January 2005 Archives

Has this breath you take now Found heat, once, in my lungs? I found you in a spacecar I found you when it was all breaking. The child is lost, she is wandering in a world of broken glass that can never cut her. And here, there is still you, and me, we. This breath you take now has found heat, once in my lungs. I found you in my fear, my loathing; I found your silence saved me. Will these gestures we have made Be remembered when we need them? We whisper in the shade between We whisper where the old is now. She grows tall; she flourishes; Her dark hair has hints of gold that glimmer in the dark. And here, there is still you, and me, we. These gestures we have made will be remembered when we need them. We whisper in our guts, our sex; we whisper how we have found our we.

The reason everything looks so darned pretty around here is I upgraded WordPress. This lovely design came packaged with the 1.5-beta-1 nightly build I'm using. I upgraded because I really hate not having comments turned on. Soooooo... Comments are back on, but are time-limited: after two weeks, the comments on a post will automagically close. Hopefully, this will limit the amount of spam I get (experience would tend to support this working - most of the spam was on older posts.) Have at it.

Some guy is spending five months waiting 'in line' for Star Wars, and he's got a fan of his own. His fan, who almost certainly has a degree in literature or 18th century hygenic practices (or something equally useless) wrote him a letter. Excerpt:

Briefly: Jeff is not an attention-seeker or a local media hound, he will continue his wait with or without any recognition from the wider world; rather, Jeff is someone who, as odd as it may seem to conventional society, feels deeply motivated by the idea of "waiting" for things of value, and in a consumer driven, materialistic culture he sees as spiritually drained, this is where he's putting his time and energy down as a worthy investment. All Star Wars fans are moved by how these films capture mythic themes of heroism, discipline, and inner strength, but I would wager that very few of them have been as thoroughly transformed by these ideals as Jeff Tweiten.

So... wait. Let me get this straight. He's saying that Jeff is fighting the Evil Consumerist Voodoo Spirits (TM) by... standing in line for a movie that has an estimated budget of $115,000,000? Look, I understand the guy's devotion, as a simple fan. Ok, maybe I don't quite. I understand standing in line for Ben Folds tickets overnight, or pre-ordering a copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, or going to that special midnight first showing of Return of the King. I completely grok looking forward to something. But I don't understand waiting in an empty 'line' for five months for a movie that, given the last two, isn't going to be any good at all. Sorry, Jeff. On the upside, it's clear that somebody thinks you're saving the world from the tyranny of the dark side er, consumerism.

Sample question, from my chemistry quiz today:

Which of the following pairs of ionic compounds do NOT have the same number of atoms in their chemical formulas?
1. calcium bicarbonate and sodium dichromate
2. aluminum cyanide and sodium sulfate
3. barium permanganate and strontium nitrate
4. ammonium chloride and aluminum phosphate

Hypothesis: Need to study more. Much more.

Three Jimmy Dean employees talk about Jimmy Dean breakfasts.

Employee 1: "Jimmy Dean omelets are made from real eggs, 'cause that's how you make an omelet." Employee 2: "You can take a Jimmy Dean wrap anywhere, except places they don't allow Jimmy Dean wraps, and that's no-where you want to be."

Here's where it gets really disgustingly unfortunate.

Employee 3: "The eggs come from real chickens, the cheese comes from real cows, and the sausage comes from Jimmy Dean."

Some people apparently think the Mac Mini is heralding the apocalypse, but I welcome it. I wouldn't mind having one here as a web server (that I didn't hate). I seriously wish, too, that they'd come out with these before Christmas. We get my mom an eMac. This was a maneuver known as the forced switch, in which we, as the de facto tech support for my mom, decided we were mad as hell and weren't supporting Windows anymore. Mom loves the new computer, loves that it doesn't break or give her weird error messages every five minutes. The only niggle she has with it is Pogo.com games don't all work perfectly, but I'm finding her some alternate games. Anyway, if the Mac Mini had been out a month and a half ago, we could have gotten two of those instead of one eMac, and my sister could have bitched a lot less about the hand-me-down* laptop we gave her for Christmas. That would have been awesome. In other news, you're apparently not supposed to eat the iPod shuffle. * The laptop, while not being a Mac, had very respectable specs and was completely useable except the battery was dead. So it was effectively a decent Windows desktop, given to her under the rationale that she's smart enough to not click 'yes' when ToolbarSpammer asks if it can install in her copy of Internet Explorer. Personally, if I got a computer for Christmas, I wouldn't complain, but that's just my over-developed sense of gratitude, I suppose.

I've turned off comments. After getting a ratio of 80+ spam comments to 1 read comment, I decided that it just wasn't worth it. I'm going to change the format of this site after I get done with some design projects, anyway, and if I come up with a satisfactory way to reenable the comments, I might. Trackbacks and pingbacks remain enabled.