As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?
But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?
And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.
Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:
Bowling
Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
Pool hustling
You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
Juggling
Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced) I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
Blogging
Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:
Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.
And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.
When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.
I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.
It's all about hookers and blow with these people.
You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.
Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.
Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.
So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.
Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.
So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.
Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?
One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?
Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.
The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.
How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.
In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.
The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.
The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.
But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.
The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.
There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).
What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.
So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.
Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?
what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
and Home Sharing?
Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?
I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.
But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.
I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.
Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.
This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.
Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...
I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:
Pedestrian Crossings
The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:
at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings
I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?
I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.
What are provisional licence conditions?
As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.
Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.
A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera's "Facial Gestures" April Fools' jape. In question was the following paragraph:
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.
It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don't think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!
Luckily, I can't remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it's written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:
Now, I'm not exactly a scholar of 18th century men's fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama's boys don't even have sideburns to speak of.
Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.
I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.
Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.
It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.
I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.
But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.
I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.
You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:
Plugs.
When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.
Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.
As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.
The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.
If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.
This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.
I'm helping a friend pack his house and move out these days. He's moving back to Spain, owing to family circumstances of an unfortunate nature. Moving house is always a pain in the ass, but when it's accompanied by the ending of a job, friendship, tenure in a country it takes on a sad color.
Every time I move, and I'm packing my life into little boxes, I think that I could probably toss 90% of my crap into a bin and never miss it. Every stupid little trinket that came out of a Happy Meal, or useless gadget that I got for Christmas, just taking up place in my boxes and making weight that I have to carry up and down stairs. Nonetheless, there are things that I've been carrying around for 30 years, across 2 continents, each time unpacking it and wondering, 'why the fuck do I still have this?' A few years later, there I am packing it back into a box.
The non-functional Akai amplifier on my desk is a fine example of this. I will probably have it until I die, but it hasn't worked properly for at least 5 years now. Then there's the FX-7000G Owner's Manual, which I have not opened since my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I still have the calculator, and it works just fine, but the do I really need Owner's Manual? But the longer I have them, the harder it is to throw them away; and isn't that just the nature of things.
So, my friend is sorting out the things that will go to Spain, and the things that will stay here in England. I'm sure that all of these useless items will be carried on, if not out of need then at least to postpone the final decision. Maybe it's all worth that one moment, 5 years down the road, when you finally open that box and say, 'Why, O why am I still dragging this thing around', and then smile when you remember.
Hi, all. I just wanted to let you know that we here at You Bitch! are not without the Spirit of Christmas. We went to the grocery store today and bought 5 bottles of wine and a crate of Carlsberg, so it's shaping up to be a merry one, indeed.
I'm a Christmas guy, despite my lack of devoutness, or any other property that would reek of character. It's probably because I like getting presents, and I plan to clean up this year: The crappy little British tree that's shedding needles all over my living room carpet as we speak plays host to a gleaming pile of brightly-wrapped packages, each of them the potential Perfect Toy that I expected throughout childhood, but alas never received. But hope springs eternal, and after a good shaking of each and every one of those packages my optimism is strong.
So, let's all get 'faced and wander into pointless arguments with dear relatives. It's what Christmas is about, and it will end in tears. So enjoy the food while you can.
Last night, I sat down with the Sistas, and we opened up the Game of Life. We'd procured it for a measly £1 at a local charity store a few months ago, and were cracking the box for the first time. It being a used specimen bought on the cheap, the usual defects were there: broken pegs, dog-eared 10,000 bills and promissory notes. Unfortunately, the rules were also missing.
We googled for the rule book, and came up with dozens of different versions of this bastard game. There are more variations to this game than I would have thought. It never really seemed like the organic type of game that would evolve over time. When I was getting my ass beaten at it as a child, it seemed that the adults so thoroughly dependent upon its intricacies that the slightest variation thereupon would render it unplayable.
This being the UK edition, the rules and numbers are different from the one I grew up with in the US. My playing companions, being Germans, were also used to different rules; notably, the German version probably doesn't require you to pick a career until the half-way point.
We managed to cobble up a thoroughly unplayable system of compromises from the various rules, where they made sense (or didn't). Nevertheless, I got my ass handed to me, just like always. You can read the rest of the story over there.
This image just came crawling across my emails, embedded in an advertisement for the karaoke game, Lips.
I have no idea what those little monsters are supposed to represent, crawling all over those terrified teens. It looks like some of the sicker shit the Japanese come up with for the comic books, don't google it kids.
Then again, I wish I'd had a couple of them in High School. What am I talking about? I could use a couple of them right now.
Whatever they are, they are creepy little bastards.
British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:
These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There's nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!
I'm not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn't much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It's the principle. It's simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.
I have no idea what they're selling. It's in English, I suppose, but it's like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.
And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:
How's that for a business card? "Customer Support Bombardier". In Belfast, no less.
There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29's, "upgraded to NATO standards":
Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:
Apparently NATO standards don't include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.
There were all the things you'd expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn't expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:
You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what's been outside my office window all week.
That's some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we've identified:
Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
WWII-vintage Spitfire
F-15
F-16
F-18
F-22
Avro Vulcan
Eurofighter Typhoon
Airbus A380
Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
many more that we haven't been able to ID yet
All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I've ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn't land at the airport, sadly.
We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.
My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we're pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn't much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.
When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.
Ahh, Dexter, you naughty little boy. Harry told you to be careful about cutting those people up. If you've seen Showtime's Dexter, you've got all the information you need to decide whether or not to read this book. It is, after all, the book upon which the first season is based. What's more, the producers of the television series managed to capture, and even surpass Lindsay's dry wit, and protagonist Dexter Morgan's relentlessly likable monologue.
The series is actually better than the book in this regard. Season one, covering about the same time period as this book, has more interaction with characters like Angel Batista, Detective La Guerta, and Dexter's sister, Deborah. All of these were enjoyable characters on screen, but none of them were really explored in the book. Even the main antagonist, the Ice Truck Killer, was only marginally developed in the book.
Still, this is a cool, funny book that bears reading. It makes me really look forward to Dexter Season Three, if there ever will be such a thing. It also makes me think about searching out the other Dexter books, which are mentioned on the back cover text.
The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.
