Best idea I’ve gotten from Metafilter in a while:
Dear Verisign,
I am unable and unwilling to comply with the terms of service for your new sitefinder service. Please advise me on how I may avoid accessing it in the future via a mistyped URL or invalid hyperlink.
(Orginally posted on 9⁄23 but for some reason blogger wouldn’t let me publish all week. I keep thinking about making the switch to Movable Type …)
This has been one of the more entertaining weekends I’ve had in a while. Friday night Jolayne and I went down to The Beast haunted house and I screamed like a little girl. I’d never really been to any kind of haunted house before and always thought they were a little lame, but this was a lot of fun. It took up an entire four story warehouse and was pretty elaborate over all. On Saturday we headed down to the Plaza Art Fair to check out some really cool (and a lot of really expensive) art. Saw some good stuff there, but nothing that I could really justify forking over a chunk of cash for. I’m such a philistine. Then to round out a day full of culture we made it the Unicorn Theatre just in time to see their performance of the play “Lobby Hero”, which was very enjoyable. I’ve never really been into theatre too much but the play was fairly humorous at times and well acted also, so it was a good time.
Wow, where did the last month go? It’s just flown by, I think in a large part due to the fact that Jolayne is out here now! She’s been here since the middle of August and that’s been really, really great She’s staying with her aunt and uncle on the other side of town, but that’s much much better than 700 miles away. About a week after she came out, we went over to St. Louis to see Radiohead, which was awesome even though we were about 20 miles away in the lawn seating. My parents came out to visit for the first time the week after that, but other than that I’ve pretty much just been working a lot. Oh yeah, and then there was the cat that I had for about 3 days. Jolayne found a cat that had been abandoned in a cardboard animal carrier and it stayed at my place while we tried to find it a shelter that wouldn’t put it to sleep eventually. The thing was, the cat liked Jolayne but would always hiss at me so I was pretty glad when we found him a temporary home at the Friends of Liberty Animal Shelter. We were relieved to find a “no-kill” shelter that would take cats since most were too full. So yeah, that pretty much brings everything up to date.
Out of the 100 Albums You Should Remove from Your Collection Immediately, I’m kind of suprised that I ended up as a pretty light offender. I’m currently facing 5 counts of musical manslaughter (I’m pretty sure that’s just a misdemeanor in most states) due to owning:
06 The Replacements – Tim
20 Fugazi – 13 Songs
32 Flaming Lips – The Soft Bulletin
52 Mogwai – Come On Die Young
58 Ben Folds Five – Whatever and Ever, Amen
There are a few albums on there though that I used to own (14, 17, 56, 61, 62, 71, and 72) and also quite a few that I’d still like to get despite their inclusion on this list of pariahs. I’m over 50% less guilty than Brett though, not that anyone’s keeping score. Are they?
So when you think of World War II, what’s the first thing that naturally springs to mind? That’s right, circa 18th centrury pirate warfare. I can hardly believe it myself, but there’s actually a pirate based mod for Battlefield: 1942. It’s bizarre, yet strangely compelling. If only the developers could be convinced to add ninjas to it so that the real ultimate power of a ninjas vs. pirates battle could finally be made available to those of us not fortunate enough to have been born as a pirate or a ninja. (That’s right, I’m linking to realultimatepower.net well over a good year after it was totally awesome to do so. What are you going to do about it?)
Ok, I’ll admit it. I’m a total hard drive whore. I can never pass up the chance to get more storage, and so when a co-worker decided to sell off a 180 gig hard drive I was all over that like a zombie on the sweet tasty brains of the living. This brings me up to 280 gigs on my machine with another 8 gb sitting around waiting for me to find something to do with it. I’d copied over all my collected tv shows to the new drive and everything had been working fine for a couple days when I got a nasty surprise at work today. I logged in to my home machine from work via Remote Desktop to check on some eDonkey2000 file transfers that were running and found a ton of error messages and an inaccessible 180 gig drive. All my episodes of Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Sealab 2021, MST3K, Simpsons, The Tick, Trigun, and the Brak Show flashed before my eyes in a bittersweet montage of hilarity. I had to nervously wait out the rest of the day at work before rushing home to see if I could salvage anything. I first applied the old stand-by of turning the power off and pressing on all the cable connections. Booted back up and… everything was back to normal. I don’t know if something was loose or if it was overheating, but I do know that nothing is worse for a hard drive whore than to have a disk that you don’t trust. The big drive is going to be on probation for quite a while until I feel safe putting anything on it again.
FLCL (aka Furi Kuri aka Fooly Cooly) is without a doubt the most insane, incomprehensible, and entirely enjoyable anime I’ve seen in a long time. I caught the first episode of it on Adult Swim last night and was blown away. The animation goes over the top to riff on every manga-style animation gimmick imaginable in hyperactive rapid fire succession, and then throws in a ton of new tricks to boot. The show itself is highly self-referential and it knows that it’s so cool that it doesn’t even have to bother with making sense right off the bat to get you hooked. As for the story, well, see… there’s this alien girl riding around on a vespa carrying a Rickenbacker with some kind of motor and a ripcord in it… and then there’s a boy who has giant fighting robots THAT JUMP OUT OF HIS HEAD!! So as you can see, very basic stuff here, nothing too strange… If you even remotely like anime and have no problem with shows with a severe case of ADD that go out of their way to confuse you, then you really ought to check this out.
(via Neal [thanks a lot man, I got in to work later than I’d wanted to today because I just had to finish reading this.])
Great article on the intractable state copyright law seems to currently be in. I know I’ve harped on it repeatedly before, but this quote elegantly sums up the problem I have with the ways our laws are being mangled to preserve existing revenue sources. Available technology should drive business models, not the other way around. Also, I’d never thought about it before but given the kludged together state of copyright law, I’m not even sure if providing a quote from the article in this matter constitutes fair use.
Don’t copy that floppy. Holy crap, this is the most amazing thing on the internet.
