flog

"How does the donkey find grass?"

"Because it rains and makes lots of grass."

Hunter S Thompson dead at age 67 (or 65).

I'll be altering my consciousness today in tribute.

Now, I can just record the two shows I like on Fuse instead of waiting until I occassionally happen onto them while Shannon isn't watching something else.

Tivo does need a little help in working out its suggestions, though. Last night I recorded, CSI, Black Adder, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Good Eats, and set a wishlist item for Kids in the Hall. The suggestions it came back with were first, The Drew Carey Show, and then later, Unscripted (an HBO exclusive piece of crap) and some show with Carson Daly. Bad Tivo!

Trailer for the Icelandic production, Beowulf & Grendel.

I tend to shy away from forwarding silly internet prank thingies, but this one's funny, even if John Cleese didn't write it.

"Why does the horse not have grass?"

"Because it snowed."

"Woo, that was a silly joke," says Gareth.

It's Kyuss, Jim, but not as we know it. "Wretch" is a full-out hard rock album. You have the tuned-down guitars and the grinding, pervasive bass, but the tempo is much faster than the distinctive stoner Kyuss that was to come.

It is certainly not the "crap" it has been labeled as by some.

FireFox and spyware.

You know what's wild? You never see a positive drug story on the news, do you? Ever seen one? Isn't that weird? Don't you think that's strange? I mean, the news is supposed to be objective. Isn't it supposed to be THE news, but every drug story is negative? Well hold it, I've had some killer times on drugs. I'm not promoting it, but I'm not denying it. Let's hear the whole fucking story.

Same LSD story everytime we've all heard it, "young man on acid, thought he could fly, jumped out of a building. What a tragedy." What a dick. Don't go blaming acid on this fuckin' guy. Hey, hey, hey, if he thought he could fly, let him take off from the ground and check it out first. Fuck it. He's an idiot; he's dead. Good. You don't see ducks lined up to catch elevators to fly north. Do you? ....

Let's hear the whole story. Wouldn't you like to see a positive LSD story on the news? To hear what it's all about perhaps? Wouldn't that be interesting, just once? Today a young man on acid realized all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness, experiencing itself subjectively. There's no such thing as death; life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather.

Wow! Did you see the news?

I bow down to the Google Gods.

It'd be cool if one could eventually do multiple hops all on the same map. For example, Beowulfland, IA to Denver, CO to Sky Valley, CA.

It's funny how Windows sucks so bad that I never have any of these problems I read about. Maybe, idiots who can't manage a Google search shouldn't be trying to run a PC. After all, a computer isn't a toaster.

There are things about Windows that do suck, especially Win9x/Me, but I'll be damned if I see people talking about these real problems. Demonstrating illuminating egomania, the argument usually boils down to "everyone should use what I like because it's the best".

Part of the reason there is a dearth of Mac viruses is because only about 2% of geeks worldwide actually run Macs. Virus writers, usually, seek to wreak the greatest amount of havoc possible. (Friend of a friend $13,000 hack contests from the "early 90s" notwithstanding.) That dictates writing for the most popular platform out there. How many DOS viruses do you see anymore? Should I conclude DOS is more robust than Windows because of the lack of viruses that target the platform? The numbers game is a red herring, but it's an easy game which is why it's played so often. The greatest security threat to a PC is the person using it.

And, yes, I am a hypocrite. Of course, in my day, when I thought things mattered, I was complaining primarily (quack quack) about Microsoft's unfair marketing practices.

Languishing in an exceedingly boring meeting a few weeks ago, making no effort to look engaged, I started playing around with fractions. My discovery (banal, though it was) excited me.

One can use hexadecimal numbers while doing elementary school style fractions and everything works just as one would expect with base-10.

For example (from my scribblings):

  F0  ?  F

  --  = --

 100    10



 ---> 240  ?  15

      ---  =  --

      256     16

It all holds. Of course, when I was reducing by 0x10 with the hex fractions I was really dividing both sides by 16. This lead me to wonder what would happen with decimals. Can I sensibly talk about $1.FF? It seems like I should be able to, though CALC.EXE only lets me do integer division in HEX mode. Each place to the right of the decimal is a negative power of 16, in exactly the same way that each place to the left of the decimal is a positive power of 16. This must be indicative of something.

god bless you, brother

Someone broke into my hunk-a-junk car to steal my stereo. Yeah, they broke my window to get to my $100 Best Buy tape deck.

I have this to say to the Crips and/or Bloods who dared to dream.

Who locks an 89 Mazda?!? Check the handle, dumbass! It's unlocked!

Got my 3rd Kyuss CD today. I've only heard Part I (comprising the first 3 songs from the album, smashed together as a single track on the CD) so far, but it is quite good.

Welcome to Sky Valley was released chronologically between "Blues for the Red Sun" and "...And the Circus Leaves Town". In terms of the thick, heavy stoner rock bass, it is a lot closer to BFTRS than ATCLT.

Of the three albums I've heard so far, ATCLT is the most polished, but at the moment BFTRS is probably my favorite. We'll see how my obsession with WTSV develops. The next time I'm in LA, I'm definitely going to try to make a run out to Sky Valley to see if I can find the sign on the cover.

Remember, brothers and sisters that Christ died for our...donuts.

ibvq ebg13(pune *);



vag znva(vag netp, pune **neti) {



  vag ep = 0;

  vag v = 0;

  pune p = '';

  pune f[1] = "";



  vs (netp <= 1) {

    /* Ernq FGQVA */

    juvyr (RBS != (p = trgpune())) {

      f[0] = p;

      f[1] = '';

      ebg13(f);

    } 

  }

  ryfr {

    /* Ernq nethzrag yvfg */

    sbe (v = 1; v < netp; v++) { 

     ebg13(neti[v]);

     cevags(" ");    

    }

    cevags("a"); 

  }



  erghea ep;

}



ibvq ebg13(pune *f) {



  pune p = '';

  pune q = '';

  vag v = 0;

  vag w = 0;



  sbe (v=0; f[v] != ''; v++) {



    p = f[v];



    vs (!vfnycun(p)) { 

      q = p;

    }

    ryfr {

      vs (gbhccre(p) == p) {

        w = 65; 

      }

      ryfr {

        w = 97; 

      }

      q = ((p-w+13)%26)+w;

    }

    f[v] = q;

  }

 

  cevags("%f", f); 

  erghea;

}