Imagine

Imagine you live in that weird country I read about this one time where monkeys are sacred and you can't shoot them and they know it and harass people.  Now imagine you live there, and every day you get up, a monkey slaps you in the face.  You shoo it off, but every chance it gets it kicks you or slaps you in the face or steals your food.  Every fucking day.  You're just going about your work, and the monkey pops out and slaps you in the face.  You try to pick some fruit, or whatever.  Slap in the face.  Walking on the road.  Monkey slaps you in the face.  You stack some barrels.  Monkey knocks them over and slaps you in the face.  You try to stack the barrels again and he gets a quick slap in because you weren't careful.

Now imagine you get fed up.  You stick a grenade in an apple, toss it to the monkey, and watch as he blows his head off trying to eat it.  You look around, at the monkey guts all over your yard.  You close your eyes and relax, taking a deep breath.  No one slaps you in the face.

THAT is what it feels like to disable Firefox's retarded gay-ass clipboard URL bullshit with the middle mouse.

about:config, set middlemouse.contentLoadURL to false.

Just wanted to write a quick little "fuck you" to the developers that thought that antifeature would be useful.

::sigh::

Wait you guys start over I missed the beginning

It is 10:04 Seattle time now.  Sometime in the last 20 minutes there was a fight between a cyclist and a driver and I missed the beginning!

I had just reached the corner of Denny and some other street when I noticed across the way a cyclist in a fight with a guy in a red car.  The driver side door was open and they were really going at it.  The red car was in front of a line waiting at the light.  The cyclist was between him and the center median.  The driver was still in his seat;  I think he still had his belt on.  There was a girl in the passenger side.  At first I wanted to run over there and pull the cyclist off but I was on the other side of 4 lanes of traffic, and I was wearing my backpack with my work laptop.  The cyclist was fucking furious.

Then the cyclist broke off and rode away.  Some lady honked and pointed at the guy in the red car and said something like "I got your number!"  Oh also the guy in the red car like couldn't start it, but that doesn't seem relevant.  That is when I started to wonder...why would a cyclist be that pissed, and why was the guys door open if he still had his belt on?  Given all the clues I'm beginning to think the guy in the red car doored the cyclist, which would mean he deserves much more of a beatdown than he got.  I may never know exactly what happened, unless a police report is filed and I can get access to it.  Suffice to say I spend the rest of my communite wondering how to best assault a person in a car.

Punching doesn't seem like a great idea...too hard to get a good shot in through that opening.  I think the best option is to, when on a bicycle or motorcycles, carry a can of mace on your belt.  If you get doored and survive, you can spray it right inside the car.  That should fuck up everything inside without too much blowback in your face, which hopefully will still be protected by your helmet.

What do you guys think?

I Learned Something Today

Today I learned what it was I said in the Speakeasy.  Holy shit dude.  Not good.  So that explains a lot.

[fiction] The Book of Lost Rides: A Different Breed

Maybe I'm a different breed
Maybe I'm not listening
So blame it on my ADD baby

Four men sat at a poker table, where once eight men had smoked and sung.  Two lines of bottles led from the back door to the table, perfectly arranged longnecks except for the end of one line, where Jason had run out of Coronas and used something that came it red glass instead.  Biff watched him now.  Jason still gripped his cigarrette the same, but he had a different look about him otherwise.  Glassy eyes.  His muscles had fattened up and were alot rounder now.  The edges of his frame had been smoothed out.  Biff knew the man spend more time fucking his wife than he did at the gym.

"So there I was," Jason was saying, "with one hand on the wheel, and the other one is broken but I'm still trying to count forward from her birthday--"

"Why didn't you just subtract--"  someone started.  Every one else was laughing.

"No!  Shut up.  So it fucking hurts like hell when I move each finger, but I keep doing it.  All the way to eight--"

"Fifteen?"

"Eighteen, and fuck you.  Yeah.  And then I saw her fucking...shoe.  Bigass red high heel--just one--is sitting there on the floor of the passenger side."

"You went all the way back?"

"I sure as hell wasn't going to see her after that night,"  said Jason, "so you're damn right I went back.  And that was when I decided high school prom wasn't for me."  Jason spoke as if he was rejecting a flavor or ice cream.

Dave fell out of his seat laughing.  Biff leaned over and peeked at his cards.

"I fold," said Biff.  He stood up.    The others followed suit, dropping their cards.  It was late.  Biff looked around.  Close to thirty people were sleeping, huddled with blankets on chairs and couches and other soft surfaces.  Biff remembered when the parties had been hundreds of people, and most of them slept it off in a puddle of their own vomit.

Biff and Jason walked around the yard for a bit, finishing their cigarettes.  They stopped at the kiddie pool.  It was the closest thing to a pool or a scenic view that they could stop and look at while they talked.

"Is this water or ky jelly?" asked Biff.

"I don't...well definitely don't drink it.  You shouldn't touch it either.  Or breathe much...in fact it might catch fire if..."  Jason tossed the last of is cig in the pool and the the two men seemed almost disappointed that it didn't explode in their faces.

"Jason I need you to do something for me.  There's a number of items all over Lee's garage that would make Sheriff Raynor cream in his pants if he caught us with it.  I need you to put it in storage."

"You got it boss.  You know its been five years and everybody is still talking about that stunt you pulled with the tractor trailer," said Jason.

"Which one?"

"Exactly.  You miss it, don't you?"

"Miss it?  I never stopped, Jason."

"How can you keep going like that?  Fuck if I stay up two nights in a row these days my ears start ringing, and thats not just from Betsy yelling at me.  We're getting old, big dog."

Biff took one last drag and tossed his firestick into the kiddie pool.  "I can't help it.  And I don't have a girl that needs to be kept warm."

"I saw a couple earlier tonight.  Don't know what happened to them..."

"One went home before midnight, and the other is passed out under your coffee table."

"That was pretty specific."

"Yeah."

"You know they were pretty hot.  Like any of the old dogs would have cut off a finger to take one of them home."

Biff shrugged.  "I guess I'm a different breed."  Biff pulled out another cigarette and lit it.  The flame from his lighter danced around the end of it like a drunk ballerina.

"That you are my friend.  Are you staying over?  You got first dibs on the den douch."

Biff shook his head.

"Betsy made it up for you.  You know she's gonna give me hell if you don't sleep in it."

Biff shrugged.

Betsy caught him on his way out.  "Really Biff?  You can't just stay for a night?  What it my house not good enough for you?"

"I'll just end up staring at your ceiling all night."

"I have I nice ceiling!  We picked out the tile from Home-"

"I have a nicer car."  Biff slapped her ass as he walked by.  "Make him work for it tonight."

Betsy blushed.

Outside, Biff was parked in two deep.  They were American made.  Old.  Strong frame.  It made it easy for Biff to do what he was about to do.  He would have felt guilty putting the squeeze on some delicate little Japanese rice burner.  Biff got in his car and started the engine.  The lights flooded Jason's house with light.  Biff could feel the rumbling of the engine through his seat.  It calmed his nerves.

Biff backed up, slow, steady.  He had to go slow enough to avoid denting the bumpers, and that required grinding the clutch a bit.  Biff blew a kiss at the dashboard and whispered an apology.  Then he turned behind him and watched the cars he was displacing.

If a cop had seen it...well, lets just say no one saw it happen.  A certain few people just found their cars the next morning to be a bit dented and in a very different place than they'd left them.

Biff hit the highway and tucked a pillow to is left, to keep his face away from the cold glass.  He turned on the radio softly.  A good jazz station was playing.  Biff sat back and let his mind wander.  He eye lids grew heavy.  This was the only way he slept nowadays.  Soon Biff was out.  His car drived over the solid yellow lines for a spell, like it was swaying to the music on its own.

Bait and Switch will Never Die

I have been sick all weekend.  No real symptoms...just an intense fever and a bit of nausea.  Mostly been watching Mad Men, which is fun to watch but doesn't seem to have a point.  Then I felt a little better today and thought I would try out Firefall, some kind of massive online FPS.  I signed up to be in the Beta while I was at Pax.  At least, that's what I thought I did.

What actually happened, is that I was standing at the enourmous Firefall like multi-booth with this girl that is hooking up with one of my friends when one of the booth guys walked over and asked if I wanted to be in the Beta for Firefall, and handed me a tablet to give them my email address.  Then instead of turning to the girl next to me, he made a big deal of something about how he was so sorry--he shouldn't have assumed I would be the only one of us signing up for the Firefall Beta (shouldn't have given me the tablet first...blah blah blah standard pathetic geek mysogynistic penance).  This girl was annoyed and signed up for the Beta.  I guarantee she has no interest in playing the Firefall Beta.

Turns out that doesn't matter.  Have you caught on yet?  Lets replay a bit.  He asked if I wanted to play the Firefall Beta, and then I gave him my email address.  That was the transaction.  He didn't say I would be in the Beta.  I wrongly inferred that I was trading my email for a spot in the beta.  That was the bait.  What I actually got by giving up my email address was an account on their message boards, and advertising emails.  That's the switch.

Its a bit humbling to be the one getting fooled like that, but seriously, who does that?  "Would you like to be in the beta?  Give me your email"  seems pretty clear.  Kind of like "would you like another PB&J sandwich?  Give me your plate."  I think its reasonable to be surprised if your plate comes back with a stack of advertising.

I used to feel some kind of self-righteous rage about this kind of thing but now it just seems typical.  I'm only interested in the cleverness of it.  Think about how that worked.  I need to go out to a bar and try that.  "Hello would you like a million dollars?...Give me your number...What??  I bought a lottery ticket in your name, what did you think was going to happen?"

Damnit

Wait, why do we have so many damn dolls in here?

--Archer

I got all entrepreneurial and thought I would make and sell some Lego mosaics of the Firefox logo but some guy beat me to it.  Ass.

While we're at it, just to catch you up to speed:  some guy also did a Lego model of Serenity (the Firefly class spaceship that starred in a tv show of the same name) only he used the wrong scale and did a crappy job of it so I'm not linking that one.

My next project, I guess, will be to use some glowing wire I found on some hardware girl's website to turn a suit of motorcycle armor into a tron suit.  I don't care if someone has done this before;  it will look awesome and increase my safety and I will be able to turn it off and become a normal person whenever the hell I want.

[Edit]
This might be a good way to meet people:

http://www.grubwithus.com/

In Restless Dreams I Walked Alone

I like to monitor my blogging stats page with vigilance as much as the next self-absorbed writer.  Sometimes one of those "hits"--like maybe a random guy whose google search for Ubuntu or Legos bumped into something I wrote--can satiate the need for human interaction and saves me from having to pick up the phone and call someone.  For this reason, when I tell you that readership has been dropping off and no one seemed to read this anymore, you should know that I at least got that conclusion from a pretty graph.  Turns out the pretty graph is dead wrong.  Not only do my friends still read this but they even read the fiction posts, which google claims no one reads.  Maybe Mr. big search engine just doesn't like my writing.

I was going to write a fake ghost story that looks like it  is supposed to be scary, like with a monster ghost, until the end when the uncle of the protagonisst, a dead motorcyclist, shows up and not only beats the shit out of the monster ghost but also dismembers the monster ghost, breaks its back, rips off its head, and then pulls out the monster ghost's entrails and sets them on...on ghostfire.  Then the dead motorcyclist points at the protagonist and winks and says "here's looking at you kid" (and hopefully the audience doesn't read too much into the casablanca reference...maybe it will be a dead boyfriend instead of uncle) and the last line of the story is something like "this is what I think of ghost stories."  But all that sounded too similar to a story I already wrote so I didn't bother.

Speaking of stories, Game of Thrones helped me get through the flights to philly.  Did I peak your interest?  NED STARK DIES.  You obviously don't know who that is so just trust that I've ruined it for you.  Don't get  me wrong, I did enjoy the book, however the author did that gayass thing where they have like 7 separate plot lines all going at once, so every chapter is a cliffhanger because they switch plot lines immediately after anything interesting happens.  Those of you with literary taste might remember that The Lord of the Rings did not need to abuse this base writing trick.  It had like, two plot lines, at the most.  Also, the guy writing this book, like, started a bunch of stuff that goes nowhere and is just heating up as the book ends--it is clear that the story is supposed to drag on through another three books, and we will probably have to read all four in order to get any closure for anything.  Also,  its like a soap opera.  Most of the plot is talking, and most of the talking is devious lying--the kind where the reader knows the truth but has to sit back and watch as all of the stupid characters kill all of the fun characters basically with lies.  The battle scenes were ok, and the sex scenes were...like the opposite of hot.  Listen.  If you're going to include a sex scene, well, first off, you should only include a sex scene if it is relevant to the plot like the sex  scene in A History of Violence.  Secondly, make it fucking hot.  Not boring, or kinda gross even.  Sex scenes should make the readers want to take their pants off; they should not make the reader wonder what time it is and start guessing how long until the flight is over.  There was some kind of interesting stuff going on...and a lot of great ideas, but also a lot of bullshit.  I'm not sure I'll read the other books or not.  I bet a bunch of nerds at work all like it;  I think I of heard of this "song of ice and fire" bullshit somewhere.   .....   Its better than twilight.

At one point it seemed like hordes of people all wanted to go to karaoke.  I was debating between an 8 and a 12 person room.  Then everyone flaked out and we had four.  Guess what.  It was still awesome.  Amanda sang Rolling in the Deep almost as good as Adele herself, Matt drank enough to start singing, Adam and I sang some Evanescence, and me, Adam and Matt all sang a sort of special off-key cover of Can You Feel the Love Tonight that would make any sober person's ears bleed if they heard it.  Oh, and guess who has a cover of rollin in the deep!  Yeah we played some linkin park too.  Then we spent $500.  Maybe 6.  It was bad.  Turns out the bottles of wine we kept re-ordering were $30 each.  It was worth it.  Also, Amanda totally loved it, and I think she has the charisma to get people off their lazy asses and into the city.  Seriously, if I spend $1000 and a third of my vacation to travel 3000 miles to hang out on the east coast, would it kill you to travel 40 miles to come into the city?  Or at least respond to a facebook message...I get really creeped out when people ignore me on facebook and then act like they are happy to see me when we end up at the same party in real life.  Whatever.  So, the plan next time is we are going to pregame in my hotel room (or kev's place and ride the train) and then maybe get a room during those hours that the room is free if you buy enough drinks.  Also, we will eat food during the pregaming.  Also...ok that is it.

Chris pointed this little gem out to me and explained that it inspired an epic furor on the internet that I never heard about:  http://gizmodo.com/5833787/my-brief-okcupid-affair-with-a-world-champion-magic-the-gathering-player

Yeah.  Thats why girls suck.  That is also why I don't play magic or D&D.  Though I have no love for the author of that piece, the words she writes are not lies, and the fact that she admits what many know to be true is probably insufficient cause for persecution.  Yes:  it totally sucks when hot girls judge you because you play some card game, and yes:  the world should not be like that.  But guess what.  Girls do judge you because you play some card game, or because you don't hate the same religion, or because you are a programmer.  Thats the way it is, and bitching about it will probably not get you laid.  So lets fix it.  My personal strategy is three or four or maybe five pronged.  First, there are like a million things I'm interested in.  Like, I'd really like to learn how to juggle, right?  Just never got around to it because there are so many other things in this world that I also want to learn, and my juggling experiment with the soup cans could have gone better.  So if you have one activity, such as becoming a world-class Starcraft2 player, which, in America, has no sex appeal and does not involve meeting many girls, well, that activity just has to get de-prioritized in the face of things I love with sex appeal--motorcycles--and things I love that involve meeting girls--salsa.  That was the long winded way of saying "step 1:  don't be a fucking magic or D&D nerd."  Because if I had just said that, you'd think I was an asshole.  The second thing...step 2....actually step 1 mostly covered it.  I guess step 2 is don't be a fucking nerd.  I'm not saying don't be smart and passionate about cool shit like programming.  In my opinion, mathematics is as awesome as being a fighter pilot, and there's no shame is having passion for either of them.  There is shame is acting like a nerd, in having long-guy-hippie-hair (i.e. guys with long hair that dont take care of it), in treating girls like they are aliens, in being super awkward, in creating yet another "us and them" atmosphere and using technical jargon in conversations with people who don't have a technical background, in covering one's fatass belly under gay shirts with messages written "in binary" even though its actually a textual representation of the binary encoding of an ASCII file, and in watching the show Big Bang Theory, and in making stupid jokes that aren't funny but after which you pause anyway expecting people to laugh.  I would wager you could have any hobby you wanted, and when you finally get a date with the one well-adjusted girl on okcupid, you would both have a good time.  Especially if you don't take her to some weird show that hipsters probably like.  There is this sort of board game called Warhammer...and then I talk about the space marines...lets just be done with this paragraph.  That reminds me, I've going to try to find a chorus to join--someone told me there are lots of girls in those, and I like to sing.

Karaoke...oh yeah the wedding.  So, I kind of felt like I was going to pass out at this wedding also.  I think I'm allergic to weddings?  My other theory is that I always get lightheaded or sleepy 2 hours after ingesting caffeine.  I'm going to have to do some experiments to find out.  A family situation of moderate urgency (which is now resolved) forced me to reveal the somewhat broken nature of my heart to my inner family.  I'm going to pay for that later with all the questions I'll have to deal with, but at least I can stop dodging questions about why I don't fly anymore.

Back to the wedding.  I felt, and sounded a bit like a wedding crasher.  Thats probably  a habit I should curb.  The ceremony was nice.  Some guy sung something called "The Lords Prayer."  What you need to know about "The Lords Prayer" is that it is not, and should never be, a song.  Maybe a rap.  Something  like "give us this day our daily bread so i can feed all these bitches from the club last night.  I'm so holy, bullets go right through me.  Forgive us our trespasses, 'cause I'll tresspass all over your shit, bitch."  That's what I think of most rap songs.  Anyway, I wasn't seated with any of the 3 people I knew there, which I think I had been warned about.  I was with some people who were cool but who were all married with kids and left early.  Then it was just me and a dance floor and crappy hip hop music.  There were two girls that reminded me of my nieces.  I tried to dance with one of them, and she ran away.  One of my friends may have gotten a picture of her running from me, which would honestly make it worth it.  Before the night was over I got a salsa dance in with Nicole, who despite not dancing for so long still rivals the girls I dance with now...also Pink Shirt Girl is probably a tad better.

I may have to finally give up my PA license.  I didn't realize that you had to renew your license online, and then wait 10 days for this other thing in the mail before you can renew it.  My license is going  to expire before my next trip home.  I had been boycotting WA because I've heard that you have to take a written test to get their ugly-ass license, and taking a test in a state with drivers that stupid hurts my ego.  But, since my ego is  not a state-issued photo id, it loses this round.  Seriously, though, I don't want to be a Washington driver.  I want no part of their disgusting mess.

Kevin has an entrepreneurial idea involving coffee.  Might get involved with that.  I just severed involvement with some people who were building a social networking phone app using a Microsoft SOA (service oriented architecture) framework that, of course, only works with other Microsoft shit, and can only be programmed in Windows, the operating system that exists to allow me to play Starcraft.  I mentioned my waning desire to "boot up my starcraft partition" in my farewell email, so they probably won't be interested in collaborating with me ever again.  Probably no love lost there...this one guy would like just read Microsoft "whitepapers" which based on what I read over his shoulder, appear too be fact-less bromides written for people who don't know how to read RFCs.  We got in an argument.  He claimed that this microsoft whitepaper claimed that if we used https, the message would get decrypted by what the whitepaper called an "intermediary."  No one in the room knew what the whitepaper meant by "intermediary" and despite the fact that his interpretation of that undefined word was material to our disagreement everyone  seemed to think that arguing about it without looking up any other references would be a great use of our time.  I tried to get them to pull up the original RFCs for https, but it was like pulling teeth...perhaps rightly so:  the RFCs were very lengthy, and it would have taken probably hours of studying them, and also a reference book on software security engineering, in order to prove constructively that the ssl/https connections that google, yahoo, facebook, and like every other website in the world, rely on for their login pages, would be secure enough for the login page of the prototype of our phone-based videogame.  I forget which microsoft product we were supposed to use instead...it probably involved XML (please refer to the paragraph where I whine about nerds using technical jargon at the wrong audience).

This paragraph is for going on and on about whether I should move back to philly or not.

[Edit]
That second to last paragraph, about the microsofts, actually put me to sleep.  So thats a cool way to get yourself to bed on time.