kaasirpent | Entries tagged with geek

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The Leather!

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 07:14 am

You know that I got a new computer the other day. Well, I've been basically carrying it with me everywhere. To work, to dinner, my office here at the house, The Chair *evil chord*....

Why? Because I can, that's why. :) Sucker is light, thin, and easy to tote around.

But I didn't want to just...carry the naked laptop around. It might get stained or scratched or dented or otherwise unshiny.

I've been using the neoprene laptop sleeve I bought at Fry's *Nirvana¹ chord* for my old laptop, and it works great. Except for one thing: no handle.

So I started looking for a new sleeve. I prefer leather², and I quickly narrowed my choices down to just two, and then after only a little deliberation, I ordered the Saddleback Leather Laptop Case. And it's already on its way from Texas. UPS claims it will be here by Wednesday! From what I've heard about these Saddleback bags, I could feed one to a hungry wolverine and it would come through "slightly scratched." :)

And then I promise I'm done spending money for a while. Really. Well, OK, until Dragon*Con on Labor Day weekend, anyway. :)

Gah! It's August. I let that sneak right up on me.

Curse you, acquisition cycle! Dammit! This one really did sneak up on me.

No, not that one. The one without Kurt Kabang.
Tougher, nicer, provides more protection.

Current Mood: excited
Current Location: My office at home
Current Music: The AC running full blast

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Proclamation From Your (Future) Overlord, Part 2

Thursday, August 6th, 2009 08:09 pm

When I become Lord Supreme Ruler of Everything (applications for Australia are still available, but Algeria still goes to my cats as a litterbox), my second proclamation shall be as follows:

Be it hereby known that, henceforth, any software developer whomsoever shall programmeth a web site registration system that blindly and trustingly accepts any email typed into the "What is your email?" box and immediately starts Spamming that email without verifying (by any of several methods) that the person who typed the email address actually owns said address shall be slowly and painfully tortured to death, but only after they are stripped naked, painted purple, and forced to pole-dance atop a harpsichord whilst singing "I'm the worst developer in the whole world" in the key of G-minor. For my entertainment. And any of my minions who may wish to look on. (Seriously, Australia! How can you pass this up? Apply to be my loyal minion and you might get Australia!)

I'm just going to go ahead and cut this because I know before I even type the first line that it's going to get long and extremely snarky and ranty. I'll try to curb my penchant for devolving into a string of pejoratives and expletives. Really.

And I promise to make it as humorous as I can. :)

( Clicky. Or not. )

Rant over. :)

Current Mood: sick and tired of nonsense
Current Location: Work. For now.
Current Music: the janitor vacuuming the second floor

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Proclamation From Your (Future) Overlord

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 04:21 pm

When I become Lord Supreme Ruler of Everything (except Australia, which I will give to my most loyal minion, and Algeria, which I shall give to my cats as a litterbox), my first proclamation shall be as follows:

Be it hereby known that, henceforth, any software developer whomsoever shall programmeth a pop-up (or under) window shall be put to death immediately, regardless of the language of application therein...under...to. The method of death—and the painfulness thereof—shall be determined by the amount of inconvenience accorded the user when the pop-up (or under) interrupts what they're already typing. Should what they're typing "accidentally" press a button in the pop-up (or under)...you really don't want to know the kind of sick things I could think of to punish that developer.

This offense shall carry unto the next generation of said developer if it is the operating system which dost perform in this manner.

So train your children well, friends.

Train. Them. Well.

Avoid the certain death that will certainly come to many. I'm sure my eventual "cleansing" will make the Nacht der langen Messer look like a church picnic. And not the kind with catholic priests and altar boys, but the kind with actual G-rated stuff going on. And lemonade. And screams of terror.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Location: Work. For now.
Current Music: (mindtrack) Seether - Fake It

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It's So...Shiny! (O.O)

Friday, July 31st, 2009 02:18 pm

Last night I went to the Apple store at the MOG. I had an appointment for 7:30, and I showed up at 7:28.

I had to wait behind a roped-off area in front of the store. There were "cops"¹ posted inside the store to keep people from breaking in line.

Who knew?

I was fourth in line, so it took about 15 minutes for me to be called. I was escorted through the police barrier by a sky-blue-shirted Andy who noticed the USB thumb drive I was wearing around my neck and said, "You look like the kind of person that's done your research. So what machine may I help you with?"

Smart salesman, that Andy. :)

It only took me about 20 minutes to select the 17" Macbook Pro², which Andy expertly punched up on screen and completed the order, then took me to stand in line to give them money.

I waited another 15 minutes or so in that line, listening to other blue-shirted folks guiding other shoppers through their many choices.

There was a moment of tension at the cash register when I scanned my Discover Card and they declined the transaction. I quickly called them, correctly having guessed that it was the amount of the transaction that was the problem.³ I correctly identified my mother's maiden name, my zip code, social security number, the 11th number in the Fibonacci sequence, the 17th prime number in octal, my blood type, the air speed of an African (not European) swallow, and recited Jabberwocky in tlhIngan Hol⁴, so they were able to verify that I was, indeed, me. Transaction complete, I was handed my (shiny!) computer and sent on my way. On the way out, the sky-blue-shirted associate with whom I spoke two weeks ago on my first visit greeted me and congratulated me on my purchase.

I spent the next several hours...exploring. Yes, that's the word: exploring. :) I downloaded Saviar for TIM, Second Life, Scrivener for writing, and Adium for multi-platform IMing. And the battery was still at > 40% after several hours. I gave out and had to go to bed before it did.

Oh, the places we'll go! :)⁵

They were uniformed, but I didn't look closely enough to determine if they were Mall Cops™ or The Real McCoy™.
For those who will inevitably ask for the specs: 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 duo, 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM (2x2G), 500GB Serial ATA Drive @5400 rpm, 17" Hi-Resolution Glossy Widescreen display, Backlit keyboard, iWork '09, 1-year One to One membership, AppleCare Protection Plan.
I have never paid for anything this expensive before with a credit card, much less my Discover that I've only had for a couple of weeks...which was also part of the problem. They wanted to make sure no one had stolen it out of my mailbox. :)
That's Klingon for "Klingon language."
Gratuitous Dr. Seuss reference.

Current Mood: excited
Current Location: Work
Current Music: (Songza.com) P!nk - Please Don't Leave Me

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Bilingualism

Thursday, July 16th, 2009 03:40 pm

I find bilingualism—the ability to speak two (or more if you include multilingualism) languages fluently—fascinating.

Take last night for an example.

I went to a Cuban restaurant called Coco Loco that is near my office. They followed me on Twitter and their menu sounded tasty, so I decided to give it a try.

I think both waiters must have thought I was in the other's section because it took a while for them to acknowledge that I was there. Which was okay, because it gave me time to read the entire menu.

And to half-listen to the conversation at the next table over from me. :)

Three people were seated there: a man and two women, all in their 20s, if I were forced at gunpoint to guess. They were speaking amongst themselves in Spanish. Then, out of the blue, I hear this exchange, all in English:

Woman #1: Is that her?
Man: I don't know.

And that was it. Then they moved to a bigger table, and another man and woman came in and sat down with them, after much hugging and greeting.

I was now primed that they were at least bi- if not multilingual, so I paid attention. As the new folks came in, all the various greetings were done purely in English ("Hi, how are you, I'm fine..."), but the conversation then settled into Spanish.

As I ate my dinner, their conversation continued in Spanish, except for every once in a while, I'd hear a random phrase all in English. Like "I don't know" or "Could be."

I don't know how many of you guys are bi- or multilingual, but I wonder if there's a rhyme or reason to which phrases get spoken in one language and which another or if it's essentially random.

I mean, I can understand why English borrows words from other languages. Schadenfreude is so much easier to just say in German than translating it into the English phrase "joy derived from another's misfortune." Ennui is much easier to say in French than the English equivalent "extremely bored by the tedium of it all." And we won't even go into ferklempt or weltanschauung.

But "Is that her?" or "I don't know"?

Please enlighten me if you can. As I said, this stuff fascinates me. :)

Two quick little anecdotes from my college days to demonstrate why I think bi- or multilingualism is fascinating:

I had a friend from Puerto Rico named Ramphis. We would all go down to the cafeteria together to eat in one big group, and since it was mostly all guys, the conversations could turn strange and disgusting fairly quickly. After one such exchange that basically caused most of us to put down our forks, we noticed Ramphis was still happily shoveling food into his mouth. We asked how he could possibly still be hungry. He explained that when the conversation took that kind of turn, he just started thinking in Spanish and then he didn't "understand" the rest of us. That is just so cool. :)

There were these two girls who were from some Central American country. I think Panama or Guatemala, but I'm not sure this many years later. As such, they also spoke Spanish natively and English as their second language. Like Ramphis, they were fluent in English. One day, a friend and I were standing behind them in line at the cafeteria (honestly, not all my college stories involve a cafeteria...). There was a lull in our conversation, and we naturally started to "eavesdrop" on the two girls in line in front of us. Who, noticing our increased interest, smoothly switched into Spanish in the middle of an exchange and kept going as though we weren't there. That is just so cool. :) (Of course, having a paranoid, slightly self-obsessed perspective, my friend thought they were talking about him, but "pendejo" never came up, so.... :)

Current Mood: fascinated
Current Location: Work (in body only)
Current Music: (mindtrack) The Cranberries - The Icicle Melts

Tags:

geek,
language

Updatey Updates (Manuh Manuh)

Monday, July 13th, 2009 05:14 pm

Cats

Because you know you love it. Lucy and Matt both learned some very, very bad habits from Granddaddy's other cat, Tiny. Matt claws furniture to get attention, and both Lucy and Matt are fond of raking their unsheathed claws over my bare flesh, also to get attention. This must end. But they're 16, and I don't want to get them de-clawed. Any suggestions? Right now I'm using negative reinforcement with an unpleasant sound.

I said before that neither of them were "players." I think one of my superpowers is manifesting itself in a new way. Whenever I make a claim like this, the universe has a way of making a liar out of me. To be fair, I haven't actually witnessed any playing, but one of Gremlin's catnip toys mysteriously found its way under my bed, and another of Gremlin's and Taz's toys wound up in a place where it normally is not, and broken, probably to get at the catnip within. So I'm thinking one or both of the cats are up to something when I'm not there or when I'm asleep. Involving catnip.

Matt lets me pet him at will, now. But only if I'm sitting down. If I stand up, I become an evil, cat-eating...thing that is evil.

I used to brag that my cats—and we're talking Gremlin and Taz, here—never used to wake me up to be fed. Taz would occasionally rake his claws across my face, but it was because he wanted to play or be petted. (I shall leave as an exercise for the reader to decide whether his tactic was ever successful.)

Lucy has now awakened me several mornings, quite frantic, and when I dutifully followed her as she hopped to ~~where Timmy was in the well~~ her food bowl, it was empty. After I had to have Taz put to sleep, I got rid of anything the cats had eaten or drunk out of, just in case it was something catching and I got another cat. I can see, now, that a trip to PetSmart is looming large for me. One of those perpetual dry-food dispensers and a water bowl are a necessity.

MANGO

A while back I mentioned a new "local" restaurant called Fuego Mundo. I swore then that I would have to go back and try basically everything on the menu, including the mango pie. Well, I've been back several times, and it's been really good each time. I've been for dinner a few times, but today I decided to try lunch. I had the grilled turkey breast fillet, which is basically a boneless, skinless slab o' turkey breast, marinated and then grilled over their wood fire; The Latin side combo, which consists of rice, black beans, and sweet fried plantains (heaven); a beef empanada with their vinegary "pico de gallo"-like sauce; and for dessert, the mango pie.

The turkey breast came out perfect: moist, tender, and flavorful. The Latin was good, as always, as was the empanada. I think I could live on their empanadas alone. I mean, it's got meat and bread, and the sauce kinda counts as vegetables. Hmmm. The mango pie provides dairy....

The mango pie (are you listening,

slymongoose?) was creamy, sweet-but-not-too-sweet, rich, and very mango-y cheesecake in a graham-cracker-crumb pie crust. A tasty and not over-filling end to a nice lunch.

I'd also like once more to point out that on rainy days—or potentially rainy ones, like today—Fuego Mundo has a back entrance from inside a parking deck. You could go there during a monsoon downpour and not even get damp.

I probably don't need to say it at this point, but I'll be back. And back and back and back. It's only a 20-minute drive from my office. Both ways. And besides, everyone takes an hour-and-a-half lunch, occasionally, right? Right?

Babylon 5

It's no secret (because I tell anyone and everyone who will listen) that I'm a big-ol' geek. And one of my biggest geek-ons is for Babylon 5. I think it was about two weeks ago, now, that

geek_72 mentioned on FaceBook that Claudia Christian—who played Susan Ivanova on Babylon 5—was selling her personal scripts on her web site.

I contacted her (really someone like her agent or assistant) and purchased two of my favorite episode scripts of the ones remaining. When I received them a few days later, they were autographed to me (squee!) and included some other collectibles from Ms. Christian, also autographed (squee!). The scripts join my small-but-growing collection of B5 stuff. I may have to create a Wall of Squee™.

Gaming

Had an especially fun session this past weekend with our usual group minus the out-of-towners who come from Alabama to join us. We solved a murder mystery! :) One of our party (the magic-user) was seen by three eye-witnesses stabbing a guy in cold blood. And they weren't lying. So, in typical D&D fashion, we solved the crime: we resurrected the corpse so there was no longer a murder, then used a combination of past vision and teleportation to see who really did it, and eliminated him with extreme prejudice. And in the course of this, we discovered that the Egyptian god Set is really, really pissed off at the party member who was framed. And we can expect more little incidents like the frame-job. Joy. But at least my cleric and the magic-user discovered a fantastic one-two punch of spells guaranteed to turn any bad guy into a puddle of sticky goo. Mmm, Minions-of-Set-goo. Now in Bear Flavor!™

So because we can't kill a god (yet), we decided to go after our big bad enemy, Bob, one more time. Bob has kicked our ass so many times it's not even funny. But hey. Better than Set, right? :)

(Have I mentioned I'm a geek? Because I am one. And a big one, at that.)

Writing

Had the first chapter of one of my works in progress critiqued by a second local group that only meets once per month, but they give harder-hitting, deeper critiques than my Tuesday Night Writers Group, because we read them ahead of time, critique them before the meeting, and the limit is 10,000 words instead of 1200. :)

I was tickled pink that they all liked it, but found that they all kind of picked up on the same problems. Which tells me that 1) I'm not telling the story right if no one picked up something I thought was obvious; 2) the ending, as planned, will suck; and 3) my main character isn't fleshed out enough. There were others as well, but those are the main three points. I think I'll need to rethink this story a little. Which means I'll be working on my novel for a bit. :)

Birthdays

Attended

totallysirius's 30th birthday dinner at Cowtippers. Was fun. Got to see some folks I don't see often enough and consume mass quantities of good food.

In other news,

ladyimp's and

monkeypocket's daughter is the cutest thing ever. Just so you know. And she knows the most important thing for a two-year-old to know: the best way to eat macaroni and cheese is with both fists. Spoon? There is no spoon! I'd do it, too, if I could get away with it.

Current Mood: updatey
Current Location: Work. For now.
Current Music: LoudWoman and Minion of LoudWoman loudly being loud.

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Squirrels!

Friday, May 29th, 2009 09:28 pm

I said in my last post that I'd do a follow-up post to explain the last post.

This is that post. And I'm sorry, but it's a bit lengthy. I'll try to make it entertaining, though.

So, <flashback effect> picture it: Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the summer of 1982.

I'm between my junior and senior year in high school. (I'm 44. Put away the calculator.) Because my ACT score was high enough, I got into the Capstone Summer Honors Program at the University of Alabama. Basically, this is a summer-semester-long program for college-bound high school students with a high enough test score to earn college credit before actually going to college.

It also turns out to be a great opportunity

to meet other students who are at your same level, both academically and socially (with 18 in my senior class, there weren't a lot of nerds, geeks, etc. for me to hang out with who had read Vonnegut and Stephen King and Heinlein, liked (programming) computers, and could recite Star Wars)

to learn {about|your way around} the campus

to learn about life in a dorm and having roommates

to learn how to use campus resources like the libraries, textbook stores, registration, etc.

Since we were seventeenish years old and, therefore, young and naïve and stupid—and since we were there by permission of our parents, who had been promised nothing bad would be allowed to happen to us—we got all the standard lectures about fraternizing with "the wrong element," going to places where that element hung out, and basically ruled, regulated, and "infractioned" to death.

Since it was expected that many of us would be returning to campus in a year to begin our college careers, the counselors would give us "helpful hints" about the University of Alabama campus to make things smoother for us.

Among these tips were

Stay away from Byrd Hall¹! They're weird and they <whispering>probably do drugs!</whispering>.

Always buy used textbooks whenever you can because they cost less.

You do not, as it turns out, get an automatic 'A' in every course if your roommate dies during the semester.

The Quad is a very dangerous place and under no circumstances were any of us wide-eyed, innocent high-schoolers to walk on The Quad alone.

And no, that is not because Denny Chimes will crumble if a virgin walks by it.

And no, that does not mean you should try to remedy that status if it applies to you, "to save the chimes."

For the purpose of this little narrative (and to actually get us to the topic of squirrels), the only one of those that matters is the fourth one about the quad being dangerous.

Now, to be fair, I'm sure it was dangerous, to a certain level. Especially to girls walking alone at night.

Of course, I immediately found mah peepz (i.e., I found the nerds/geeks and they found me) and we immediately formed our little clique. That was on day 1. :) About a week into the semester, after all the warnings and orientations and what-have-you, we discovered that one of our little group was a jogger. He liked to get up at the ungodly hour of 5 AM (I mean, seriously. Five AM? Weirdo.) and go jogging around...<dun Dun DUNNNNN!> the quad.

So we jokingly asked him, "Hey, Mark, did you see any of those rapists and murderers and kidnappers out there?" Because, you know, we were seventeen and fairly stupid in spite of being smart.

"Nope, not a thing," was his reply. "Except an awful lot of squirrels."

"Squirrels?" we asked.

"Squirrels," he confirmed. "There must be thousands of them. And they have no fear."

Well, that's all that took. Thus began, in the 1982 Capstone Summer Honors Program, the rumor of <dun Dun DUNNNNNN!> The Killer Squirrels™!

It wasn't rapists, murderers, kidnappers, muggers, and aggressive Jehovah's Witnesses out there on the quad at five in the morning that we were supposed to be wary of. It was <dun Dun—> Okay, I'm going to stop that, now. Ahem. It was The Killer Squirrels™. <insert images of squirrels with switchblades> <insert image of squirrels swarming an unsuspecting, lone student, consuming him until nothing is left but bones, lying on the green grass of the quad, gleaming in the hot sun....> Mark must have gotten away safely only because he somehow was of no interest to the squirrels or could perhaps outrun them.

We had great fun with The Killer Squirrel™ thing. The counselors rolled their eyes a lot, quite aware that all their precautions and warnings and "infractions" were doing nothing to stop us from doing everything they said not to do. It just made us² more stealthy.

So, anyway, Capstone ended, 1982 ended, and 1983 came 'round. I graduated from high school. And I went back to the University.

And it was then that I learned that we were not the first group to have come up with the whole Killer Squirrels™ thing. It was a joke around campus that our quad was populated with aggressive squirrels who would chase people for hand-outs and had pretty much no fear of people.

</flashback effect> And then there's now.

Today, I was reading a new-to-me online comic called Surviving the World. It's not really a comic, so much as it is a guy taking pictures of funny things he's written/drawn on a blackboard, and he wears a lab coat and a hat, and....well, here:

So when I saw this, I IM'd my friend

adsmguy who was at UofA at the same time I was and said, "Hey! I thought the whole Killer Squirrel™ thing was just a UofA thing!" I sent him the link. He wasn't surprised, but I was. I had no idea that others might have come up with the whole Squirrel Uprising thing besides us. Proving that age and experience don't necessarily cure naïveté and stupidity, even if you're (supposed to be) smart. :)

So that's what the poll was about. It was to see how many of what is admittedly a fairly small but diverse group in terms of age and geography had also heard of Killer Squirrels™ or the Squirrel Uprising or whatever.

I'm somewhat vindicated by the response, though. Most of you had no idea what I was talking about (or at least didn't without context, which was admittedly and purposefully lacking), but a few of you did, and not all of them were from the University of Alabama, nor from the early 80s. :)

On campus, there was an Honors Residence Program called The Mallet Assembly wherein many of the so-called "smart people" lived. Well, really, there were two. Byrd Hall was the men's dorm and Fitts Hall was the women's version of same. I can't speak for what they told the girls, but they told us boys to steer clear of Byrd/Mallet because, basically, they were weird...and probably did unspeakable things in there. Like drugs and underage drinking and quantum physics. I mean, who knows, right?³ *shudder*.
And by "us" I mean "them." I was as pure and innocent as driven snow. I never did anything they said not to. I never got in any trouble. And at least one of those statements is true, but not all three. :)
The sheer irony of it all is that I believed the malarkey (see above, re: young, stupid, naïve) they fed us about Mallet and steered clear of it. Two of my current long-term friends turned out to have been in Mallet at that very time; a co-worker I liked at my first, on-campus job lived there with his girlfriend, who later became his wife; a classmate I befriended as a junior lived there, and we ended up spending a lot of time together at Byrd working on a team project; and two other long-term, close friends were associated with Mallet in some way (they were Mallet groupies who hung around but didn't live there). So it turns out if I hadn't listened to the counselors at CSHP in 1982, I would have met all these people I befriended way before I eventually did, and probably would have come through college a little more loose for the experience. Oh, and although there may have been drugs (and quantum physics!), it was discrete and none of my friends participated in any of that sort of thing. :)

I really hope they're not still warning students away from the "weird folks" just because they're weird. What a travesty.

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: Work. For now.
Current Music: (mindtrack) The GoGos - Our Lips Are Sealed

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This Is How My Brain Works

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 05:23 pm

Disclaimer: This really is how my mind works. Try not to be afraid.

I've been getting a series of Spam emails on one of my accounts, and they all have a certain...similarity to one another:

uplift your couch experience
hoist your lover bed experience
support your lover bed experience
heave your darling sexual times
raise your lover night adventures
hoist your sweet bed times
heave your darling sexual times
boost your lover couch adventures
boost your darling night experience
raise your lover sexual experience

Based just on what I've received on this one account where all these arrived in the last three or so days, I'm guessing these are their rules to generate subject lines:

[Verb]
uplift
hoist
support
heave
raise

[Adjective1]
lover
darling
sweet

[Adjective2]
night
couch
sexual
bed

[Noun]
experience
times
adventures

[SexEuphemism]
%Adjective2% %Noun%

[Subject]
%Verb% your %Adjective1% %SexEuphemism%
%Verb% your %SexEuphemism%

How unimaginative. I'd like to suggest a few...improvements.

[Verb]
uplift
hoist
support
heave
raise
erect
arouse
tumesce
succor
bear aloft
elevate
buoy
fulfill

And those adjectives! So uncreative. So...stupid. So..."English is not anywhere near my first language." They all have to go.

[Adjective1]
erotic
passionate
stimulating
sensual

Good...good, that's shaping up nicely. Now, that second set of adjectives! So...unimaginative.

[Adjective2]
night
couch
sexual
bed-time
kitchen counter
Jacuzzi
elevator
50-yard line

Awright! Now, we're cookin'. Finally, those nouns...<sigh>

[Noun]
experiences
times
adventures
romps
fantasies
affairs
encounters
escapades

There we go! All better, now. Now we could "fulfill your sensuous elevator fantasies" or "arouse your passionate 50-yard line escapades."

At least that would be entertaining. But no. Spammers got no imagination.

They should let me design these—

Wait! What the hell am I saying? Gaaaaah!

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: Work. For now.
Current Music: (mindtrack) Diana Krall - I Get Along Without You Very Well

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Need Some Help From the (Zombie) Hive Mind

Thursday, April 16th, 2009 02:37 pm

Last night, I had a very strange dream from which I awakened shortly after 5:00 AM, and was then unable to go back to sleep.

Not because of the dream. Well, not per sé. The dream images spawned a story idea which I've been letting percolate all day, until I was sure there might actually be a story in it. I lay awake for over an hour going over it, then got up and went about my day.

This is where you guys come in. I know some of you are zombie fans. I don't mean the drink, and I don't mean The Zombies. Or Rob Zombie. I mean zombies. You know, the shambling, animated corpses of dead people. Those zombies.

I am not a big fan of—and I chuckle even to write this—"zombie fiction," but the story idea I had is sort of set in the aftermath of a zombie uprising, after it's gone through all the horror and shambling and death and mayhem and brain-eating and has been ended through whatever Heroic Means™ the good guys arrived at.

So, here's my question: can you suggest short stories, movies, or novels set in the aftermath of a zombie uprising? If I'm going to write this thing—and I might, if I can come up with some interesting characters other than the main guy, a plot, and a resolution (just little stuff like that!)—I'll need to know what's already out there so I don't reinvent the wheel.

I'm not talking about movies where 90 minutes of it are the uprising and then the last 15 are the dazed survivors walking out of their barricaded fortresses to the sunrise of a new day. I'm talking about the whole story being set after the zombie action has ended.

Anything like that out there? Help me out, Hive Mind!

Current Mood: excited
Current Location: Work
Current Music: iPod:

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Just One Question, But it's a Doozy

Thursday, April 9th, 2009 12:49 pm

I had heard for years what a great show Stargate: SG-1 was. All my friends who watched it raved about it, saying it was way better than the movie, etc.

Only problem was, it came on some channel I didn't have, and when I finally did get that channel, it was way past the point where I could join and know what the hell was going on.

One thing about me: I like to read a book from cover to cover, skipping no words. I like to see a movie from studio logo through credits, with no missed minutes.

And with series like SG-1 that, I was told, had an ongoing arc not only for the show, but for the characters and the world, I like to see it from start to finish, in order, with no exceptions.

I learned that lesson with Babylon 5, and it greatly enhanced my enjoyment of both Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and Angel

So I finally started watching SG-1 on NetFlix. I started in season 1 and have been watching it (minus about 1 year when NetFlix simply didn't have the first two disks of season 2 available for rental) in order since then. I'm at the tail end of season 4, now, and about to begin season 5.

And I have one, burning question.

So, you have these Go'a'uld who are, basically, Egyptian Gods in Spaaaace! They're all but all-powerful, they're amazingly advanced. They have ships that can destroy worlds and fly faster than light by entering hyperspace. They have unbelievable knowledge spanning millions of years. They have weapons that can stun or kill. They have artificial gravity and their ships run on inertia. And they have sarcophagi that can heal a lowly, puny human of anything, including death, as it turns out.

And yet, in all the amazing vastness of power that is the Go'a'uld...why the ever-lovin' crap do they light their technological marvels of interstellar starships with torches?

I mean...come on! Torches? Sure, it adds to the ambiance and lends flavor to the entire "Egyptian" schtick, but every single time there's a scene in a Go'a'uld ship or base and it's being lit by a damned torch, I lose my "willing suspension of disbelief" and get tossed right out of the story onto my ass. I miss whole scenes because all I can focus on is the torch burning in the background.

You see, in a spaceship, there's kind of a little thing we like to call "a limited amount of air." And even though there would presumably be some sort of "scrubber" that removes CO₂ and CO and other bad things from the air and recirculates it, adding torch soot and the extra heat from the fires makes about as much sense as taking deviled ham sandwiches with cheese to a Yom Kippur picnic. And let's not even go into burning oxygen for lighting.

So far, I have listened to every single commentary track. Seen every extra on every disk.

Not once has anyone brought this up. You'd think I was the first person this ever bothered.

So...do they ever bring this up in the next 5 or 6 seasons of the show? Do they? Because if they don't, I need to know it, now. So I can get a prescription for Valium. A plot hole so wide you could fly a super-massive black hole through it and not even perturb the edges of the hole is something that annoys the living crap out of me. And if they never even bring it up and deal with it, I'm going to need to medicate.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Location: Work (in body only)
Current Music: (mindtrack) Alanis Mor+is+et+e - Isn't it Ironic? (NO! DAMMIT! IT'S SO FUCKING NOT! GET OUT OF MY HE

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Help Me, Hive Mind!

Monday, February 23rd, 2009 05:09 pm

I'm looking for a freeware Windows application that will show me per process how much of my current Internet bandwidth is being used, and it would be nice if it also told what IP addresses were connected.

I have done many Google searches over the last 24 hours or so, and I have yet to find anything that fits the bill. I know that some routers will do this, but mine will not, so I'd need for this to be at the OS level because I'm not interested in spending a bunch of money.

I suspect that I'm still harboring some process or processes on my machine that are doing bad things without my knowledge. I'd like a way to track it down and either destroy the offender or have a good reason to reformat my drive and start over from scratch (yes, it's that annoying).

I could go shareware if it doesn't cost too much or if it's a fully functioning application that dies after x days of usage or whatever. What I'm not interested in are hobbled demos or anything that scans, says there are potential problems, but requires me to pay just to get the "Oh! Nope, nothing's wrong, sorry for the anxiety" message. (i.e., "scams")

So far, everything I have found is designed for corporate net-nazis to track what their employees are doing with every CPU cycle. I'm not interested in paying corporate prices, nor am I interested in installing something that will itself cause more problems than it fixes.

One symptom, if anyone's interested, is periodic extreme slowness of network access to the point where I have to reboot the cablemodem and/or router. Now, I know I had some trojan/viruses that every monitoring application I have installed assures me are gone (I use AdAware, SpyBot Search and Destroy, AVG Virus Scanner, and Spyware Doctor; all upgraded to the latest version often). Another symptom is that occasionally, my computer will just...freeze. No rhyme or reason. Just...freeze. And I have to one-finger-salute it because it can't see the keyboard. And during these freezes, the hard drive light is furiously blinking.

The only thing I haven't specifically checked for are rootkits, but I do that about once every four months. I'll do that, tonight, when I get home.

But anyway, if you know of an app like the one I've described, let me know. I'd certainly appreciate it.

Current Mood: aggravated
Current Location: Work
Current Music: iPod: Elton John - Sad Songs (Say So Much)

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Because it's funny. That's why.

Monday, January 5th, 2009 03:24 pm

Today's stuck-song medley is as follows:

"The Lonely Goatherd" from The Sound of Music
"The Old Gumbie Cat" from Cats (Jennyanydots)
"I'll Never Tell" from "Once More With Feeling" (the musical episode of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer)

I blame

telleestmavie. :)

High on a hill was a lonely goatherd
Lay ee odl lay ee odl lay hee hoo
Loud was the voice of the lonely goatherd
Lay ee odl lay ee odl-oo

I have a gumbie cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots
Her coat is of the tabby kind with tiger stripes and leopard spots
All day she sits beneath the stairs or on the steps or on the mat
She sits and sits and sits and sits—and that's what makes a gumbie cat

This is the man that I plan to entangle, isn't he fine?
My claim to fame was to maim and to mangle, vengeance was mine!
But I'm out of the biz, the name I made I'll trade for his.
The only trouble is - I'll never tell.

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: Work. Under Protest.
Current Music: Take a wild guess.

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In Which I Expound Upon the Subject of "Why Kaa?"

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 03:59 pm

Someone asked me the other day why I had chosen the name "Kaa." I was absolutely sure I had mentioned it on either LiveJournal or my old website. The old site has a little of the story, but I have never said anything on LJ. I have bemoaned that Russian git who "stole" the

kaa account and is making no use of it that I can see. But that's neither here nor there.

Here, then, is the history of...well, me. Online. :)

( I feel like James Burke doing an episode of "Connections" )

Here's the somewhat smoother answer off my old website. I leave out all the stuff about trying the other Jungle Book characters first and portray me as going directly to Kaa. Not strictly true, but not altogether false, either. :)

Why "Kaa"? I've been asked this a number of times. I'll try to answer. One of my favorite films of all time is Walt Disney's "The Jungle Book" Gotta love that cuh-ra-zy jazz, man! But before I saw the movie as an adult (I'm sure I saw it as a child, but I have little or no recollection since it was released when I was three years old), I had read and thoroughly enjoyed Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. When I saw the movie, I realized that Disney had villain-ized Kaa. I can understand this—he is a snake, after all, and snakes are (rather unfortunately) viewed in our society as "evil." All because of some misty-eyed fairy tale about a woman, an apple, and the wrath of a god. But I digress. In Kipling's The Jungle Book, Kaa is not strictly a villain. He is, at worst, out for himself. If the needs of others coincide with his own best interests, he'll help. But next time, he might just decide the same people he helped last time are now good candidates for dinner. He's not about to go slithering through the jungle like some herpetic Mary Poppins, looking for people to help. In short, he's misunderstood. As a much younger me, I felt misunderstood. So when I was looking for a new persona for my online role-playing, Kaa came to mind. He's great to role-play.

Remember in the Disney movie how the monkeys steal Mowgli from Baloo while Baloo is being his usual, lazy self, and then Baloo and Bagheera rescue Mowgli from their clutches? Would it surprise you to know that Kaa is actually the hero of that story? Well, read "Kaa's Hunting" by Rudyard Kipling. That's the story they "Disnified" to turn into the King Louie sequence in the movie. They took the hero out, turned him into Shere Khan's whiny stooge, and pandered to the masses who think of snakes as evil. It also bears repeating (no pun intended) that the character of Baloo was also "dumbed down" by Disney. In Kipling's book, he's a wise creature who is the teacher of the Law of the Jungle to all the cubs. Disney turned him into a lazy idiot. Only Bagheera and Shere Khan escaped absolute Disnification.

Because of role-playing Kaa, most of my e-mail addresses are 'Kaa@somethingorother.com/org/net/etc.' This gets me in trouble because 1) it's only 3 letters long, so I get spam addressed to "kaa, kab, kac, kad...."; 2) it stands for a number of things, including Korean-American Association, Kids Across America, and Killian and Associates, all of which are fine organizations, but they're not me; 3) a lot of people have the initials KAA; I get cubic buttloads of misdirected e-mail to Kristen, Kyle, Kevin, Kamali, Kathy...; and 4) people who think they're getting kaa@isp.com where I already have that address don't seem to be aware that the isp is automatically appending random numbers after their e-mail address, so I get replies from people who were originally mailed by kaa123@isp.com. It can be very frustrating. But I persevere.

So, there you have it. Two explanations for the price of one!

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Location: Work (in body only)
Current Music: (mindtrack) Trusst in meeee, jusst in meee....

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The Fuel Crisis: A Solution

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 05:25 pm

I was just chatting with a friend in Google Chat and I believe we have hit upon the plan that will save this country billions of dollars in fuel costs while simultaneously lowering food prices and ridding the south of a perennial pest.

Yes, I'm talking about turning kudzu into ethanol. Just think about it: Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi could become the hub of a global fuel cartel. We could call it: BUBBAPEC (but that's just a working title, for now). You think Arabs are scary? Give a bunch of rednecks with shotguns a chance.

Yes. Yes! Forget corn! Forget switchgrass! Kudzu is everywhere and it grows anywhere and you can't kill it! It's...it's....perfect!

We'll make millions! Billions! Dare I say....trillions? <drool>

Current Mood: creative
Current Location: Work (but not working)
Current Music: iPod: Julie Collings - Simple Things

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I Simply Had to Share

Monday, November 19th, 2007 01:58 am

While I was typing that last post, Semagic (the client I use for LJ posts) was going nuts. Words were appearing out of nowhere. As I got more frustrated, it got worse. I was picturing a horrible virus on my computer and some 13-year-old kid with audible pimples and a zombie net of several hundred computers using my new computer *geeky chord* as a tool to send out his nefarious spam.

Then I realized that I had inadvertently turned on the voice-recognition software and it was attempting to translate the sounds it was hearing into English text. The sounds of me typing, the chair squeaking, me mumbling, and...*ahem* singing along with my mindtrack.

Once I realized what was going on, I decided to see if it had remembered all that training I put it through back in August. As its mistakes got worse and worse, I got more and more tickled. Finally, I was laughing hysterically, unable to stop, barely able to breathe, and with each new hilarious transcription of my laughter as some English phrase, I laughed all the harder. I finally had to leave the room to calm down. Hereinafter is an exact transcription of me attempting to get the computer to type "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party." And then cursing at its incompetence...and then dissolving into hopeless laughter for most of 10 minutes. Enjoy.

NATO and the time for holding than to come to the aid of their party admittance to the fact that all have the time now to time now. The time and now, he isn't the kind of it as a dns in this ... IDs has enhanced followed your condition at you, thank you do and what you get out the kid in a row of data that the setup at the thought that are at the same time, but rather the setup at the site at that time, but at the hhow does a better grasp of asp the suspect that the back of the [about this a can identify the type of thing to do not have an attempt at a time and at , the president of the fact I decided I'd say the attacks and the sentences but it has been said and at the hospital at the site of the bride's and a half-life, and at the end of act up, but the intent of the tactic , the end of the the content of the top of them, and if the data for and what about the specifics of the cotton to the state of the Cincinnati citizen, the own it and newest at an act as a set of them have dumped on the other side effects of data on the time, the less of them up or shut up and down , citizens of the Internet and Clinton , the seventh of the own citizen or conduct the set of what happened if the up and fact it a ten minute whole , a table at a rate of passion to the front, the Clinton plan , half a dozen , and of the side of this and the guys in the open for them for a few of the citizen that the that it at the fact the citizen Clinton picked the zone, but that an FA decked out about the impact of the sock , that's a button but had bottomed out and not the same thing , it can to mitigate the low, and that an endowment that I'm for alternate and the data, the data what a lot of the button at a time , the life of a button, a, a a a a dns this setup of the site of the same time and conduct of the vote of the content and the data, but conduct outside of the button, the conduct of the end of it and what of data, fact that a lesson that a ten-by to brighten the sentences in Cincinnati, at the end of the bed and the own daughter, the consent of the the lesson , can sit here from it and the data that you need any , the lips, and a nine to six and went went with it and a lot , fax us at the end of the fact that he said that it can't have it, and Feinstein the clicks of the site at the time to time,@@@@@@@, set up the pace at the bottom of the car, and the Brandon the data, and an fact, it said he'd forgotten that act, and it has the leading , to an end to it and it hasn't done and ten , the long and the hall at The key would be at six and get a ticket

I mean, seriously. "Feinstein"? What the hell? :) I haven't laughed this hard in months. I got an abdominal cramp.

I think we see how spammers generate those random emails, now. They just hook up a voice recognition package and then watch The Three Stooges.¹ It interprets their laughter and the result is 95% of what you get in your inbox.

As a side note, it seems rather infatuated with Clinton and Cincinnati, does it not?

I presume, here, that all spammers possess a Y chromosome and are in that percentage of said Y-chromosome-possessors that does not include me who finds The Three Stooges the least bit amusing. YMMV.

#1996

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: My office at home
Current Music: (mindtrack) Hugh Grant & Drew Barrymore - Way Back into Love

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A Quick Book Review (No Spoilers)

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 12:57 pm

I just finished reading Looking Glass, by James R. Strickland.

The book is set in the near future; 2025, to be exact. The United States has fractured into several pieces after a war which we apparently lost. Technology, however, has marched on, and this novel is very firmly in the Cyberpunk genre, with which I'm not at all familiar, having only read one genre piece before now. One that I didn't really enjoy.

The book takes place over a four-day period (approximately; I'd check, but the book is at home and I'm not) in a combination of the cybernetic "Gestalt" and the real world, which often feels more alien—to me, at least—than the online world.

Dr. Catherine Farro—"Shroud," online—is a security expert who works for a large retail store chain based in Colorado, which is now a province of Canada. She spends most of her days floating in the hyper-saline solution in what amounts to a sensory deprivation tank, jacked directly into the network through an implanted connection in her skull. In her off-time, she is a soft, pale, 40-year old paraplegic. But online, she is respected...and perhaps feared. The world of security in this future is cutthroat and unapologetic. Script Kiddies trying to breach OmniMart's firewall security are as likely to be killed—brain-fried by Shroud and her team—as arrested. They knew the risks going in. Them's the breaks.

But one Friday, a concerted attack by an unbelievably fast, powerful intruder fries all but one of Shroud's team, literally scrambling their brains in a way she has never heard of before. And the brains of the security team of an upstream company, as well. That night, the same intruder takes out the night shifts, as well. She vows revenge and, having to immerse herself in the real world for the first time in a long while, she sets off on her quest to find and punish—permanently—the hacker who murdered her teams.

I'm not going to give any of the plot away. Suffice it to say that it is a good story, told well, and I'll not spoil anything else. What I've already said you could get from the blurb on the back cover or on the author's web site.

I enjoyed the book. It was really a page-turner. The plot pacing is well done and somewhat unrelenting, but interspersed with a necessarily sizable amount of exposition, which he does quite well. Only once or twice did I catch myself thinking about it; the exposition that was done meshed well with the storytelling and served to flesh out the world in which Shroud lives and works rather than being an infodump. That's hard to get just right, but I think Strickland does just that.

Another thing I really liked was the first-person POV. Again, this is often very difficult to get right, but he gets it just right. Shroud is an unreliable narrator, and we catch on pretty quickly that her perceptions of other people are a little off...but you're never quite sure. Maybe she's right and everyone is out to get her...or maybe she's a bit paranoid and she's imagining the whole thing. It is a true first-person narrative; the reader only knows what Shroud knows, and her perceptions color everything. You also find yourself wondering just how she got the way she is. And you're not disappointed—the author makes good on the promise of filling in the gaps as the story progresses.

The language took some getting used to. I don't mean that in a bad way; it's nothing like as hard as A Clockwork Orange, and there is a glossary of terms at the back if you get bogged down, but most of it is intuitive once you get into the story. I only had to reference the glossary three times before I got "into" the lingo and the pace and the style of narration and it didn't slow me down after that. But there is that initial few pages where you find yourself thinking, "What? Ice? Penguin? OSDeck? Gestalt? What the Hell is he talking about?" But that's on purpose, I believe. The literary equivalent of jumping into the deep end of a cool swimming pool on a hot, summer day. Might as well get it over with; the sooner you immerse yourself in it, the faster you'll acclimatize. In a strange way, it also helps you sympathize with the feelings the character is experiencing at the same time.

The style of the language is another thing that I rather enjoyed. I thought it was a good approximation of what it's like to be in someone's head, listening to them interact with the world around them. Short, choppy sentences. Half-finished thoughts. Arguments with her inner self. Shut up! Why should I? Random passages from literary works interspersed with her subconscious repeating things others have said to her that resonated. I'm not doing a very good job of describing it; I'm making it sound messy, and it's not. It's very easy to follow because it's sort of how my own mind works. YMMV. :)

So I guess what I'm saying is that I highly recommend the book. I enjoyed it, and it makes me want to re-try the cyberpunk genre. It can be done well. And the cover art is magnificent. :)

Oh, and I should mention one, last thing. The author? Yeah, that'd be our very own Happy-Hacker from TinyTIM. :)

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: Work
Current Music: people typing

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Ha-HA! Finally! I think I can coin a word. :)

Monday, July 2nd, 2007 10:33 am

No hits whatsoever on Google. So there.

Grammar Nazi seems so...negative. And

tbons won't let me use Grammar Ninja without going "NOT ZEE" over and over. Plus, ninjas are stealthy, and I'm...well, not. :)

So, I coin this new word <insert fanfare here> for describing myself and others like me who are curmudgeons about grammar, but don't like the negative connotations of "Grammar Nazi."

I give you: grammudgeon

I expect a $.0001 royalty every time it's used.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Location: Work
Current Music: (mindtrack) Rammstein - Du Hast

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geek,
language

Three Interesting Things and a bizarre question

Friday, April 6th, 2007 01:54 am

Wildly different subjects.

Spiders: Ew!

I had a burned out porch light bulb, so I decided to replace it with one of those nifty fluorescent bulbs that doesn't burn out every time you turn around. When I reached in to get the burned-out bulb, I reached through the sticky tendrils of a spider web. Moreover, I could see said spider skittering around. But I toughed it out and didn't completely lose it. I managed to get the bulb changed! Triumph!

We won't dwell on how long I washed my hands up to the elbow afterwards.

Home for Sale?

You know I recently had the siding replaced on my house and the entire thing repainted. Well, the contractor put up a sign in the front yard saying that the house was sided with Hardiplank and that the work had been done by his company, and gave his phone number.

He told me today during the final walk-through (yay!) that he had, in fact, gotten two phone calls generated by the sign.

Both from people who thought the sign was a realty sign and who wanted to know more about the house. Like, to buy the house.

My house.

This house.

The one I've called an albatross at least once. I won't say I haven't thought about it. A lot. And I won't say I'm not thinking about it even as I type this. A lot. But I won't say it's a strong thought, either. Because it's not. Not really strong, anyway. A lot.

MySpace: Feh

I now have a MySpace account. Not because I want one, or because I'm just dying to have 300 pedophiles posing as 13-year-old girls immediately try to friend me. No, this is in retaliation.

Today, I started getting MySpace Spam again, and I went to the site to find that for the fifth time, someone has signed up to MySpace using my email. In spite of what MySpace may tell you, they don't give a flying fuck about privacy. They will take any email you give them when you sign up and instantly start spamming it. I got several friend requests. So this time instead of just deleting the damned thing, I decided it was time to do what I should have done the second time it happened: I requested the password and took over the account. It had been ostensibly set up by someone calling "her"self NatalieBaby who was ostensibly a 23-year-old Leo ostensibly from Oklahoma. Ostensibly. I changed the account name, password, and privacy settings, then deleted all her little friends, messages, groups, music, likes, dislikes, notes, blog entries, etc. All gone. Buh-bye! Thank you for flying IDon'tGiveAFlyingFuck Airlines! Don't come again! Buh-bye!

I turned off every possible way that MySpace gives you of contacting me or having the site spam me on behalf of someone else.

Now it just remains to be seen exactly what way MySpace will find to circumvent their own "privacy policy" and incessantly spam me.

If you hate someone, by the way, sign them up for MySpace, then go on and give their account a provocative name and make them a young woman who uses lots of exclamation points and no other punctuation!!!!!! People will flock to "their" page and inundate them with requests to befriend them. Make sure you let anyone IM them (give MySpace their IM name), text-message them (MySpace happily takes whatever phone number it's given), and friend them (especially including movies, bands, fictional characters, and groups), and have MySpace send them all the spam it can generate.

The Question

Let's say I'm a crew member of the USS Enterprise/Voyager/Defiant/DS9/Whatever and that my five-year mission is to figure out just how the hell the holodeck does whatever it is that it does. :)

<geek>Let's say that the holodeck is, at most, 60 feet square. Why that arbitrary number? I pulled it out of my ass, that's why. :) So, let's say you've got Worf and Dax trying to kill each other in their "calisthenics" program. As long as they never get more than 60 feet from each other, nothing untoward happens, right? Or Geordi and Leah Brahms gettin' all up in each other's personal stable subspace field-bubbles. Either way, they're within 60 feet of each other. But what if, say, Cisco and the gang want to play baseball? Or Worf and Data beam up a couple of hundred colonists into simulated caves? Or if Data, Dr. Pulaski, and Geordi want to roam independently all over 19th-century London trying to solve a fake murder?

At some point, people are going to get far enough away from one another that it won't be possible for them to physically be in the same room, spatially. So what does the holodeck do? Make some of them think they're far away, when in fact they're close by? Beam one of them into computer memory, in effect turning them into a sentient computer program that can still have subjective experiences in real-time that interact with solid people who aren't dissolved into data? Does it shrink them all down so that no matter what they've programmed, they still actually fit in the room? Does it form a pocket universe of sufficient size and beam them all into it?

Stuff like this always bugs the hell out of me. If you take all the holodeck episodes of all the shows and combine them, you get one big mass of inconsistencies and not a single shred of explanation of the real problems that a technology like that would have to solve in order to be viable. I submit that any technology capable of doing that would, in fact, be a sentient form of life or perhaps a god, for all intents and purposes. Not the the intrepid crew(s) hasn't met their share of those. Q, anyone?</geek>

Yeah. I know. But it had to be asked. Why? Um...<flogs brain> I got nuthin'. :)

Be sure to tune in next time when I'll try to answer just how Geordi's face-barrette can detect a baryon particle flux caused by a hyperbolically fluctuating, unstable subspace continuum using interphase radiation, but he can't detect a plasma fire ten feet away inside a bulkhead that must be emitting infrared like crazy-go-nuts. Hell, you could feel the infrared, you wouldn't have to see it with a face-barrette.

But I digress. I gotta save something for next time.

Current Mood: various :)
Current Location: The Chair *Evil Chord*
Current Music: nothing, for a change

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WonderKaa Superpowers: Activate!

Friday, February 9th, 2007 09:38 am

Quite some time ago, I broke the most sacred rule of superheroes and revealed to you, my LJ friends, that I am not merely mild-mannered computer programmer Kaa, but that I had a number of superpowers, as well.

Dubious superpowers, certainly. But superpowers, nonetheless.

Last night I not only revealed my awesome, stunning power of KaZOT at its worst, but outed one of my best friends' superpowers, as well. A two-in-one shot, you might say.

You know (because I've told you, and clearly you all read and memorize every sacred word that I choose to type) that I have been playing around with BroadVoice VOIP phone service. The company sent me a "phone router" that (ostensibly) sits between my cablemodem and my existing router. They sent diagrams showing how to hook it up, and yea verily, it wert simple.

I followed those diagrams to the letter...and nothing happened. I couldn't get my existing router to see the Internet, no matter how many times I rebooted everything. So I called BroadVoice. The young man with whom I spoke listened to my tale of woe and advised me to...do exactly what I had already done. But, hey. I'm nothing if not accommodating, so I did it all again while he was on the phone (Cell phone; if I rebooted the phone router while on the phone...I leave the rest of that sentence as an exercise.). Nada. He said, "I don't know why it isn't working. Most routers connect with no problem whatsoever." He then advised me to try hooking it up the other way: cablemodem to existing router to phone router. We hung up.

I tried that. Nada. So, to lay the problem out before you: I can have either Internet for one hard-wired computer and BroadVoice, or no BroadVoice, but Internet through my existing wireless router. Neither of these is optimal. I want it all: phones, internet, wireless.

I have this friend named Phil. Phil is the one with the superpower I mention above. He has the ability to lay his hands on electronics and make it work. It's the polar opposite of my own power of KaZOT. You might say that I'm the supervillain to his superhero. Unlike most supervillains, however, my power is not equal to his. And this is a good thing.

He questioned me at length about the setup (he pooh-poohed my choice of wireless router, citing anecdotal evidence that D-Link is shit) and determined that I needed a crossover ethernet cable rather than the straight-through ones that I had.

Okay, fine. I went to Fry's *Mecca chord* and purchased said cable (actually, I went twice, because the first time I accidentally picked up the wrong cable, which had the wrong type of connectors on the ends, but that's beside the point). I brought it home.

With great, surging hope, I unplugged everything, hooked it all up as per the diagram, and turned everything back on in the proper sequence.

Nada. The WAN light remained dark and unblinking. Mocking me.

So I called Phil again. He said he would--and I quote--"come over and scare it into working." (He is quite aware of our polar opposite powers, as we have been friends for coming up on 17 years, and he's been coworker and/or boss for about 9 of those.)

Last night, Phil came over. We went up to my office, and I showed him the setup. I had reconnected the computer directly to the phone modem so I could have Internet and phones, but no wireless.

Phil proceeded to unhook it all and set it up exactly as was indicated in the diagram. Anyone else, I would have said, "I tried that; it didn't work." Anyone else, I would have said, "You're wasting your time."

He plugged the crossover cable into the WAN port of my existing (D-Link) wireless router. The WAN light immediately came on and started blinking merrily. Mocking me.

"I tried that!" I wailed. "I had it hooked up exactly that way! And it did. Not. Work!" Phil is used to this from me, and all it elicited was a knowing smile. He said he believed me (Did I mention 17 years?) to the point that he brought Cat-5 cable, crimpers, and even a spare router with him.

I tested everything, and it worked fine. We talked for a while, and he left.

I'll bet it wasn't 20 minutes after he left that--and I'm only guessing this is what happened--his ambiance faded from the house. The power he so easily exudes was overpowered by the weaker, but more insidious influence of KaZOT.

It stopped working. Cold. The WAN light was back to a steadfast darkness. Mocking me.

I rebooted everything in proper sequence. Nada.

I recable. Nada. Again. Nada. In my frustration, I did the only thing left for me to do: I very firmly went to bed.

This morning when I awoke to the melodious strains of NPR, I rewired again, hooking my computer directly to the phone router so I'd have at least one computer on the Internet. I IM'd Phil. Following is a lightly edited transcript of that conversation:

me: Guess what I'm about to tell you. :)
Phil: It quit working.
me: Right after you left. No joke.
Phil: I'll rent you a cardboard cutout :)
me: It's more tempting than you think. :)
Phil: What lights were on?
me: Everything was fine...except it stopped recognizing the WAN.
me: To make sure the WAN port hadn't blown cookies, I plugged the cable modem directly into it. Worked fine.
me: Rebooted everything. Still nada.
Phil: What sequence did you boot them?
me: I'm not sure whether this proves your divinity or my ability to, as Geoff [craftsman] would put it, "fuck up an anvil." :)
me: I unplugged the cable modem, the wireless router and the phone router, then plugged them back in in the same order.
Phil: Do the cable modem, then the phone router, and then the wireless router. That will start them in dependent order.
me: That's actually what I meant, but I'll try again in case I did lose my head in the heat of battle.
Phil: If that fails, leave them off for 5 minutes before starting them
<insert five minutes of hold music here>
me: Nothing.
[Lengthy conversation involving what kind of router to get that would be better than the D-Link model I have now.]
me: Good enough. Thanks for the help. If nothing else we've proven your power over electronics and/or my ... whatever the opposite of your power is. ;)
me: It's my superpower.
me: I should cultivate it.
Phil: Or at least learn to control it :)
me: True.

So, there you have it. Strong evidence for the existence of my superpower, Phil's superpower, or perhaps both.

Clearly, I have but one option, at this point: Shave my head and trim my beard into a goatee. If I'm going to be a supervillain, Goddammit, I should at least look like one. I already have the white, fluffy cat. All I need beyond that is a British, German or Russian (but not Belgian) accent; woefully simple plans for world-domination; ineffective henchpeople who can't follow the simplest instructions; Rube Goldberg-esque machines designed to kill my opponents spectacularly slowly; and a volcanic island lair. I have always wanted a volcanic island lair.

<goes off to check supervillainrealty.com for available volcanic lair property>
<goes off to careerbuilder.com to post an ad for 'clueless henchperson'>
<goes off to illtemperedmutatedseabass.com to see if they have some that have frickin' "LASER"s on their heads>
<goes off to rubegoldbergareus.com to see the latest in ineffective, tortuously slow methods of killing one's enemies>
<goes off to villainousaccents.com to hire a dialect coach>
<plugs in beard trimmer to charge>

Current Mood: amused / frustrated / resigned
Current Location: Work
Current Music: (mindtrack) Baltimora - Tarzan Boy

Tags:

Snake! On a Plane!

Friday, May 26th, 2006 11:20 am

[Friends-locked for soon-to-become-obvious reasons.] [Revoked after it became unnecessary.]

I've been waiting for more than a month to make this post, and to use that userpic. The best humor is a long time in the making.

I'll be flying from Atlanta to Boston, this afternoon, where I will be met by

ian_smith and

ddreslough, and then we'll all have dinner, then head back to where they live in Connecticut. I will be spending the holiday weekend (Memorial Day, for those not in the US or simply out of the loop) with those two and

ddreslough's husband

invisible_mouth and their daughter. And various cats, chickens, and other livestock. :)

I'll be non-posty during that time, probably. And unless the muse (Thalia, probably) moves me, this will be the last post for today. Perhaps one of them will post about my visit while I'm actually up there. And hopefully, it will not start with, "Ugh! I can't believe what a bastard that Kaa is!" :)

But you have to admit, I couldn't--simply could not--pass up a chance to use this userpic.

I'm sure that, by the time I'm back Monday evening, I will more than happily paraphrase Samuel L. Jackson's pre-famous line, "I've had it with this motherfuckin' snake on these motherfuckin' planes!" :) I dislike the experience of flying. I don't mind the flying itself. It's all the shit that comes with it that I hate. The endless hours of waiting. The cramped seating. The noisy kid that somehow always ends up seated right behind or in front of me. The ear problems. The useless little snacks.

Oh, and I decided to get myself a little belated birthday gift, last night, to help alleviate some of the boredom that also comes with flying. Went to Fry's on the way home from work. I've got it loaded with five audiobooks and about 5 days' worth of music. I even own most of it. :) Now I'm one of you. You may commence with the gloating. *sigh* Go ahead, I know you want to. A snake can only resist temptation for so long. [Made a funny, I did!]

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Billy Joel - And So It Goes

Tags:

Prose and Kaa

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The Leather!

Proclamation From Your (Future) Overlord, Part 2

Proclamation From Your (Future) Overlord

It's So...Shiny! (O.O)

Bilingualism

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This Is How My Brain Works

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In Which I Expound Upon the Subject of "Why Kaa?"

The Fuel Crisis: A Solution

I Simply Had to Share

A Quick Book Review (No Spoilers)

Ha-HA! Finally! I think I can coin a word. :)

Three Interesting Things and a bizarre question

Spiders: Ew!

Home for Sale?

MySpace: Feh

The Question

WonderKaa Superpowers: Activate!

Snake! On a Plane!