Been meaning to post about this for a while—about a year, actually.
I’m trying to think about how to introduce what is going to seem like a stupid piece of quotidia, but I cannot emphasize enough how important the following piece of software has been to my overall well-being.
No kidding. Mac & Windows. Use it. Love it. That’s all I have to say.
Yesterday I got some wireless multiplayer going on the DS, and experienced one of those oh-wow-technology moments. Something about the pick-up-and-go nature of gameplay added to the fact that one unit can act as a kind of server that supplies software to another via etheric translation (or something) was deeply impressive.
Sometimes I cannot believe the times in which I live.
I wasn’t cool enough to get one of the older ones with more space/memory, but yesterday I picked up a Linksys WRT54G router and flashed it with DD-WRT. The procedure was totally smooth and uneventful. Haven’t done anything fancy with it yet, but I’m at least going to do MAC filtering and some QoS stuff for BitTorrent Skype. Good geeky fun.
I threatened to perform the process naked so that I would have “flashed the router” in a different sense, but that proved impractical.
This isn’t a recipe whose wording has been inflated to ridiculous proportions, but simply an observation of a phenomenon: Canned evaporated milk is delicious in coffee, and significantly cheaper than half & half. This discovery is revolutionizing my mornings.
Maybe everybody already knows this, in which case, why were you jerks holding out on me?
I really want to use TextMate. I mean I really, really want to use it. It seems like it would solve a whole litany of minor problems I have in using LaTeX as my primary environment for academic writing.
But there is one absolute dealbreaker. It doesn’t support multibyte character input. That means no Japanese.
So frustrating.
I ranted to Julia about precisely this subject yesterday, but as usual Ze Frank says it way better than I did.
The reaction to this “foiling of the terrorist plot” has been so extreme that they might as well have succeeded.
I believe I’ve sung the praises of the first two Flight books already. Book 3 has been out for some time—since June, actually. Lacking, as I do, a regular comic store at which I can obtain this sort of geek paraphernalia in a timely fashion, I only remembered to get Flight 3 a week or so ago, and am only now managing to write about it.
I said “geek paraphernalia,” and it is an inescapable fact that Flight 3 is what most would call a “comic book.” But this collection of stories is something that transcends such a lable, shedding the raiment of the nerd ghetto somewhere on the way to the house of High Art.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, go out and buy this book right goddamn now. It will make you want to do something beautiful.
Spending as much time in the downtown milieu as I have been recently, one becomes acquainted with all manner of eccentrics. Here are a few.
In many ways, the worst kind of weirdos are the ones right on the borderline of normalcy. They possess only a thin veneer of sanity, and all it takes is eye contact to shatter it like the glaze of a crème brûlée. I discovered one such specimen, and comrades, let me tell you: this guy was a piece of work. I’d guess him to be early 30s, baseball cap, bad teeth, but mistakable at a distance of a few yards for a sane human. He coasted up to the bike rack on Bishop where I frequently stop; I was sitting there in front of the Starbucks, daydreaming between runs.
“Hey,” he says.
”’Sup,” I reply by way of greeting.
“Girl problemth.” Oh god—the lisp of the socially maladroit. Also, at close range now, I see the glint of madness in his eyes. I should have run.
“That sucks,” I say.
“Yeah, she won’t let me talk to her anymore, she’th crathy!” The gentlemen begins yammering, and even through his incoherent relating of his “girl problemth,” I can pretty much peg the fellow as a man for whom the word “inappropriate” carries no heft. I start to worry. I still have no idea of the horror that is about to ensue.
“Chicks, man. What can you do?” I say.
“Yeah, she’th like…” I am vague on his monologue, because it was incoherent and I was rapidly becoming terrified. He starts to lock his bike to the rack where mine is, and begins wrenching my bike around to make room for his. Unacceptable. He doesn’t know it’s mine, but still—this I cannot abide.
“Yeah, well, good luck with that, man, I gotta go,” I say, and jump up from my seat, proceeding to unlock my bike.
“Oh, that’th yourth? I’m thorry, man…” and thus saying, he leans down lovingly and nuzzles the top tube of my frame, whispering some vile apology.
“WHOAH WHOAH okay buddy, I gotta go see you later” I hastily say, getting on the bike, sprinting away, and praying I never see him again. I haven’t so far.
Recently I went on a run to cash a check for an old woman in the hospital. How would that work? Well. I don’t know this lady’s story, but she needed some cash from her account, and she was in the hospital. So my job was to go to her hospital room, where she would write a check to me, which I would take to her bank, cash, and return to her. Needless to say, this is a suboptimal solution to the problem of getting cash, because it involves complete trust in a total stranger.
I did this run, and the woman in question—I don’t know if she was homeless, probably not—but she was certainly alone and in poor health. She was probably a little crazy. She fished out a check from her purse that was tattered and water-damaged despite being blank, and made it out to me for $100.00. A hundred bucks. I had really expected it to be more, for some reason. I rode the few blocks over to the bank and cashed it, and returned the money. No big deal, just a slightly weird run.
But then I got to thinking, how lonely and desperate would you have to be to resort to such a roundabout way of getting money from your bank account? There must be nobody in the world who cares enough for that old woman to run a tiny errand for her, so I did it, and made ten bucks in the process.
I was depressed for several hours after that run.
I’m unlocking my bike, and a shambling, dirty old woman in a black dress that must once have been alluring walks by, grinning. She is missing her front teeth, and it is not a pleasant sight. She leers at me as she passes, and yells—really shouts—“Blowjobs, extra extra! Blowjobs, extra extra!”
This was near the end of the single most exhausting day I have ever had in this job. All I could think was, “Huh?” In retrospect, did she think I was a paper boy? Was she impugning my supposed profession, or making some kind of unthinkable, horrific proposal? She sounded amused, like she had cleverly insulted me with a real zinger, as if she expected me to be really insulted. Or maybe it was just hilarious to her.
Whatever it was, it left a bad taste in my mouth. Um, so to speak.
Insane transients of Honolulu: leave me alone. Thank you.
I’ve been thinking seriously about going back and self-censoring a bunch of my posts, and generally trying to make things a little more professional, distasteful to me though that is.
Then I read this comic and I feel much less inclined to change one goddamn thing.
It’s time to start writing again. Rock.