February 2002 Archives

IT departments may be the most famous for having armed guards "escort" just-fired (and possibly disgruntled) employees out of the building. There are, however, other professions that should consider a bit of supervision for the recently released.

If a world isn't both beautiful and frightening, then is it really worth living in?

The aforementioned Register USA kicks off with a delightful rant against the "Motion Picture Ass. of America" which goes on to indict all of Hollywood.

Just found an interesting not-quite-a-blog powered by MT; Nethistory v2.0 looks more like a mini-portal than anything else. However you want to classify it, someone is compiling a promising collection of links to sites about the history of the internet. I don't know if I'd call it "exhaustive" (not yet, anyway) but it's a good start.

The UK technology news site The Register has long been one of my daily reads, and a prime source for link fodder. Now it turns out thet they're launching a new stateside edition. It should be the same nasty, entertaining, hard-hitting industry gossip reporting, only without quite as many Brit-specific stories.

I just read that animator Chuck Jones died Friday of heart failure. It always seems to be the deaths of my favorite entertainers and creators that hit the hardest. Without the creator of Wile E. Coyote and the animator of "The Dot and the Line", "What's Opera, Doc?" and How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the world isn't as funny a place.

The latest controversial console videogame might have an anti-globalization theme, but its makers sure seem to be laughing all the way to the bank.

Actually, I was kind of hoping for this result:

I am Ludo! People just don't understand me. I'm a sweetheart who loves making friends - even with rocks, but I seem like a monster. Once people get to know the real me, they just can't help but love me.

Take the "Which Labyrinth character are you most like?" quiz by smarmy

[via Patti]

If we can send one boy band member into space, why can't we send them all?

Or at least, amusing enough for the moment. Until Jish brings his site back up to full power, take a look at the little toy he's left us to play with, even if he doesn't know where it came from.

Today is my birthday (my 32nd — more on that later) and it's probably going to be a pretty quiet one. However, I've just received my major birthday present: I now have a Stowaway keyboard for my Cliè handheld. Aside from the general object coolness of a full-sized keyboard that folds up into a package slightly smaller than a paperback murder mystery, it feeds into my pretentions of being a Writer, however amateur. Hopefully, the keyboard, bundled with a decent word processor, will help me to write some of the essays, rants, stories, etc. that I have floating around in my head, but that I always seem to busy to work on when I'm sitting at my PC. And being in electronic format, perhaps some of these ramblings will eventually find their way onto the web. Either that or I'll have to admit that I'm just a lazy bastard.

I lost interest in entertainment awards so long ago that even seeing a movie I like getting nominations out the wazoo doesn't really matter to me.

After (accidentally) catching the end of a really awful movie the other day, I realized just how low my standards for entertainment can be: Give me a giant steampunk spider-mecha, and I can ignore a lot of faults.

Apparently, I'm not the only Southerner who considers all that foolin' around on snow and ice unnatural:

I'm from the South and tend to think of winter sports as the games Northerners have invented for bad weather when they can't do anything else. I can see, for example, how you might have a frozen lake out on your back 40, and a broom on hand and a big rock, and you might see your kid out there playing with all that and think to yourself, if you're a shuffleboard kind of guy, "Hey, that looks like fun!" So, you go curling.

In the latest insanity from the copyright world, movie and television studios have declared war on personal video recorders (and the customers who use them). This time, they claim that recording programs by keyword is a violation of copyright law. [via rc3]

Every year at Mardi Gras, my folks order a king cake shipped to me from Paul's of Picayune. Paul's claims to have originated the filled (usually cream cheese and/or fruit) king cake, which I love, even if some purists don't approve. At any rate, UPS delivered this year's cake to the office right on schedule this morning. I scrounged a knife and plates, found a place here in the IT department to set it out, and cut myself the first piece. I took a bite, and guess what I found? Even if I weren't living among heathens Missourians, I guess I'd have to provide the next cake anyway.

I know I've railed against "stunt casting" on TV shows from time to time, but every now and then, I do appreciate such a casting decision. In an upcoming episode of Enterprise, Scott Bakula will be reunited with his Quantum Leap sidekick, Dean Stockwell.

For once, some good news from the intellectual property world: A Stanford professor is working to develop and promote more flexible IP licenses to allow creators a reasonable degree of control of the use of their creations, while leaving room for those who want to build upon those creations. [via Tomalak]

When his sister's computer was stolen, a clever Mac hacker soon realized that the sloppy thief had left an installed remote control program in place. With a little help from the Mac scripting community, he managed to bedevil the thief (or at least the recipient) and eventually track down the hot goods. [via Risks]

The "Punch the Monkey" folks finally have some serious competition for the title of the most obnoxious web-page ad to date. Given the trend towards large, mid-page, interactive Flash-based advertising, it was only a matter of time before someone found a new low. A certain booze concern, well-known for its "artistic" print ads, is now running an online ad that pretty effectively prevents surfers from being able to read anything else on the screen without being distracted by an array of rapidly-flashing images. You can mouse over the images in order to freeze them, but are then left with an only slightly less irritating looping animation. It's only a few pageviews away from making me cut another one of my regular reads off my bookmark list.

Microsoft is working on a new product for would-be hackers who want to write programs that spread themselves about the net. While some of us think that could describe any of their recent operating system, Terrarium is supposed to be nothing more than a game where the battling code is locked safely away inside a virtual machine. sound familiar? Aside from showcasing Microsoft's .NET platform (and possibly sublimating the urges of those who crack Windows to show off), they also seem to be demonstrating some massive peer-to-peer networking concepts.

One of the great things to search for on the web is recpies, especially if you're obsessed with one particular ingredient like I am at times. I wanted to make something for Sunday's... Crap. I still can't bring myself to talk about it. Anyway, for a gathering that I attended Sunday, I figured I'd try a Black Bean Chipotle Dip I'd found. I think the recipe needs a little tinkering; slightly too sweet for my tastes, but it went over well.

In case anyone was trying to access this site earlier, my hosting provider has been having some problems. He got hacked by a couple of "customers" earlier this week, and seems to have been putting in some long hours tightening things down as much as possible. In the meantime, he's set up an offline blog to track system status, which might be a good idea for any small hsoting service. Anyway, the man who's running my host is really one of the good guys, who's just learning his way through some difficult tasks.

Is anybody who reads this site seriously considering attending BlogCon2002? Of course that presumes that anybody else is reading this site at all.

Microsoft may be taking a month-long break from creating new problems for its users, and finally trying to fix old ones.

We will not speak of what has happened tonight.