If you would like a beating, please send me an email, then immediately IM me to ask if I’ve read it yet. For extra vigor on your beating, you may call to confirm that I received your IM.
Thank you. Beatings will be delivered in the order that the emails are received. We currently have a backlog of several beatings, please be patient if you have earned one and have not yet received it.
Word on the street (my street, at least) is that the hammer of inditement drops on Libby and Rove on Wed. Given that Rove is the architect of all that has gone evil and wrong in my country in the past six years, I am planning to have a party.
You heard it here first.
Okay, the next two weeks are doomed. Rather, I’m doomed. I suspect that the weeks themselves have other things on their minds. Here are the high points of the next two weeks:
* Thursday, I’m teaching a day long class about The Software.
* Friday, I’m sitting in on my colleague’s class about His Software
* Sweet, blissful weekend
* Wed, next, I’m giving a talk at some sort of “virtual megaconference in genomics.” I have to be at an “Access Grid” location in Boston for that.
* After that, I head back to Providence and get on a plane for West Palm Beach, FL
* Thursday, I teach a day long class at a customer site which combines material from the two classes mentioned above.
* Friday, if all goes well, I’ll drive over to see my grandmother, who lives on the other side of Florida.
Guess I should make some slides or something.
So, I made some hard cider. Some apple jack. This is the alcohol-laden version of everybody’s favorite fall beverage. It was stunningly simple compared to making beer. Basically, I took the cider (pasteurized, but with no chemical additives, since they would kill the yeast), put it in a sterilized carboy, and added yeast (a nice German Ale Yeast, for a sweeter flavor). For about a week if foamed wildly, and then for another week it settled back down. I bottled it two days ago.
During the bottling process, there was a small disaster. I got the cider into 12oz bottles, and as I put the cap on the second bottle, my capper broke. The handle snapped right off. At that point I had a bunch of bottles sitting there, and no way to close them. Fortunately, I’ve got an ample supply of EZ-Cap and Grolsch style bottles in the basement. I stomped downstairs, got them, quickly sanitized a whole bunch of them, and used a funnel to transfer the cider. Those who have done this know that the biggest pain in the butt part of making beer is washing and sterilizing all the bottles. I got to do that twice this time. What a pain.
Still, it’s pretty tasty. I may make another batch before Fall ends.
We’ve got a behavior in The Software, which only came up with the most recent release of Safari.
We use cookies to do authentication to our web portal system. When someone successfully authenticates, we issue a cookie, good for 24 hours. Anytime someone comes to the front door of the system, we ask for the cookie. If it’s not there, they get shown the authentication screen. Just like every other web portal in the universe.
Our interface has three frames. There’s a top menubar, a left side listing of tools (in a cute little java folder-thing), and the main frame.
On the newest Safari, it takes two “reloads” after authenticating to get the display to look right. I have no bloody idea why this would happen:
* When you authenticate, the main frame refreshes, but the other two don’t.
* Hit reload, and the left and top frames load correctly, but the main window goes back to the initial authentication screen.
* Hit reload *again*, and the thing looks right.
This does not happen with Firefox, IE, Mozilla, or Netscape. I’ve read through the actual HTML that’s driving this crap … and I don’t see anything obvious (like outdated “expire” tags or anything).
I’m totally stumped. Any ideas on where I should start looking?
Everyone must go rent and watch the movie Kontroll, now. I will wait.
Allright, now that we’ve all got a shared context, what the hell just happened to my brain? It was genius, that much is clear, but in such random directions. Based on the first 5 minutes, I was totally expecting somebody to (a) whip out a broadsword and start chopping up bad guys (b) be an alien. Turns out, that’s just how things go down in Hungarian art flicks.
No, seriously. Go watch this movie.
It’s raining record amounts now. We just surpassed the 100 year record for rain in October, and yesterday something like doubled the single-day rainfall ever recorded in Providence. It’s been alternating between drenching deluge and dampening drizzle for about a week now.
Got my computer memory back, and I’m now clocking in at a consistent 1.25GB. It’s pretty awesome, let me tell you. The new screen is really bright and clean too. I might even get one of those little screen socks that people use to protect the screen from the keyboard. Who knows.
So now, catching up on the stuff that I didn’t bother to push over to the loaner laptop. Checkbook balancing, Photo library updating, … all the good stuff.
If we’re really, really productive today, there’s a chance that we’ll go to the Ansel Adams exhibit at the MOFA tomorrow.
I got my laptop back from the shop today. Shiny new display. No dead pixels that I can see! Apparently, a shiny new logic board as well, with TWO working SO-DIMM slots rather than one. W00t.
However, the tech forgot to put my gig of RAM back in the machine before giving it back to me. Just talked to him, it’s sitting on his bench now. Headed over there before they close. Working with 256MB of RAM sucks.
Additionally, Mail.app “helps” with POP mailboxes by not really deleting messages until you say “yeah, no kidding, delete it.” Switching back over to my laptop meant that Mail.app forgot all those deletion marks for my primary email address. 674 in my spam folder, 232 in my inbox … and the first one of those non-spam ones is titled “The easiest score you’ll ever have!!!” Gah. GAAAAAAA!
Meditate, meditate, meditate.
GAAAAAAAA!
Perfect little birds
fluffed against the morning chill
Through the window seen
Starbucks, warm and bland
Nature sits on its trash
And catches my eye
How odd, odd indeed
Being the known personage
Seen at random here
All non geeks may feel free to stop reading now. This may well be incomprehensible. I don’t know, I have no context.
There is a dialect of text speech, related to text message abbreviation. Gamer kiddies use it. It’s called 1337, which is pronounced “Leet”. A decent definition is here. I would be in the category that they describe as “certain factions,” and “some communities.”
In recent years, leet has dropped out of style in some communities. Some gamers and Internet users choose not to use it as they consider it to signify weakness and immaturity rather than coolness or of “having skills/sk1LLz”. However, many words from leet are now a significant part of modern Internet culture, such as “pwned”, the common leet misspellings such as “teh” (73|-|), and especially the “z” at the end of words, such as “skillz”. Another prominent example of a surviving leet expression is the ever-popular “woot/w00t”. Also, gamers for whom using Leetspeak seriously is out of style sometimes use it in an ironic sense, e.g. “ph342 m`/ 1337 sk1llz.”
Anyway, to summarize:
At a first level, one starts mIxiNg uP CaPiTalIzAtion.
neXTT, sPeLLin gOeS
4ft3r T|-|4T 1T G3T5 W0R53...
t1ll i+'5 i|\|C0|\/|PR3|-|3|\|518L3.
I have an instance of this which is beyond me. It came up in a rude context, so I’m sure it’s a rip … somehow. The person who sent it to me is mocking me, and says that he’s “133732” (more elite … Leeter) than me. There’s no love here: http://www.jayssite.com/stuff/l33t/l33t_translator.html.
Here is it: 100 points to the first solution that seems to make sense of this cyrillic for me:
/-_//9 U2273)(-
Today’s MegaTokyo makes excellent use of 1337.