Plaidophile

If you're using phpbb_integrate, it's definitely time to upgrade. (Also, if you're still getting BBCode errors, it's time to reread the original thread.)

Here's a hint to telemarketing agencies: Trying to sell things to English speakers works better if you hire people who can actually articulate in English.

I just got a spam to my Earthlink DSL email address. Which is funny because I have never, ever, ever used that address for anything but correspondence with Earthlink, and so far as I know it's never been listed anywhere on the Internet.

So, is Earthlink selling addresses to spammers (maybe as part of trying to sell their spam-prevention "service"), or did they mess up and accidentally list all registered usernames somewhere?

Yes! IT runs under DOSBox!

Last night I had a great interview with LANL. Right now I'm waiting for my IBM one..

So here I am, at the annual job fair my university has, which I only found out about last night.

Convenient.

So I was just talking to Steve at PSL. It turns out that the position he was going to post "ended up getting turned into a student position."

Well, gee, thanks for telling me this LAST WEEK when I could have still registered as a STUDENT!

OH WAIT YOU DIDN'T!

Guess who's finally back!

Ugh. I totally need to just rework the templates and CSS for this weblog from scratch. This was my first CSS layout, and it was based on rather hacky crap from the default MovableType templates. Add in the totally non-semantic markup that phpBB throws in and it's just a real mess right now.

I really should be working on a paid webdesign project, though, but that requires parsing through (and totally rewriting) the exceedingly-rambly stuff which the client sent to me as "content."

Fwee.

Classified ads are a great way to lose a lot of sleep.

So far I have sold a good amount of the stuff I'm trying to sell. But there is much more to go.

Jesus God this fight is huge.

Anyway. Listen to mine and vote for whoever's you like the best.

Look ma! I'm on CNN!

(HTML Generated by Mixmaster.)

This time in OS X itself...

From an article about a kid named Mike Rowe being sued by Microsoft for his webdesign business' name being infringing: (emphasis mine)

Rowe registered the name in August. In November, he received a letter from Microsoft's Canadian lawyers, Smart & Biggar, informing him he was committing copyright infringement.

I just found that vaguely amusing.

Bryan Baker (who, as you may recall, was the recipient of a CoverFight butchering) decided to have a friendly competition for remixing his song His Skin Disguise. He posted a bunch of loops and told people to remix them in interesting ways.

Most people just made something which sounded like the original song.

Not me.

We know you're proud, but do you really need to go around waving your caulk at everyone?

The discussion was ambivalent.

goatse.cx seems to have its registration suspended. Odd.

You don't have to visit goatse.cx to see this, either; check nic.cx's information about it.

Goodnight laptop

Goodnight whiteboard

Goodnight officemates

Don't worry, most of my weblog is just the bog-standard boring weblog crap. Sad to say, the entry which was linked to was an anomaly.

The living room is done, and I've started on the kitchen.

The living room now actually feels like a place I'd like to be. It makes me feel bad for not getting around to doing these things until just now.

Also, I have discovered that painter's caulk is, bar none, the most useful thing to have when it comes to interior decoration. (I've gone through three full-sized tubes so far...)

D-Link is actually quite impressive with their old product support; the DI-604 which I bought (as a backup measure) over a year ago (when it was already being phased out) is still getting firmware updates.

Since I never got around to selling it, I decided to play around witih the latest firmware to see if it can decently replace a dedicated Linux system just yet. (Verdict: Almost, definitely for most people, but not quite for me.)

Two things:

1. I have now finished painting my living room, and am getting things back into some semblance of order. The plain white walls look so totally different than the old brown paneling (much brighter and nicer though), and I definitely should get my artwork hung up again to break up the monotony. (The new brass curtain rod and old red curtains only do so much... And red really doesn't work with white. If I felt like spending money on new curtains I'd get purple.)
2. At the store today, I noticed that M&Ms are currently in monochrome. It looks extremely cool (but I have a bit of a monochrome fetish — the complete absence of colors and shades is just as sexy, if not moreso, than unnaturally hyper-colored things). It also made me think of the Oliver Sachs writeup in An Anthropoligist on Mars about the guy who could only see in stark black and white after an auto accident, and how the only way he could adjust was by surrounding himself by things which he knew to be stark black and white (particularly for food).

I just went back and found most of my ancient Solace development diary (starting in December 1999, which I accidentally nuked in late 2002) on archive.org.

I could probably import the various old entries into a new MovableType weblog for it, huh? This will probably be part of me opensourcing Solace.

MT is probably a pretty good platform for it.

Jobby things, renovation things. Maybe someday I'll have interesting things to talk about again, but in the meantime, I don't.

Remember Apple's classic "1984" ad? Well, for the 20th anniversary, Apple is showing it again, only with one little addition...

Jobs JUST ANNOUNCED IT. It's neat.

Not a really good deal though. 4GB (unlike the rumored 2GB), but $250. The new low-end hard drive one is 15GB for $300. Though the iPod Mini is also teeeeeny tiny. But I think the normal iPod is still small enough. :)

Hm, and the dock costs extra. Meh.

It does also come in colors, but none of them are purple. So, when I have money for an iPod I'll just buy the 15GB and paint it myself. :)

Every few months I embark on a quest. A quest to determine whether there's anywhere that my furnace can possibly accept an air filter. A quest to make it so that my smoke alarm doesn't go off every time my furnace turns on after not being used in a week or so, or whenever there's dust in my house due to, say, sanding the walls (which I'm done with, by the way, and I've gotten all of the stuff I need to prime them and so on tomorrow).

The day before yesterday I posted a preliminary yard-sale listing of items to sell on my cs.nmsu website, the intent being that it would be for local people (and anything I can't sell I'd then go through the hassle of listing on eBay and dealing with shipping and so on). This included my ghetto projection system.

Now I'm getting people emailing and even calling me (ostensibly getting the number from my resume) from all over regarding this system and whether it's still available for shipping.

Hopefully the note I just added to the top will dissuade people from trying to contact me about it.

Spent the last 7 hours sanding the wood paneling in my livingroom so I can paint it so I can get more money for it when I sell it. Now I'm totally sore all over. I also took a shower to get all the sawdust off and I blew my nose and the snot was all gray, because I'm bad about wearing a respirator. Yay me!

As it turns out, the effort to hold a belt sander up is almost as much as it is to just do it manually.

When everything has coalesced into a whole bunch of black holes, will the universe be at a standstill?

Consider that black holes, due to various quantum-level effects, still shed their mass as Hawking radiation. This mass would then be taken up by other black holes, and would (theoretically) then be shed back out, ad infinitum.

Seems like it'd be a lot like neurons communicating.

(BTW, I'm back in Las Cruces now. Though it seems that my time left here will be refreshingly brief.)