Met up with Dan, gave him a gift—a big tin of purple Silly Putty, so now he’s got something socially acceptable and healthy to do with his hands instead of smoking or fiddling with tableware. We ate at the Rosebud, then went to Denise’s and had ice cream. Mmm… cheesecake ice cream. Huge amounts for $3 too.
(I wish I could be a dyke. Especially a cute one. I probably wouldn’t be able to come up with enough drama, though.)
Had a late afternoon mood crash, accompanied by one of those rare moments of emotional release… Which was badly timed, as sara reminded me that we were supposed to be going to someone’s housewarming party.
We had something to eat, and I rallied a bit, and we went. I think I mostly did an OK job of impersonating a normal functioning human being. Now I can do what I wanted to do, which is crawl into bed and go explore the dream world.
Peter Gabriel has a new album out, and is touring. He’s playing Boston. I’ve seen him live before, and he’s fantastic.
Problem 1: It’s at the FleetCenter. Which means it’s going to be really, really expensive.
Problem 2: Tickets are available exclusively from the FleetCenter or from TicketBastard. Which means big “service” fees.
Problem 3: The small print says “Date, act and time subject to change without notice.”
So, $46 plus service fees to watch from the other end of the FleetCenter, or $131 to be as close as I was at the concert in London.
Fuck it. I’ll just buy the CD.
Alan Johnstone, BBC World Service:
“Israel’s population has grown by over 20% in the last ten years. Meanwhile, the Palestinian population is exploding.”
Mobile Radio Technology magazine:
“Losing the WTC [antenna] sites was like losing a personal friend… To see the WTC come down along with its 351-foot antenna mast made me feel sick.”
Tiger Direct online catalog:
“Glancing away from your computer screen, your unfocused eyes reveal a vision. Modular, innovative, advanced. Is it a hallucination? You arise from your chair, drawn to this mechanical marvel. The hallucination is real. A Belkin USB 4-port hub!”
Overheard in Sears:
“I’ve got to start paying off more of my Sears card. Dad said I should just pay off the minimum each month.”
Everyone should take the Disinformation Quiz.
I got 20/27. Analysis:
I thought the Vatican were much bigger crooks than they actually are.
Having read about the Southern Poverty Law Center’s industrious fundraising, I thought it unlikely that they would be honest about the number of KKK members, even though I knew the real number was tiny.
I thought kids were typically killed by other kids, rather than mostly by adults. Thinking about it longer, the real answer is obvious when you consider all the children beaten to death by their parents. I guess I was only thinking of street violence and gang warfare and teenagers.
I thought drug overdoses were mostly dumb bored teenage suburbanites.
I couldn’t remember the year of the first report blasting electronic voting systems, even though I probably read it via the RISKS digest. What can I say? Dates have never been my strong point…
I didn’t know Hannibal Lecter was based on a real case. BFD.
I was too skeptical of alternative medicine. Well, to be more accurate, I saw Dan Barker’s name at the bottom of the quiz page and mistakenly thought he might have had something to do with putting the quiz together. In other words, I gave the answer I expected the quiz to want, rather than the answer I knew to be correct… Ho hum.
In case anyone’s slightly interested, my new Birkenstocks are Richmond in Cordura. I think I’m going to have to order a second pair and stash them away.
See, when I listened to the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy radio series season 2, I didn’t feel that the whole Dolmansaxlil sub-plot was excessive at all. Like Douglas Adams, I had had the experience of walking the length of Oxford Street, visiting every wretched shoe shop, in the futile hope that one of them might have a pair that would actually fit my feet.
The strange thing is, I knew so many people in England with the same problem. Go to America, they’d say. Or Germany. You can get shoes that actually fit your feet there. Only in England could an entire industry ignore the fairly basic requirements of its customers.
Which is not to say that it’s easy to find shoes that fit in America; however, it’s possible. Whereas I only once recall finding well-fitting shoes that didn’t need insoles in the UK.
God, what a pointless and trivial journal entry.
You can now get a motherboard with a built-in tube amplifier.
Found on FARK:
I actually received a thank-you letter after an interview where the candidate (for a real job) actually sent me a thank you letter written in magic marker on yellow construction paper cut with pinking shears and decorated with stickers. That said a lot about the worth [of a] Boston University (business undergrad) 3.8 GPA.
The funny thing is, it’s only recently that I became aware of the reputation BU has…
The Register has published the details of how the RIAA web site got hacked.
It turns out that the RIAA left the admin tools of their web server active, without any password protection. To “secure” the site they set their ROBOTS.TXT file to ask search engines not to index the admin tools directory.
The hackers looked at ROBOTS.TXT to see what the RIAA didn’t want people finding via Google, saw the /admin directory listed, went there, and found they had total back-door access to the site.
I hope the fuckwit RIAA webmaster got fired. I mean, it barely even qualifies as a hack. It’s like walking through an open door that has a big neon sign next to it saying “Please do not walk through this door”.