Nothing Shocking

Hmm, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the talk of the town will be Madonna french kissing Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera in the opening number. I could be wrong.

Chris Rock killed. Very nice.

Missy Elliot finally won a very long overdue moon man. She's probably got the most interesting videos of the last several years, so it's nice to see her take it home.

Special Ed could say "bitch", but not "ho"? I'm very confused by that.

Christina Aguilera showed off her voice well in spite of the insanely bad audio mixing. Dave Navarro stepped out of the pit when she segued to "Fighter", which pretty much made the performance for me.

For several of the live performers, particularly Mary J Blige, it would've been nice to have some real time pitch correction.

There are supposed to be some "surprise appearances", but I'm going to bed. Hopefully they'll be less embarrassing than the Guns 'n' Roses performance last year.

UPDATE: It appears that Metallica performed. No other surprise appearances, and I'll assume that Metallica did a far, far better job than Axl and Co did last year.

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Destiny was calling, Monday afternoon

conv w/griz (a true Coloradan and recurring character here).

(11:29:56) griz: which only goes to prove that the world-wide-conspiracy to make all DBAs appear to be unstable, heavily armed sociopaths goes back a really long time
(11:30:12) rev: heh. It's a useful public image to have.
(11:31:01) griz: I think I'll stick with the "friendly, competent thorn-in-the-side-of-upper-management image
(11:31:33) rev: I shoot for the acerbic-but-lovable-smartass
(11:31:43) griz: heh
(11:31:47) rev: To be played by Matt LeBlanc in the movie version.
(11:32:00) rev: Whereas you'll be played by RMS*
(11:32:02) griz: ow - stop it
(11:32:05) griz: ow
(11:32:15) rev: :D
...

(11:36:01) rev: OK, so the mascots were racing. An italian sausage, a hot dog and a bratwurst or something. If this happens at games a lot, I'm going to start going to them. That would be worth the price of admission.
(11:36:18) rev: Screw the ballgame, I want to watch mascots racing.
(11:36:29) griz: just that ball park - the race happens every game, but not the assaults...
(11:36:46) rev: Well, yea. That'd be even better, but the race alone would be worth it.
(11:36:58) griz: ok - now you're scaring me - there is a word for people that are a little too into other people in foam rubber costumes...
(11:37:11) griz: I have no idea what it is, but I'm sure there's a word
(11:37:19) rev: Furries. Don't ask.
(11:38:01) griz: I wasn't intending to.
(11:40:19) griz: did you see (about a year ago) the coverage of the drunken father and son that jumped the fence and attacked the first base coach?
(11:40:50) rev: Oh yea, when parents who are living vicariously through their children attack, next on Fox!
(11:41:03) griz: pretty much both benches were emptied to beat the crap out of the two fans.
(11:41:10) griz: A Fair and Balanced report
(11:41:16) griz: ow - stop it
(11:41:27) rev: Wholly without merit.

---

*Note that RMS is Richard M Stallman. If you know griz, this is hilarious. If you don't, it's still funny.

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Early in the morning' we'll be starting' ou

I've subscribed to Safari, and I highly recommend the service to anyone of a technical nature. Ten bucks a month and access to the best tech books out there.

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Just when you think you got your system down

Quote from M1 at the status meeting:

"We thought we were going to hell in a handbasket. Now we're there and we're descending to the next level"

Among the other insanites, our critical June meeting (which was rescheduled to July, then August, then September) has been postponed again with no tentative reschedule date. I don't think anyone even remembers why we were meeting at this point.

Note to companies hiring contractors: Be wary of companies claiming CMM levels. In certain countries (India, for example) you can just buy CMM levels rather than actually demonstrating any competency or capability. CMM3 is $20,000.

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Sleep so heavy that it's out of the question

Questions posed by Melissa.

As per usual (and as I forgot to put in my prior questions post): if you want me to interview you, comment.

1. It must be wonderful having the Marginator living so close to you now. I know she's a wonderful lady, but, seriously: How are you coping?
I cope with her just fine, unless she tries to rearrange my house. She doesn't like the way we organize things, so she changes them and I can't find anything. She hasn't done that since moving here, but it's only a matter of time. Other than that it's great.

2. If it was your birthday, and you could have any music group that no longer exists play at your birthday party, who would you want?
The Beatles, of course. Given that half of them are dead however, maybe a group that no longer exists but are all still alive. Skankin Pickle.

3. Your wife is pregnant. Are you hoping for a boy or a girl? Be honest.
Early on, either is fine. About the time the teenage years hit, I'll possibly think back to this day and say "I hope it's a boy so I don't have to kill all the boys who are trying to nail my daughter".

4. Do you like vegetables? And if so, which one is your favorite?
Veggies are good for you. I like a very limited subset of vegetables, but the ones I do like, I like a great deal. Green beans would have to be number one.

5. You've lived several places. Which is your favorite so far, and why?
Now that is a seriously tough question. I love the Bay Area, but it's ridiculously expensive and crowded. I doubt I'd ever want to live there again. I hated L.A. plain and simple. Denver was nice, and I made a lot of really good friends there, but the city itself never did anything for me. STL has a lot of the cultural characteristics that I liked about the Bay Area, but with a much much lower cost of living and a lot less congestion. For the stage of life I'm in, STL is the best place to be.

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Words choked on my lies

Joe Conason suggests a new tagline for Fox: Wholly without merit. Which would also be truth in advertising

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I got the ways and means to New Orleans

db: the eBay song for example [on the new Weird Al album] - couldn't tell you what song it's a parody of, but I've heard it enough to recognize that I've heard it...
j: I could tell you it's "my way" or "that way" or something by whatever boy band is popular now...
db: heh - I think boy bands are actual incarnations of vampires - they never actually age, suck the life out of things, and are intrinsically evil...
j: Interesting theory. I'm glad I eat a lot of garlic.
db: LOL
db: I'll have to put some more garlic in my spaghetti sauce now...
j: "Why do you eat so much garlic?" "Oh, it keeps the boy bands away."

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Question time, mine came first, dancing queen

From Aubrey. I seem to have been volunteered to answer these questions.

1 What do you have against every second video played on MTV?.
Well, that's actually a fairly dated comment of mine, as MTV no longer plays music videos. I seem to recall at the time that at least half of the videos were crap hair bands.

2 What religion are you a reverend of: Baptist, SubGenius, or Satan.
Universal Life Church. I have read the works of LaVey and wasn't impressed. I was raised Catholic, and I'm recovering nicely, so Baptist is out. I might also be a minister of the Church of the SubGenius, but I'm low on slack of late. I will be performing my first service as a Reverend in the ULC this coming April for a good friend of mine and his intended.

3 Why is white chocolate mocha your favorite? Are you a chocolate bigot?
Not at all, but they generally use milk chocolate for their drinks and that's just boring. Dark chocolate would be preferred, white is a suitable second.

4 You're one of the final two contestants on American Idol and you must sing a song from the eighties acapella. What will you sing and why? It would probably have to be something people have heard of, which leaves out lots of great underground stuff. I'm going to go with Purple Rain, because Prince was the most important artist of the 80's, and in my opinion is still one of the most innovative and consistently interesting musicians alive.

5 Smoochie is aptly named as he looks like he is puckering up for a smooch. Do you think you are aptly named for what you look like? If not, what should your name be?
I was opposed to the name Smoochie. I wanted to name him "grep", as I generally call Mowie "CAT-5" since he's behind the computers and desks a lot. Smoochie, however, turned out to be appropriate. I think Matt is as appropriate a name for me as any other. I thought about changing my name to Griffith when I was thinking of becoming a writer. Griffith was my grandfather's name.

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A slick brother that can easy outfox ya

Fox has lost their suit against Al Franken. The judge notes, among other things:

"There are hard cases and there are easy cases. This is an easy case. This case is wholly without merit, both factually and legally."

Franken's lawyers noted that O'Reilly made similar use of the phrase "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" in one of his book titles, and that the phrase "fair and balanced" is as stock news term that was in use in journalism schools for decades before Fox even existed.

The astoundingly idiotic lawsuit, which no lawyer worth their billing rate ever thought Fox could possibly win, has served to create such demand for the book that the published has increased the initial print run by 20% and moved up the release date by a month. My copy shipped yesterday...

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Looking through a glass onion

America's finest news source has the definitive guide to the front runners in the California recall.

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Distribute lyrics like I'm hand to hand herb hustling

A proposal for a system to replace phonograph record merchandising.

A business venture proposed by Frank Zappa as a partnership with Rothschild Venture Capital. Interesting as a historical item, in that Zappa was proposing essentially iTunes all the way back in the early 1980's.

Zappa contends (rightly) that the majority of money and effort at labels is expended in promoting new material by established artist as well as new artists. Most of the new artists don't pan out (possibly because the middle aged coke addled executives who are more interested in which artist's manager can get them the best hookers than in the music itself, but that's just my opinion. Or maybe the execs truly have no taste in music) and cost the labels a lot of money. Zappa's points out that major labels have tons of catalog material by many many artists that music fans would love to have access to, if it were available in a convenient format.

"Music consumers like to consume MUSIC... not specifically the vinyl artifact wrapped in cardboard." (Zappa 1989, 338)

Obviously, that statement would have to be altered to plastic artifact wrapped in plastic to remain relevant, but that is a minor adjustment. He proposed to purchase digital rights to the best catalog material from all the labels and to "by phone or cable TV, directly patchable into the user's home taping appliances, with the option of direct digital to digital transfer" (Zappa 1989, 339). He proposed billing at a monthly rate with no limit on volume of material.

This was before CDs had even hit the market, and the internet hadn't been heard of outside of hardcore geek academia and the government. The idea of cable internet was even further out. His proposal was to use cable as the delivery system, and to provide album art, song lyrics, liner notes, etc of the currently playing song to one of the many cable channels "where nothing ever seems to happen (there's about 70 of them in L.A.)"(Zappa 1989, 339). This would satisfy the "Fondlement and Fetishism Potential" of a segment of the music buying public that places a high value on that, while providing cheap and easy access to whatever music people want. Mindful of the social importance of music and desire to be hands-on that many music fans have, he also later proposed in-store kiosks that would allow you to select whatever songs you wanted from the catalog and have them burned to a CD while you wait.

As Zappa notes, "most of the hardware devices are, even as you read this, available as off-the-shelf items, just waiting to be plugged in to each other in order to put an end to the record business as we know it". (Zappa 1989, 340).

Zappa, Frank, with Peter Occhiogrosso.
1989. The Real Frank Zappa Book New York: Poseidon Press.

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Set me free from your disease

Music industry stalwart Ernie Ball has gone all linux. This is not some small time local shop. Ernie Ball's client list reads like a who's who of the music world. This is an incredibly important article if you are involved in IT at all. Here is a decidedly non-technical person, the head of a decidedly non-technical company that went 100% linux. He makes a lot of great points about the realities of switching, that the "you can't get support for linux" line is complete garbage because they haven't needed any help. The TCO is much lower, the transition cost is far lower than Gartner et al claim, and productivity has risen dramatically since they switched. His argument is that linux wins from a *business* perspective, not a technical perspective.

Three more Microsoft holes patched today. Two critical, one minor. Security guru Richard Forno notes: Forget California, its' time to recall Microsoft. After all the hassles I've seen people going through to deal with the daily virus warning, I just don't understand why anyone would use Windows.

On another recall note, recall Bush.

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There won't be no confusion

Yesterday, I attended an off the record briefing of the upcoming agency wide single sign on initiative. One of the development team members knew how big a problem it was going to be and took it upon himself to let some of the other offices know what was coming their way. We are most appreciative. Boils down to: we are moving to single sign on. The API and documentation will be finalized at the end of September, and we have to comply by October 21st. Yes, that's three whole weeks to completely revamp our security on all applications. That includes testing time. The groups with heavy mainframe components are even more frantic than we are, so we could have it much worse. The team convened to discuss our proper approach, and we hammered out something that, while not ideal, will work.

From todays status meeting:
MSBlast is still running rampant through the DC offices. Apparently LAN Support there is not able to deal with the problem (I'm not sure what's so complex, but OK) so they are going to designate someone to contact Sparks! and coordinate a response.

The Central Office is reorganizing. We don't know how this will affect the process or our current requirements gathering efforts. If it ends up that CO is the only entity we're dealing with, we may have a much easier time getting answers. Or it could turn into a complete goat-rope. R quit, B didn't get her promotion and is now only doing "clerk" work because she's "just a clerk". Which doesn't prevent her from doing all the db conversion coding.

We cannot have any meetings about the Money project without Fred. Fred is an affable sort of guy, who knows just enough about things to ask lots of time consuming and stupid questions and come up with lots of wildly incorrect answers. I would note for the record that I have a far more charitable opinion of him than most of the government employees do, including his former boss who routinely apologizes for Fred's existence.

Oh, and the big agency wide single sign on solution failed the form 300 submission (a security review). This may alter all our big security plans made in haste yesterday.

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You've got your records packed away in boxes

What a long and tiring week. We've been busy busy busy, as there is much to do before babygeek arrives. Jackapotamas has found an apartment in record time, largely due to presenting a very professional image, being insanely organized, and having very solid financials. We met years ago when we both worked at Wherehouse. We've been great friends ever since, and as he also became good friends with Mae, he was best man at our wedding. I'm looking forward to him being here, and I think the change of environment will be good for him.

There was a Saint Louis Bloggers get together on Thursday at Growlers. I left early to get Marginator home and to do some codework. Yes, Kat, I do plan on making the site a little friendlier to those with 13" monitors.

Built kitchen cabinets, with an eye to installing them next weekend with help from Cybr.

We also managed to get in a quick bowling trip, with Elroy, Cybr, Kat, Marge, Ryan, and Angeline. Jeff managed to drop by at the tail end and to say hi, and introduce everyone to Trent, which was great. Trent is very cute, and very curious. Smart kid. Too bad we didn't get to spend more time with them, but there's always next time.

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Who are the brain police?

In a Fair and Balanced world, the news media would present unbiased information and allow viewers to make up their own minds from the facts. Sort of a "We Report, You Decide" approach. Rather than the current "We Distort, You Shut Up And Think What We Tell You To" approach. I read an interview back in the early 90's where Rupert Murdoch was more forthcoming than he probably meant to be. He stated that his news shows never ever broadcast anything that he disagrees with, because if they did he'd fire everyone involved on the spot. That's Fair and Balanced.

In August 2003, Fox announced that they were suing Al Franken and his publisher for trademark infringement. Franken's upcoming book is called "Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right". This is comparable to a restaurant that claims to have "the best burger in town" suing someone who writes a song that includes the phrase "the best burger in town."

Also note that Franken writes about Fox and O'Reilly a great deal in his book, and his use of the phrase will probably be considered nominative fair use.

While liberals have predictably flocked to Franken's defense, so have conservatives such as Glenn Reynolds. Conservative internet gossip maven Matt Drudge claims that the lawsuit was filed at the direction of Fox star Bill O'Reilly as revenge for Franken having embarrassed O'Reilly on CSPAN's "Booknotes" program by pointing out that O'Reilly lied repeatedly about having won several prestigious industry awards even after the organizations that hand out the awards had pointed out the fallacy.

Jon Stewart on the Daily Show probably put it best.

"Fox News has filed suit against political satirist Al Franken over use of the phrase 'Fair and Balanced'. Huh? You're kidding me! I don't know what to say. I'm Shocked and A..., no I'm... Dazed and C...... um.... I know! I'm Confounded and Bewildered! (Announcer: Confounded and Bewildered is a registered trademark of Jon Stewart and Comedy Central)".

Ultimately, the strategy of attempted prior restraint may backfire, in that the day after the suit was announced, Franken's book shot up in Amazon's salesrank from somewhere in the 400's to number 1. For a book that doesn't come out for a month and a half by an author that probably 50% of Americans couldn't pick out of a lineup, that's not bad.

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You can get anything you want

The Restaurant is having some troubles. An added bonus, on Howard Stern this morning Howard noted that one of his interns was an extra on The Restaurant and would testify that it was scripted and he was given lines to read. Does anyone at this point believe that the "reality" shows are NOT scripted? Seriously. I watch Trading Spaces and Changing Rooms, but I don't believe that it's all "real". I'm interested in the designs they come up with and techniques they use to accomplish them. As Howard noted, there's only ever been one reality show: Watergate. Nixon was completely honest on those tapes because he didn't think anyone would ever hear them. If the participants know there's a camera on them, it's not reality.

Jon Stewart notes that "those at Fox News know plenty about bluring and tarnishing the phrase Fair and Balanced." He also noted that he is "Chagrined and Bewildered" and that he has copyrighted that phrase. Please note that the book is now the #1 seller at Amazon, even though it doesn't come out until September 22nd. Someone else (I forget who) notes that the lawsuit doesn't complain about the fact that Bill O'Reilly is prominently featured on the cover right underneath the word liar, and the writer theorizes that Fox realizes that a court would decide that truth is not slander.

Oh, and by the way: fuck.

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I wanna devise a virus

And a world governing body will be created to enforce them
Crises percipitate change.

Secretly plotting your demise
I wanna devise a virus
to bring dire straits to your environment
Crushing corporations with a mild touch
Trash the whole computer system and revert you to papyrus

I wanna make a super virus
Strong enough to cause black outs in every single metropolis
Cuz they dont want to unify us
So fuck it
total anarchy and can't nobody stop us

You see late in the evening
Fucked up on my computer and my mind starts roaming
I create like a heathen
The first cycles of this virus i can send through a modem

Infiltrate and hit your station
No microsoft or enhanced dos with mp
Society thinks theyre safe when
Bingo hard drive crashes from the rending

I want it where file replication is a chore
Lights out shut down the entire White House
I don't want just a bug that can be corrected
I'm erecting immaculate design
Break the nation down section by section
Even to the greatest minds
its impossible to find

We have already planned
the plan is programmed into every one of my 1000 robots
we will not hesitate
we will destroy the homo sapien
please say where you are

I wanna develop a super virus
Better by far then the old Y2K
This is 3030 the time of
global unification break right through their
terminals burn em all
slaves of silicon
corrupt politicians with leaders and their keywords

FBI and spies stealin bombs
dissipitate their plans
and their faithful catch the fever

Everybody loot the stores get your canned goods
Even space stations are having a hard time
Peacekeepers seek to take our manhood
which results in a form of global apartheid

ghettos a trash dump with gas pumps
exploded and bunt out just before the great union
the last punks walk around like mass monks
ready to manipulate the database or break through em

human rights come in a hundredth place
mass production has always been number one
new earth has become a repugnant place
So its time to spread the fear and fund some

for too long have we tried to extend our glorious empire out to the stars
only to be driven back

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You are bound to your silent legacy

Status update:
We will be replacing the WCS legacy mainframe loan servicing system. But we won't do the loan servicing part yet.

We can't move forward on project 4 because we don't know anything about C-stock. And even though project 4 doesn't have anything to do with C-stock, we have to wait until we finish WCS (project 5), WGR, and JJR first. If we get those contracts. So project 4 will be delayed two years.

The government people will be giving us a delivery schedule (yes, they give us the dates and we have to figure out a way to make it work). We don't know what the deliverables are, or the scope, or the requirements. And likely won't until we've missed at least one date, if past experience is a reliable indicator.

And the users aren't cooperating, doing everything they can to avoid meeting with us and providing feedback on use cases or answering questions about requirements.

I think this project is going to be in progress until long after I die.

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Move to the flow of the pyramid blaster

So the latest Microsoft worm is wreaking havoc across the net. It hit everyone here at work (except of course myself and our sysadmin, who patched his system a month ago when the vuln was announced). If you are going to use a computer, you would be wise to keep up to date with security patches. Regardless of platform, as there are security holes on all platforms.

I pitched in yesterday afternoon after Sparks! left, to help some people who hadn't been patched yet. I find the XP interface to be incredibly ugly, and once again they've moved everything and changed the admin tools enough that I had to hunt to get anything done. I still wasn't able to determine how to add a domain user to local admin (not that I tried very hard), but I got the system patched and that's all that matters I suppose.

Charles Cooper has an interesting observation:

If this were the exception rather than the rule, I would agree that the customer should be held responsible for making sure the latest fixes were downloaded onto a company's computers. But after two decades' worth of Swiss cheese software security, the world's biggest supplier of operating system software has run out of excuses. It took scientists less time to map the human genome.

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Sometimes the scales get unbalanced

So Fox "News" is suing Al Franken for using the phrase "Fair and Balanced" in the subtitle of his new book. Apparently Fox is unfamiliar with the concept of fair use. In this instance, parody (which the Supreme Court supported in the legendary Flynt -vs- Falwell case).

Of course, the people at Fox don't support the right to free speech anyway, so of course they wouldn't approve of fair use.

I prepaid for my copy today.

Favorite terms of the day: Flightsuit-in-Chief, Object McNuggets.

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The revolution will not be televised

Warren Ellis is doing something interesting...

Apparently Father Guido Sarducci is now a candidate for Governer in California, but then who isn't these days? I theorize at Watchblog about the massive coverage it's getting. I find it interesting that according to Nielsen ratings, a greater percentage of people in places like Oklahoma are interested in the recall than are people in CA.

Obligatory E2 reference: The television will not be revolutionized.

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I am the first mammal to make plans, yea

So I was mowing the lawn over the weekend, and thinking my random thoughts (as I am wont to do). Here's my question, which I haven't had time to research yet but plan on doing so at some point: What does punctuated equilibrium mean to the future evolution of the human species? Are we it? With modern transportation, the isolation required by punctuated equilibrium no longer exists. Have we technologized ourselves into an evolutionary dead end? Yes, these are the things I think about while doing home maintenance.

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Doctor, Doctor, mister MD

We were at the OB the other day for an ultrasound. The doctor glanced at the book I'd been reading in the waiting room (Practical RDF) and he asked me what it was. I said "It's about managing meta data between distributed systems" (Not entirely accurate, but good enough for a non-technical person) and he said "Man, I'm glad I went into the line of work that I did."

Yea, because if I screw up a web page doesn't work. Big freaking deal. I would argue that he has the more complex job.

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Sleepin' on the politics

Just posted Amateur Hour to Watchblog

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I wrote for luck

New reviews: Manic Street Preachers and Queensryche. I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. Don't buy imports at Tower/Amazon/Wherehouse/Best Buy. Go to HMV Online. Even with shipping, the Manics set was 10 bucks cheaper through HMV.

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People are the main thing turning this world around

Inspired in part by a post from burningbird.

To assume that a person is entirely what you see on their website is foolish. To assume that people will not judge you based on your website is also foolish. I've observed this happen time and again.

A has a blog, and posts a certain subset of their thoughts on it. B reads the blog, and decides that person A is an idiot/pervert/threat to society/etc. Person A gets upset by this.

Who is the bigger fool, however? "A" must realize that people who read what they write will make judgements about them based on the information available. "B" must realize that the contents of a blog are not the sum total of who that person is, and is frequently just a very small part of who they are.

I've seen plenty of people who extrapolate all sorts of bizarre details about who a person is based solely on their blog entries (and they are almost invariably wrong). I've also seen people who spill far more personal details than they really are comfortable doing, and then getting mad that people make judgements the blogger based on those details.

Do I make judgements based on what I read in people's blogs? Of course I do. I also qualify those judgements by recognizing that I'm working from a very limited set of information, and I'm willing to adjust my opinions as new information becomes available.

I also make a point of not caring what people think of me based on what they read in my blog. If you don't like it, that's your problem, not mine.

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Parliament's a fake life saver, you better wake up and smell the real flavour

Quick notes on the political (ob)scene:

• For all their cries of foul play in the quorum busting event, the Texas Republicans pulled the same thing. Typical double standard, we can do whatever we want but the Dems can't.
• Larry Flynt, "The smut peddler who cares", is running in the California recall race. I wish I lived in CA so I could vote for him.
• Lieberman is saying that if the Dems choose someone to the left of him, it will go down in history as the biggest mistake the party ever made. First of all, there are so many contenders for that title that I doubt this would qualify. Second, the candidate to the immediate left of Lieberman is Bob Dole, followed by George W Bush and John McCain.
• Over the weekend, one of the hard core conservatives on watchblog was arguing that Howard Dean is a radical leftist, while the people he was arguing with contended that Dean is a centrist. He went and did some research and came back with this observation: "You are correct. I wonder how much of my misconception of Dean is based on the major networks coverage of him. Now that I am clear about his political positions, I wonder who is behind the constant misrepresentation of him."

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We don't need no education

David Remer has an excellent piece on Watchblog. A fairly extensive and reasonably impartial explanation of how privatization will affect education.

On an unrelated note, I expect to be starting in on a little escapist novel by burning bird called "Practical RDF" tonight.

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Everybody's working for the weekend

A good time was had by all (or at least that's what it looked like to me). Many of our regulars (Kat, Vince, Melissa, Elroy, Tim, Ryan, Angeline) were there and I got to meet some cool new people. I was not misled, Yeti really is as entertaining as they say, and I managed to remember his name (I've always been really bad at names). Jennifer was not nearly as dumbfounded as she claimed, and was a lot of fun to talk to as well. Yes, I did just figure out this week that her domain name is her name backwards. In my defense, several other people hadn't figured it out. The charming and crazy, but sadly blogless, Kathie as well as the ultra laid back ta2d. I saw, but didn't actually meet, Buckshot. And theresome of cybr's friends who don't blog and whose names I don't recall, but were very cool as well. Apparently there was something involving cleavage that I missed. Dammit.

k: well, my wife decided to quite school, so now the student loan is due. So now she's going to be upset all weekend and feeling like she's useless and doesn't contribute anything and I don't love her anymore.
me: what are you going to do?
k: I'm going to say "You're not useless! I love you! If you'd wasted $2000 of my money and I didn't love you, one of us would be gone! Now shut up!"
sparks!: Yea, let me know how that works for you.

I've been feeling very inspired and motivated to play (largely due to Jane's Addiction) and write (largely due to KLF) but I've been severely lacking in time. Sigh.

A very large event of sorts seems to be happening downtown today. Mmmmm, I picked a good day to forget lunch. I am told that Strassenfest is happening. Brats for lunch today!

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