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From: hsm-offers

Subject: 'Free' 'MP3' player

Yeah, that's a good start...

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And it just gets better!

Many lines from Star Wars can be improved by substituting the word pants.

Sarah Connor?

What do you call a person who wags the dog by pointing to someone wagging the dog?

<Dread> Lovely@58..Posing Around the House

<Dread> NO!

<Dread> BAD INTERNET!

Talk about sad stories. The story certainly sounds like a comic book plot, but I'm not sure if it's more Batman or Eddy Current.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

One more note from the anti-419 movement.

Dads suffer, too! You thought bouncing a kid on your knee was tiring...

From the Good-For-Her department of Yahoo! news:

Jordanian Woman Attacks Harassers

Sun Sep 22,11:49 AM ET

AMMAN, Jordan (AP) - All that was missing was the Wonder Woman costume.

Witnesses say a Jordanian woman ripped off her enveloping black cloak and veil � to reveal a traditional long dress that was nearly as enveloping � and punched and kicked into submission three young men who had been verbally harassing her.

The official Petra News Agency reported Sunday that shopkeepers and passers-by believe the unidentified woman must have had martial arts training. In Friday's incident on the main street in Zarqa 13 miles north Amman, the three men were too shocked to react at first and ended up knocked to the ground, screaming in pain. They then scrambled up and fled.

The woman quoted the title of a song made famous by the late Egyptian star Umm Kalthoum � "patience has its limits" � before continuing on her way as a crowd cheered her.

Petra quoted witnesses as saying the three men had regularly directed obscenities at the woman as she walked in the area. It was not clear if they harassed other women as well.

I wonder why we have so little philosophy today. It seems the world of pure thought has stagnated, which strikes me as particularly unusual. In the United States alone, we have remarkable opportunity for reflection. We claim to be raw capitalists, yet corporate welfare has been part of our government economic policy since its inception. We claim that all men are created equal, but they are obviously not, and it is permitted for them to be hindered or helped based on their circumstances of creation.

I'm not espousing opinion on those examples, merely that the warp and weft that hold our country (and, I'm sure, all others) together provide many nutrients for a woven philosophy, rather than mere political discourse.

This is the land of plenty to think about.

What can I say? I think someone is about to see a red card in that photo.

I'm looking forward to when speech recognition improves to the point of untrained usability. What I really want to see are automated real-time transcripts of phone conversations so I can tune out until I hear someone ask me a question. Then I can read the previous ten lines of conversation and appear to be paying attention all along.

Because, well, I hate conference calls. I'm just there so normal people can discuss requirements and then say,"Can we do that?" or "How many people for how much time would that take?" I don't want to have to listen, especially on a cruddy connection! :-)

Pixel has been having a problem with clumping fur lately. She developed a bit of agoraphobia in the loft in SF, and took to hiding under beds when tense. With the petsitter coming in (and us gone) for a few weeks, she spent all her time under the bed, and didn't groom herself. After we came back and discovered that the petsitter obviously didn't check on her, we did discover her fur matted and clumped. I cut off the biggest mats, and took her to the vet for the rest when we had her certified healthy for travel.

The vet pulled out a flea comb to pull through the clumps. I had used a regular cat comb before, and she absolutely hated it, no matter how careful I was about pulling the skin. I bought a flea comb (embarrassed though I was at the counter) and the problems went away. Easy to pull through the clumps and clear them, and no pain for Pix. Highly recommended if you have problem longhairs.

If you look at the picture above, Pix is about twice as big now. I hardly remember a time when she was so tiny as a fully-grown adult cat. I think she averaged around seven pounds then, and now she's above 13. Almost a full stone! She's depicted a bit more accurately here.

I went to the nearby newsstand/Hallmark store this evening to pick up a birthday card for my little sister, who's turning 22 on the 27th. I felt so sorry for the guy in front of me, because something happened to him that all men probably dread at some time in their lives, while buying anything slightly embarrassing.

The woman behind the counter had the habit of repeating the name of the item to herself while she looked for the price stamped on it. This is fine if she's just repeating something like,"Rice Crispies", "Doublemint Gum", "Baseball cap".

But god help you if you're buying porn. ;>

"Hustler, Hustler, Hustler, oh, x dollars. Barely Legal, Barely Legal, Barely Legal, ah, n dollars."

I was standing behind the guy so I couldn't see precisely which shade of red he ended up when she was done with him, but it made me want to open a newsstand so I could do the same thing to people.

I installed esr's bogofilter yesterday, and I'm watching it learn how to detect spam. It thinks all fvwm-related emails are spam, a notion of which I have yet to disabuse it. I've been filtering those emails to /dev/null for a long time anyway.

I'm still getting quite a few false positives, but that's expected without a seeding database.

It does make me nervous to rely on esr for my email, though.

I've noticed more and more people doing this. I'm hoping it will lead to a reduction in the quantity of 419 scam emails I get, when fake responses take up too much of their time.

One bit that I found...amusing...was one of the sigs added by Yahoo! mail:

Yahoo! - We Remember


9-11: A tribute to the more than 3,000 lives lost

Talk about tasteless -- they should have left the company name off.

My third famous-person sighting happened today. Let me just say...Ethan Hawke has bad skin.

A guy on the team wasted a few hours yesterday, and several hours today tracking down idiosyncratic behavior between a browser and HttpUnit, and how they handled a test form. Apparently, HttpUnit uses JTidy, which will not parse invalid HTML that would otherwise make it past a browser. So, if your HTML is not a valid tree, and elements span inappropriate lexical boundaries (such as having a form begin in a table and end outside it), it'll puke on you.

Which is as it should, being a unit-testing framework. However, it should tell you.

And it will, if you call HttpUnitOptions.setParserWarningsEnabled( true ).

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!

The weather here in New York is finally starting to turn to the cooler, for that brief period before it becomes brutally cold and windy. I'm looking forward to it, having suffered here for the past couple months and missed a San Francisco summer.

If you're spending time here looking for the missing centerfold, let me help. I do this because, well, I don't want you to waste the time I did looking for the secret. :-)

Then again, if you want to look at lots of pictures of naked women with some made-up innocent excuse, be my guest.