11:14 AM
In my office at work I've got this torchiere light and because I'm lazy I have it hooked up to a wireless power switch. With a flick of the battery-operated switch on my desk the light turns on and off.
This setup has worked well for over a year. Until now.
Yesterday my light started turning on and off all by itself. I thought maybe it was just a fluke, but today the same thing happened around 10AM. Repeatedly.
I am now engaged in a daily battle with an unknown opponent. Someone in this building must have the same type of transmitter, and by chance it also happens to operate on "Channel E". (The channel is not changeable - you'd have to buy a whole new switch that uses a different one.)
When he turns my light off, I turn it back on, which probably turns his off, and we go back and forth for a little while.
Sometimes things will be fine for an hour or two, then the light will go off again and we'll get into a heated battle of flickery switchitude! Or switchery flickitude. Whatever you want to call it, it's ON.
Eventually I got tired of fighting and tried to send him a morse-code SOS. dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot.
I don't think he knew what I was trying to do because he just flicked the hell out of his switch after that.
Then I tried to send him a message in the UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE OF MATH. Unfortunately the Fibonacci sequence was lost on him/her/it because I got nothing back.
I have no idea what to do at this point. I could go around to all of the other building tenants within a 100 foot radius of my desk, angrily waving the switch in the air and be like "DUDES. WTF! Let's be friends."
Or I could just continue this battle and hope the other side gives up.
10:20 AM
According to this supposedly leaked speech from Nintendo, the Wii is going to launch in the US on October 2nd for $175. They're allegedly throwing a ton of peripherals into the box, too... A white or black Wii, a Wii remote, a nun-chuck connector, a classic controller, a sports game, and a voucher of "1000 coins" to buy games online, a-la Xbox Live Arcade.
I'm a little skeptical that this speech is the real deal...It announces a VR head-mounted-display peripheral. WHAT.
Nintendo IS making some kind of announcement on September 14th, so we'll just have to wait and see...
edit: The paper is crumpled in exactly the same spots on each page. Nice work, Photoshop Master!
10:57 AM
This vocoder tutorial celebrates the almighty power of the vocoder!
The tutorial includes before and after mp3s and the results are astounding. What started off as a nerdy-sounding Finnish guy singing mostly off-key has been transformed into a robot singing in perfect pitch in a space-synth extravaganza!
You have to hear it to believe it. It actually makes me want to go out there and start making music.
I lost it on our trip to San Francisco. Tammy and I had just finished up a morning at the Bliss spa. She got a massage and I got my first facial ever.
The facial was nice. Astrud Gilberto and Norah Jones quietly sang to me through a speaker in the ceiling while I lay in a towel-covered lounge chair in a darkened room as as a nice lady rubbed nice-smelling things all over my face. I even had cucumbers on my eyes - the whole bit.
This facial included an arm/hand and leg/foot massage, complete with massage oil! That was super, but it left my fingers and toes in a greasy, slippery state. Somewhere between leaving the locker room that morning and sitting down to lunch that afternoon my ring must have just slipped off.
I've retraced my steps and made all kinds of phone calls. I've been checking the lost and found at Craig's List San Francisco every single day. So far nothing's turned up, and I've pretty much lost all hope.
Today, on my three-year wedding anniversay, I really miss it. :(
I'm 28 and I've never had to wear glasses. In the past two or three months, however, I've noticed that I'm starting to have trouble focusing on my computer screens.
I guess I only realized the problem a few days ago. I was thinking to myself "I used to be able to read that text without squinting, and now I can't. Wait a...OH GOD MY EYES"
That realization scared the hell out of me, and I knew I had to take action! Desparate times call for desparate measures, so that night I went to the grocery store and immediately put myself on an all-carrot, all-the-time diet.
I had hoped that this would shock my system with enough Vitamin A to snap my eyes back into their awesomely perfect state toute suite.
Unfortunately after a day and a half of eating nothing but carrots, my body fought back with some hardcore diarrhea. See what happens when you try to do a good thing for your body? I guess I put my colon on fiber overload. Sorry, colon.
Anyway I did some research and found that carrots are *a* good source of Vitamin A, but probably not the best source for a significant amount of it. So I quit my diet right then and there.
Yesterday I switched to taking Vitamin A supplements. 8000 I.U. per day is 5000 more than what the government recommends, so I am expecting RESULTS. The tolerable upper intake level for a human being is acutally 10,000 IU per day...any more than that and it's HELLO CANCER! Or osteoperosis. Or a host of other equally scary medical problems.
Like you, I always assumed that poor vision was not reversible. This is mostly true. However I have read reports of malnourished prisoners in other countries who have had their lousy eyesight magically healed after a few weeks of eating good food and taking the right vitamins.
3:11 PM
Internet Explorer is not the greatest web browser in the world. That's not news.
What is news is that IE7 (in beta right now and due before year's end) really is going a long way toward fixing IE's legendary and historically broken CSS implementation.
The IE developers' blog explains a lot of what has changed in IE7, and it makes me happy. This isn't just a case of Microsoft paying lip service to a bunch of cranky bloggers. These changes are real! I've installed the beta and the difference between it and older versions of Internet Explorer is basically unbelievable.
For the first time...ever...Internet Explorer isn't ignoring web standards. Pages that render properly in Firefox require little or no alteration at all to work in IE7.
As someone who has to work with xhtml and css on a regular basis, this is incredible. There's no way I'll switch away from Firefox, but man this will help a lot when it comes time to test across browsers.
9:31 AM
The Sci-Fi channel seems to have this crazy habit of cancelling my favorite shows...especially when those shows are the highest-rated on the network.
I don't understand it. First Farscape was cancelled in 2003. That broke my heart, but I got over it.
Now, ten seasons and more than 200 episodes later, Stargate SG-1 has gotten the axe.
I guess they figure the show has run its course. And if you think about it, ten years is pretty remarkable for any sci-fi show. That's a real shame, because things were starting to get interesting again with the whole Ori/Ancient backstory...
I'm no big fan of Stargate Atlantis, but I guess I'll have to start watching it now. Sucks.
Disneyland is pretty much ruined now. I really hope I never see him there in person. I wonder if he's able to go 30 minutes without mentioning his DRM/Copyright crusade to anyone who will listen.
For someone who hates our copyright system, he sure loves Disney...one of the biggest users/abusers of copyright out there. Figure that one out. Cory Sucks.
9:56 AM
Last night I finally had an opportunity to check out a world-famous cougar den - the Foxfire restaurant in Anaheim Hills.
We showed up after dinner and went straight to the bar because a friend's band was playing that night.
Foxfire. Locally it's known by many names.
Wrinkle Ranch. Menopause Manor. The Crotchfire.
All of these names turned out to be terrifyingly accurate.
I was prepared to see older women hooking up with younger men, but what I got was an all-out freakshow.
Sure, I saw plenty of "May-December" romances. I was expecting that. But they worked both ways - older women with younger men AND older men with younger women.
Some people there had aged gracefully, and some...had not.
I saw a woman in her 40s with a face like a man and hair like a warthog.
I saw a black man in his 50s with a package so big it looked like he took a crap in the front of his pants.
I saw a guy my age copping a feel on a good-looking woman old enough to have been his mother.
I saw people as old as my grandparents dirty dancing.
It was only a Thursday night and the place was packed. If you're turned on by the mystique of an older lover and the faint scent of Preperation H wafting through the air, I cannot recommend Foxfire enough.
11:16 AM
I've got so many freakin' club/discount cards it's insane. Vons, Ralphs, Sav-On, Petco, Petsmart, BevMo, you name it, I got it. They were making my wallet so enormous that I took them all out and now I keep them all together in my glove compartment and just take them out as I need them.
A better solution is to enter all of your club card numbers into the form at Just One Club Card. It'll generate a printable wallet-card that contains all your account numbers and barcodes for you. Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?
1:11 PM
I'll be honest. I don't listen to the rock and roll that the kids listen to these days. You got your Radioheads and your Aerosmiths and your Pearl Jams and your Strokes and your White Stripes and what have you...but man those guys are just no good. Their rhythms just don't speak to my SOUL, MAN.
However! Coldplay is the one band that has managed to melt my icy heart of rock. I don't really know how it happened, but somewhere along the way I guess I started liking them.
So Chris Martin named his kids Apple and Moses. I'm willing to overlook that if they release another album as good as X&Y. White Shadows is a great song! Talk is just an old Kraftwerk tune but Coldplay added lyrics to it to make it BETTER!
For a while there I was raging against the corporate record making machine and just writing off all their artists as talentless digitally tweaked overengineered crapola...but they can and do pump out some good stuff from time to time. Coldplay is good stuff according to me!
9:16 AM Texas Hold 'Em is coming to Xbox Live Arcade a week from today!
If you download it within the first 48 hours, it'll be completely free! If you forget about it and wait too long the only thing you'll get for free is the demo. Save yourself the ten bucks and set an alarm or something for next week!
Rumor has it that Hold'em may also support the Xbox Live Vision camera, so that's something too.
Yessir we were in San Francisco for a super duper wedding! It happened on Saturday afternoon and the weather was pretty much perfect out at Crissy Field. Good food, good people, and good fun all around!
Friday afternoon when we landed at the airport in San Francisco we were pretty hungry. It was Tammy's birthday and we had plans for a fancy dinner after we got to the hotel.
We went to Chaya and ate like kings. I got the rib-eye and Tammy had the seared tuna fillet. We also started with a Red Dragon Roll sushi appetizer which was so good we almost considered cancelling our orders and just getting sushi. Luckily the food was fantastic and the service was top-notch! Tammy finished finished everything off with a glass of dessert wine and I even had a snifter of Courvoisier! I'm smoove like that.
Chaya is right on The Embarcadero which means it also has a great view of San Francisco Bay and of the Bay Bridge. It was very romantic!
By the time we finished our dinner the sun had gone down and it was still pretty comfortable outside, so we decided to walk back to the hotel rather than take another cab. It was a nice night and the hotel was less than a mile away, so we linked arms and headed south along Howard Street through downtown San Francisco.
As we turned past a dark corner I thought I felt someone brush past me. I didn't think much of it until two seconds later when I felt something poke me in the back. A gruff voice from behind me said "Give me your wallet, Man. I ain't jokin."
I could feel Tammy tense up but I was one cool customer. At that point I just did what I had to. I reached into my pocket, pulled out my black sunglasses and put them on. I whispered "Not today motherfucker." Not today.
I elbowed this guy in the stomach and felt his ribs break one after the other like ice cubes snapping in a glass of water. Before he knew what was happening I spun around and used the flat of my fist to uppercut his face into oblivion. Blood spurted from his flattened nose as he fell back onto the sidewalk, howling in pain. He was still moving though, so I roundhouse kicked him to the head, and a second time right in his junk. He lay in the street curled up, moaning in agony and I figured he had learned his lesson.
I turned to Tammy and said "Let's leave this trash in the gutter where it belongs," grabbed her hand, and turned to walk back to the hotel.
As we started walking away I heard the unmistakable flick of a switchblade. Without thinking I pushed Tammy to the right and I jumped to the left, just in time to avoid the tip of a three inch blade as it rushed through the air between us. I changed my stance with a quick hop, grabbed the arm holding the blade and twisted it back deep into the guy's stomach, just as I had practiced a hundred times before. I pushed long and hard until the tip of the blade poked through his back, then I looked in his eyes and said "Now you're starting to get the point" before releasing him with a flourish. He fell to the ground and I watched as his grey hoodie started to stain with the unmistakable deep burgundy that only a mortal wound can release.
At that point I knew I had the guy in a bad spot but he must have been high on crack or some shit, because he jumped up AGAIN, whipped out a .38, and started waving it around like nothing happened. Through streams of blood across his face and dripping spit he shouted "You gonna regret that, mothafucka! I'll kill you!"
He pointed the gun at me but at that point he was pretty shaky and it looked like he didn't have the strength to pull the trigger. In a situation like that you don't really have time to think, so I grabbed a passing homeless guy's brown paper booze bag and used it to whack the gun out of his hand. Finally he dropped to the sidewalk in pain and begged me to leave him alone.
I looked down on him with the streetlights behind me, paused for a minute, then said "Aww. Baby needs his bottle." I yanked the bottle out of the paper bag and cracked it over the guy's head. It shattered on impact and a few seconds later as he lay motionless on the ground a dizzying mosaic of red cuts began to appear across his face. "Looks like my 40 beats your 38."
At that point this guy was done. Kaput. He lay sprawled on the ground in a quickly-growing pool of his own blood. It was then that I noticed the top of a rolled up $50 bill sticking out of his pocket. I picked it up and asked the lifeless body before me "Didn't your mother ever tell you that crime doesn't pay?"
Tammy and I didn't say much on the way back to the hotel, but when we got to our room she looked at me quizzically and asked "Who ARE you, Brett Dunst?" To which I replied "I'm only a man." I sighed. "A man who loves you." Then I ripped off her dress and we made passionate love on the bed.
I may have gotten some of the details wrong, but that's pretty much how Friday went.
First! Who gives a crap about Mel Gibson! Seriously. Lots of people get DUIs every day. Why are we still talking about him? Everybody says stupid crap that they don't mean when they're drunk. Who cares!
Look at that face. He's trashed! How could anyone take offense to anything that comes out of that mouth?
Also! It's bad enough that we have to take our shoes and belts off in airport security, but now we can't even carry toothpaste or bottles of unopened water on a plane! What the christ! I forsee a future where in order to board an airplane everyone must change into a TSA-provided unitard. Changing stations at all airports will be provided and your original clothes will be sealed in plastic bags and thrown in with the rest of the luggage. Your only inflight entertainment will be a copy of Skymall and the GameBoy that you smuggled up your butt prior to boarding. That is not a future that I look forward to!
9:07 PM DS Link is the first DS flash cartridge that fits entirely in the DS's DS game slot. You won't need to put anything at all into Slot 2! It even uses MicroSD/Transflash cards so you can load up with up to 2 gigs of games! Whoops, I meant 'homebrew applications'. Yeah.
What's the catch? Well there's two, actually. First, it won't play GBA roms. DS only. Second, it won't act as a passkey - you'll need to flash your firmware with Flash Me to make it work.
With that in mind, it still looks promising! DS Link goes on sale at the end of the month.
If you can't wait that long and GBA games are important to you, the Supercard Lite is available now!
WHO ARE THOSE PEOPLE? I recognize Paul Robb in the red hair... But Morrissey Jr., that blonde girl and the other guy are new to my eyes.
Is Information Society COMING BACK with three new members? The last I heard was that Kurt Harland bought the rights to the band's name years ago and hasn't done anything with it recently. (He also took the Insoc sound to a strange and embarrasing gothic/industrial place, but that's another story for another day.)
Maybe Paul bought the rights back from Kurt and is going to resurrect the classic Insoc sound? Maybe? I hope? Who knows! You read it here first!
---
Oh wow. Five minutes of e-research gave me the answer I was looking for!
Information Society reformed on May 1st. Their Myspace blog REVEALS ALL!
10:03 AM
Did you know that it's possible to unlock just about anything with a keyhole in less than a second without doing any damage to the lock? I didn't either! All you need is a keyring full of 'bump keys' and a hammer. You don't need any special training and you don't need a lockpick set.
10:54 AM
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on the original PlayStation was hands-down the greatest game in the 20 year history of the Castlevania franchise. In fact if you manage to track down a secondhand copy of it these days you can usually expect to pay more than double its original retail price.
Well good news. In Q1 2007 the entire game will be available as a download on Xbox Live Arcade! Whoo!
Here's hoping Konami doesn't screw it up like Capcom screwed up Street Fighter. That was an abomination.
Oh sure, they'll still charge you if you use their dial-up service...$9.95 a month. But if you've already got yourself some kind of net connection AOL is free, free, free. Or at least it will be in "early September" when it will be completely supported by advertising revenue.
A lot of Internet old-timers had an AOL account 'back in the day'. I had one back in the pre-Internet days and it wasn't that bad. I sort of flip-flopped between AOL and GEnie.
Maybe I'll check it out again! Free is free, right?
10:32 AM
Tammy got a new job last year that has her travelling a lot. She's racking up the frequent flier miles and getting all kinds of neat Starwood bonuses so that's a plus.
She was in Chicago for two weeks last month. Yesterday she was in Phoenix for a few hours. She flew out at eight in the morning and was back home by seven. Today she's in Denver and comes back tomorrow. Then Friday (her birthday) we're both flying up to San Francisco for a wedding this weekend.
I don't know how she does it. I'm not much of a traveller and I don't think I could keep up with that kind of schedule.
As a side effect of her flying all around this great nation of ours, I've gotten to know John Wayne/Sana Ana airport intimately. It's basically the greatest small airport ever. There's never any traffic, parking lots are really close to baggage claim, parking is only $1 an hour (Ontario is $2!), and everything is covered so that if it's pouring rain you stay dry.
Hey look! I took a picture in an airport and nobody arrested me or tried to confiscate my camera. If The Duke were still alive, he'd say "Let freedom ring, bitches."
2:35 PM
Despite this past month from hell, we continue to grow like gangbusters and we're now the 25th biggest host in the world. Bigger than Verio, even!
![[Powered by Blogger]](http://buttons.blogger.com/bloggerbutton1.gif){kind=small}
