A really cool read: John Perry Barlow’s description of a real Taste of the System: unacceptable searches of checked baggage on an airline, and his efforts to use the case to resuscitate the 4th Amendment.
And, the 200+ comments accompanying his post.
Tonight Patrick and I went into a wine merchant to pick up a bunch of Stimson Merlot for the upcoming holiday festivities. We walked up, and who was leaving the shop but Elvis Costello. He held the door open for us, as polite as can be. I didn’t have the nerve to wish him luck at the Grammy Awards next year, nor to be honest did my brain recognize him until seconds later after the door had closed. That’s okay, though—he was just another guy getting some wine, and I wouldn’t want to intrude on his ability to live a calm life away from his work.
As I learned when E and I were in Los Angeles, it’s cool to know the person behind the name is a nice normal human being, and not drowning in their own greatness. Even enough to still do common courtesies. 🙂
I found this idea really funny: somewhere up above is a satellite that’s pinpointing the location of cheating wives right now. Score!
Subject: Profile has been added
Date: Tuesday 21 December 2004 17:36
From: …
To: brendan@…an-old-address…4 Cheating-Wives have been matched for you in your area:
1) Jessica, 120 lbs, 5’9, 36c, 10 miles away, available Dec 21-23rd
2) Laura, 127 lbs, 5’8, 36d, 8 miles away, available Dec 22-28th
3) Tabatha, 117 lbs, 5’6, 34b, 19 miles away, available most nights(husband
works midnights)
4)Sandra, 134 lbs, 5’9, 36c, 21 miles away, available most
week nights(looking for side-fling)All 4 women are waiting to speak with you live & have photos. Webcam’s are
available for all 4.http://…
Today, at 12:41 UTC was the Solstice. I was rolling out of bed at that time, so I faild to observe it.
I have several vacation days I need to use before the end of the year or I loose them. So tomorrow my holiday starts. I hope to make a nice vegetarian Solstice dinner for 余艾蕾 tomorrow, purge the body before the lox, meatballs, ham, herring, and lutfish at my Mom’s Julbord. I know my Mom’s Julbord will be good, hopefully my meal will not be too outré.
I just finished putting on the final gloss on the white parts of our magnolia+white bathroom upstairs. When we first got our house here in Ireland, we hired someone to paint everything so we could get it out of the way. He did a shitty job in the upstairs bathroom (among other places). No primer coat on anything, meaning it’s been peeling ever since he was here.
A few weeks ago we finally decided we’d do the entire room over again. It had bothered us for years, and we weren’t going to put it off any more. Sand away the gloss from what he did, prime parts that had plaster still exposed, paint paint paint. Undercoat. Paint. More priming of the wooden step that runs the length of the bath and the box of pipes going along the floor, and they finally get painted, too. More undercoat. And the doors. And the trim. And and and…
And even finally took care of that big oval blotch of plaster up in our bedroom ceiling. It was the repair for a hole in the ceiling where the idjut builder trying to convert our attic (a long horrific story to be told another time) put his leg through the attic floor and into our bedroom.
Tonight I inhaled far too many fumes finishing the baseboards, bath step, and lots of other bits. Next time, we’re saving up and hiring someone again. 🙂 But we’re holding out for picking someone who’s referred by someone we know, not a shot in the dark using the golden pages (aka yellow pages).
E and P are both asleep upstairs (we’d both painted most of it, but today I chose to finish it instead of other things), so I’m just relaxing in the livingroom with my laptop next to a fresh pint of Guinness and some homemade raisin bread that Patrick and I made yesterday. I’ll spend a some time listening to a couple of podcasts,Daily Source Code and Rock and Roll Geek Show, then move Patrick back to his own bed so I can have somewhere to sleep. Patrick decided the center of my pillow would work, but better to be sure and sleep diagonally across my half of the bed.
Dear Shirley,
There’s a great article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel (in California) about the current attempts in the US government to convince us how privatizing the Social Security system is its only chance for survival. The article offers a great explanation for the claim “Social Security is a pyramid scheme, not a pension program.”
I know the money being consistently deducted from the paychecks in my life isn’t being tucked away for me. Somewhere in East Bumf****, New Jersey there’s a chain smoker who never leaves his home and gets his cases of Old Milwaukee delivered using money from a monthly direct-deposit—one made up in part from my earnings.
Hoping for an actually helpful fix to this growing cancer of a problem has to be high on the current government’s list of priorities—well, right after paying public school teachers a fair salary or helping single parents.
Surely my hopes aren’t too high. Surely.
Sincerely,
Your Conscience
Without a doubt, Doogle has got to be the best example of Irish creativity after a lengthy spell at the pub. Absolutely awesome.
Thanks to our friend Jason for the pointer.
This has to be the best subject line I’ve seen in a long time. Not only is it not deceptive (the email was about the same thing), but it certainly gives the impression of how easy it is to earn money using this system:
“Even my idiot Cousin makes $2000/month from this business”
I haven’t done full time web development since I worked for Wired magazine in the 1990s, but both at jobs and at home I’ve been doing it here and there since. A little PHP here, a little Perl there. A little MySQL here, a littel PostgreSQL there. A little Apache here, a little Boa there.
The other week I discovered a new arnonym: “LAMP.” I’ve seen references to LAMP developement before but I guess I’m just so out of it I had no idea what it meant. I snuffed it off as some proprietary alternative to, um, well, LAMP. In case you are like me, it means: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. I found one place that says the “P” stands for PHP/Perl/Python. I’ve been doing this for years! I must be too engrossed in my work or something.
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