list. I would've put Gates in there, but c'mon, how could you hate that cute widdle face of his?! Paul, however, knew what Gates was up to when they founded that company, and didn't shoot him. Adding to this infamy, Paul is also directly response for MS-DOS using the backslash (\) to separate directories, instead of the forward slash as God and AT&T intended. Although I suspect most of you mouse-jockeys have never noticed such a thing, I assure you it's diabolical.

Tim Berners-Lee

As you probably know, Berners-Lee invented the World-Wide Web, and is therefore directly responsible for comment spam. Fuck you, Tim.

John F. Kennedy

I know he died before I was born, but he was responsible for the entire bad part of the 60s. He got us into Vietnam to save the French(!), and gave Generation IX something to bitch about until the present day. Inexplicably, his babies in Vietnam and Cuba are thrown into our faces every time America tries to do something good in the world, and yet every pampered playboy candidate from the Democratic side of the fence tries to waltz into the White House with his mask on. Go figure. Maybe he actually did some good by keeping the Democrats effectively out of office for 40 years? Naah.

William S. Burroughs

I liked Burroughs' first couple of books, Junky and Queer. They were gritty, gripping, and entertaining to read. But after that, he spent 50 years showing people that you don't need to be able to write to be a writer, and you don't need to be able to think to be an intellectual. Once he got his thinking cap on, all he did was bastardize literature with pop vapidness, and utterly destroyed American philosophy with hate-filled, nihilistic crypto-elitism. His material was the prototype for celebrity pseudo-intellectuals like Timothy Leary, Oliver Stone, and Noam Chomsky. Through his association with one-hit wonders like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, he installed the backdoor through which intellectual thought slipped out unnoticed in the 60s.

Lou Gerstner

Rounding out our trio of technical goats is this sack of shit. Lou is the reason you're probably reading this page with a Microsoft browser, on a Microsoft OS, after clicking a link with an overpriced, ergonomically baffling Microsoft Mouse. You see, Lou was in charge of IBM back when they were developing my beloved operating system, OS/2. They'd successfully wrenched it from the jaws of Microsoft Perfidy (actually, Microsoft Perfidy sounds like a great name for a new product, doesn't it? Then, when you called tech support, they'd ask you, "So, do you have the latest Perfidy?" And you could respond wryly, while watching a little hourglass run out sand and turn itself over for an eternity, all because somebody else's fucking computer crashed across the office while you had a drive mapped to it, "Yes, Mr. Tech Support Guy, I do indeed have the latest Perfidy, you soulless, soulless cur."), and it was developing into an advanced, beautifully architected system which was superior in every way to its competitors from Microsoft and Apple. It should have been the OS that the computer revolution ran on. Gerstner didn't have the vision to keep OS/2 advancing, and, waiting until I'd spent about, oh, $2000 on various OS/2 versions and programs which are today about as useful as 1990 Sugar Bowl Tickets. But Gerstner didn't want to stop there! He also arranged to buy Lotus, the guys who were Office before Office, and drive them into the ground, just so the Microsoft Applications Division could sleep at night without worry that there might have been some competition out there or something. If I can figure out how Gerstner managed to destroy Novell, I'll have his ass in a cell with Martha Stewart for shady corporate skullduggery.

Jesse Jackson

I'll just let Acidman explain that one. My thoughts exactly.

Well, now, that was fun. Maybe we should reduce it to 5, though. 5's a meme; 10's almost like work.

If you think you've got some good search-engine placement, just lookie what Rube's got.

Yeah, buddy, send in the horny mexicans, there be room for evvabuddy here in El Rube's Rancho de Amore.

I would think I'd get more hits over that one. My top ten searches?

There is style, there. I'm not saying I'm disappointed, just a bit confused. Oddly enough, it looks like Apple's G5 intro got google-bombed into the #5 spot. I guess the number 3 spot on the world-wide supercomputer list is just not enough for some people.

Over at A Small Victory, they've started the ol' fat-chick/skinny-chick theoreticals up. Why in the world does anybody debate this point? The cool thing is, the extremes are out. There's people over there dredging up stories about that 300-lb. gorilla-woman they bagged in college who really wasn't that bad in the sack, and had a good heart to boot, not that I asked and oh, don't worry, I always wear my dinner on my shirt. I'm sorry, guys and gals, but if fat-mouthing gets your goat because your chick's a whale...sorry, I can't think of a good animal metaphor to end that sentence, but still, you're the one with the problem.

I wouldn't date a fat girl. They're not attractive to me, and therefore it would be silly for me to date one. I also wouldn't date this Teri Polo chick because she's a fucking actress! Have you ever talked to an actress? Jesus, it's like holding a conversation with your hand after jerking off, I mean really, thanks for the amusing lay, honey, but I've got a book to read. I need a bit more intellectual grab-ass than that. I need a girl who can talk about something that's not written in all-caps on a piece of paper after her name and a stage direction. I mean, really, up until the 1970s actors and actresses weren't even considered polite company.

So, will I be considering my possible future with Teri Polo, spending late nights drinking cheap wine and discussing with her the theological implications of the theory of relativity, and the destabilizing influence of voice recording on the natural evolution of human language? No, I doubt it.

Will I be masturbating vigorously over the upcoming Playboy spread? Yes. Yes I will. At least until the cashier at the gas station catches me.

UPDATE: Get a load of this guy at Michele's

My theory is that guys who go for girls with bodies like 11-year-old boys actually would prefer to be with 11-year-old boys.
Posted by Dirk on January 18, 2005 07:24 AM

Yes, "Dirk", because all 11-year-old boys have 36-inch hips and perky, pouting breasts with well-defined yet subtly protruding nipples, as well as expertly-manicured vaginas. My theory, Dirk, is that men who have trouble telling Playboy models from 11-year-old boys better just stay the fuck away from my nephews, that's all I'm saying.

I can't go on, just kill me now, god and sonny jesus.

Via Augie, and I don't even wanna fucking know what she was doing surfing around for MS-Pr0n, jesus, my eyes, it may well take me a while to get over this one, in fact I may just have to break into spontaneous grown-up straight-mail non-teen-beat oriented good ol' surfing for tits after this.

My eyes, to repeat. Good god-a-mighty, my eyes.

So, I'm sitting here, typing away on my newly-reactivated PC, and I just noticed, after 4 hours of working, that either the blue gun is getting all hyperactive, or the red and green ones are sleeping on the job. Every couple of seconds, the color on the monitor washes all blue, then goes back to normal.

So, as a request for comments: I'm now on the lookout for a new monitor. The one I've got is an aging 19" CTX VL90. I'd like to get a 19" flat panel, wide-format if possible. Any suggestions?

The hook, of course, is that I've got exactly €3.50 in the bank.

My bestest little buddy went on a trip today. He's never been out there on his own before, so of course I'm worrying myself sick, hoping he's OK, and that the people at the Apple Repair Center are taking care of him. That's right, at 9:02 this morning, the UPS guy came by and picked up my Powerbook. He wasn't feeling well. The Powerbook, I mean. Thanks to this problem, he's going on vacation.

Now I'm working on my Windows PC. First day today. So far:

• Virus update notification that couldn't be clicked away
• ZoneAlarm popped up while I was playing Doom 3; machine frozen between video modes
• Windows blue-screened for some inscrutable reason (rebooted before I could read the error message)
• Upon restart received "Windows Critical Error" dialog, without specifics on which application it was
• Weird window-management feature, where a window was off-screen, and could only be seen when maximized. "Tile Windows" didn't bring it back
• Font-management bug where a Type 1 font couldn't be substituted in Macromedia Flash

It's going to be a long week.

As if reading my mind, michael say:

Going to a place that's far, so far away and if that's not enough Going where nobody says hello, they don't talk to anybody they don't know You'll wind up in some factory that's full time filth and nowhere left to go Walk home to an empty house, sit around all by yourself I know it might sound strange, but I believe You'll be coming back before too long At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care if you're not here with me 'Cause it's so much easier to handle All my problems if I'm too far out to sea But something better happen soon Or it's gonna be too late to bring you back It's not as though I really need you If you were here I'd only bleed you But everybody else in town only wants to bring you down and That's not how it ought to be I know it might sound strange, but I believe You'll be coming back before too long

In no particular order:

• The comical 'Boing!' sound in Whammy! by the B-52s; 1983; Athens, GA
• The last 2 Space is the Place-minutes of Bugman by Blur; 1992; UK
• My putting Upside Down by The Jesus & Mary Chain right in the middle of a make-out mix tape; 1989; Woodstock, GA
• Peter Buck selling his distortion pedal; 1989; Los Angeles, CA
• 

Poking around Little Green Footballs (no link, because I don't want y'all Bitch-dotting Charles' nice little blog there), I came across this little gem of a page.

Looking at that cheered me up for a number of reasons. First off, Charles is absolutely right about the Valentine's flash banner. Priceless; an absolute masterpiece of medieval Muslim romantik. Xenophobia begins at home, kids. But mostly, I just have to giggle when I see a URL that has "ShowFatwa.php" in it.

Awesome! You guys are nuts...

Just in case any y'all was looking for a good dildo-party this weekend.

Just sayin'...

Click here for the story...

It's Monday again. How do I know this? Well, first of all, I'll be inebriated in just a few short hours. My liver's already quivering --quivering!-- with anticipation. Secondly, every Monday afternoon there's a little parade that marches past my office window. Far from being a celebration of my own glorious acts, it's actually a sad little group of about eight freeloaders protesting Hartz IV, the German social services reform bill.

I don't really know much about Hartz IV, having Googled it for the first time just a minute or two ago, and I don't really care what's in it. Often, I'll eschew informing myself about an issue and simply base my decision on who's marching against it. The bongo-beating, rhyme-chanting mouth-breathers that just limped past my office window have just made me a huge fan of Hartz IV, even if it reads like a Jonathan Swift treatise. Beat those bongos, slackers; I'm going shopping for fava beans.

Just a factoid for the stream:

In typesetting, you generally want to avoid leaving a line of a paragraph by itself on a page. When it's the first line, it's called a widow When it's the last line, it's called an orphan. In German, you called the first line a Cobbler's boy (Schusterjung), and the last line 'son of a whore' (Hurenkind).

Carry on.

[This is a book review I've written for next month's Die Neue Szene, the local scene-rag, in case anyone feels like reading it.]

€16.90
"Digital gestalten: Der Erste-Hilfe Kurs in Typo, Farbe und Layout" (Günter Schuler)
Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2005

In this compact volume, author Günter Schuler attempts to cover almost all aspects of modern electronic typographical design and layout. As the subtitle suggests, the book is arranged like a course on design basics, with long stretches of raw information about design and layout, culminating in a detailed example showing its application.

Starting with the evolution of movable type, and tracing the histories of various typefaces, we learn for what purposes many familiar fonts were originally developed, and by whom, and what it is about them that has kept them alive into the digital age. Next, we move on to how one goes about using them. The classic techniques of layout are covered, and are analogized to workflows of modern programs like InDesign and QuarkXPress. This is attractive to budding designers; learning the principles of layout, instead of the tools and tricks, allows the reader to apply this knowledge to any design process.

Unfortunately, Mr. Schuler wastes large portions of the book with endless lists of examples that contribute little to the reader’s experience. The lists of typefaces in the opening chapters, for example, are overwhelming, not to mention boring to page through. Also, many examples of bad design are subtly made, and not clearly marked, giving the reader an uncomfortable impression that the guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, after all.

Despite the occasional glitches in writing style and organization, this book offers an excellent entry point into the world of professional design. It is brimming with the kind of information and concepts one needs to rise above the Web-monkeys and Photoshop-jockeys that saturate the field today.

Every now and then, me and the old lady sleep late, work up an appetite, then get up and enjoy a nice breakfast together. I'm happy to say that today was one of those days. Unfortunately, they don't have Waffle Houses over here, so your options are limited. It's either head over to the coffee shop for a $10 breakfast of yogurt and oak leaves, or do it yourself.

It just so happens that the old lady and me enjoy practicing the culinary arts, and brother, we produced. I'd like you all to meet someone very dear to me, the Small Southern Breakfast:

Let's see, what we got here?

• Hot coffee
• Fresh-squeezed orange juice
• Homemade biscuits au Rube
• One double-sized, spicy-hot Augsburg-style omelette
• Cheese grits (made with Gouda, which is surprisingly good, even for a cheese-grits purist like myself)
• Assorted cheeses (Gouda, swiss, emmentaler)
• Butter, honey, peach jelly, and red-pepper spreads
• Peanut butter, a rare commodity in these parts
• One hungry Rube
• One hungry Augie

Yuuuuuummmmmmm-mi!

Then came the nap, but I forgot to take pictures. Y'all over there living in the Land o' Plenty have no idea what a rare joy it is over here to stuff yourself like a peanut farmer before getting out of your pajamas.

TrustedReviews: IBM, Sony, Toshiba to acCELerate Processor Market?

After three years of co-development between industry giants IBM, Sony and Toshiba the fruit of their labours has finally been detailed to the public. The Cell processor, which among other things will power Sony’s PlayStation 3 games console, is a multicore chip that its designers boast has the potential to run 10 times faster than current PC chips.

They don't mention it in at the end of that article, but in this one (German) they make it pretty clear that this cell processor thing is a 64-bit, multi-core, scaled-down Power5. It's a similar manufacturing scheme as the current Power4 machines from IBM and the Apple G5 line of Power Macs. Can you say 'Power Mac G7'? I thought you could.

There are a couple of things that are interesting in these articles. Apparently, they're already being fabricated. IBM will be introducing them in a workstation line later this year, and the PlayStation 3 is already under development, so prototypes probably exist. Secondly, the price of the chip will be less than those in Intel's line-up. The introduction of the G5 lagged behind the Power4 by just over a year. That means if Apple opts for the cell, and if reports are accurate about its performance they should definitely consider it, we could see the new processor wearing something stylish sometime next year, and with a lower price-tag than the G5s.

So, wonder what Motorola's up to these days? Probably somewhere ordering rubber dicks with Tom Sizemore.

So, I booted up my WIndows computer yesterday, for the first time in a while. What a patronizing, pedantic little shit that thing is. First of all, I get about 50 little things popping up in my system tray, telling me my virus definitions are outdated, that this or that program is trying to contact the Internet, then some pop-up window trying to sell me Half-Life 2, which I already bought about 3 months ago, and that there are approximately six relevant system updates I really, really need to install (I already installed SP2 on this dick thing here, wasn't that just last month?). It also found a "New USB HID Device", which it finds every single time it boots, and can't seem to remember. The signal-to-noise ratio in Windows is rapidly approaching zero.

But I'll be damned if a little pop-up didn't come up at the end and tell me that my Desktop has too much stuff on it, and maybe I don't think I should maybe get off my ass and run the Desktop Cleanup Wizard for once. What is this thing, my mother? Can't try to do anything around here without some little window popping up at you and telling you you're doing it wrong. I'm not trying to make excuses here, but there's only like a baker's dozen things on my desktop. I run my monitor at extra-big resolution and believe me, I've seen worse. I mean, check this out:

It's not exactly bursting at the seams, now is it? But, I figure, what the hell, I'll spend a little time wiping Windows' ass for a change. So, I grab the Quicktime Player icon and drag it over to the trashcan. Easy, one step operation, right?

You might not be able to read German, but that's a dialog telling me that, despite what I probably think, throwing away a link doesn't un-install the application. Now, I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but honestly I wasn't even expecting it to un-install the application. I was throwing a link in the trash. The observant among you may have noticed two suspicious things about this dialog:

1. There's no "Do not show this again" checkbox. I cannot fathom this.
2. There's no option to un-install the program in this dialog.

Every single time you throw a link away from your desktop, you get this dialog saying you're doing it wrong. Don't believe me? Ok, here's one for Ad-aware:

Aaaand, here's one for iTunes:

Aaand here's one for QuickBooks:

Huh? QuickBooks just got deleted, and there's no dialog? What's up with that? Hmmm...maybe he's figured I know what I'm doing. Ok, I'll just throw away Trillian:

What the fuck? Hmm...maybe it doesn't say anything about deleting quickbooks because it actually DID uninstall the program? Nope. More likely because it's a competitor with MS Money.

You piss-ant little fucker. Who the hell came up with this workflow here? First, he tells my desktop, MY DESKTOP, is too cluttered. Did I mention that it is, after all, MY FUCKING DESKTOP? Then he bitches and moans about every single little fucking thing I do, that I'm not doing it right.

Windows, you whiny-ass little bitch. If I had half a choice I'd de-rez your ass.

When deciding what to have engraved on your iPod, please try to be sober.

Jesus, that's one huge fucking pile of crockery.

Back in the good old-to-middlin' days, I was an avid user of OS/2. It had a lot of technical trickery you could entertain yourself with. Shadows, for example. Shadows were like the links you can make in Windows, except they actually worked. In Windows, a link isn't much more that a text file with the path of a document or program in it and the .lnk suffix. This means, of course, that if the document ever moves the link doesn't work any more. It's not a link at all, really: It's a bookmark. Not so with shadows; once made, you could move the document to wherever you wanted, and the shadow would always know where it had gotten off to. Incidentally, Mac OS X is the only operating system I'm aware of that has this functionality today, eComStation excepted.

OS/2 wasn't perfect, though. It was ugly, even by the standards of 1994. It also had a weird interface to it. Sometimes, dialogs were arranged in tabs along the right, sometimes along the top, and they hardly ever had OK buttons. Presentation Manager, the OS/2 version of Windows' Explorer, also had some quirks when viewing things in tree fashion. The multimedia subsystem sucked, frankly. You couldn't reliably changed things like screen resolution, or color depth. The on-screen fonts were powered by some weird, mutated version of Adobe Type Manager, which wasn't compatible with any other version, so you had to convert your Windows ATM fonts over with UNIX tools, just in case you had an SGI sitting around (we did, fortunately). And, compared to DOS and Windows, it was slow and memory-intensive to do anything with.

Probably the only things I miss about OS/2 now are the applications I used with it. You see, kids, back then, when you said 'Office', you just as likely meant Lotus Smartsuite or WordPerfect Office as Microsoft Office. Smartsuite/2 was a combination of Ami Pro, Lotus 1-2-3, Organizer, and Freelance, all distributed on about 40 3.5" diskettes. The very first word processor written for Windows, Ami Pro was a nice environment to get stuff done in. Then Lotus bought it. Then they bought Harvard Graphics out, I think. Then Paradox, the database. While they were busy buying and ruining the pieces they didn't have, and suing people like Borland over competing products (the Lotus lawsuit over Quattro touched off a couple of years of "Look & Feel" paranoia), IBM was getting ready to buy their asses and return the favor.

There were also some pretty innovative programs you could play around with. DeScribe, for example, was the first word-processor that included as-you-type background spellchecking. Clearlook tried really, really hard to be all frame-y like Ami Pro/Word Pro, but was more like KWord than anything else. Galactic Civilizations was a kick-ass Civilization-in-Space game. Then there was OpenDoc. I was really excited about OpenDoc, seeing as OLE sucked ass back then, as it still does today. That functionality is actually worse today than it was back then! OpenOffice is about the only spreadsheet/word processing combo where you can still 'Paste Link'. That doesn't even work with Office anymore. I guess I was the only schmoe that thought it was useful. Ah, the fruits of Taligent, doomed by market forces and the absolutely grisly OS/2 typography engine.

Between IBM and Corel, the roadkill and also-rans of computing history have finally found a home. Kind of like the Island of Misfit Toys, or some'n.

The Dirty Ashtray » Whoever Said Age is Only a Number and Only a State of Mind Can Kiss my Ass.:

I never realized I was old until one day, when I was laying down to go to sleep, I made this long sort of, 'arrrrrrrrrrrr' grunting sound. If I'd then added, "boy, my dogs are a-barkin'" at the end, I would've been my dad. That's when I noticed that pretty much no matter what I do, I make some sort of grunting sound to accompany it. When I sit down, when I stand up, when I reach over to turn on the nightstand-lamp.

And every action has its own distinct sound. I think two old men could always tell what each others doing, even while blind-folded. "Put down that remote, I'm listening to that!" "What remote?" "Don't you try to fool me, sonny, I recognize the reaching-over-to-the-coffee-table groan when I hears it!" I think it starts at 30. You stretch your back and, for the first time, it just doesn't feel right without that, "rrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh" as punctuation.

Well, that, and those weird ear-hairs that I've got going on.

QuickSilver is an interesting thing.

Take a look at www.blacktree.com (as far as I can tell, the blog plug-in doesn't support HTML, nor, by extension, real links).

(click to play)

Obligatory Parentary Advisory:

Mac Mini: The Emperor's New Computer:

So is the mini a maxi value? For me, clearly, no. When I consider that a good deal of my time is spent running applications like Disk Defragmenter, Scandisk, Norton AV, Windows Update and Ad-Aware--none of which are available for the Mac platform--it doesn't make sense for me to "switch" to a Mac at this time.

via WizBang

(Click to View)

We're back from Vienna now, and we were greeted by even more hospitable German weather:

I'm having to catch up on work, so there's not much time to be blogging, neither passively nor actively, at the moment. But here's some more pictures in case anybody's wondering just what the phrase "cold as a witch's titty" looks like in the implementation phase.

Tagged at Thundernose's. A coward's tag, but tagged nonetheless. So, figuring what better time to try out the Amazon function of my blogging software, I decided, why not?

Rube's Random 10

"Parklife" (Blur)	"Hank Williams - 40 Greatest Hits" (Hank Williams)	"Alice" (Tom Waits)	"Good for Your Soul" (Oingo Boingo)	"The Downward Spiral" (Nine Inch Nails)
"Red Headed Stranger" (Willie Nelson)	"Candy Apple Grey" (Hüsker Dü)	"Chips from the Chocolate Fireball" (The Dukes of Stratosphear)	"Darklands" (Jesus and Mary Chain)	"Reckoning" (R.E.M.)

1.) What is the total amount of music files on your computer?
I just spent about a week sucking all my music into iTunes, along with cover art and what-not. The final damage?

2.) The last CD you bought is:

"Excursions in Ambience 1" (Various Artists)

That was well over a year ago. I already seem to have everything I need.

3.)What is the song you last listened to before this message?

Live with Me, Rolling Stones from Let It Bleed

4.) Five songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you:
I'm a sentimental goon, and tend to get all weepy if the right song comes on at the wrong moment.

Three Days, Jane's Addiction

Prodigal Son, Alison Krauss & Michelle Shocked

Mother Nature's Son, The Beatles

Streets of Baltimore, Bobby Bare

Oh, You Pretty Things, David Bowie

5.) Who are you gonna pass this stick to (five persons and why)?

I'll be passing this one along to:

• My Brother, no link, but I'd be interested to hear what he's listening to these days
• Augie, even though, being German, she'll probably just list a bunch of Kraftwerk CDs
• The Hetzfresse, just to irritate him
• Andy of "XOR", for pretty much the same reason
• And, finally, to Rappinhood, because I'd like to see if he puts his own records on there...

Well, that was entertaining. Damn you, Zonker. Damn you to HELL! I'll get this one back at the Wreckyll, if I remember to reserve a room...

(click to play)

Gut Rumbles: the guitar face:

What a hoot; Acidman got me there. I don't even play guitar all that good, but when nobody's looking I stick out the tongue and squint my eyes like the guy from Uriah Heep, "Magicians Birthday"-style. It's all pretty ridiculous anyway when all you can play are a couple of sappy old Beatles tunes; I mean, it's not like you have to jump around the room and bash in your amp after Norwegian Wood, now is it.

While we're on the subject, I know that some of youse that drop by every now and then are musicians. I'm looking for a better way to guitar into my computer. I'm thinking of setting myself up with some sort of guitar synth, but I really have no idea what all I'll need. Any suggestions? All I've got right now is a jangly old western acoustic and a Mac. Well, it was enough for Matthew Sweet to get started...

What kind of rock was I under last week to make me miss this beauty:

With Moore sitting in the audience, the Dirty Harry star said, "Michael Moore and I actually have a lot in common - we both appreciate living in a country where there's free expression.

"But, Michael, if you ever show up at my front door with a camera - I'll kill you. I mean it."

Jeeps, I can't think of many things that would fill my pants quicker than Gunny Highway telling me he was going to kill me, then adding 'I mean it' just to make sure I knew he wasn't joking.

A man's got to know his limitations, Mike.

Via Evil White Guy

Acidman is looking for somebody to blame. And, as my old boss at UPS was wont to say, nobody's gonna be getting anything done around here until we find a scapegoat. Let's play!

Gloria Steinem

She didn't invent feminism, but she certainly became the poster-girl for it. The two-income, latchkey family is at the root of a multitude of problems in America, both economically and socially.

Tom Freston

The founder of MTV. Freston's behemoth is the reason the music industry, traditionally one of America's most innovative areas, has become the sole province Gangstas telling kids not to do drugs and digitally tone-corrected dotards and dotardesses like Cher.

Bob Saget

That's right, fucker, I said Bob Saget. Goddamn Canadian bastard was actually a very funny stand-up comic at one time. But then, he turned his sights on a network job, and hit the big-time with America's Funniest Home Videos. He turned into an unfunny, maddeningly-smug little camera mugger. This opened the floodgates for 20 years of sappy, horribly unfunny television 'humor', undoing decades of hard work by the likes of Redd Foxx, Carroll O'Connor, and the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. See also, Dave Coulier.

George Lucas

How the fuck can you make Star Wars suck? I mean, farting ewoks?

Paul Allen

This no-good sonofabitch was a co-founder of Microsoft, the guys who brought you Bob. Paul, being one of the co-founders of Evil Itself, is a shoo-in for this list. I would've put Gates in there, but c'mon, how could you hate that cute widdle face of his?! Paul, however, knew what Gates was up to when they founded that company, and didn't shoot him. Adding to this infamy, Paul is also directly response for MS-DOS using the backslash (\) to separate directories, instead of the forward slash as God and AT&T intended. Although I suspect most of you mouse-jockeys have never noticed such a thing, I assure you it's diabolical.

Tim Berners-Lee

As you probably know, Berners-Lee invented the World-Wide Web, and is therefore directly responsible for comment spam. Fuck you, Tim.

John F. Kennedy

I know he died before I was born, but he was responsible for the entire bad part of the 60s. He got us into Vietnam to save the French(!), and gave Generation IX something to bitch about until the present day. Inexplicably, his babies in Vietnam and Cuba are thrown into our faces every time America tries to do something good in the world, and yet every pampered playboy candidate from the Democratic side of the fence tries to waltz into the White House with his mask on. Go figure. Maybe he actually did some good by keeping the Democrats effectively out of office for 40 years? Naah.

William S. Burroughs

I liked Burroughs' first couple of books, Junky and Queer. They were gritty, gripping, and entertaining to read. But after that, he spent 50 years showing people that you don't need to be able to write to be a writer, and you don't need to be able to think to be an intellectual. Once he got his thinking cap on, all he did was bastardize literature with pop vapidness, and utterly destroyed American philosophy with hate-filled, nihilistic crypto-elitism. His material was the prototype for celebrity pseudo-intellectuals like Timothy Leary, Oliver Stone, and Noam Chomsky. Through his association with one-hit wonders like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, he installed the backdoor through which intellectual thought slipped out unnoticed in the 60s.

Lou Gerstner

Rounding out our trio of technical goats is this sack of shit. Lou is the reason you're probably reading this page with a Microsoft browser, on a Microsoft OS, after clicking a link with an overpriced, ergonomically baffling Microsoft Mouse. You see, Lou was in charge of IBM back when they were developing my beloved operating system, OS/2. They'd successfully wrenched it from the jaws of Microsoft Perfidy (actually, Microsoft Perfidy sounds like a great name for a new product, doesn't it? Then, when you called tech support, they'd ask you, "So, do you have the latest Perfidy?" And you could respond wryly, while watching a little hourglass run out sand and turn itself over for an eternity, all because somebody else's fucking computer crashed across the office while you had a drive mapped to it, "Yes, Mr. Tech Support Guy, I do indeed have the latest Perfidy, you soulless, soulless cur."), and it was developing into an advanced, beautifully architected system which was superior in every way to its competitors from Microsoft and Apple. It should have been the OS that the computer revolution ran on. Gerstner didn't have the vision to keep OS/2 advancing, and, waiting until I'd spent about, oh, $2000 on various OS/2 versions and programs which are today about as useful as 1990 Sugar Bowl Tickets. But Gerstner didn't want to stop there! He also arranged to buy Lotus, the guys who were Office before Office, and drive them into the ground, just so the Microsoft Applications Division could sleep at night without worry that there might have been some competition out there or something. If I can figure out how Gerstner managed to destroy Novell, I'll have his ass in a cell with Martha Stewart for shady corporate skullduggery.

Jesse Jackson

I'll just let Acidman explain that one. My thoughts exactly.

Well, now, that was fun. Maybe we should reduce it to 5, though. 5's a meme; 10's almost like work.

If you think you've got some good search-engine placement, just lookie what Rube's got.

Yeah, buddy, send in the horny mexicans, there be room for evvabuddy here in El Rube's Rancho de Amore.

I would think I'd get more hits over that one. My top ten searches?

There is style, there. I'm not saying I'm disappointed, just a bit confused. Oddly enough, it looks like Apple's G5 intro got google-bombed into the #5 spot. I guess the number 3 spot on the world-wide supercomputer list is just not enough for some people.

Over at A Small Victory, they've started the ol' fat-chick/skinny-chick theoreticals up. Why in the world does anybody debate this point? The cool thing is, the extremes are out. There's people over there dredging up stories about that 300-lb. gorilla-woman they bagged in college who really wasn't that bad in the sack, and had a good heart to boot, not that I asked and oh, don't worry, I always wear my dinner on my shirt. I'm sorry, guys and gals, but if fat-mouthing gets your goat because your chick's a whale...sorry, I can't think of a good animal metaphor to end that sentence, but still, you're the one with the problem.

I wouldn't date a fat girl. They're not attractive to me, and therefore it would be silly for me to date one. I also wouldn't date this Teri Polo chick because she's a fucking actress! Have you ever talked to an actress? Jesus, it's like holding a conversation with your hand after jerking off, I mean really, thanks for the amusing lay, honey, but I've got a book to read. I need a bit more intellectual grab-ass than that. I need a girl who can talk about something that's not written in all-caps on a piece of paper after her name and a stage direction. I mean, really, up until the 1970s actors and actresses weren't even considered polite company.

So, will I be considering my possible future with Teri Polo, spending late nights drinking cheap wine and discussing with her the theological implications of the theory of relativity, and the destabilizing influence of voice recording on the natural evolution of human language? No, I doubt it.

Will I be masturbating vigorously over the upcoming Playboy spread? Yes. Yes I will. At least until the cashier at the gas station catches me.

UPDATE: Get a load of this guy at Michele's

My theory is that guys who go for girls with bodies like 11-year-old boys actually would prefer to be with 11-year-old boys.
Posted by Dirk on January 18, 2005 07:24 AM

Yes, "Dirk", because all 11-year-old boys have 36-inch hips and perky, pouting breasts with well-defined yet subtly protruding nipples, as well as expertly-manicured vaginas. My theory, Dirk, is that men who have trouble telling Playboy models from 11-year-old boys better just stay the fuck away from my nephews, that's all I'm saying.

I can't go on, just kill me now, god and sonny jesus.

Via Augie, and I don't even wanna fucking know what she was doing surfing around for MS-Pr0n, jesus, my eyes, it may well take me a while to get over this one, in fact I may just have to break into spontaneous grown-up straight-mail non-teen-beat oriented good ol' surfing for tits after this.

My eyes, to repeat. Good god-a-mighty, my eyes.

So, I'm sitting here, typing away on my newly-reactivated PC, and I just noticed, after 4 hours of working, that either the blue gun is getting all hyperactive, or the red and green ones are sleeping on the job. Every couple of seconds, the color on the monitor washes all blue, then goes back to normal.

So, as a request for comments: I'm now on the lookout for a new monitor. The one I've got is an aging 19" CTX VL90. I'd like to get a 19" flat panel, wide-format if possible. Any suggestions?

The hook, of course, is that I've got exactly €3.50 in the bank.

My bestest little buddy went on a trip today. He's never been out there on his own before, so of course I'm worrying myself sick, hoping he's OK, and that the people at the Apple Repair Center are taking care of him. That's right, at 9:02 this morning, the UPS guy came by and picked up my Powerbook. He wasn't feeling well. The Powerbook, I mean. Thanks to this problem, he's going on vacation.

Now I'm working on my Windows PC. First day today. So far:

• Virus update notification that couldn't be clicked away
• ZoneAlarm popped up while I was playing Doom 3; machine frozen between video modes
• Windows blue-screened for some inscrutable reason (rebooted before I could read the error message)
• Upon restart received "Windows Critical Error" dialog, without specifics on which application it was
• Weird window-management feature, where a window was off-screen, and could only be seen when maximized. "Tile Windows" didn't bring it back
• Font-management bug where a Type 1 font couldn't be substituted in Macromedia Flash

It's going to be a long week.

As if reading my mind, michael say:

Going to a place that's far, so far away and if that's not enough Going where nobody says hello, they don't talk to anybody they don't know You'll wind up in some factory that's full time filth and nowhere left to go Walk home to an empty house, sit around all by yourself I know it might sound strange, but I believe You'll be coming back before too long At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care if you're not here with me 'Cause it's so much easier to handle All my problems if I'm too far out to sea But something better happen soon Or it's gonna be too late to bring you back It's not as though I really need you If you were here I'd only bleed you But everybody else in town only wants to bring you down and That's not how it ought to be I know it might sound strange, but I believe You'll be coming back before too long

In no particular order:

• The comical 'Boing!' sound in Whammy! by the B-52s; 1983; Athens, GA
• The last 2 Space is the Place-minutes of Bugman by Blur; 1992; UK
• My putting Upside Down by The Jesus & Mary Chain right in the middle of a make-out mix tape; 1989; Woodstock, GA
• Peter Buck selling his distortion pedal; 1989; Los Angeles, CA
• 

Poking around Little Green Footballs (no link, because I don't want y'all Bitch-dotting Charles' nice little blog there), I came across this little gem of a page.

Looking at that cheered me up for a number of reasons. First off, Charles is absolutely right about the Valentine's flash banner. Priceless; an absolute masterpiece of medieval Muslim romantik. Xenophobia begins at home, kids. But mostly, I just have to giggle when I see a URL that has "ShowFatwa.php" in it.

Awesome! You guys are nuts...

Just in case any y'all was looking for a good dildo-party this weekend.

Just sayin'...

Click here for the story...

It's Monday again. How do I know this? Well, first of all, I'll be inebriated in just a few short hours. My liver's already quivering --quivering!-- with anticipation. Secondly, every Monday afternoon there's a little parade that marches past my office window. Far from being a celebration of my own glorious acts, it's actually a sad little group of about eight freeloaders protesting Hartz IV, the German social services reform bill.

I don't really know much about Hartz IV, having Googled it for the first time just a minute or two ago, and I don't really care what's in it. Often, I'll eschew informing myself about an issue and simply base my decision on who's marching against it. The bongo-beating, rhyme-chanting mouth-breathers that just limped past my office window have just made me a huge fan of Hartz IV, even if it reads like a Jonathan Swift treatise. Beat those bongos, slackers; I'm going shopping for fava beans.

Just a factoid for the stream:

In typesetting, you generally want to avoid leaving a line of a paragraph by itself on a page. When it's the first line, it's called a widow When it's the last line, it's called an orphan. In German, you called the first line a Cobbler's boy (Schusterjung), and the last line 'son of a whore' (Hurenkind).

Carry on.

[This is a book review I've written for next month's Die Neue Szene, the local scene-rag, in case anyone feels like reading it.]

€16.90
"Digital gestalten: Der Erste-Hilfe Kurs in Typo, Farbe und Layout" (Günter Schuler)
Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2005

In this compact volume, author Günter Schuler attempts to cover almost all aspects of modern electronic typographical design and layout. As the subtitle suggests, the book is arranged like a course on design basics, with long stretches of raw information about design and layout, culminating in a detailed example showing its application.

Starting with the evolution of movable type, and tracing the histories of various typefaces, we learn for what purposes many familiar fonts were originally developed, and by whom, and what it is about them that has kept them alive into the digital age. Next, we move on to how one goes about using them. The classic techniques of layout are covered, and are analogized to workflows of modern programs like InDesign and QuarkXPress. This is attractive to budding designers; learning the principles of layout, instead of the tools and tricks, allows the reader to apply this knowledge to any design process.

Unfortunately, Mr. Schuler wastes large portions of the book with endless lists of examples that contribute little to the reader’s experience. The lists of typefaces in the opening chapters, for example, are overwhelming, not to mention boring to page through. Also, many examples of bad design are subtly made, and not clearly marked, giving the reader an uncomfortable impression that the guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, after all.

Despite the occasional glitches in writing style and organization, this book offers an excellent entry point into the world of professional design. It is brimming with the kind of information and concepts one needs to rise above the Web-monkeys and Photoshop-jockeys that saturate the field today.

Every now and then, me and the old lady sleep late, work up an appetite, then get up and enjoy a nice breakfast together. I'm happy to say that today was one of those days. Unfortunately, they don't have Waffle Houses over here, so your options are limited. It's either head over to the coffee shop for a $10 breakfast of yogurt and oak leaves, or do it yourself.

It just so happens that the old lady and me enjoy practicing the culinary arts, and brother, we produced. I'd like you all to meet someone very dear to me, the Small Southern Breakfast:

Let's see, what we got here?

• Hot coffee
• Fresh-squeezed orange juice
• Homemade biscuits au Rube
• One double-sized, spicy-hot Augsburg-style omelette
• Cheese grits (made with Gouda, which is surprisingly good, even for a cheese-grits purist like myself)
• Assorted cheeses (Gouda, swiss, emmentaler)
• Butter, honey, peach jelly, and red-pepper spreads
• Peanut butter, a rare commodity in these parts
• One hungry Rube
• One hungry Augie

Yuuuuuummmmmmm-mi!

Then came the nap, but I forgot to take pictures. Y'all over there living in the Land o' Plenty have no idea what a rare joy it is over here to stuff yourself like a peanut farmer before getting out of your pajamas.

TrustedReviews: IBM, Sony, Toshiba to acCELerate Processor Market?

After three years of co-development between industry giants IBM, Sony and Toshiba the fruit of their labours has finally been detailed to the public. The Cell processor, which among other things will power Sony’s PlayStation 3 games console, is a multicore chip that its designers boast has the potential to run 10 times faster than current PC chips.

They don't mention it in at the end of that article, but in this one (German) they make it pretty clear that this cell processor thing is a 64-bit, multi-core, scaled-down Power5. It's a similar manufacturing scheme as the current Power4 machines from IBM and the Apple G5 line of Power Macs. Can you say 'Power Mac G7'? I thought you could.

There are a couple of things that are interesting in these articles. Apparently, they're already being fabricated. IBM will be introducing them in a workstation line later this year, and the PlayStation 3 is already under development, so prototypes probably exist. Secondly, the price of the chip will be less than those in Intel's line-up. The introduction of the G5 lagged behind the Power4 by just over a year. That means if Apple opts for the cell, and if reports are accurate about its performance they should definitely consider it, we could see the new processor wearing something stylish sometime next year, and with a lower price-tag than the G5s.

So, wonder what Motorola's up to these days? Probably somewhere ordering rubber dicks with Tom Sizemore.

So, I booted up my WIndows computer yesterday, for the first time in a while. What a patronizing, pedantic little shit that thing is. First of all, I get about 50 little things popping up in my system tray, telling me my virus definitions are outdated, that this or that program is trying to contact the Internet, then some pop-up window trying to sell me Half-Life 2, which I already bought about 3 months ago, and that there are approximately six relevant system updates I really, really need to install (I already installed SP2 on this dick thing here, wasn't that just last month?). It also found a "New USB HID Device", which it finds every single time it boots, and can't seem to remember. The signal-to-noise ratio in Windows is rapidly approaching zero.

But I'll be damned if a little pop-up didn't come up at the end and tell me that my Desktop has too much stuff on it, and maybe I don't think I should maybe get off my ass and run the Desktop Cleanup Wizard for once. What is this thing, my mother? Can't try to do anything around here without some little window popping up at you and telling you you're doing it wrong. I'm not trying to make excuses here, but there's only like a baker's dozen things on my desktop. I run my monitor at extra-big resolution and believe me, I've seen worse. I mean, check this out:

It's not exactly bursting at the seams, now is it? But, I figure, what the hell, I'll spend a little time wiping Windows' ass for a change. So, I grab the Quicktime Player icon and drag it over to the trashcan. Easy, one step operation, right?

You might not be able to read German, but that's a dialog telling me that, despite what I probably think, throwing away a link doesn't un-install the application. Now, I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but honestly I wasn't even expecting it to un-install the application. I was throwing a link in the trash. The observant among you may have noticed two suspicious things about this dialog:

1. There's no "Do not show this again" checkbox. I cannot fathom this.
2. There's no option to un-install the program in this dialog.

Every single time you throw a link away from your desktop, you get this dialog saying you're doing it wrong. Don't believe me? Ok, here's one for Ad-aware:

Aaaand, here's one for iTunes:

Aaand here's one for QuickBooks:

Huh? QuickBooks just got deleted, and there's no dialog? What's up with that? Hmmm...maybe he's figured I know what I'm doing. Ok, I'll just throw away Trillian:

What the fuck? Hmm...maybe it doesn't say anything about deleting quickbooks because it actually DID uninstall the program? Nope. More likely because it's a competitor with MS Money.

You piss-ant little fucker. Who the hell came up with this workflow here? First, he tells my desktop, MY DESKTOP, is too cluttered. Did I mention that it is, after all, MY FUCKING DESKTOP? Then he bitches and moans about every single little fucking thing I do, that I'm not doing it right.

Windows, you whiny-ass little bitch. If I had half a choice I'd de-rez your ass.

When deciding what to have engraved on your iPod, please try to be sober.

Jesus, that's one huge fucking pile of crockery.

Back in the good old-to-middlin' days, I was an avid user of OS/2. It had a lot of technical trickery you could entertain yourself with. Shadows, for example. Shadows were like the links you can make in Windows, except they actually worked. In Windows, a link isn't much more that a text file with the path of a document or program in it and the .lnk suffix. This means, of course, that if the document ever moves the link doesn't work any more. It's not a link at all, really: It's a bookmark. Not so with shadows; once made, you could move the document to wherever you wanted, and the shadow would always know where it had gotten off to. Incidentally, Mac OS X is the only operating system I'm aware of that has this functionality today, eComStation excepted.

OS/2 wasn't perfect, though. It was ugly, even by the standards of 1994. It also had a weird interface to it. Sometimes, dialogs were arranged in tabs along the right, sometimes along the top, and they hardly ever had OK buttons. Presentation Manager, the OS/2 version of Windows' Explorer, also had some quirks when viewing things in tree fashion. The multimedia subsystem sucked, frankly. You couldn't reliably changed things like screen resolution, or color depth. The on-screen fonts were powered by some weird, mutated version of Adobe Type Manager, which wasn't compatible with any other version, so you had to convert your Windows ATM fonts over with UNIX tools, just in case you had an SGI sitting around (we did, fortunately). And, compared to DOS and Windows, it was slow and memory-intensive to do anything with.

Probably the only things I miss about OS/2 now are the applications I used with it. You see, kids, back then, when you said 'Office', you just as likely meant Lotus Smartsuite or WordPerfect Office as Microsoft Office. Smartsuite/2 was a combination of Ami Pro, Lotus 1-2-3, Organizer, and Freelance, all distributed on about 40 3.5" diskettes. The very first word processor written for Windows, Ami Pro was a nice environment to get stuff done in. Then Lotus bought it. Then they bought Harvard Graphics out, I think. Then Paradox, the database. While they were busy buying and ruining the pieces they didn't have, and suing people like Borland over competing products (the Lotus lawsuit over Quattro touched off a couple of years of "Look & Feel" paranoia), IBM was getting ready to buy their asses and return the favor.

There were also some pretty innovative programs you could play around with. DeScribe, for example, was the first word-processor that included as-you-type background spellchecking. Clearlook tried really, really hard to be all frame-y like Ami Pro/Word Pro, but was more like KWord than anything else. Galactic Civilizations was a kick-ass Civilization-in-Space game. Then there was OpenDoc. I was really excited about OpenDoc, seeing as OLE sucked ass back then, as it still does today. That functionality is actually worse today than it was back then! OpenOffice is about the only spreadsheet/word processing combo where you can still 'Paste Link'. That doesn't even work with Office anymore. I guess I was the only schmoe that thought it was useful. Ah, the fruits of Taligent, doomed by market forces and the absolutely grisly OS/2 typography engine.

Between IBM and Corel, the roadkill and also-rans of computing history have finally found a home. Kind of like the Island of Misfit Toys, or some'n.

The Dirty Ashtray » Whoever Said Age is Only a Number and Only a State of Mind Can Kiss my Ass.:

I never realized I was old until one day, when I was laying down to go to sleep, I made this long sort of, 'arrrrrrrrrrrr' grunting sound. If I'd then added, "boy, my dogs are a-barkin'" at the end, I would've been my dad. That's when I noticed that pretty much no matter what I do, I make some sort of grunting sound to accompany it. When I sit down, when I stand up, when I reach over to turn on the nightstand-lamp.

And every action has its own distinct sound. I think two old men could always tell what each others doing, even while blind-folded. "Put down that remote, I'm listening to that!" "What remote?" "Don't you try to fool me, sonny, I recognize the reaching-over-to-the-coffee-table groan when I hears it!" I think it starts at 30. You stretch your back and, for the first time, it just doesn't feel right without that, "rrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh" as punctuation.

Well, that, and those weird ear-hairs that I've got going on.

QuickSilver is an interesting thing.

Take a look at www.blacktree.com (as far as I can tell, the blog plug-in doesn't support HTML, nor, by extension, real links).

(click to play)

Obligatory Parentary Advisory:

Mac Mini: The Emperor's New Computer:

So is the mini a maxi value? For me, clearly, no. When I consider that a good deal of my time is spent running applications like Disk Defragmenter, Scandisk, Norton AV, Windows Update and Ad-Aware--none of which are available for the Mac platform--it doesn't make sense for me to "switch" to a Mac at this time.

via WizBang

(Click to View)

We're back from Vienna now, and we were greeted by even more hospitable German weather:

I'm having to catch up on work, so there's not much time to be blogging, neither passively nor actively, at the moment. But here's some more pictures in case anybody's wondering just what the phrase "cold as a witch's titty" looks like in the implementation phase.

Tagged at Thundernose's. A coward's tag, but tagged nonetheless. So, figuring what better time to try out the Amazon function of my blogging software, I decided, why not?

Rube's Random 10

"Parklife" (Blur)	"Hank Williams - 40 Greatest Hits" (Hank Williams)	"Alice" (Tom Waits)	"Good for Your Soul" (Oingo Boingo)	"The Downward Spiral" (Nine Inch Nails)
"Red Headed Stranger" (Willie Nelson)	"Candy Apple Grey" (Hüsker Dü)	"Chips from the Chocolate Fireball" (The Dukes of Stratosphear)	"Darklands" (Jesus and Mary Chain)	"Reckoning" (R.E.M.)

1.) What is the total amount of music files on your computer?
I just spent about a week sucking all my music into iTunes, along with cover art and what-not. The final damage?

2.) The last CD you bought is:

"Excursions in Ambience 1" (Various Artists)

That was well over a year ago. I already seem to have everything I need.

3.)What is the song you last listened to before this message?

Live with Me, Rolling Stones from Let It Bleed

4.) Five songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you:
I'm a sentimental goon, and tend to get all weepy if the right song comes on at the wrong moment.

Three Days, Jane's Addiction

Prodigal Son, Alison Krauss & Michelle Shocked

Mother Nature's Son, The Beatles

Streets of Baltimore, Bobby Bare

Oh, You Pretty Things, David Bowie

5.) Who are you gonna pass this stick to (five persons and why)?

I'll be passing this one along to:

• My Brother, no link, but I'd be interested to hear what he's listening to these days
• Augie, even though, being German, she'll probably just list a bunch of Kraftwerk CDs
• The Hetzfresse, just to irritate him
• Andy of "XOR", for pretty much the same reason
• And, finally, to Rappinhood, because I'd like to see if he puts his own records on there...

Well, that was entertaining. Damn you, Zonker. Damn you to HELL! I'll get this one back at the Wreckyll, if I remember to reserve a room...

(click to play)

Gut Rumbles: the guitar face:

What a hoot; Acidman got me there. I don't even play guitar all that good, but when nobody's looking I stick out the tongue and squint my eyes like the guy from Uriah Heep, "Magicians Birthday"-style. It's all pretty ridiculous anyway when all you can play are a couple of sappy old Beatles tunes; I mean, it's not like you have to jump around the room and bash in your amp after Norwegian Wood, now is it.

While we're on the subject, I know that some of youse that drop by every now and then are musicians. I'm looking for a better way to guitar into my computer. I'm thinking of setting myself up with some sort of guitar synth, but I really have no idea what all I'll need. Any suggestions? All I've got right now is a jangly old western acoustic and a Mac. Well, it was enough for Matthew Sweet to get started...

What kind of rock was I under last week to make me miss this beauty:

With Moore sitting in the audience, the Dirty Harry star said, "Michael Moore and I actually have a lot in common - we both appreciate living in a country where there's free expression.

"But, Michael, if you ever show up at my front door with a camera - I'll kill you. I mean it."

Jeeps, I can't think of many things that would fill my pants quicker than Gunny Highway telling me he was going to kill me, then adding 'I mean it' just to make sure I knew he wasn't joking.

A man's got to know his limitations, Mike.

Via Evil White Guy

Acidman is looking for somebody to blame. And, as my old boss at UPS was wont to say, nobody's gonna be getting anything done around here until we find a scapegoat. Let's play!

Gloria Steinem

She didn't invent feminism, but she certainly became the poster-girl for it. The two-income, latchkey family is at the root of a multitude of problems in America, both economically and socially.

Tom Freston

The founder of MTV. Freston's behemoth is the reason the music industry, traditionally one of America's most innovative areas, has become the sole province Gangstas telling kids not to do drugs and digitally tone-corrected dotards and dotardesses like Cher.

Bob Saget

That's right, fucker, I said Bob Saget. Goddamn Canadian bastard was actually a very funny stand-up comic at one time. But then, he turned his sights on a network job, and hit the big-time with America's Funniest Home Videos. He turned into an unfunny, maddeningly-smug little camera mugger. This opened the floodgates for 20 years of sappy, horribly unfunny television 'humor', undoing decades of hard work by the likes of Redd Foxx, Carroll O'Connor, and the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. See also, Dave Coulier.

George Lucas

How the fuck can you make Star Wars suck? I mean, farting ewoks?

Paul Allen

This no-good sonofabitch was a co-founder of Microsoft, the guys who brought you Bob. Paul, being one of the co-founders of Evil Itself, is a shoo-in for this list. I would've put Gates in there, but c'mon, how could you hate that cute widdle face of his?! Paul, however, knew what Gates was up to when they founded that company, and didn't shoot him. Adding to this infamy, Paul is also directly response for MS-DOS using the backslash (\) to separate directories, instead of the forward slash as God and AT&T intended. Although I suspect most of you mouse-jockeys have never noticed such a thing, I assure you it's diabolical.

Tim Berners-Lee

As you probably know, Berners-Lee invented the World-Wide Web, and is therefore directly responsible for comment spam. Fuck you, Tim.

John F. Kennedy

I know he died before I was born, but he was responsible for the entire bad part of the 60s. He got us into Vietnam to save the French(!), and gave Generation IX something to bitch about until the present day. Inexplicably, his babies in Vietnam and Cuba are thrown into our faces every time America tries to do something good in the world, and yet every pampered playboy candidate from the Democratic side of the fence tries to waltz into the White House with his mask on. Go figure. Maybe he actually did some good by keeping the Democrats effectively out of office for 40 years? Naah.

William S. Burroughs

I liked Burroughs' first couple of books, Junky and Queer. They were gritty, gripping, and entertaining to read. But after that, he spent 50 years showing people that you don't need to be able to write to be a writer, and you don't need to be able to think to be an intellectual. Once he got his thinking cap on, all he did was bastardize literature with pop vapidness, and utterly destroyed American philosophy with hate-filled, nihilistic crypto-elitism. His material was the prototype for celebrity pseudo-intellectuals like Timothy Leary, Oliver Stone, and Noam Chomsky. Through his association with one-hit wonders like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, he installed the backdoor through which intellectual thought slipped out unnoticed in the 60s.

Lou Gerstner

Rounding out our trio of technical goats is this sack of shit. Lou is the reason you're probably reading this page with a Microsoft browser, on a Microsoft OS, after clicking a link with an overpriced, ergonomically baffling Microsoft Mouse. You see, Lou was in charge of IBM back when they were developing my beloved operating system, OS/2. They'd successfully wrenched it from the jaws of Microsoft Perfidy (actually, Microsoft Perfidy sounds like a great name for a new product, doesn't it? Then, when you called tech support, they'd ask you, "So, do you have the latest Perfidy?" And you could respond wryly, while watching a little hourglass run out sand and turn itself over for an eternity, all because somebody else's fucking computer crashed across the office while you had a drive mapped to it, "Yes, Mr. Tech Support Guy, I do indeed have the latest Perfidy, you soulless, soulless cur."), and it was developing into an advanced, beautifully architected system which was superior in every way to its competitors from Microsoft and Apple. It should have been the OS that the computer revolution ran on. Gerstner didn't have the vision to keep OS/2 advancing, and, waiting until I'd spent about, oh, $2000 on various OS/2 versions and programs which are today about as useful as 1990 Sugar Bowl Tickets. But Gerstner didn't want to stop there! He also arranged to buy Lotus, the guys who were Office before Office, and drive them into the ground, just so the Microsoft Applications Division could sleep at night without worry that there might have been some competition out there or something. If I can figure out how Gerstner managed to destroy Novell, I'll have his ass in a cell with Martha Stewart for shady corporate skullduggery.

Jesse Jackson

I'll just let Acidman explain that one. My thoughts exactly.

Well, now, that was fun. Maybe we should reduce it to 5, though. 5's a meme; 10's almost like work.

If you think you've got some good search-engine placement, just lookie what Rube's got.

Yeah, buddy, send in the horny mexicans, there be room for evvabuddy here in El Rube's Rancho de Amore.

I would think I'd get more hits over that one. My top ten searches?

There is style, there. I'm not saying I'm disappointed, just a bit confused. Oddly enough, it looks like Apple's G5 intro got google-bombed into the #5 spot. I guess the number 3 spot on the world-wide supercomputer list is just not enough for some people.

Over at A Small Victory, they've started the ol' fat-chick/skinny-chick theoreticals up. Why in the world does anybody debate this point? The cool thing is, the extremes are out. There's people over there dredging up stories about that 300-lb. gorilla-woman they bagged in college who really wasn't that bad in the sack, and had a good heart to boot, not that I asked and oh, don't worry, I always wear my dinner on my shirt. I'm sorry, guys and gals, but if fat-mouthing gets your goat because your chick's a whale...sorry, I can't think of a good animal metaphor to end that sentence, but still, you're the one with the problem.

I wouldn't date a fat girl. They're not attractive to me, and therefore it would be silly for me to date one. I also wouldn't date this Teri Polo chick because she's a fucking actress! Have you ever talked to an actress? Jesus, it's like holding a conversation with your hand after jerking off, I mean really, thanks for the amusing lay, honey, but I've got a book to read. I need a bit more intellectual grab-ass than that. I need a girl who can talk about something that's not written in all-caps on a piece of paper after her name and a stage direction. I mean, really, up until the 1970s actors and actresses weren't even considered polite company.

So, will I be considering my possible future with Teri Polo, spending late nights drinking cheap wine and discussing with her the theological implications of the theory of relativity, and the destabilizing influence of voice recording on the natural evolution of human language? No, I doubt it.

Will I be masturbating vigorously over the upcoming Playboy spread? Yes. Yes I will. At least until the cashier at the gas station catches me.

UPDATE: Get a load of this guy at Michele's

My theory is that guys who go for girls with bodies like 11-year-old boys actually would prefer to be with 11-year-old boys.
Posted by Dirk on January 18, 2005 07:24 AM

Yes, "Dirk", because all 11-year-old boys have 36-inch hips and perky, pouting breasts with well-defined yet subtly protruding nipples, as well as expertly-manicured vaginas. My theory, Dirk, is that men who have trouble telling Playboy models from 11-year-old boys better just stay the fuck away from my nephews, that's all I'm saying.

I can't go on, just kill me now, god and sonny jesus.

Via Augie, and I don't even wanna fucking know what she was doing surfing around for MS-Pr0n, jesus, my eyes, it may well take me a while to get over this one, in fact I may just have to break into spontaneous grown-up straight-mail non-teen-beat oriented good ol' surfing for tits after this.

My eyes, to repeat. Good god-a-mighty, my eyes.

So, I'm sitting here, typing away on my newly-reactivated PC, and I just noticed, after 4 hours of working, that either the blue gun is getting all hyperactive, or the red and green ones are sleeping on the job. Every couple of seconds, the color on the monitor washes all blue, then goes back to normal.

So, as a request for comments: I'm now on the lookout for a new monitor. The one I've got is an aging 19" CTX VL90. I'd like to get a 19" flat panel, wide-format if possible. Any suggestions?

The hook, of course, is that I've got exactly €3.50 in the bank.

My bestest little buddy went on a trip today. He's never been out there on his own before, so of course I'm worrying myself sick, hoping he's OK, and that the people at the Apple Repair Center are taking care of him. That's right, at 9:02 this morning, the UPS guy came by and picked up my Powerbook. He wasn't feeling well. The Powerbook, I mean. Thanks to this problem, he's going on vacation.

Now I'm working on my Windows PC. First day today. So far:

• Virus update notification that couldn't be clicked away
• ZoneAlarm popped up while I was playing Doom 3; machine frozen between video modes
• Windows blue-screened for some inscrutable reason (rebooted before I could read the error message)
• Upon restart received "Windows Critical Error" dialog, without specifics on which application it was
• Weird window-management feature, where a window was off-screen, and could only be seen when maximized. "Tile Windows" didn't bring it back
• Font-management bug where a Type 1 font couldn't be substituted in Macromedia Flash

It's going to be a long week.

As if reading my mind, michael say:

Going to a place that's far, so far away and if that's not enough Going where nobody says hello, they don't talk to anybody they don't know You'll wind up in some factory that's full time filth and nowhere left to go Walk home to an empty house, sit around all by yourself I know it might sound strange, but I believe You'll be coming back before too long At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care if you're not here with me 'Cause it's so much easier to handle All my problems if I'm too far out to sea But something better happen soon Or it's gonna be too late to bring you back It's not as though I really need you If you were here I'd only bleed you But everybody else in town only wants to bring you down and That's not how it ought to be I know it might sound strange, but I believe You'll be coming back before too long

In no particular order:

• The comical 'Boing!' sound in Whammy! by the B-52s; 1983; Athens, GA
• The last 2 Space is the Place-minutes of Bugman by Blur; 1992; UK
• My putting Upside Down by The Jesus & Mary Chain right in the middle of a make-out mix tape; 1989; Woodstock, GA
• Peter Buck selling his distortion pedal; 1989; Los Angeles, CA
• 

Poking around Little Green Footballs (no link, because I don't want y'all Bitch-dotting Charles' nice little blog there), I came across this little gem of a page.

Looking at that cheered me up for a number of reasons. First off, Charles is absolutely right about the Valentine's flash banner. Priceless; an absolute masterpiece of medieval Muslim romantik. Xenophobia begins at home, kids. But mostly, I just have to giggle when I see a URL that has "ShowFatwa.php" in it.

Awesome! You guys are nuts...

Just in case any y'all was looking for a good dildo-party this weekend.

Just sayin'...

Click here for the story...

It's Monday again. How do I know this? Well, first of all, I'll be inebriated in just a few short hours. My liver's already quivering --quivering!-- with anticipation. Secondly, every Monday afternoon there's a little parade that marches past my office window. Far from being a celebration of my own glorious acts, it's actually a sad little group of about eight freeloaders protesting Hartz IV, the German social services reform bill.

I don't really know much about Hartz IV, having Googled it for the first time just a minute or two ago, and I don't really care what's in it. Often, I'll eschew informing myself about an issue and simply base my decision on who's marching against it. The bongo-beating, rhyme-chanting mouth-breathers that just limped past my office window have just made me a huge fan of Hartz IV, even if it reads like a Jonathan Swift treatise. Beat those bongos, slackers; I'm going shopping for fava beans.

Just a factoid for the stream:

In typesetting, you generally want to avoid leaving a line of a paragraph by itself on a page. When it's the first line, it's called a widow When it's the last line, it's called an orphan. In German, you called the first line a Cobbler's boy (Schusterjung), and the last line 'son of a whore' (Hurenkind).

Carry on.

[This is a book review I've written for next month's Die Neue Szene, the local scene-rag, in case anyone feels like reading it.]

€16.90
"Digital gestalten: Der Erste-Hilfe Kurs in Typo, Farbe und Layout" (Günter Schuler)
Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2005

In this compact volume, author Günter Schuler attempts to cover almost all aspects of modern electronic typographical design and layout. As the subtitle suggests, the book is arranged like a course on design basics, with long stretches of raw information about design and layout, culminating in a detailed example showing its application.

Starting with the evolution of movable type, and tracing the histories of various typefaces, we learn for what purposes many familiar fonts were originally developed, and by whom, and what it is about them that has kept them alive into the digital age. Next, we move on to how one goes about using them. The classic techniques of layout are covered, and are analogized to workflows of modern programs like InDesign and QuarkXPress. This is attractive to budding designers; learning the principles of layout, instead of the tools and tricks, allows the reader to apply this knowledge to any design process.

Unfortunately, Mr. Schuler wastes large portions of the book with endless lists of examples that contribute little to the reader’s experience. The lists of typefaces in the opening chapters, for example, are overwhelming, not to mention boring to page through. Also, many examples of bad design are subtly made, and not clearly marked, giving the reader an uncomfortable impression that the guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, after all.

Despite the occasional glitches in writing style and organization, this book offers an excellent entry point into the world of professional design. It is brimming with the kind of information and concepts one needs to rise above the Web-monkeys and Photoshop-jockeys that saturate the field today.

Every now and then, me and the old lady sleep late, work up an appetite, then get up and enjoy a nice breakfast together. I'm happy to say that today was one of those days. Unfortunately, they don't have Waffle Houses over here, so your options are limited. It's either head over to the coffee shop for a $10 breakfast of yogurt and oak leaves, or do it yourself.

It just so happens that the old lady and me enjoy practicing the culinary arts, and brother, we produced. I'd like you all to meet someone very dear to me, the Small Southern Breakfast:

Let's see, what we got here?

• Hot coffee
• Fresh-squeezed orange juice
• Homemade biscuits au Rube
• One double-sized, spicy-hot Augsburg-style omelette
• Cheese grits (made with Gouda, which is surprisingly good, even for a cheese-grits purist like myself)
• Assorted cheeses (Gouda, swiss, emmentaler)
• Butter, honey, peach jelly, and red-pepper spreads
• Peanut butter, a rare commodity in these parts
• One hungry Rube
• One hungry Augie

Yuuuuuummmmmmm-mi!

Then came the nap, but I forgot to take pictures. Y'all over there living in the Land o' Plenty have no idea what a rare joy it is over here to stuff yourself like a peanut farmer before getting out of your pajamas.

TrustedReviews: IBM, Sony, Toshiba to acCELerate Processor Market?

After three years of co-development between industry giants IBM, Sony and Toshiba the fruit of their labours has finally been detailed to the public. The Cell processor, which among other things will power Sony’s PlayStation 3 games console, is a multicore chip that its designers boast has the potential to run 10 times faster than current PC chips.

They don't mention it in at the end of that article, but in this one (German) they make it pretty clear that this cell processor thing is a 64-bit, multi-core, scaled-down Power5. It's a similar manufacturing scheme as the current Power4 machines from IBM and the Apple G5 line of Power Macs. Can you say 'Power Mac G7'? I thought you could.

There are a couple of things that are interesting in these articles. Apparently, they're already being fabricated. IBM will be introducing them in a workstation line later this year, and the PlayStation 3 is already under development, so prototypes probably exist. Secondly, the price of the chip will be less than those in Intel's line-up. The introduction of the G5 lagged behind the Power4 by just over a year. That means if Apple opts for the cell, and if reports are accurate about its performance they should definitely consider it, we could see the new processor wearing something stylish sometime next year, and with a lower price-tag than the G5s.

So, wonder what Motorola's up to these days? Probably somewhere ordering rubber dicks with Tom Sizemore.

So, I booted up my WIndows computer yesterday, for the first time in a while. What a patronizing, pedantic little shit that thing is. First of all, I get about 50 little things popping up in my system tray, telling me my virus definitions are outdated, that this or that program is trying to contact the Internet, then some pop-up window trying to sell me Half-Life 2, which I already bought about 3 months ago, and that there are approximately six relevant system updates I really, really need to install (I already installed SP2 on this dick thing here, wasn't that just last month?). It also found a "New USB HID Device", which it finds every single time it boots, and can't seem to remember. The signal-to-noise ratio in Windows is rapidly approaching zero.

But I'll be damned if a little pop-up didn't come up at the end and tell me that my Desktop has too much stuff on it, and maybe I don't think I should maybe get off my ass and run the Desktop Cleanup Wizard for once. What is this thing, my mother? Can't try to do anything around here without some little window popping up at you and telling you you're doing it wrong. I'm not trying to make excuses here, but there's only like a baker's dozen things on my desktop. I run my monitor at extra-big resolution and believe me, I've seen worse. I mean, check this out:

It's not exactly bursting at the seams, now is it? But, I figure, what the hell, I'll spend a little time wiping Windows' ass for a change. So, I grab the Quicktime Player icon and drag it over to the trashcan. Easy, one step operation, right?

You might not be able to read German, but that's a dialog telling me that, despite what I probably think, throwing away a link doesn't un-install the application. Now, I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but honestly I wasn't even expecting it to un-install the application. I was throwing a link in the trash. The observant among you may have noticed two suspicious things about this dialog:

1. There's no "Do not show this again" checkbox. I cannot fathom this.
2. There's no option to un-install the program in this dialog.

Every single time you throw a link away from your desktop, you get this dialog saying you're doing it wrong. Don't believe me? Ok, here's one for Ad-aware:

Aaaand, here's one for iTunes:

Aaand here's one for QuickBooks:

Huh? QuickBooks just got deleted, and there's no dialog? What's up with that? Hmmm...maybe he's figured I know what I'm doing. Ok, I'll just throw away Trillian:

What the fuck? Hmm...maybe it doesn't say anything about deleting quickbooks because it actually DID uninstall the program? Nope. More likely because it's a competitor with MS Money.

You piss-ant little fucker. Who the hell came up with this workflow here? First, he tells my desktop, MY DESKTOP, is too cluttered. Did I mention that it is, after all, MY FUCKING DESKTOP? Then he bitches and moans about every single little fucking thing I do, that I'm not doing it right.

Windows, you whiny-ass little bitch. If I had half a choice I'd de-rez your ass.

When deciding what to have engraved on your iPod, please try to be sober.

Jesus, that's one huge fucking pile of crockery.

Back in the good old-to-middlin' days, I was an avid user of OS/2. It had a lot of technical trickery you could entertain yourself with. Shadows, for example. Shadows were like the links you can make in Windows, except they actually worked. In Windows, a link isn't much more that a text file with the path of a document or program in it and the .lnk suffix. This means, of course, that if the document ever moves the link doesn't work any more. It's not a link at all, really: It's a bookmark. Not so with shadows; once made, you could move the document to wherever you wanted, and the shadow would always know where it had gotten off to. Incidentally, Mac OS X is the only operating system I'm aware of that has this functionality today, eComStation excepted.

OS/2 wasn't perfect, though. It was ugly, even by the standards of 1994. It also had a weird interface to it. Sometimes, dialogs were arranged in tabs along the right, sometimes along the top, and they hardly ever had OK buttons. Presentation Manager, the OS/2 version of Windows' Explorer, also had some quirks when viewing things in tree fashion. The multimedia subsystem sucked, frankly. You couldn't reliably changed things like screen resolution, or color depth. The on-screen fonts were powered by some weird, mutated version of Adobe Type Manager, which wasn't compatible with any other version, so you had to convert your Windows ATM fonts over with UNIX tools, just in case you had an SGI sitting around (we did, fortunately). And, compared to DOS and Windows, it was slow and memory-intensive to do anything with.

Probably the only things I miss about OS/2 now are the applications I used with it. You see, kids, back then, when you said 'Office', you just as likely meant Lotus Smartsuite or WordPerfect Office as Microsoft Office. Smartsuite/2 was a combination of Ami Pro, Lotus 1-2-3, Organizer, and Freelance, all distributed on about 40 3.5" diskettes. The very first word processor written for Windows, Ami Pro was a nice environment to get stuff done in. Then Lotus bought it. Then they bought Harvard Graphics out, I think. Then Paradox, the database. While they were busy buying and ruining the pieces they didn't have, and suing people like Borland over competing products (the Lotus lawsuit over Quattro touched off a couple of years of "Look & Feel" paranoia), IBM was getting ready to buy their asses and return the favor.

There were also some pretty innovative programs you could play around with. DeScribe, for example, was the first word-processor that included as-you-type background spellchecking. Clearlook tried really, really hard to be all frame-y like Ami Pro/Word Pro, but was more like KWord than anything else. Galactic Civilizations was a kick-ass Civilization-in-Space game. Then there was OpenDoc. I was really excited about OpenDoc, seeing as OLE sucked ass back then, as it still does today. That functionality is actually worse today than it was back then! OpenOffice is about the only spreadsheet/word processing combo where you can still 'Paste Link'. That doesn't even work with Office anymore. I guess I was the only schmoe that thought it was useful. Ah, the fruits of Taligent, doomed by market forces and the absolutely grisly OS/2 typography engine.

Between IBM and Corel, the roadkill and also-rans of computing history have finally found a home. Kind of like the Island of Misfit Toys, or some'n.

The Dirty Ashtray » Whoever Said Age is Only a Number and Only a State of Mind Can Kiss my Ass.:

I never realized I was old until one day, when I was laying down to go to sleep, I made this long sort of, 'arrrrrrrrrrrr' grunting sound. If I'd then added, "boy, my dogs are a-barkin'" at the end, I would've been my dad. That's when I noticed that pretty much no matter what I do, I make some sort of grunting sound to accompany it. When I sit down, when I stand up, when I reach over to turn on the nightstand-lamp.

And every action has its own distinct sound. I think two old men could always tell what each others doing, even while blind-folded. "Put down that remote, I'm listening to that!" "What remote?" "Don't you try to fool me, sonny, I recognize the reaching-over-to-the-coffee-table groan when I hears it!" I think it starts at 30. You stretch your back and, for the first time, it just doesn't feel right without that, "rrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh" as punctuation.

Well, that, and those weird ear-hairs that I've got going on.

QuickSilver is an interesting thing.

Take a look at www.blacktree.com (as far as I can tell, the blog plug-in doesn't support HTML, nor, by extension, real links).

(click to play)

Obligatory Parentary Advisory:

Mac Mini: The Emperor's New Computer:

So is the mini a maxi value? For me, clearly, no. When I consider that a good deal of my time is spent running applications like Disk Defragmenter, Scandisk, Norton AV, Windows Update and Ad-Aware--none of which are available for the Mac platform--it doesn't make sense for me to "switch" to a Mac at this time.

via WizBang

(Click to View)

We're back from Vienna now, and we were greeted by even more hospitable German weather:

I'm having to catch up on work, so there's not much time to be blogging, neither passively nor actively, at the moment. But here's some more pictures in case anybody's wondering just what the phrase "cold as a witch's titty" looks like in the implementation phase.

Tagged at Thundernose's. A coward's tag, but tagged nonetheless. So, figuring what better time to try out the Amazon function of my blogging software, I decided, why not?

Rube's Random 10

"Parklife" (Blur)	"Hank Williams - 40 Greatest Hits" (Hank Williams)	"Alice" (Tom Waits)	"Good for Your Soul" (Oingo Boingo)	"The Downward Spiral" (Nine Inch Nails)
"Red Headed Stranger" (Willie Nelson)	"Candy Apple Grey" (Hüsker Dü)	"Chips from the Chocolate Fireball" (The Dukes of Stratosphear)	"Darklands" (Jesus and Mary Chain)	"Reckoning" (R.E.M.)

1.) What is the total amount of music files on your computer?
I just spent about a week sucking all my music into iTunes, along with cover art and what-not. The final damage?

2.) The last CD you bought is:

"Excursions in Ambience 1" (Various Artists)

That was well over a year ago. I already seem to have everything I need.

3.)What is the song you last listened to before this message?

Live with Me, Rolling Stones from Let It Bleed

4.) Five songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you:
I'm a sentimental goon, and tend to get all weepy if the right song comes on at the wrong moment.

Three Days, Jane's Addiction

Prodigal Son, Alison Krauss & Michelle Shocked

Mother Nature's Son, The Beatles

Streets of Baltimore, Bobby Bare

Oh, You Pretty Things, David Bowie

5.) Who are you gonna pass this stick to (five persons and why)?

I'll be passing this one along to:

• My Brother, no link, but I'd be interested to hear what he's listening to these days
• Augie, even though, being German, she'll probably just list a bunch of Kraftwerk CDs
• The Hetzfresse, just to irritate him
• Andy of "XOR", for pretty much the same reason
• And, finally, to Rappinhood, because I'd like to see if he puts his own records on there...

Well, that was entertaining. Damn you, Zonker. Damn you to HELL! I'll get this one back at the Wreckyll, if I remember to reserve a room...

(click to play)

Gut Rumbles: the guitar face:

What a hoot; Acidman got me there. I don't even play guitar all that good, but when nobody's looking I stick out the tongue and squint my eyes like the guy from Uriah Heep, "Magicians Birthday"-style. It's all pretty ridiculous anyway when all you can play are a couple of sappy old Beatles tunes; I mean, it's not like you have to jump around the room and bash in your amp after Norwegian Wood, now is it.

While we're on the subject, I know that some of youse that drop by every now and then are musicians. I'm looking for a better way to guitar into my computer. I'm thinking of setting myself up with some sort of guitar synth, but I really have no idea what all I'll need. Any suggestions? All I've got right now is a jangly old western acoustic and a Mac. Well, it was enough for Matthew Sweet to get started...

What kind of rock was I under last week to make me miss this beauty:

With Moore sitting in the audience, the Dirty Harry star said, "Michael Moore and I actually have a lot in common - we both appreciate living in a country where there's free expression.

"But, Michael, if you ever show up at my front door with a camera - I'll kill you. I mean it."

Jeeps, I can't think of many things that would fill my pants quicker than Gunny Highway telling me he was going to kill me, then adding 'I mean it' just to make sure I knew he wasn't joking.

A man's got to know his limitations, Mike.

Via Evil White Guy

Acidman is looking for somebody to blame. And, as my old boss at UPS was wont to say, nobody's gonna be getting anything done around here until we find a scapegoat. Let's play!

Gloria Steinem

She didn't invent feminism, but she certainly became the poster-girl for it. The two-income, latchkey family is at the root of a multitude of problems in America, both economically and socially.

Tom Freston

The founder of MTV. Freston's behemoth is the reason the music industry, traditionally one of America's most innovative areas, has become the sole province Gangstas telling kids not to do drugs and digitally tone-corrected dotards and dotardesses like Cher.

Bob Saget

That's right, fucker, I said Bob Saget. Goddamn Canadian bastard was actually a very funny stand-up comic at one time. But then, he turned his sights on a network job, and hit the big-time with America's Funniest Home Videos. He turned into an unfunny, maddeningly-smug little camera mugger. This opened the floodgates for 20 years of sappy, horribly unfunny television 'humor', undoing decades of hard work by the likes of Redd Foxx, Carroll O'Connor, and the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. See also, Dave Coulier.

George Lucas

How the fuck can you make Star Wars suck? I mean, farting ewoks?

Paul Allen

This no-good sonofabitch was a co-founder of Microsoft, the guys who brought you Bob. Paul, being one of the co-founders of Evil Itself, is a shoo-in for this list. I would've put Gates in there, but c'mon, how could you hate that cute widdle face of his?! Paul, however, knew what Gates was up to when they founded that company, and didn't shoot him. Adding to this infamy, Paul is also directly response for MS-DOS using the backslash (\) to separate directories, instead of the forward slash as God and AT&T intended. Although I suspect most of you mouse-jockeys have never noticed such a thing, I assure you it's diabolical.

Tim Berners-Lee

As you probably know, Berners-Lee invented the World-Wide Web, and is therefore directly responsible for comment spam. Fuck you, Tim.

John F. Kennedy

I know he died before I was born, but he was responsible for the entire bad part of the 60s. He got us into Vietnam to save the French(!), and gave Generation IX something to bitch about until the present day. Inexplicably, his babies in Vietnam and Cuba are thrown into our faces every time America tries to do something good in the world, and yet every pampered playboy candidate from the Democratic side of the fence tries to waltz into the White House with his mask on. Go figure. Maybe he actually did some good by keeping the Democrats effectively out of office for 40 years? Naah.

William S. Burroughs

I liked Burroughs' first couple of books, Junky and Queer. They were gritty, gripping, and entertaining to read. But after that, he spent 50 years showing people that you don't need to be able to write to be a writer, and you don't need to be able to think to be an intellectual. Once he got his thinking cap on, all he did was bastardize literature with pop vapidness, and utterly destroyed American philosophy with hate-filled, nihilistic crypto-elitism. His material was the prototype for celebrity pseudo-intellectuals like Timothy Leary, Oliver Stone, and Noam Chomsky. Through his association with one-hit wonders like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, he installed the backdoor through which intellectual thought slipped out unnoticed in the 60s.

Lou Gerstner

Rounding out our trio of technical goats is this sack of shit. Lou is the reason you're probably reading this page with a Microsoft browser, on a Microsoft OS, after clicking a link with an overpriced, ergonomically baffling Microsoft Mouse. You see, Lou was in charge of IBM back when they were developing my beloved operating system, OS/2. They'd successfully wrenched it from the jaws of Microsoft Perfidy (actually, Microsoft Perfidy sounds like a great name for a new product, doesn't it? Then, when you called tech support, they'd ask you, "So, do you have the latest Perfidy?" And you could respond wryly, while watching a little hourglass run out sand and turn itself over for an eternity, all because somebody else's fucking computer crashed across the office while you had a drive mapped to it, "Yes, Mr. Tech Support Guy, I do indeed have the latest Perfidy, you soulless, soulless cur."), and it was developing into an advanced, beautifully architected system which was superior in every way to its competitors from Microsoft and Apple. It should have been the OS that the computer revolution ran on. Gerstner didn't have the vision to keep OS/2 advancing, and, waiting until I'd spent about, oh, $2000 on various OS/2 versions and programs which are today about as useful as 1990 Sugar Bowl Tickets. But Gerstner didn't want to stop there! He also arranged to buy Lotus, the guys who were Office before Office, and drive them into the ground, just so the Microsoft Applications Division could sleep at night without worry that there might have been some competition out there or something. If I can figure out how Gerstner managed to destroy Novell, I'll have his ass in a cell with Martha Stewart for shady corporate skullduggery.

Jesse Jackson

I'll just let Acidman explain that one. My thoughts exactly.

Well, now, that was fun. Maybe we should reduce it to 5, though. 5's a meme; 10's almost like work.

If you think you've got some good search-engine placement, just lookie what Rube's got.

Yeah, buddy, send in the horny mexicans, there be room for evvabuddy here in El Rube's Rancho de Amore.

I would think I'd get more hits over that one. My top ten searches?

There is style, there. I'm not saying I'm disappointed, just a bit confused. Oddly enough, it looks like Apple's G5 intro got google-bombed into the #5 spot. I guess the number 3 spot on the world-wide supercomputer list is just not enough for some people.

Over at A Small Victory, they've started the ol' fat-chick/skinny-chick theoreticals up. Why in the world does anybody debate this point? The cool thing is, the extremes are out. There's people over there dredging up stories about that 300-lb. gorilla-woman they bagged in college who really wasn't that bad in the sack, and had a good heart to boot, not that I asked and oh, don't worry, I always wear my dinner on my shirt. I'm sorry, guys and gals, but if fat-mouthing gets your goat because your chick's a whale...sorry, I can't think of a good animal metaphor to end that sentence, but still, you're the one with the problem.

I wouldn't date a fat girl. They're not attractive to me, and therefore it would be silly for me to date one. I also wouldn't date this Teri Polo chick because she's a fucking actress! Have you ever talked to an actress? Jesus, it's like holding a conversation with your hand after jerking off, I mean really, thanks for the amusing lay, honey, but I've got a book to read. I need a bit more intellectual grab-ass than that. I need a girl who can talk about something that's not written in all-caps on a piece of paper after her name and a stage direction. I mean, really, up until the 1970s actors and actresses weren't even considered polite company.

So, will I be considering my possible future with Teri Polo, spending late nights drinking cheap wine and discussing with her the theological implications of the theory of relativity, and the destabilizing influence of voice recording on the natural evolution of human language? No, I doubt it.

Will I be masturbating vigorously over the upcoming Playboy spread? Yes. Yes I will. At least until the cashier at the gas station catches me.

UPDATE: Get a load of this guy at Michele's

My theory is that guys who go for girls with bodies like 11-year-old boys actually would prefer to be with 11-year-old boys.
Posted by Dirk on January 18, 2005 07:24 AM

Yes, "Dirk", because all 11-year-old boys have 36-inch hips and perky, pouting breasts with well-defined yet subtly protruding nipples, as well as expertly-manicured vaginas. My theory, Dirk, is that men who have trouble telling Playboy models from 11-year-old boys better just stay the fuck away from my nephews, that's all I'm saying.

I can't go on, just kill me now, god and sonny jesus.

Via Augie, and I don't even wanna fucking know what she was doing surfing around for MS-Pr0n, jesus, my eyes, it may well take me a while to get over this one, in fact I may just have to break into spontaneous grown-up straight-mail non-teen-beat oriented good ol' surfing for tits after this.

My eyes, to repeat. Good god-a-mighty, my eyes.

So, I'm sitting here, typing away on my newly-reactivated PC, and I just noticed, after 4 hours of working, that either the blue gun is getting all hyperactive, or the red and green ones are sleeping on the job. Every couple of seconds, the color on the monitor washes all blue, then goes back to normal.

So, as a request for comments: I'm now on the lookout for a new monitor. The one I've got is an aging 19" CTX VL90. I'd like to get a 19" flat panel, wide-format if possible. Any suggestions?

The hook, of course, is that I've got exactly €3.50 in the bank.

My bestest little buddy went on a trip today. He's never been out there on his own before, so of course I'm worrying myself sick, hoping he's OK, and that the people at the Apple Repair Center are taking care of him. That's right, at 9:02 this morning, the UPS guy came by and picked up my Powerbook. He wasn't feeling well. The Powerbook, I mean. Thanks to this problem, he's going on vacation.

Now I'm working on my Windows PC. First day today. So far:

• Virus update notification that couldn't be clicked away
• ZoneAlarm popped up while I was playing Doom 3; machine frozen between video modes
• Windows blue-screened for some inscrutable reason (rebooted before I could read the error message)
• Upon restart received "Windows Critical Error" dialog, without specifics on which application it was
• Weird window-management feature, where a window was off-screen, and could only be seen when maximized. "Tile Windows" didn't bring it back
• Font-management bug where a Type 1 font couldn't be substituted in Macromedia Flash

It's going to be a long week.

As if reading my mind, michael say:

Going to a place that's far, so far away and if that's not enough Going where nobody says hello, they don't talk to anybody they don't know You'll wind up in some factory that's full time filth and nowhere left to go Walk home to an empty house, sit around all by yourself I know it might sound strange, but I believe You'll be coming back before too long At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care if you're not here with me 'Cause it's so much easier to handle All my problems if I'm too far out to sea But something better happen soon Or it's gonna be too late to bring you back It's not as though I really need you If you were here I'd only bleed you But everybody else in town only wants to bring you down and That's not how it ought to be I know it might sound strange, but I believe You'll be coming back before too long

In no particular order:

• The comical 'Boing!' sound in Whammy! by the B-52s; 1983; Athens, GA
• The last 2 Space is the Place-minutes of Bugman by Blur; 1992; UK
• My putting Upside Down by The Jesus & Mary Chain right in the middle of a make-out mix tape; 1989; Woodstock, GA
• Peter Buck selling his distortion pedal; 1989; Los Angeles, CA
• 

Poking around Little Green Footballs (no link, because I don't want y'all Bitch-dotting Charles' nice little blog there), I came across this little gem of a page.

Looking at that cheered me up for a number of reasons. First off, Charles is absolutely right about the Valentine's flash banner. Priceless; an absolute masterpiece of medieval Muslim romantik. Xenophobia begins at home, kids. But mostly, I just have to giggle when I see a URL that has "ShowFatwa.php" in it.

Awesome! You guys are nuts...

Just in case any y'all was looking for a good dildo-party this weekend.

Just sayin'...

Click here for the story...

It's Monday again. How do I know this? Well, first of all, I'll be inebriated in just a few short hours. My liver's already quivering --quivering!-- with anticipation. Secondly, every Monday afternoon there's a little parade that marches past my office window. Far from being a celebration of my own glorious acts, it's actually a sad little group of about eight freeloaders protesting Hartz IV, the German social services reform bill.

I don't really know much about Hartz IV, having Googled it for the first time just a minute or two ago, and I don't really care what's in it. Often, I'll eschew informing myself about an issue and simply base my decision on who's marching against it. The bongo-beating, rhyme-chanting mouth-breathers that just limped past my office window have just made me a huge fan of Hartz IV, even if it reads like a Jonathan Swift treatise. Beat those bongos, slackers; I'm going shopping for fava beans.

Just a factoid for the stream:

In typesetting, you generally want to avoid leaving a line of a paragraph by itself on a page. When it's the first line, it's called a widow When it's the last line, it's called an orphan. In German, you called the first line a Cobbler's boy (Schusterjung), and the last line 'son of a whore' (Hurenkind).

Carry on.

[This is a book review I've written for next month's Die Neue Szene, the local scene-rag, in case anyone feels like reading it.]

€16.90
"Digital gestalten: Der Erste-Hilfe Kurs in Typo, Farbe und Layout" (Günter Schuler)
Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2005

In this compact volume, author Günter Schuler attempts to cover almost all aspects of modern electronic typographical design and layout. As the subtitle suggests, the book is arranged like a course on design basics, with long stretches of raw information about design and layout, culminating in a detailed example showing its application.

Starting with the evolution of movable type, and tracing the histories of various typefaces, we learn for what purposes many familiar fonts were originally developed, and by whom, and what it is about them that has kept them alive into the digital age. Next, we move on to how one goes about using them. The classic techniques of layout are covered, and are analogized to workflows of modern programs like InDesign and QuarkXPress. This is attractive to budding designers; learning the principles of layout, instead of the tools and tricks, allows the reader to apply this knowledge to any design process.

Unfortunately, Mr. Schuler wastes large portions of the book with endless lists of examples that contribute little to the reader’s experience. The lists of typefaces in the opening chapters, for example, are overwhelming, not to mention boring to page through. Also, many examples of bad design are subtly made, and not clearly marked, giving the reader an uncomfortable impression that the guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, after all.

Despite the occasional glitches in writing style and organization, this book offers an excellent entry point into the world of professional design. It is brimming with the kind of information and concepts one needs to rise above the Web-monkeys and Photoshop-jockeys that saturate the field today.

Every now and then, me and the old lady sleep late, work up an appetite, then get up and enjoy a nice breakfast together. I'm happy to say that today was one of those days. Unfortunately, they don't have Waffle Houses over here, so your options are limited. It's either head over to the coffee shop for a $10 breakfast of yogurt and oak leaves, or do it yourself.

It just so happens that the old lady and me enjoy practicing the culinary arts, and brother, we produced. I'd like you all to meet someone very dear to me, the Small Southern Breakfast:

Let's see, what we got here?

• Hot coffee
• Fresh-squeezed orange juice
• Homemade biscuits au Rube
• One double-sized, spicy-hot Augsburg-style omelette
• Cheese grits (made with Gouda, which is surprisingly good, even for a cheese-grits purist like myself)
• Assorted cheeses (Gouda, swiss, emmentaler)
• Butter, honey, peach jelly, and red-pepper spreads
• Peanut butter, a rare commodity in these parts
• One hungry Rube
• One hungry Augie

Yuuuuuummmmmmm-mi!

Then came the nap, but I forgot to take pictures. Y'all over there living in the Land o' Plenty have no idea what a rare joy it is over here to stuff yourself like a peanut farmer before getting out of your pajamas.

TrustedReviews: IBM, Sony, Toshiba to acCELerate Processor Market?

After three years of co-development between industry giants IBM, Sony and Toshiba the fruit of their labours has finally been detailed to the public. The Cell processor, which among other things will power Sony’s PlayStation 3 games console, is a multicore chip that its designers boast has the potential to run 10 times faster than current PC chips.

They don't mention it in at the end of that article, but in this one (German) they make it pretty clear that this cell processor thing is a 64-bit, multi-core, scaled-down Power5. It's a similar manufacturing scheme as the current Power4 machines from IBM and the Apple G5 line of Power Macs. Can you say 'Power Mac G7'? I thought you could.

There are a couple of things that are interesting in these articles. Apparently, they're already being fabricated. IBM will be introducing them in a workstation line later this year, and the PlayStation 3 is already under development, so prototypes probably exist. Secondly, the price of the chip will be less than those in Intel's line-up. The introduction of the G5 lagged behind the Power4 by just over a year. That means if Apple opts for the cell, and if reports are accurate about its performance they should definitely consider it, we could see the new processor wearing something stylish sometime next year, and with a lower price-tag than the G5s.

So, wonder what Motorola's up to these days? Probably somewhere ordering rubber dicks with Tom Sizemore.

So, I booted up my WIndows computer yesterday, for the first time in a while. What a patronizing, pedantic little shit that thing is. First of all, I get about 50 little things popping up in my system tray, telling me my virus definitions are outdated, that this or that program is trying to contact the Internet, then some pop-up window trying to sell me Half-Life 2, which I already bought about 3 months ago, and that there are approximately six relevant system updates I really, really need to install (I already installed SP2 on this dick thing here, wasn't that just last month?). It also found a "New USB HID Device", which it finds every single time it boots, and can't seem to remember. The signal-to-noise ratio in Windows is rapidly approaching zero.

But I'll be damned if a little pop-up didn't come up at the end and tell me that my Desktop has too much stuff on it, and maybe I don't think I should maybe get off my ass and run the Desktop Cleanup Wizard for once. What is this thing, my mother? Can't try to do anything around here without some little window popping up at you and telling you you're doing it wrong. I'm not trying to make excuses here, but there's only like a baker's dozen things on my desktop. I run my monitor at extra-big resolution and believe me, I've seen worse. I mean, check this out:

It's not exactly bursting at the seams, now is it? But, I figure, what the hell, I'll spend a little time wiping Windows' ass for a change. So, I grab the Quicktime Player icon and drag it over to the trashcan. Easy, one step operation, right?

You might not be able to read German, but that's a dialog telling me that, despite what I probably think, throwing away a link doesn't un-install the application. Now, I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but honestly I wasn't even expecting it to un-install the application. I was throwing a link in the trash. The observant among you may have noticed two suspicious things about this dialog:

1. There's no "Do not show this again" checkbox. I cannot fathom this.
2. There's no option to un-install the program in this dialog.

Every single time you throw a link away from your desktop, you get this dialog saying you're doing it wrong. Don't believe me? Ok, here's one for Ad-aware:

Aaaand, here's one for iTunes:

Aaand here's one for QuickBooks:

Huh? QuickBooks just got deleted, and there's no dialog? What's up with that? Hmmm...maybe he's figured I know what I'm doing. Ok, I'll just throw away Trillian:

What the fuck? Hmm...maybe it doesn't say anything about deleting quickbooks because it actually DID uninstall the program? Nope. More likely because it's a competitor with MS Money.

You piss-ant little fucker. Who the hell came up with this workflow here? First, he tells my desktop, MY DESKTOP, is too cluttered. Did I mention that it is, after all, MY FUCKING DESKTOP? Then he bitches and moans about every single little fucking thing I do, that I'm not doing it right.

Windows, you whiny-ass little bitch. If I had half a choice I'd de-rez your ass.

When deciding what to have engraved on your iPod, please try to be sober.

Jesus, that's one huge fucking pile of crockery.

Back in the good old-to-middlin' days, I was an avid user of OS/2. It had a lot of technical trickery you could entertain yourself with. Shadows, for example. Shadows were like the links you can make in Windows, except they actually worked. In Windows, a link isn't much more that a text file with the path of a document or program in it and the .lnk suffix. This means, of course, that if the document ever moves the link doesn't work any more. It's not a link at all, really: It's a bookmark. Not so with shadows; once made, you could move the document to wherever you wanted, and the shadow would always know where it had gotten off to. Incidentally, Mac OS X is the only operating system I'm aware of that has this functionality today, eComStation excepted.

OS/2 wasn't perfect, though. It was ugly, even by the standards of 1994. It also had a weird interface to it. Sometimes, dialogs were arranged in tabs along the right, sometimes along the top, and they hardly ever had OK buttons. Presentation Manager, the OS/2 version of Windows' Explorer, also had some quirks when viewing things in tree fashion. The multimedia subsystem sucked, frankly. You couldn't reliably changed things like screen resolution, or color depth. The on-screen fonts were powered by some weird, mutated version of Adobe Type Manager, which wasn't compatible with any other version, so you had to convert your Windows ATM fonts over with UNIX tools, just in case you had an SGI sitting around (we did, fortunately). And, compared to DOS and Windows, it was slow and memory-intensive to do anything with.

Probably the only things I miss about OS/2 now are the applications I used with it. You see, kids, back then, when you said 'Office', you just as likely meant Lotus Smartsuite or WordPerfect Office as Microsoft Office. Smartsuite/2 was a combination of Ami Pro, Lotus 1-2-3, Organizer, and Freelance, all distributed on about 40 3.5" diskettes. The very first word processor written for Windows, Ami Pro was a nice environment to get stuff done in. Then Lotus bought it. Then they bought Harvard Graphics out, I think. Then Paradox, the database. While they were busy buying and ruining the pieces they didn't have, and suing people like Borland over competing products (the Lotus lawsuit over Quattro touched off a couple of years of "Look & Feel" paranoia), IBM was getting ready to buy their asses and return the favor.

There were also some pretty innovative programs you could play around with. DeScribe, for example, was the first word-processor that included as-you-type background spellchecking. Clearlook tried really, really hard to be all frame-y like Ami Pro/Word Pro, but was more like KWord than anything else. Galactic Civilizations was a kick-ass Civilization-in-Space game. Then there was OpenDoc. I was really excited about OpenDoc, seeing as OLE sucked ass back then, as it still does today. That functionality is actually worse today than it was back then! OpenOffice is about the only spreadsheet/word processing combo where you can still 'Paste Link'. That doesn't even work with Office anymore. I guess I was the only schmoe that thought it was useful. Ah, the fruits of Taligent, doomed by market forces and the absolutely grisly OS/2 typography engine.

Between IBM and Corel, the roadkill and also-rans of computing history have finally found a home. Kind of like the Island of Misfit Toys, or some'n.

The Dirty Ashtray » Whoever Said Age is Only a Number and Only a State of Mind Can Kiss my Ass.:

I never realized I was old until one day, when I was laying down to go to sleep, I made this long sort of, 'arrrrrrrrrrrr' grunting sound. If I'd then added, "boy, my dogs are a-barkin'" at the end, I would've been my dad. That's when I noticed that pretty much no matter what I do, I make some sort of grunting sound to accompany it. When I sit down, when I stand up, when I reach over to turn on the nightstand-lamp.

And every action has its own distinct sound. I think two old men could always tell what each others doing, even while blind-folded. "Put down that remote, I'm listening to that!" "What remote?" "Don't you try to fool me, sonny, I recognize the reaching-over-to-the-coffee-table groan when I hears it!" I think it starts at 30. You stretch your back and, for the first time, it just doesn't feel right without that, "rrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh" as punctuation.

Well, that, and those weird ear-hairs that I've got going on.

QuickSilver is an interesting thing.

Take a look at www.blacktree.com (as far as I can tell, the blog plug-in doesn't support HTML, nor, by extension, real links).