reesesWeb

I just need to cache some pages that have been sitting unread in Phoenix tabs for weeks. I don't want to lose them when the browser crashes.

MyLifeBits Project

DEVONthink 1.6

As We May Think

Database Debunkings

CafePress publish on demand

gawker

Silicon Valley

10% unemployment

traffic's much better.

I can't believe that the DC tax burden is higher than frickin' Alberta. We need to find oil under this city! I'm going to write my congressmen.

Oh. Damn.

I held off on writing about this, because, frankly, I had been waiting to see if I could get photos. This kind of story just screams for them. And, given the personal import, the volume on everything else is so low as a result that nothing else really matters enough to bother typing.

At slightly after midnight EDT Friday morning, my phone rang. Every time my phone rings, it surprises me. I never check my voice mail, because I have structured my life such that perhaps four or five people actually get in touch with me by phone. I hate phones, because I'm a creature of secondary communication, and I can't get any of the feedback that I require when speaking to someone, if I can't see their faces. It's so disconnected that it feels like I'm shouting down the well at them. Those of you who have participated in conference calls know exactly what I'm talking about -- I'm like a caricature from the '30s, some luddite perched over the phone, shouting into it as if it's necessary to increase the volume to be heard all the way on the other side of the world, that my voice won't make it to Germany or Amsterdam if I don't give it a little boost.

So, when the phone rang at midnight, not only was I surprised, I was tempted not to answer it, thinking it was one of the numerous wrong numbers I get. As Washington, DC, is an international city with a significant population of foreign nations who, presumably, would speak to people in foreign countries with more frequency than people in the general population of, say, Seattle, they're making a lot more calls after nine or ten PM than decency would suggest, and they seem to dial a lot of wrong numbers at this hour, too. The benefit of caller id is such that, in this circumstance, I was able to see that this was probably a call I didn't want to miss, coming from my parents' house in Washington State. Even more strangely, my sister was calling, which has happened perhaps three times since I left home a hundred years ago. Usually, my mom calls, and if my sister's around, I'll talk to her later. She never actually originates the call.

"First of all, you need to know he's fine." Of course, no good conversation starts this way. "Dad was in an accident, and mom is driving him to the hospital to have his hand rebuilt. He'll probably lose part of his ring finger, but he's otherwise fine and coherent."

It turns out that my father was driving his work vehicle, a monstrous Expedition, home on a state highway. Two lanes, undivided, 55mph speed limit, winds around a lot of blind corners, goes through semi-residential areas, lots of access roads, etc.

My dad came around one of these blind corners to see a car stopped in the process of turning left, making a u-turn, whatever. Right around a blind corner, with no oncoming traffic. He couldn't honk and go to the left, in case she continued forward and he plowed into her, and he obviously couldn't hit her straight on. He hit the brakes, calculated that his rate of deceleration was not sufficient to clear the car, and steered onto the shoulder to the right. The gravel on the soft shoulder caught the right front wheel and started pulling him very hard to the right, so once past the stopped car, he pulled it back to the left. When the tire caught on the asphalt, his car was sufficiently turned against the direction of momentum that his car rolled.

Unfortunately, his side window was down, it being about 900 degrees, and he couldn't keep his left hand in the car. The hand was thrown outside the window, where it was beaten between the ground and car before the car stopped rolling. My dad, ever the clear thinker, looked down through his side window, and saw something you don't really want to see out the side window of your car, right past a blind corner on a highway: the yellow line. (In the US, this divides lanes of opposite directions of travel) He managed to unbuckle his safety belt with his functioning hand, and dragged himself out of the truck limped to the side of the road to await the emergency response staff, who happened to include a kid I played hockey with, and a couple kids my dad had umpired in little league. Pictures were taken, and he was carted off to the emergency room.

To give an idea how bad his hand was, the trauma nurse said that it was the worst hand injury she had ever seen. This, in a farming community of thresher and combine accidents, rattlesnake bites, and general small-town drunken foolishness. The staff surgeon looked at the hand and declared that he was unqualified to work on it. Having a history of hand injury, my father instructed them to call his hand surgeon at a hospital fifty miles away, who prepped to receive my dad when he arrived.

Now, I'm going to interrupt the narrative here to explain something about my dad. In fact, about both of my parents. They're incredibly tough people. They come from hardy stock who put up with an incredible array of hardships just to stay alive and get out in the middle of nowhere. I have an absurd level of admiration for the stuff they get through, and while I have nowhere near their level of kantian determination, they have definitely given me excellent preparation in dealing with misfortune. If you're not dead, you can laugh about it, and you can take another run at it later.

So, I call my dad's cell phone, expecting to reach my mom. My dad answers it, exactly as he always answers the phone, stating his name. (Why is it that so many guys answering cell phones answer with their names? We seem to think that, if the phone can be anywhere when it rings, that the person on the other end of the phone doesn't really know which phone they'll get when they dial our number.) I'm a bit surprised, and think that perhaps it was all a dream, or a surreal and cruel joke, or an hallucination.

It turns out that (here we go about the toughness) my dad didn't really want to be strapped down in the back of an ambulance for the hour-long drive to Richland. So, he had them clean him up a minimal amount, (so no damage was done to what was left of his hand) give him a jolt of morphine, and my mother would drive him to the other hospital.

They make it there without incident (I didn't ask if his truck was still there when they passed the accident site) and he went into microsurgery for several hours, while his surgeon re-established as much blood flow as possible. This was an emergency surgery, and no bones were re-set, pinned or screwed together. The hand was cleaned and kept alive until the next surgery, scheduled for Sunday morning, where the three broken fingers will be pinned and screwed back on, and any other bones will be encouraged to migrate back to their original positions.

A third surgery, which may or may not be needed, will involve a skin graft to replace lost tissue. Of course, the joke about this is that he's been making deposits in the skin bank for the past ten years, as he's gone from about 150lb to 190lb, and he's about to make a withdrawal and reap the dividends.

Some people claim that I'm a pessimist, but I'm mostly just sarcastic. (And whiny, of course.) While the stream of garbage that comes out of my mouth and fingers is largely negative, I have a vastly optimistic view of the future. While this accident is hugely unfortunate, it actually strengthens my happy expectations for the coming years.

You see, as mentioned on many occasions before, I have this incredible fear of death. I don't really fear dying, and have done a lot of things that increased my chances of dying at any point, but I'm obviously not yet dead. If I am dead, either heaven is vastly overrated, or hell is really unimaginative in its torments. In addition to my death, I also have a monstrous fear of my parents dying. I know it's going to happen, and, as my father is 61, he's probably closer to the end than the beginning.

What reinforces my optimism is how bloody easily he has dealt with this accident. As I mentioned before, he's very tough. 61-year-old men don't just walk away from accidents that turn their hands into bone-studded pulp, after being put through the spin cycle. They definitely don't answer the cell phone and ask how the heck the other person is doing, while being driven to the hospital.

If he can do that, I figure he's got a long, long time to look forward to finding new ways to mangle his hands, his back, his stomach, his esophagus, his intestines, his nose, his neck, and G-d knows what else. In my selfish opinion, this is a very good thing for me.

r0x0r.

One of the funnier abuses of statistics I've seen today.

I find this article quite eye-opening for a few reasons. I'll give a little summary:

Consolidating publicly- and openly-available data, a grad student at GMU has built a GIS database containing all (or at least a very large quantity) of the communications links in the US. Various people are in a tizzy because this information could be terribly useful to black hats interested in taking out our communications infrastructure.

One of my favorite quotes in the article:

�This is why CEOs of major power companies don�t sleep well these days,� Derrick said, flattening the pages with his fist. �Why in the world have we been so stupid as a country to have all this information in the public domain? Does that openness still make sense? It sure as hell doesn�t to me.�

I know that the computer security industry went through something like this back in the dark ages, and it has a name: Security Through Obscurity. The idea is that, sure, you may have a backdoor exploit that would allow people to get into your "secure" system, but if they never find out about it, who cares? This idea is especially attractive when you realise that, even if you release a patchkit, and send it to all of your customers in a bright red envelope with bright orange lettering reading,"INSTALL THIS NOW OR YOU'LL BE IN THE HORSE COSTUME ON GAY DAY AT THE PETTING ZOO, AND YOUR MOM WILL GET THE PICTURES," they still won't install it. Ever.

So, not only haven't you solved the problem, you've made it public knowledge, and bad kids or bad men will take advantage of this knowledge and the reluctance to fix it, and walk through your system like drippy poo through goose's guts.

Anyway, Security Through Obscurity actually 'worked' in the computer industry for a long time. Until people started looking for these holes in the castle wall, and they were surprisingly easy to find. Heck, in my first week of using Unix, back in 1990, I discovered an exploit that allowed me to gain read access to ttys on a Dynix system, and read all of the passwords for people logging in via the terminal pools in my university. This is even without the scads of rootkits floating around for Skript Kiddies who don't even bother learning about the APIs, because they have ready-made rootkits.

So, how hard do you think it's going to be to hide your billion-dollar fibre project from anyone interested enough to come looking for it? These aren't day trippers out for a little sightseeing, off to see the new trench where the Intarw3b is. These are seriously bad people who want to ruin your day, and are willing to die trying. I imagine that, honestly, they'd spend a year walking a three-block section of Manhattan, just to find the right spot to blow up. Your solution is not making it harder to find the information, because it's a one-way valve. Once it gets out, it's way too hard to contain.

Your solution needs to involve a communciations infrastructure that can't be destroyed by a limited coordinated attack upon a few of its links. Your communications network needs massive redudancy, or the ability to heal and re-route around any disturbances. Why is DARPA sleeping through this?

(Yes, I did write this so that I could look back in a year and laugh over "gay day at the petting zoo". You got me.)

Yeah, I'm babbling like a school girl with a meth habit today. Because, it's, umm, role playing!

Tonight, it's time for another installment of Why DC Is Weird.

I recently had a revelation that is probably really obvious to other people in general, and especially to people here, but it's honestly something that hasn't occurred to me before.

Several months ago, I had this conversation with someone who shall remain nameless (Hi Scott!) that really and truly confused me. It went something like this, set in an office, talking about cheap LCDs:

Me: I wonder if it has a DVI port. Probably not, because it's so cheap.

Someone else: Do you really need a DVI port?

Me: Yeah, because the ADCs in the cheap LCDs really suck. You don't want one of those.

Someone else: Hmm, can you connect a regular VGA card to a DVI-only LCD?

Me: No, because--

Someone else: Oh, right

Me: -- it's a lot harder converting from analog to digital than converting from digital to analog.

Someone else: Yes, yes, I know, enough with the head-patting.

OK, so this is paraphrased a lot, and too long to be interesting to anyone but me (as if anyone but me reads this), but this is the gist: I have this tendency to state things that people know, or may know, or may not know, or may not know that I know that they may know. I'm not always a dork about it, but honestly, I often am.

Anyway, I really rubbed this particular guy the wrong way. We had a bit of a bad vibe, we worked through it, blah blah. But it still seemed strange. I worried for a long time that I was sending these evil arrogant mind rays out, and I was, and am, but this seemed even more arrogant than usual, almost a Pratsylvanian Count Pricula type thing, and I really don't like being that guy. I think I blew what could have been a good friendship with it, but I blow those all the time.

So, I took some time off, cleared my head, and took a new job. This job has its own set of peccadillos, (oh good god, if it weren't for the easy money and the proximity to home, I'd still be sitting on the couch writing porn novels.) but it suddenly became worthwhile because of a certain insight it has recently given me.

Have I ever mentioned that I'm _really_ slow on the uptake? I rarely forget anything, but I have this tiny peephole to the outside world. Information trickles in really slowly, swirls around the cesspool, and ends up wherever, in some eddy off to the side somewhere, torturing and befouling innocent metaphors and analogies. I don't smoke pot, but I have the short-term memory of an ounce-a-day toker.

This revelation is something that anyone else would have figured out ages ago, but I only actually noticed and internalised recently. I'm normally very good at reading people, (especially clients) but for some reason, this little nuance had totally escaped my notice.

What I noticed recently is that it's really important for people to count coup on other people in the office, by knowing things the other person doesn't know, or didn't think of. (See that earlier post.) It's nauseating to start a conversation with someone, and see that their only interest is finding fault with your construct. Who cares if I pull a number out of my ass and it's not right? How many times do I have to say,"It doesn't matter what the number is -- there's just some number. Don't get caught up in which numbers I actually use to illustrate my point." before it sinks in? Why do you need to finish someone's sentence for them? Why do you need to correct someone's pronunciation of something that has nothing to do with the conversation at hand, especially when you're the one pronouncing it wrong? Why is there this stupid microcompetition between people who are ostensibly on the same team?

Every day, I hear people casually correcting other people in a very ugly way. It's not "Oh, I noticed that you used this API instead of this one over here. I had trouble with that before, and discovered that you really want to avoid that, because it's very poorly written." That sort of exchange is why I like working in technology, and specifically software development. People in a collegial environment helping each other out, pointing out possible hazards to avoid, having fun, building something together. Have a question? Ask it. No one's going to think you're that stupid, and even if they do, they'll forget it when they have to ask a stupid question, too.

What I don't like is hearing someone attacking someone in a way that is phrased nicely, but is obviously intended to assert the speaker's superiority over the other person. I'm not sure if either person is even consciously aware of this, but you can tell their subconscious is wise to the game. Voices rise almost to a screech, the cadence compresses, and it's a truly awful thing to behold, almost like seeing a fight between a couple who are friends with you. Naked aggression that would probably be better resolved with fisticuffs on the playground than not-so-subtle dissing in the classroom. It's the nasty Thanksgiving fight with your Uncle Philbert or whatever, or your buddy jealous of your girlfriend. Just whip your peckers out, measure up, and leave it be. Mene mene tekel upharsin, right?

This is what I hated about Microsoft, and why I didn't stick around. This is also why I like the west coast a lot more than the east, and why I'll be so glad to move back.

If you happened to read this and also happen to be one of the people I peeved by acting like a disrespectful dork, honestly, I didn't mean it, and had no idea how it was coming off. I have huge amounts of respect for everyone, and if I don't, believe me, everyone around will know not long after you figure it out. Unless you're one of the imaginary friends, and I never liked you lot much anyway.

All I have to say is, get the hell away from the beast coast. It's not like this out west. Except at MSFT, of course.

When was the last time Zamf poo'd? Should I order him a little help? That boy's going to be a brown bomb ere long.

I never actually forget anything. It's just that sometimes, things trickle out of my head at a time other than the right time. I'm that guy who'll wake up at three AM, the night after a big debate, with the witty rejoinder.

"No, you can't use kittens tied to balloons as little messengers to keep your secret plans out of the hands of your enemies, because they can't talk, and they're awful at writing!"

I mean, the really obvious stuff, right? I go looking for it...nothing. I turn my inner eye...inward, and nothing, just a black, gaping void. My inner eye gets a little scared, like it's taking a midnight stroll down the wrong alley in the wrong part of the Tenderloin or that park in Belltown by Mama's (oh, wait, let me localise this for DC -- like SE DC) with a string of fifty-dollar bills taped together the long way, hanging out of its back pocket, a little moneytail or something, although really, I think the scariest thing in the Tenderloin or SE DC or Belltown or whatever, would be this little eye in parachute pants cruising down the street like the head of the Comet Ulysseses Grants, and ain't no way someone's getting in a tussle with that eye for a few hunny, dig?

What the heck was my point? I think I illustrated it perfectly, anyway. I'm a bit absentminded, but really, more tardyminded, but that has a whole other implication that hits a little too close to home, so let's leave that be.

Ah, yes. So, I had forgotten to mention that I was on the plane Monday morning, flying back from Schiphol, and they showed The Recruit. Now, it's an enjoyable enough movie, because any movie with Bridget Moynahan can't be that bad, especially if you're not listening to the movie, but typing away and looking up and feeling a little disgruntled that they edited out the bits where she's running around nude, even if it's all shot from the back. I think Patrick Moynahan was her body double, though, and that's just too much.

So, in this movie, which I had seen before in the states, there were two bits that made me wince a little bit, being one of the roughly 30% of the people on the plane from the states, the other 70% being godless foreigners. Two bits where Al Pacino's character talked about money, and I realised a couple things.

I just came from a country (Hungary) where very few people are going to be whinging about making only $70k or $75k or whatever per year. That's about eighteen million forints a year, which is enough to buy a crappy flat in the city. Where if someone offers you $200k, you're not going to be asking what the job is, because you wouldn't want them to have any opportunity to change their minds and give it to some other sod. I'm sure the dutch people on the plane didn't mind either way, because each job would leave them with forty euros after taxes, which they'd spend on beer and cigarettes.

Anyway, I think the last movie I saw dubbed into another language was possibly The Matrix, when I saw it in Nice sometime last century. It generally avoided discussions of money, so I really couldn't say how translators handle currency. Do they translate the amounts into quantities that would make sense in the local context, or is this why so many foreigners think we're so affluent? That $70k is the poverty level in the US, and we all get out of college with salaries of at least $200k?

I have very little understanding of how much, say, the average frenchman makes throughout his life. I've spent a lot of time talking to french people, lived in Paris, etc., but it's not something that comes up. "So, Jean-Philippe, how much did you make right out of University? How long before you made FF100k? How much did your flat cost?" Right, I want to reinforce their idea that americans think about money all the time. (Just a sec, I have to put in this stop order.) I imagine that, especially in countries with more progressive taxation, (I hate that term, because of the association of the word 'progress' with something so foul and malodorous) the curve is much more flat. Flatter. And that is why Flattery will get you nowhere.

Where are my pants?

Kat had a weird pain in her tooth that throbbed in time with her step while she was walking around. She made an emergency appointment with the dentist (only because I kept insisting), and went in for an exam, complete with panoramic x-rays. The dentist was an american dentist living in Budapest, not some former Soviet bloc guy asking,"Is it safe?" while drilling into her incisors, never diagnosing her sinus infection as the cause.

Anyway, that little snippet above is from my recent Amex statement. Unadjusted by insurance.

In the past few years, Budapest has become quite the destination for dental holidays. The prices are miniscule compared to procedures in the west, many of the dentists are western-trained, and if you live in Europe, the travel and lodging to get to Budapest are much less expensive than the procedures at home, so you get a free vacation to dirty Hungary on top of it. With decent American insurance, it's much less compelling, especially if the airfare is relatively expensive, as it is from the US to Budapest. Then again, if you're planning a trip to Hungary anyway, and you have some expensive procedure to go through, you might as well hit the dentist on your last day and sleep off the return flight with a bottle of percoset. Can you tell I'm not a doctor? If not, don't intentionally go flying around with serious, recent oral trauma upon my recommendation. Take a couple extra sick days instead, and fly back later.

Of course, with an influx of cash like this, opportunisim abounds, and even hotels are getting into the act, with on-site dental surgeries and package deals including dental exams.

That's dead goat arse. With strike.

I just wanted to mentioned again that changedetect.com sucks goat arse, in case you forgot.

This is a very deadly magyar insult. You thought the Evil Eye was the worst thing the Roma could throw at you?

Redzilla fell for the mewling-humans-under-the-cage trick every time.

I need this for Windows XP. Email me if you have a solution, SVP.

A couple gear reviews.

Not gear reviews, but reviews on gear. The reviews themselves suck.

Camera: Canon Powershot S230 Digital Elph

I bought this camera for digital snapshots in Budapest, and later Prague. Because I was foolish and waited too long, and because I thought some tosser could get a good discount on the S400 through a particular ecommerce site he just launched (lies!), I had to buy at a brick & mortar. This wasn't actually bad, because the guy dropped the price $50 because I look good in a turban, and I was out the door.

First things first: It's still too heavy. It's lighter than the S400, but the Optio S was lighter, cooler looking, and if it didn't use xd media AND have a crappy lens, I would have bought it instead. The S230 also takes too long to focus. If you're strolling along and try to take a subtle picture of some hottie, you'd better have continuous shot mode on, or you're going to miss 2/3 of the shots.

Other than that, the lens is good, and the pictures are nice if you have time to stop and frame them. And, to its credit, it does focus and lock on much, much faster than my old A50.

Earphones: Sony MDR-NC11 noise-cancelling earphones

Bad: the computational unit is bulky, large enough to hold the 1xAAA battery that powers things. The earphones, because they fit snugly in the ear, transmit a lot of ambient resonance to your eardrum, so you hear yourself walking, sniffing, breathing, chewing, etc. And it's loud. There's also a lot of noise -- it's almost as if the "noise cancellation" is just white noise that masks the low-frequency noise instead of blocking it. The sound quality of the earphones is not as clear as it might be, especially if you're used to something like the Etymotics or even a good pair of open-air headphones. I listen to my Grados a lot (SR-80s at work and SR-125s at home), and they've accultured me to very "bright" music, so everything else sounds more subdued.

On the good side, the noise cancellation does work well on the train or on the plane. Because there's a fairly good seal between the rubber plugs and your ear canal, it also blocks a fair bit of outside noise on this basis alone. They look cool, and once you get them fitted to your ear canal, are actually amazingly comfortable, and I'm speaking as a person who can't stand most earphones for more than a few minutes.

I can't fault the Magyars their fixation on bacon.

I made it back into the states today. Fortunately, I was not the person who died on the plane.

I have a few trite observations to make about Budapest. I'm tired and cranky (so, in other words, feeling normal), so this will be short, in the form of bullet items.

• "Budapest has the most beautiful women in the world."
  
  Perhaps at one time, they did. But the Madison Avenue model machine morlocks have apparently sucked them all away, like so many Eloi appetisers. There are a lot of "pretty" girls with fantastic bodies -- the sort who think they can make it in Hollywood and become movie stars, and do, but in porn. There are also a lot of "cute" girls working in places far beneath what would be their stations here in the states -- mall kiosk girls that could easily be regional catalog models, etc.
  
• Very dirty, run-down buildings
  
  Budapest is about ten years behind Prague in cleaning up their city after throwing off the industrial yoke of the Soviet collectivisation regime. This stands to reason -- half of Budapest was destroyed in the second World War, and replaced with godawful Sovbloc concrete cubes of residential misery. Who'd want to clean that up? It'd just be polishing a turd.
  
• Porn capital of Europe
  
  It may be the porn capital of Europe, but it's almost all for export. Even in the tourist areas (where lots of porn is typically sold), the best you could do is a handful of truly scary looking magazines with emaciated, drugged out girls on the covers. After I worked my way through those, there wasn't anything else.
  
• Food & Hotel are absurdly inexpensive for European city standards. The five star hotel we stayed in (Kempinski) was about half the cost of similar lodging in Prague, and about a third to a fourth the cost in Nice, Paris, or the states. And food -- eating at McDonald's is about 1/2 the cost of a gourmet meal at one of Budapest's new "elite" scenester restaurants (Tom-George). However, the bill of fare at these restaurants lead me to believe the menu was composed by a guy who came to the west coast once, and made up a list of dishes that sounded to him as if they'd be served in SF or LA. Lots of bacon, though. Bacon chips, bacon noodles, bacon nigiri. You think I'm making that last one up. Anyway, we had a very satisfying meal for about 10kft, or about USD40. The huge numbers would throw me off after eating, too. I'd think,"Oh, jesus, 5000ft to take a cab from the airport!" and have to calm myself by telling myself it was about USD20. That backfired, though, when I checked out of the hotel and settled the minibar tab. I signed away 36kft without thinking or questioning how perhaps ten bottles of Coke, Fanta, and water could come to $144.
  
• Lots of fat americans in BP
  
  It's american vacation season, true. It's Hungarian travel season, too, lowering their numbers. But everywhere I went, I heard loud american-accented english. Everywhere. However, on the bright side, I didn't hear any of the "ugly american"-isms that embarrass us overseas. Perhaps Budapest, being slightly inaccessible (good god, you'll never learn the language), is on the other side of that Rubicon, impregnible to the people who roll through the Netherlands and call everything 'quaint'.
  
• Grocery stores close absurdly early
  
  OK, this last one sucks, but so do grocery stores that close at 4pm on Saturday, and 2pm on Sunday, if they're open at all.
  

Kat asked if I'd go back, because she's keen on living there. Not because it's her favorite place, as I think we're both partial to Prague in that region, but because there's actually work for her there. Lots of work in the human rights/international law field, and she could get a job that would pay for law school in only 250 years.

Let's just say,"no." I might consider it if I were single, just to debauch for a year or two, but not old and married. It's too dirty, it's too backward in terms of technological facilities available, and the language is just too damned hard. I can't emphasise the language barrier enough. Sure, everyone speaks english, but I don't want to be one of those gits who lives in a foreign country for a year, and still can't hold a conversation about the weather.

So, if you wanted to know how brilliant I was/am/are/be, just ask me if, after I transferred scads of Good Eats episodes, ripped dvds, and such to my work laptop (the one with me in Europe), I bothered to install or even download the divx/xvid codecs.

Go on.

See? At least Schiphol has WiFi, so I was able to make momentous blog entries such as this.

As it was, I had to read on the plane. I don't thinki I'll recover from the trauma.

Off to Budapest...

Off to Budapest for the weekend. Apparently, Budapest is the pr0n capital of Europe, and home to the most beautiful women in the world. That's a combination that can't easily be beaten.

So, of course, I had to buy a new digital camera. Expect an update when I return Monday.

Oh, and if any of you spotty-bottomed wankers has moved and not updated me with your address, let me know. I can't pass up the opportunity for shameful postcards. Say hi to mom!