Via Mind Hacks - Psychology Today: The Loose Screw Awards.

Curse you, Amazon one-click used book purchases!

I just finished the boingboing-recommended Strange Angel. Get in line to borrow my copy or go buy your own - the story of the life of a pioneer in rocket science, devout Alleister Crowely follower, founder of what became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and victim of L Ron Hubbard’s pre-scientology swindles is nearly beyond words.

Now on to the next damned Amazon $4 like-new purchase: House of Leaves, this time on a recommendation from some stranger on the Primer forums (go see that movie). Just flipping through, these aren’t Vonnegut drawing * assholes every once in a while wierd, this is blank pages, blocks of 18pt serif in the middle of mirror reverse italic 10pt serif text followed by pages with single words off-center, color frequently used, diagonal sections followed by 30 pages of Courier with no margins. I just hope it’s not all gimmick.

And the shuttle is back in the air, er space. Wikipedia as usual has very good and through coverage. Very good. And thorough.

It’s been a while.

I’m 5/6 of the way through the audio-book of Mr. Feynman’s second book, What do you Care what other People Think, which is very touching and I highly recommend you borrow from me. So I was reading up on him and stumbled upon a speech he gave at Caltech where he used to teach. Dig.

Take a break and catch up on history…

Yet more proof that county employee’s have too much time on their hands:

RAID0 has been given a full burial. 👻

Ben: He should have had more redundancy.
Anonymous: Doesn’t he look like him self?

Coincidentally, my morning client had a SCSI card failure and is now without a server, which I guess is kinda similar right? One of our other clients (not mine) also had a RAID1 failure today, but I think the engineer has it back online now, because it’s RAID1 and that can be done 😃

Update! Now with Mourners.

Amazing.

Of course every time I turn on c-span anymore it’s always Today in Washington followed by pre-recorded call-in segments, at least the reason for that is because I no longer have the daily commute from hell. 😃

Skim this White house press corps vs. Scott McClellan transcript for an interesting communications lesson.

Paul: lmao
Paul: caught a cockroach off the floor here… shoo’d it into an empty water bottle w/ a piece of paper… stuck some leaves and sticks in there, a piece of a potatoe chip, and put a cap full of water in it… cut air holes in it and taped it sideways to the top of my monitor. Always wanted a pet at work!
Grant: oh dear
Paul: it just needs a name… was thinking Raid…. geeky, a pun, and it’s catchy!
Grant: very
Paul: He’ll be raid1, and when he dies…
Paul: and so on
Paul: 😛
Grant: lol
Grant: raid 0
Grant: start at 0
Paul: :derp: < –- meet raid0
Paul: 😛
Paul: lol
Paul: my new pet is really boring
Paul: he just sits there
Paul: I should get him a little plastic ball to run around the room in:) lol

Three weeks later:

Grant: How’s raid0 doing?
» still alive?
Paul: yeah… I cut the lid off another bottle’s cap and attached the two bottles together, so now he has a condo.
Grant: I can’t believe he’s lived this long
» (just billing for that day, saw our initial chat in my IM logs)
Paul: I give him water and feed him chips and stuff lol
Grant: rofl

Suck, at one point, was a reason to crank up the old 28.8.

I was linking to them six years ago, and had been for 2 before that. It’s so easy to forget how different a place the web was.

Read a history of suck.

My building had a brownout from about 4:45 last night to 6 this morning. As bad as the leasing office staff here is, and they are very very bad, I think they would have put out notice were it for planned maintenance. The strange thing is that the power never went out in the living room. I was playing guitar when it went out, along with the stereo, and never noticed. My building-provided internets lost connectivity. Amanda noticed the washing machine wouldn’t turn back on. The lights in the bathroom were no brighter than matches. The AC, and this is most annoying, was out.

We then left to see Wilco at Merriweather. The elevator was out, the basement lights were out. Awesome.

A group of kids parked themselves sans-blankets on the lawn in front of just us as the Roots, who’s set consisted of covering 70’s songs while unintelligibly rapping over them, were finishing their terrible godawful set to ask us – you know if you want to hear Whole Lotta Love, Black Betty, and a terrible bass solo, look no further. The best part of their set was when the singer took a break and let the backup signer and guitar player have a straight up 12-bar blues song. I’d go so far as to say it was the only part of their set that wasn’t utter shit. I’d rather hear a DJ mix the actual songs they covered with quality rapping over it than this hip wedding-band. So anyway, to ask us,

“Did we miss The Roots?”
“Yeah man.”
“Damnit, that’s who we are here to see. So who’s left?”
“Wilco”
“Are they any good? I like weird stuff, what are they like?”
me, to myself: Weird like The Roots?
“They are like, alt-country pop music”
John: “Kinda Beatle’sie, not alt-country anymore”
Me: “Well, right.”
kid’s girlfriend: “I heard they were like, indie.”
me: “oh yeah, very indie” :rolleye:

…later:

kid: How are the cops?
me: Assholes, everywhere (:tinfoil:)
kid: Everywhere?
me: Oh you mean here right now? I haven’t seen any.
kid: Guess I should wait till the sun goes down 😉, you know 😉
me: uh, yeah.