Plaidophile

Outlook: GOOD

It's free as in speech!

who is the fluffiest of them all?

According to Google:

Extra "o"s in the word "moo"	hits
0	1720000
1	25700
2	15700
3	11300
4	5810
5	4510
6	3100
7	2330
8	1530
9	1120
10	1210
11	765
12	552

Total game time: about 7 hours.

Ending: Beautiful.

My dad's reaction: Obnoxious.

The director of music programming at TruSonic replied to my letter, amazingly enough (and fairly quickly, too), and totally satisfied my concerns and even updated the FAQ in response.

(Well okay it was actually hanukkah but okay.)

Presents!

Just killing time before going to bed...

Driving to Albuquerque tomorrow for a variety of reasons. Coming back the second of January or so.

Question of the moment: How many pears could a paring pair pare if the paring pair pared paired pears?

Last night I discovered Ouch Those Monkeys from somesongs.

This is definitely the coolest stuff I've heard in a long time, and there's lots of it.

Hi. Now and then on IRC and MUCKs I have provided a link to a song or two on my collection at home, on which I only have 128kbps of upstream, for the purpose of people downloading just one or two things.

For the last few days my connection has been sucking, and only now did it dawn on me to check to see if it was because my upstream was getting saturated for some reason. As it turns out, SOMEBODY seems to have spread one of those links, because for the last few days my connection has been totally SATURATED with hundreds of people leeching, oh, MY WHOLE FUCKING COLLECTION.

I just got a job interview scheduled up in Albuquerque. Yay!

Been sending out resumes willy-nilly, mostly to tech-specialist recruiters.

Today I just got an email from what's left of mp3.com letting me know that although mp3.com is dead, TruSonic (their independent-musician royalty licensing program) is still alive, and invited me to enroll back up. So, I did, and ran into some oddly familiar issues...

Below is the email I just sent to Vivendi's TruSonic division. Maybe someone will actually read it.

12/24/2003 Forgot to mention, they actually responded to me pretty quickly and addressed all of my concerns in my open letter. 'sall good.

New song, for SongFight.

You know what to do.

Without 'real experience' and 'maturity' I can't get a professional full-time job. Without a professional full-time job I can't get 'real experience' or 'maturity.'

Remind me why I bother to get up in the morning and feed myself and so on?

In various Discordian texts (such as the Principia Discordia and the Illuminati Trilogy series of novels), much is made about "fnords," words which are supposedly displayed constantly by agents of the Illuminati but have their existence denied, to the point that everyone supposedly both writes and reads the words without noticing it.

Of course, the Discordian texts are just humorous fiction, a parody of relgion intended to keep people guessing, based on just enough shreds of truth to make people feel uncertain and, hopefully, to question the information they're fed.

However, although it's not quite the same, there are still fnords all around us, little snippets of information where we've been drilled into not knowing them, when really those bits of information never existed to begin with.

Those of you who are struggling to find that unintended thematic content in a work of literature will probably appreciate this thing I wrote quite some time ago for Everything2, rescued from the bowels of archive.org:

Super Mario Brothers: A Literary Criticism

I don't know why I keep responding to these CSR emails.

12/11 11:40 AM AMAZING!!!

It's been a while since I've posted a recipe, so might as well post what I just made for dinner. It's good.

I was getting a fuckton of spammers registering accounts on my forum to just post links to the member list, so I made a few simple forum mods to make it easier to deal with.

Small side-effect is that now all account activations have to be manually approved, but considering I have no life and am always sitting at the computer anyway it doesn't take long.

12/30/2003 Oops, forgot to actually link to the modifications for anyone else who might want to do this stuff too. :)

My Earthlink DSL has been operating great since April, until the last few days when, during peak usage hours, I'll have spurts of connection problems, where I'll have a perfectly good line-level connection but will be unable to get a new IP address.

So of course, I submitted a trouble ticket to Earthlink to let them know about the problem.

Guess what, they think I'm a moron.

12/10 01:20 More wonderful cluefulness.

02:23 Ad nauseum.

12:18 PM Fuck it. Their network can go to hell for all I fucking care. My service commitment ends in April, and then I'll just find another provider, which will probably still just go through the same Covad concentrator anyway, unless Comcast finally has cable Internet by then.

Does anyone notice anything different about the main site layout? No? Good. (I finally got around to switching a lot of crufty visual CSS over to semantic markup, particularly in the #nav div.)

Also, I went and documented phpBB_integrate, and hopefully made it clear that it can be used to integrate things other than MovableType with phpBB as well.

Yep, I was right, VeriChip is extremely weak. Expect to see homebrew stolen ID number transmitters about a week after the tech becomes available.

I just had someone ask a class-related question during the last two minutes of my last office hours session of the semester! FINALLY, after a whole semester of diligently sitting here and waiting for students to come by and ask a question, the whole process of office hours has been totally vindicated!

Of course, it was something Dr. Cook had specifically addressed in an email he sent to the entire class a week ago, but whatever. :)

Dr. Donald Dearholt was a great influence on the department, an inspiration to everyone, and an extremely kind, thoughtful man. I regret never getting around to asking him if he wanted to play music with me, and not making an effort to get to know him better while he was still around. Even though I only knew him in five-minute intervals from casual chats in the hallway, I still consider him a friend.

Guess I should ping the world.