My work vehicle for the first three months or so was my personal 1991 Corolla. It did OK but for half that time the exhaust pipe had a hole in it near the catalytic converter so it sounded like I’d riced it out. I worked out OK at work and landed myself a company car - a 2001 Ford Focus ZX3. Not a bad upgrade! I drove the Focus for two years and went through two fuel filters before the lease ran out.

The next leased vehicle was a 2003 Acura RSX. Not the sport package but finally, a 5-speed.

The RSX was involved in two not-at-fault accidents - hit once in DC and driven into a tree by a four-year-old in the burbs. Racking up 55k miles in 2 years, I was getting tired of the car and about to go over on the lease mileage…

Friday I got the replacement company car:

Not a bad upgrade - a 2004 Infiniti G35 Auto-tragic with leather seats, and the Navigational GPS package.

Whenever I’m at the ATM, or any checkout line nowadays, I feel very tinfoil hat paranoid. I Typically cover the number pad as I hit my pin and I typically will look around for any cameras that may be pointed at the numberpad in order to obtain PINs. I’ve done this for years. But as the saying goes, just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after me.

(Yes, that’s a card reader in order to obtain the card magnetic codes). The entire series (including the camera to obtain your PIN) can be viewed over here.

The myth of multitasking. (mp3)

You, are not a parallel processing computer.

I know a few folks that give every topic an (at first) eery level of attention while maintaining the ability to jump tracks into something altogether different with amazing ease.

My usual lunch meet-up bailed on me today as it was raining and a long drive, so I was left heading to grab some pho alone. Needing a book, I stopped at Borders on the way and headed for the ‘tech’ section in hopes of something Coockoos’ Egg-ish that somehow I’d never heard of. There on the shelf was this fancy hardback from Ray Kurzweil; The Singularity is Near, with testimonials on the back from guys like Bill Gates and Bill Joy.

As I was checking out, the girl working the counter said that was the third she’d sold that day alone and wanted to know who Kurzweil was. I told her that he was this crazy person that predicted stuff, and had a bit of fame in the 70’s founding a synth and keyboard company - how do you quickly describe the concept to a lay-person?. She was making conversation flirting with me, I think. She noticed that it was only released a few days ago and guessed that the popularity stemmed from that.

The writing is OK so far. The charts and graphics are not very impressive - I read a few Tufte books and am now a snob.

My Dad just got back from a week or so in NO helping his friend Kirk get his air conditioner running again, cleaning house, and doing general fix-up stuff. I was invited but my boss called my cell immediately upon receiving the e-mail request for a no-notice week straight of work off to laugh at me.

The mold was apparently very very bad, as was the heat. Most places are closed due to lack of staffing - the local Burger King was advertising a $6k signing bonus and nearly double salary for applicants.

:rolleye: Via funsec.

• The funsec mailing list is pretty high volume but I’m digging it and it’s a welcome addition to the often sleepy firewall-wizards subscription. My first new keeper list since the days of also being on and keeping up with spamassassin-users, exim-users, epiphany-dev, cryptogram (rss’d now), firewalls, and infosec and unsubbing from everything at once due to information overflow.
• Theo, House of Cosbys just found it’s way to me a few months after the rest of the internet. Y’see.
• I am now fully caught up and have no unfilled cavities. Today is the first time I’ve been at more than a month from a drilling in over a year and a half.
• Beet sugar and raisins, when done right, make a mighty fine potable. They just opened a bar near my office but happy hours are 4-6PM and I’ve not gotten a chance to try it.
• Serenity would have been an amazing few years. Compressed it made for a decent action flick.
• Crash was fucking terrible. Predictable surprises, poor suspense. White male review of a movie focusing on racism I guess, but I was rolling my eye’s at most of the film.
• Alberto’s is the real deal, not a pizza bolli cardboard factory. Open till 4AM on the circle.
• John McLaughlin has motivated me to stop using pull-off’s and hammer-on’s (as much) and to start picking. Let’s see how long this lasts.

An ogm of Deleted Magic, a re-edit of Star Wars episode IV full of alternate takes, cut scenes, and auditions found it’s way to me half a year stale last night.

Not only did Han shoot first, he had a pretty lady at the table before the action started and got rid of her for business and all the actors on Tatooine were British and overdubbed to lose the accents (think: everyone in the Cantina scene, nobody in an Imperial uniform excluding Vader).

#cd /var/foo/bar
#ls
CTRL-X
#rm -f *
bash: /bin/rm: Argument list too long
#fuck
-bash: fuck: command not found
#for i in *
#do
#rm $i
done

And the also-handy closer:

#mount -o remount,rw /

Who listens to Clutch for the lyrics? I don’t. Clutch brings the rock.

So I’m checking out Robot Hive / Exodus, where the second song is called 10001110101. It doesn’t convert to ASCII. Shit. Is the decimal conversion at least interesting? Does 1141 mean anything to you?

Moving on…

Ribonucleic acid freak out, the power of prayer.
Long halls of science and all the lunatics committed there.
Robot Lords of Tokyo, SMILE TASTE KITTENS!
Did you not know that the royal hunting grounds are always forbidden?

Are you rolling tape now? Bits and pieces large and small
Sector, vector, eat them all.
Its already in their eyes.
Among the metal ones a messenger will soon arrive.

10001110101
Periodic table with a center piece of mind.
10001110101
Periodic table with a center piece of mind.

….

Wait, SMILE TASTE KITTENS, now I’ll forgive the binary completely.

UPDATE Oh neat: The song is actually 100,011,10101, which is binary for 4, 3, 21. Which also makes no sense.

More theories…