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Archive for November 2001 Airline industry: Oh no. American tragedy! People stopped flying!! Help, government, help!! Uncle Sam: Here is money. Do your part. Airline industry: Uh oh! Retrograde memory loss kicking in... look! Money in bank! Policies must be successful! Status quo! But, need to look busy. Hassle Arabs, "search" butts of female flight crews and passengers! Random baggage checks when inspector looking! Look at pretty money. Why you no fly? http://www.ucomics.com/paulconrad/viewtmpco.cfm?uc_full_date=20011128&uc_comic=tmpco&uc_daction=X Thanks, chief! Am I supposed to stick it to my fridge or something? In all fairness, he did a recent one where Osama Bin Laden and Dick Cheney discover their hiding places are one and the same, and I thought that one was okay. http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-112901kids.story?coll=la%2Dhome%2Dtodays%2Dtimes Saturday morning NBC and Fox Kids are throwing in the towel and leasing their time slots to shows kids will want to watch. Oh come on, guys, you need to give your programming a little more time! Programming like: NBC: Hang Time: Live-action high school basketball team. Written by a machine. California Dreams: Live-action high school rock band. Written by a machine. Saved By The Bell, Year 11: Live-action high school hijinx. Written by a simple machine, perhaps a lever or pulley. FOX: The Magician: A future magician saves Magic City from monsters. NOT KIDDING. Digimon: Alternate universe Pokemon. Even Pokemon had stories about friendship and commitment and love while peddling their wares. This show features characters walking, spotting a monster, and then stats come up on screen. Repeat every two minutes. Show Involving Ghosts Or Haunted Houses, Often Needlessly: Casper, BeetleBorgs, Toonsylvania, Goosebumps... at one point Fox Kids programming was almost entirely ghost-related. DON'T GIVE UP!!! http://www.azcentral.com/offbeat/articles/1127creed27-ON.html Creed's here-and-there lyrics about life's ability to change in an instant and people losing their way make their lyrics incredibly prescient in the light of the September 11 attacks. Never before have these concepts been touched on by songs... except all the damn time. Goodbye to you, Zejan, my friend We've known each other Since we were in the pen Together we climbed hills and trees Learned assault and battery Skinned our hearts and skinned our knees http://www.ucomics.com/paulconrad/viewtmpco.cfm?uc_full_date=20011125&uc_comic=tmpco&uc_daction=X Conrad is actually a huge regular expression used for pattern matching. Hardcore Checkerboard Nightmarites will remember the mindless, statically-benevolent god-fetus The Unraveled from a recent storyline. I have a new betta, who I've also named The Unraveled, on account of what he did to his poor fins last night. They should heal, but I don't know to what extent. His ventral fin was split in two at the pet store, and now it's in at least eight strands. We'll see what happens. He's up on the MothCam today. I also see that all these fish have different personalities. Unraveled was pretty active, and I also see he's very skittish. Maybe that'll change. I forget if I mentioned it here, but one of Melissa's fish acts just like a dog. http://www.cnn.com/2001/SHOWBIZ/TV/11/19/gen.television.mtv.reut/index.html Afghani: I hate the Taliban, so the U.S. is helping, but aren't they the devil? U.S.: No, we're not! Afghani: Is this food for me? I guess you guys aren't all bad... U.S.: Nope! Now, watch THIS! Jackass, Christina Aguilera videos, Tom Green, Andy Dick, Undressed, sex "documentaries..." Afghani: .... *ding!* Reprogrammed! Is that Green Day?? Rock!! It may seem like I'm singling out poor Untitled.gif, Exploding Dog, and Boy on a Stick and Slither. The current CN storyline seems to condemn them as being unfunny. The truth is, I like a lot of Untitled.gif (particularly the 100th comic "storyline"),I found Exploding Dog intriguing like half-remembered dreams, and BoaSaS is odd in the same way. The lattermost is a little dry for my tastes, but it's okay. Pokey the Penguin is also great a lot of the time. I can tell the good from the bad, or at least the ones I like from those I don't. It's the difference between throwing nonsense up there because it's nonsense, and inspired lunacy. Just because it's non sequitur doesn't mean it's going to be good. These comics are like the most bizarre Space Ghost episodes. They can either be very funny or interesting in an indescribable way, or they can be terrible and boring. I don't believe in non sequitur humor for its own sake. I'm no good at it. But it does work on occasion. Chex is learning the hard way that he doesn't understand how these comics work, so he's trying to combine what he knows (old Vaudeville punchline-driven humor) with this comic frontier. As always, interpret the storyline as you will (do those comics suck? a lot of people will unequivocably say "yes," my brother included, who may have a better developed sense of humor than even me), but this is my personal stance. By the way, the Welchie MP3 at Untitled.gif is stuck in my head. Leonard and I had a joke once, saying it wouldn't take much to be a political cartoonist, since all you'd need was one single-panel cartoon with something going on whose symbolism was so broad, it could be interpreted to be any current event. I believe our panel was Michigan J. Frog "knocking on the door to Vaudeville." The frog could be a country, a politician, "freedom;" same for the door. I seem to recall something about him holding a book of matches. Anyway, Paul Conrad is such a cartoonist. A lot of the time I don't know what the hell his cartoons are trying to tell me. And it's not because it's riddled with asides and witticisms -- it's generally stuff like the Democratic Donkey looking at the globe, with the caption "Tax reform?" It could mean ANYTHING. Plus, I've noticed that his cartoons since September 11th -- not that they weren't like this before the 11th -- all seem so pale and generic that they're the kinds of cartoons I'd expect to see the day after a shocking event. The WTC goes down, and Liberty is crying. Paul Conrad has brought us some variation of "Liberty crying" for the last two months. A plane labelled "terrorism" flies towards the earth. Two Earths: one untouched, one pierced by an arrow, with the caption "Has Everything Really Changed?" Two separate comics have anthrax dust and the captions "Osama bin Anthrax" and "Anthrax bin Laden." Hey, I got one: "Osama Anthrax Laden." Or maybe "Osanthrax Bin Lanthraxaden." How about a picture of John Ashcroft holding a mailbag and the caption "John Anthraxcroft?" How about one where Rush Limbaugh has dust coming out of his ears with the caption "Rush Anthrax?" My God, I could do a few dozen of these a day! Kofi Annanthrax! War Anthrax Peace! The band Anthrax, the work's been done on that one already! He could just paste a photo of Anthrax from their press kit into his comic and caption it "The World?" How about the WTC made of anthrax dust, and a plane flying at it labelled "perception" ? The caption could be "E pluribus unum!" It doesn't bug me that much, it's just funnier when the rant is really outlandish. I don't have to tell you that. Plus I'm at work right now, waiting for things to compile, and it's about 90 degrees in the building. I think the consensus is that my fish is what we in the pet-killing business call a "dier." I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. Bettas are cool fish, but maybe some less temperature dependent ones are in order. Like a school of little shiny fish. Io November 15, 2001 - November 16, 2001 I came home to find he had died. Of? Of?? Thanks a lot, fate. I had come home with a bigger tank and some plants too. I HATE PET OWNERSHIP. I will get another betta tomorrow and hopefully "do a better job," whatever that means. What did I do wrong?? *cries* All fish should be built like the betta. Unless mine dies quickly, of course. I got him last night, and have decided to name him Io. (Io, the moon, looks like a pizza. Maybe you could have pizza with your family tonight, and think about Io's volcanic surface.) Io is pure red, the reddest betta I could find. Because they're used to living in really crappy water, they have an organ which lets them intake oxygen from the air. They grab a bubble, and run it through their gills. Apparently, not only can they do this, but they need to... they don't get enough oxygen from water alone. The MothCam(tm) is trained on Io today, and here are some better pictures: http://www.nightlightpress.com/airsick/fish.jpg http://www.nightlightpress.com/airsick/fish2.jpg I want to buy a fish tank, a small one. Melissa has a pet fighting fish... I like the fighting fish, but there's so many kinds I want something different. So at lunch today I stopped at a pet store and looked at their fish. I saw the prettiest fish there... these transparent fish with a bright stripe on their dorsal surface and a thread of the same color on the ventral side. Otherwise transparent. There were blue, red, purple... I was astounded. I looked up the "painted glass fish" to find that these fish are artificially colored via a torturous acid-bath method, and often don't live more than a month as a result. You sick bastards! http://www.azcentral.com/offbeat/articles/1114LIFESTYLE-LIFE-CAMPUSMENTIS-DC.html I nearly died when I read the line about Hitler's fate. I did a few searches on Google to find names of my classmates, friends from grade school, high school. I'm surprised at how few things I've been able to come up with. The most I've been able to get is student names that show up on undergrad project presentation sites. No personal websites, nothing. Was I the only one? Where are you people? My speed dropped again -- I got lucky that one time. =( But after talking with the helpful folks at dslreports.com's forums, I find that there's nothing more I can do to improve my speed on www.fileplanet.com. I do get 120KB/s elsewhere. They said one thing you can't control is the number of hops between the modem and the server. I must have a bad one somewhere... anyway, I'm going to not worry about it. I'll just wait for Earthlink to decide something needs changing on their end without my prompting and wreck everything. On an unrelated note, Stephen Notley of Bob the Angry Flower wrote me back about my homage last Friday! Whee! Thanks to tweaks at www.dslreports.com, I've managed to get my DSL more or less up to speed. I can consistently get 140kbps off of www.fileplanet.com, whereas with dial-up I could only get 3kbps. That's over two times faster than I had before the tweaking (~60kbps). I still think fast DSL as advertised is a crapshoot. The safe money's on know-nothing, dodgy tech support. From my dad: ===== Just thought you'd like to know: a new algorithm that utilizes mega-parallel computing and a breakthrough in the Fast Fourier transform has enabled a 7.4% rendering increase in Closet World Man (CMA) animation. A somewhat lesser increase in resolution has also been achieved for the CMA standard model, which currently resides on a modified TI-100 architecture. Dr. James Blinn of JPL/CalTech has declared the advance as "unprecedented," and has announced his early retirement. ===== Related link. Sadly, the page has no information about the stupid 3D dancing man animation on the Closet World commercials. I do dare. With my increased connection speed, I can finally This is very strange. 1) I tend to get disconnected after about 10 minutes of use. Rather, the modem hangs, and I have to reconnect. I should try downloading a huge file and see if it cuts me off in the middle, or if it has some strange inactivity criteria. 2) All the online speed tests I can find say my connection speed is godlike. It's fast, but which is correct? I FINALLY, FINALLY got my DSL install kit yesterday. More than two weeks late. Installing the ethernet card was completely ridiculous, since Windows asks for its install CD for each file, and refuses to search outside of the directory you specify. This is really, really cheap copy protection. It's like saying a game has great, challenging AI, and all they did was crank up the damage each shot does to you. Moreover, the Windows 98 Upgrade CD I had didn't contain the drivers. Kurt had them, Melissa had them, her mom had them, but my installation didn't. Why? Who knows. Melissa helped me do everything. She is responsible for me not throwing my machine off the balcony. (Her and my apartment contract.) Ultimately, no thanks to Earthlink's "I won't tell you what I'm doing" software, the whole task took five hours. The good news is, I have DSL. The bad news is, it's twice as slow as Melissa's, who uses Pac Bell DSL. We live in the same building, all the wires are coming out of the same box. I should be getting around 100-150KB/s, and I'm getting an average of 65. Better still, I wasn't able to even connect for a while after it started working. Sometimes the connection just hangs. Plus, the Pac Bell modem was just USB -- you stick it in the back of your computer. I wrote them a letter without my usual "gosh, if you please could do this, it'd be so great, thanks so much for all your help, etc." I'll stay with Earthlink ONLY if: 1) They get my speed up to where it should be. 2) Well, that's actually the only conceivable reason I'd stay with them. Their tech support seems prompt, but what the hell good is promptness when they tell you they've done something and they haven't done it? That's the only way Earthlink can redeem itself in my eyes. Otherwise, I'm going to switch my account to Pac Bell. For your DSL needs, however, I suggest you be careful before settling on Earthlink. It's been nothing but a colossal pain in the ass for me so far. Recently, I complained to Earthlink about not getting my DSL modem. They replied last Thursday, saying it'd be posted immediately. Given that, I estimate it'll be here tomorrow. So, here are my predictions. 1) Tomorrow, my DSL package will not come (I paid for second-day delivery, and it's been two weeks. The line has been activated for a week and a half). 2) I will complain to the Earthlink people, this time asking that they ship my package overnight for free, or if there's a place I can buy this package with my own two hands and put it into my car and drive it to my house. 3) I will end up threatening them by saying "Pacbell DSL sounds good, I bet they provide DSL service." I have half a mind to pre-emptively e-mail Earthlink and say my package didn't get here yet. But I'll give them one more day, then I'll ask them if there's a charge for cancellation. Since I'm sure there is, I can then argue with them how I'm not going to pay for the amount of time I've had DSL and not been able to use it since Earthlink apparently doesn't know where the post office is. Can I sell my soul for my soul? What would happen? I suppose Satan could then take it and run off with it. What if I demand to have my soul first, then give him my soul? Hmmm. Why do I have to sell my whole soul? Can I get lesser things with bits of my soul? This whole soul-buying thing is pretty poorly planned on Satan's part. http://money.cnn.com/2001/11/01/technology/microsoft/ Software giant Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Justice have reportedly struck a deal to the satisfaction of both parties involved in the landmark antitrust lawsuit. In the agreement, Microsoft promises that it will make no changes to its policies, in exchange for the DOJ's indifference in the future. There was a slight hiccup in the bargaining process, as disagreement came when Microsoft wanted to have the DOJ become its "b!+@#," while the DOJ preferred to be Microsoft's "puppet." Both settled on "lapdog." |
