Who do you trust when everyone's a crook?
[We're playing the animal game.]
Me: Show me… an otter.
[He pantomimes being an otter swimming on it's back and spitting water.]
Me: Show me… a vulture.
[He sticks his arms out and pantomimes swooping around like a bird.]
Me: Show me… a bear.
[He puffs up and makes growling noises. I think he may also have pantomimed digging through a trash can, but I'm not sure.]
Me: Show me… a lemur.
The Chicken: [He dances.] I like to move it, move it! I like to move it, move it! I like to… move it!
Me: Hey, Meat Loaf is on the Today show.
The Bunny: Yeah?
Me: He's still cool.
Bunny: I'm not sure "cool" is the word I'd use.
Me: He was always kind of tubby and goofy, but at least he used to be a fireball rock 'n roller.
Bunny: When did you first become attracted to Meat Loaf? Was it after you saw his boobs in Fight Club?
(pause)
Me: Those are his "bitch tits."
This is London Bridge:
This is Tower Bridge:
This is a talentless idiot who doesn't know the difference:
That is all. Return to your lives, citizens.
Pwned!
The top photo is Westminster Bridge, not London Bridge. This is London Bridge (or at least the London Bridge still standing and still in London):
So I'm also an idiot who doesn't know the difference. But in my defense, at least I'm not singing about it in my underwear.
Saturday morning The Chicken and I made a trek to the public library. After looking at this, that and the other thing, I found myself browsing the music CDs. That's always a mixed bag.
I think my library has a $0 budget for that sort of thing, so their collection is composed entirely of donations. They have some truly "library worthy" items, like the Ken Burns Jazz series, and they have items no one will ever check out, like Vince Gill Christmas albums.
After browsing through about half of the collection, and while pondering the check out history of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's Best Loved Hymns, I noticed I was doing something really stupid. I was guarding my selections.
I'd chosen two CDs and I wasn't ever taking my left hand away from them. I was sliding the CDs along the counter as I moved from one rack to the next. Maybe it's a holdover from my more urban childhood. Maybe I'm just an idiot. Either way, I'm pretty sure no one was plotting to steal away from me The Essential Willie Nelson or the Broadway soundtrack to Fiddler on The Roof.
In the last rack, Male Vocals, I found a real surprise. Mandy Patinkin's Oscar & Steve. What? Mandy Patinkin? The guy from Dead Like Me and The Princess Bride?
Yeah, that Mandy Patinkin. And he's singing Hammerstein and Sondheim songs. He's mostly doing pretty well with it… I think. He's got a hell of a range but I can't decide if I love or hate his vibrato. The man's certainly got some pipes on him.
The one thing I'm absolutely certain I hate is the album title. That CD could be sixty minutes of white noise and I can virtually guarantee I'd love it, if only it was titled Inigo Montoya Sings.
For the last several years my anti-virus package of choice has been Norton AntiVirus. I've used it on my own computers and I've recommended it to anyone who's asked. I've always liked the way it works and how effective it's been.
But most of that has changed. Each successive package gets progressively larger and slower without introducing any appreciable new features. My recommendations have lately included more and more conditions. "It's not for you if your computer doesn't have this, or if you need such and such a feature, or if you use that one ISP."
Yeah, to hell with that. I'm done with Norton. I've even gone so far as to yank it out of my own computer in favor of the freeware AVG.
Norton, like nearly every other Windows program, leaves behind lots of little things when you uninstall. So after running the regular built-in uninstall routine I ran the special Norton removal tool from Symantec. There were still some traces left over, so I deleted those manually. I rebooted and went on my merry way.
A few hours later I noticed that one of my other programs, Forte Agent, seemed to have lost its icon. I investigated and saw that it wasn't just the icon missing, but the whole damn program folder. And not just that program. My Program Files folder was curiously missing everything up to the letter C.
I can only assume I accidentally deleted them when I was manually clearing out the Symantec junk. Agent, Adobe, Amaya, Ahead Nero… all gone. Fuck. I deleted at least a dozen programs. How the hell did I do that? That's going to be a mess to fix.
The next morning I was reading news over a bowl of cereal when I learned Microsoft had released Internet Explorer 7. Woo hoo! Finally! I'm a big believer in testing my web designs in as many browsers as possible, but I adamantly refuse to test compatibility in pre-release software. I've been burned before by beta packages that don't easily upgrade to their final release counterparts, so I've been impatiently waiting for the final release of IE 7.0.
I scurried over to Microsoft's web site to grab the download, and then very quickly learned that it wouldn't install for me. I'm one of those filthy Windows pirates, and the IE 7 installer includes a validation check. Bitches.
So off I went to scour the dark corners of the internet looking for workarounds. After a few false starts, I found what I needed. I snagged a custom package that used a patched version of the Beta 2 installer to install the files from the final version. Cackling with glee, I installed and rebooted my office computer (I was at work by this point in the day).
As Windows restarted, I was greeted with this happy little message:
Nice. I broke my fucking workstation. I'm a tool.
After a little investigation and a little voodoo I was back to the point where I could at least access Windows Explorer again. I retraced my steps and found the error to be a pebcak. Apparently I don't know how to read the fucking instructions.
Extract archive.
Run update.exe.
Do not reboot.
Install other packages #1, #2 and #3.
Now reboot.
That whole "do not reboot" thing? Those instructions must be for someone else. Surely not for an Advanced User like me. Yeah, I probably deserved my digital punch to the junk for that. In any case, I got it sorted out and was able to reinstall properly.
Then when I got home I repeated exactly the process on my home PC, including the part about not following the directions. I guess I wanted to… I don't know, confirm the error or something? Yup, sure enough, it broke my home computer too. At least on the 2nd go around I knew how to fix it and recovered very quickly. But still, what the hell was I thinking?
Don't trust me with anything technical for a while. I might be jinxed, maybe even cursed. You probably shouldn't stand too close to me either. I can't guarantee your safety.
So I'm a fan of Battlestar Galactica, right? Last night I finally caught up with this show by watching the episode that aired last Friday. Considering I don't get the Sci-Fi Channel, being caught up feels like a real feat. (Bless the internet.)
Last night I watched the new episode and tonight I caught up on all those web articles and podcasts and whatnot that I've saved but not read/played lest I spoil any surprises. Now I'm watched up, read up and listened up. Woo hoo. Speaking of listening, Jamie Bamber is English. I didn't know that until I heard him interview. He pulls off that American accent really convincingly.
Season 3 so far feels dramatically different from the previous seasons. As far as I'm concerned, season 1 was absolutely brilliant. It was a near perfect balance of action/drama and social commentary. The parallels between BSG and post-9/11 America were undeniable.
The story in BSG begins with a devastating sneak attack. The endless series of skirmishes that follows is soaked in religion, with one side worshiping a One True God and the other side nominally polytheistic but mostly godless and apathetic. There are scenes about prisoner rights, torture, due process, suicide bombers, sleeper agents, military tribunals, executive power in a time of crisis, etc., etc. It's TWAT with spaceships. And supermodel robots.
Season 2 was a little lean on the commentary undercurrent. Which doesn't make it bad at all. It's just that it's more straightforward narrative than allegory masquerading as action.
So far season 3 looks like the creators are going to back to the political well. Only now TWAT is old news. Season 3 seems like it's all about Iraq.
[Spoilers ahead.]
Have you ever considered that March of The Penguins might be the perfect lullaby movie? Don't misunderstand me; I love Penguins. As far as documentaries go, I think it's fantastic.
It's just so sleepy-time soothing. It's like one of those nature sounds CDs, plus cough syrup, plus a head injury. Who knew Morgan Freeman could be so relaxing?
There are few places harder to get to in the world, but there aren't any where it's harder to live. The average temperature here at the bottom of the world is a balmy 58 degrees below zero. That's when the sun is out.
It wasn't always like this. Antarctica used to be a tropical place, densely forested and teeming with life…
Zzzzz…
I like new stuff. New stuff is good.
New WordPress plugin: Comment Instant Messenger Links. Registered users can now add their AIM and Yahoo! Messenger ids to their profile and those ids will be attached to their comments and will be visible to other registered users. The plugin is available for anyone to download. If you decide to use it on your own blog, I'd appreciate your feedback.
New gravatar option. Have you noticed that gravatars have been unreliable lately? The servers at gravatar.com have been dreadfully slow. When retrieving images, it's not uncommon for the gravatar servers to time out, return an error or return a blank image. On this blog I use a caching system that alleviates that somewhat, but I'm not completely insulated from the problems at gravatar.com.
If you'd like, you can specify a "local gravatar," which I suppose would be technically just an avatar. For registered users, there's a Gravatar tab in your profile. You can use that tab to specify an avatar that will be used only on this blog. The interface doesn't include an upload, so you must provide the url to the location of an existing image. Supported are GIF, JPG, and PNG. Transparency and animation are also supported. If you make use of this feature, please make your image 50×50.
I was going to make use of this space to pimp a new renter. I opened for bids yesterday and was planning on choosing a new renter this morning. And now Blog Explosion is down. I can't access their site to accept a bid. Bitches.
Blog Explosion finally came back up and I've now got a new renter.
[This is really nasty. You probably shouldn't read it.]
