reesesWeb

Sing it, brother!

This page has the understatement of the week:

FORTRAN character manipulation can be somewhat painful.

l0v3 l33+ $P33|<.

NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) -- Miss Lebanon won't speak to Miss Israel. Miss Zimbabwe is ready to emigrate if the anti-white violence back home gets "out of control." Miss Turkey did not show up after Cyprus turned down Turkey's condition that she travel overland through Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus. Miss Taiwan was renamed Miss Chinese Taipei by the pageant's organizers following protests by China.

-- Vijay Joshi, Associated Press, May 9, 2000

rain + shuttles + double-tall mocha + redhook + RAID = Microsoft

It's disgusting to see the blood libel dug up in the US. It's more disturbing to see the incompetence and idiocy of the local media in reporting the event. There are a few things that are simply unacceptable, and people bandying them about should lose all credibility immediately. Apparently, SFSU has a long history of rabid anti-semitism. People under the age of 25 should be prohibited from speaking their minds, because there's nothing in there for their ideas to bounce off of.

I live in this city?

Yeah, I probably wouldn't come out if my mom were named Abe and slipped $400/month under my door each month.

Strangely, I'm kind of annoyed that this guy hasn't chopped his feet off yet. Schadenfreude? You bet.

If iz timez0r to buy the leetest computar, u need to read this.

For some reason, I can't stop laughing at this Red Meat.

Did I say Vanilla Sky was messed up? Mulholland Dr. was even wackier, in an "I'm pulling this imagery out of my tush and it's up to you to sort the wheat from the chaff" sort of way.

Vanilla Sky is one effed up movie. I hate movies like that (Total Recall, etc.). I had the misfortune of seeing Penelope Cruz first in Blow, so I didn't much like her, and thought she was completely overrated. After seeing Woman On Top and this, my opinion has changed. ;>

I need to show these to my dad in time for Christmas. We used to love fighting with the inflatable ones back in the early 80s. We'd end up with bruises from head to toe with "indestructible polycarbonite tubes" with which to thwack one another.

Intifada is hard! Let's go shopping!

I used to think Harper's Index was really cool when I was a anarcho-socialist teenager because, hey, numbers don't lie. I haven't seen it in about thirteen years, but someone has taken it upon themselves to do their fact checking for them.

I don't know about the statistical accuracy of this article, but it must have been tough for the author to get an article on the inefficacy of gun control laws on crime published in Boston.

More Ruby. I've rewritten a lame little Python script in Ruby last night. It was a lot easier to write this in Ruby than it was to write the first one in Python, and that's a purely environmental observation, as the problem itself was quite trivial.

I went out with a buddy today, meeting in the Mission area of San Francisco. Of course, I hadn't checked to see if there was a HUGE CARNIVALE in the area first, but there you go. Lines for all of the restaurants were long, except for a tiny, centrally-located, El Salvadorean restaurant.

The lack of a line should have been the first warning.

We went in, and stood around for a minute or two until a table was vacated. We sat down, next to the pile of dirty plates, for about ten minutes before the one guy working came by to clear them. He didn't wipe the table off, but he did return about another ten minutes later with menus. Another fifteen minutes, and he came by to take our order.

We waited, and every time someone came to the door, we thought,"Run, run! Don't do it! Don't come in!" Several groups came in, waited a long time, and left, before we received our food.

Fifty minutes later, he brought my "El Salvadorean Enchiladas", while my friend sat and waited for his Carne Asada. Another fifteen minutes, and he went up to ask in the kitchen if his food was coming. For those bad at math, fifty + fifteen = one hour, five minutes. It turns out the business was a real mom & pop endeavor, and mom was in the back, making one plate at a time.

I tucked into my food, and discovered that it was truly foul. Steve's "Carne Asada" was a strip of cheapest cut beef, grilled without seasoning, with a little red sauce poured on top. My enchiladas were crisp fried cornmeal disks, with shredded beef seasoned liberally with MSG, and cheap shredded-cabbage-from-a-bag on top.

Did I mention that I had to eat what I could with a flimsy plastic fork?

The place, Panchita's on 16th, looked as if it had been open a while, which baffles me completely. How do places like that stay open? They must have served maybe six plates while we were there, at an average cost of about $10/person (with beer). We were there at the busy time, so unless their rent was a few bucks or they had been so long it was under rent control at 1950s rates, it would have been really tough to cover.

I guess it should have been obvious, but my love for Ruby has developed a blemish: Ruby does not have multiple dispatch.

I'm in the middle of an existential dilemma. IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse? After having to switch from VisualAge/Java earlier this year, I've been cast adrift, and am now afraid of wasting a month switching to an IDE that isn't the best.

Yes, it is critical to choose the best one when switching, because you'll be stuck with it for a few years, and those precious seconds stolen by a bad IDE add up to days of your life you will never get back, not to mention the stress and frustration of not being able to do what you need to do, or not being able to do it easily.

Good lord, SF weather is 100x better than that of Seattle. I love hearing people complain about the weather. I am always surprised, and have to look out the window to see if it changed in the last five minutes. Then I realise that it's just the same as it was when last I was out in it, and that the person to whom I am speaking is merely a deluded crackmonkey.

It rained today, for the first time in a long time, and it was a gentle, fleeting rain, not the soul-soaking, persistent, drenching that we got in Seattle.

Miss it? The only things I miss right now are Vivace, seafood, and Larry's. Decent coffee, fresh fish, and grocery stores DO NOT EXIST in this city. You'd think the massive concentration of yuppie capital would have resulted in the presence of something capable of satisfying one's tastes in fresh food. I was _so_ grateful when my mom had a big box of live shellfish delivered overnight from Pike Place Market for my birthday. Yay mom!

I'm looking forward to going to Seattle after the wedding to go see Star Wars in digital at the Cinerama, because I'll get to go eat my tush off.

Turning thirty was a bit of a let-down. I had prepared myself for a truly traumatic experience, and pff. Thirty, big deal. I've pi**ed away half my natural life with nothing to show for it. Big deal. Get back to me when I'm on my deathbed and have wasted the rest of it. :-)

I got (well, bought for myself) a minidisc player, at least. And my parents gave me a GameBoy Advance, with all the "Arcade Classics" cartridges, so I'm ready for sitting on the plane for far too many hours.

Did I mention that in thirty days from now, I'll be getting married? Yeargh. I'm not stressing about that one, either, which is kind of a letdown. It'll probably be a gradual transition, and besides, they'll probably mess something up in translating the documents or sending them back to the US, so it will have not happened anyway.

Which stage is denial? I wonder when I get to stage two, if I'll try to bargain my way out. "Listen, let's just stay engaged for another year, and not drive out to Krivoklat just yet..." I'm sure our parents wouldn't mind at all.

This is the year of drama. Moving from Seattle to San Francisco, changing jobs, turning 30, getting married, future wife moving to Washington, D.C. to start law school one month after the wedding. As long as no one dies, I'll probably be able to hold it together just fine.

Nerf. Back to ripping my CDs to pack onto MD.

I swear I've worked with this guy, just under a different name.

I remember fantasising about all the silliness in Johnson Smith's adverts in comic books. Hovercraft plans! 7' tall ghosts you can control!

I got one of these at our company white elephant party last Christmas.

The dream is realised!

I thought I had weird experiences with women.

As an aside, this exchange with my girlfriend encapsulates completely the relationship between men and women:

"I'm bored! What's on tv?"

"The only thing on is x!"

"What's it about?"

"Dunno, change the channel and find out."

"I don't want to if it's going to stink."

In other words,"I have this problem," "I have a solution," "I don't want a solution, I just want to whine."

Joy!

Wow. I almost had to beat up a woman this morning!

I was walking Kat to work, and a good thing, too. Right after we got out the door, there was a woman on the corner, yelling at someone we couldn't see.

"Hmm, maybe we should watch out, because there may be a very scary individual on the other side of the corner there, and we don't want to get in the middle of that."

But the woman crossed the street, and no one followed her. She was looking in random directions, yelling, and swinging her arms around. Sad, but not especially unusual.

As we came closer to the intersection, though, genius Kat had to keep watching her, eventually making eye contact. So, crazy woman continued yelling random stuff we couldn't really understand, so we stopped paying attention.

Until we heard,"She's cute! I want to f* her! I'm going to f* her! Do you share? Hey, a*hole, I'm talkin' to you!"

Still, not a big deal, just funny, and we figured she'd stop after a block or so. Arguing with crazy people isn't exactly a productive use of time.

We walk another couple blocks with crazy woman at a constant distance behind us, not making any moves toward us or anything, when the things she said started changing.

"I'm stalking her! There, I've told you! I've said it! What are you going to do about it? Nothing, that's what! How ya gonna prove it? You can't! I'm going to kill her! I'm going to throw her off the bridge! I've done it before!"

So, at this point, I thought,"I'm going to have to beat up a girl! A crazy girl, but it's still a girl!"

Fortunately for everyone but unfortunately for the story, apparently she hated black people more than she hated us, because a guy walking by with headphones distracted her and she followed him around for a bit. He argued with her a lot, so maybe he was a little nuts, too. By the time I dropped Kat off and walked back, I didn't see crazy woman again.

This will save a bit of time.

Yow. this game is kicking my tuckus, and I can't stop playing!

Sometimes I really feel sorry for people. I mean, sending what you think is a private email to the USPS, including the entire context of a shipment, only to have them make it known to the world that you, April Holly Smith, of 724 Count Ave, North Las Vegas, NV 89030, bought a BEAUTIFUL RED RABBIT FUR Flogger BDSM Whip on ebay!

Of course, I made a backup in case the original page is purged by someone with common sense. Not that that's likely to happen any time soon.