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The Nietzsche Family Circus really brightened up my day. Although I'm not sure if "brighten" is really the right word to use here.
It's kind of terrifying how well they go together! To be fair, they did have a few things in common to start with: They were both preachy, and extremely creepy, albeit in different ways.
There is a Random Generator page, but you can also combine them by hand to comic-trageditastic effect for treatises on various subjects:
Drugs
Love (also makes a great mother's day card!)
Willpower
Indignancy
Morality
Thoughts And Feelings
Science
Mankind
Hygiene
The Abyss
Religion
Baseball
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I haven't dealt with Comcast in a while, but they don't disappoint.
( Click on for more, bitching, but if you want to skip to the punchline: ) But they did send me what I wanted the most, after a month of radio silence: A bill for almost $400, and an friendly yet stern admonishment for my lateness, and my failure to cleverly guess the amount and (somehow?) manage to have already paid it before the bill or Online Account Establishment PIN number arrived.( Read more... )
And I thought my company's own home-grown billing system sucks! (Turns out, it is so far in advance of regular human billing systems as to seem Magical in comparison.)
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So, while I try to keep this journal personal and very much separate from anything that might lead back to my job, I do have a vaguely work related question for you guys.
Very work related, I guess, but phrased vaguely.
My company makes business management software, and for a long time, we were specialized to a particular industry. But for a variety of reasons, we've been trying to branch out... The problem is, we're not really sure where to start knocking.
After all, there are a lot of cheapo options out there these days... Quickbooks is probably the best known, and one of the most popular, as it is fairly affordable and covers accounting as well as the basics of inventory management, sales, statistics, and so on.
The thing with us, though, is that we're really good at customization. Thanks to more than ten years of dealing with clients with their own bizarre ways of doing things, we have learned to deal with a lot of different methods of business. Maybe you also manufacture or assemble things, and need to order parts in different ratios based on the demand for your finished products; Maybe you resell things and need to keep track of their value over time. Or maybe the value (or some portion of the value) of your inventory varies over time due to exchange rates or gold prices... Or you might be selling hours of service (at different rates!) by various employees or other sub-contractors as part of, or along with your goods. Or you're interested in having a touchscreen kiosk display in your office that ties into your system, so customers can search through your inventory without bugging your staff to loot through the boxes in the back room.
It also gets interesting when you want a website for your business that ties into all this stuff. With the proper permissions, of course, so your employees can track their accounts and orders, or at least the parts of their accounts that you want them to. Or you might also be interested in tying parts of your business into other websites or online services... Listing items on Amazon or EBay, or tracking events and appointments through Google Calendar. Whatever you got, really, because unlike the business software you can buy at Staples, we wrote it ourselves, and we have a lot of experience with people who need to do things "differently". Oh, and we support MacOS. And Linux. And Windows. All together on the same network, even.
Recently, we've talked to some boutique clothing shops, a high end shoe store, and (I really should have thought of this one earlier), a tattoo parlor.
If you have any other ideas, or you know someone (or some company) who might be interested in our services, please let me know! While we're definitely more expensive than some of our brand name competitors, we're interested in expanding into other fields... And if you can introduce us to the industry of courier services, piercing shops, or alpaca farmers, or whatever, really, we can probably make it worth their while.
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Originally, it seemed like an unfortunate waste of money to start moving into a new apartment on February 1st when February at the old place was already paid for. Now, though... I'm not sure how any other schedule could have worked.
And as is the case seemingly every time I move, I am astounded at how much crap I own. You wouldn't necessarily know, because while there's stuff on the desk, and stuff in the bookshelf, the other 100 cubic feet of junk is very efficiently Tetrised into the closet. It never gets old... I try to take everything out of the closet for inspection and packing, and it always boggles my mind that, spread out, it doesn't all fit in my room.
And I always run across some forgotten item or paper that makes me feel nostalgic (or depressed, or old, or all of the above.) Invitations to weddings, old letters from friends, jotted down diagrams and ideas that seemed extremely awesome at the time... And various and sundry other things that probably wouldn't mean anything to anyone else, but that I lose several entire minutes to in a staring contest, when I remember what they are.
(Like that playbill to A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Eastman Theatre in Rochester... It would take a long time to explain, but, wow. Back in the day.)
I guess things are moving along pretty well, considering; All the furniture and heavy stuff (except my home office itself) have been professionally moved to the new place, and everything got there in once piece, and up either the incredibly steep (or 60s-batman-villain-lair-esque half-spiral) staircase into the new place. Well, except for certain pieces of Ikea furniture, but they got up in pieces, and eventually they will be whole again. (And thank you again, IkeaFans.com, for satisfying all my Furniture Assembly Instruction PDF needs.)
But I still feel pretty depressed. I am going to miss having my own bathroom, central air conditioning, a garbage disposal, and the really nice view of the Boston skyline from my bedroom window, which I now wish I had pulled up the blinds on and enjoyed a little more often than I did.
The new place is cheaper, though, and it has more space... Two porches, an attic, and a storage area in the basement. There is the small issue of the utilities (it needs natural gas, oil, and electricity for everything to work), the absence of three prong outlets in the room that was supposed to be my office (whoops) and the moving expenses, setup fees, and other charges, which are starting to add up impressively. But in the long run, I'll be saving money, even if it doesn't really feel like it right now.
But everything considered, it's a lot of progress for four days.
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I am not familiar with this model kit, the giant robot it represents, or the manga, anime, or video game it hails from... And yet, I feel that Galvion and I have a lot of interests in common.
Well... At least one, anyway.
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While I have enjoyed a very fancy apartment for almost two years now,
circumstances have encouraged me to look for newer, cheaper places to live.
On the one hand, I was pleased to see that there are quite a few apartments in and around the Boston area that are more affordable than my current one. On the other hand, quite a few of them are ass nasty.
Here's a good example of a Pro/Con list I made this weekend for (Address Omitted):
Pros:
Spacious Living Room and dining area
Two Bedrooms, one full bath
Front balcony (with sitting room!)
Rear balcony! (also with sitting room!)
Access to fenced back yard
Funky retro conical lighting fixtures in the stairwells
Less than $1400 / month!
Cons:
Overpowering sickly-sweet/seafood odor throughout (?)
Steady leak of foul smelling water through kitchen light fixture (!!!)
Sputtering, sparking light fixture (from the leak)
Big puddle and warped floor in kitchen (from the leak)
Mysterious, viscous yellow buildup on ceiling (from the leak?!?!)
Cracked windows, torn screens, holes in walls (fixable)
Rusted out front gate, windowsills, and fixtures (less fixable)
Approximately 1.5 miles from any non-defunct businesses
So, yeah. At least I'm feeling retroactively lucky about how lucky I was to land my current apartment and keep it for so long.
I could probably turn this into a fun series of posts... I was going to add something like "baleful, one eyed landlord", but actually she was really nice to us. Though "friendly" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
( Click here for some other things I hope not to see on my Cons list... )
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Christmas season work sucks.
But I was pleased to find out, as reported on many geeky/tech/history sites, that work has been completed on a functional recreation of the Antikythera Mechanism, the fabled "world's first portable computer".
Sadly, it isn't a difference engine, but (as expected after the first round of x-rays and analysis), more like world's first astronomical calculator. So while "εὕρηκα!" won't be replacing "lol, cuneiform" as the world's first text message (or "Sumerian Cat Is Sumerian" as the first internet meme) it is still an interesting footnote on the evolution of technology.
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In lieu of a Halloween party, I ended up having a sort of Electoral Party at my place, with halloween cupcakes and Candy Corn and other such post-holiday-discounted badness.
And thankfully, for us all, the Blue States have represented, and it did not turn into a misery fueled Palin-hating cupcake eating contest.
We still aren't Palin fans here at the Bachelor Pad, but it was hilarious to compare the Concession Speech to the Acceptance Speech. While McCain remains my "favorite Republican", and he was a good sport about it, his crowd was booing (and swearing?) in less than classy fashion whenever he mentioned Obama. (And to a certain extent, when he mentioned his Vice Presidential candidate. Ouch.)
I have to say that Obama really impressed me with his speech; We have seen thoughtful, dignified, and well spoken Presidents in the past, but not all at the same time, at least not since I was born. He was very humble about the challenges he's inheriting, and had nothing but nice things to say about McCain (and even Negative Nancy over there), and it was also great to hear his crowd cheer for them right along with him. I have had mixed feelings about voting Democrat, as an alternative to Republicanism rather than a genuine trust in the party, but between the representative crowds on TV (and my own resident poorly informed "I'm not racist but I don't like black people" pro-McCain co-worker), I definitely feel like I have done the right thing, at least as far as our two party electoral college system is concerned.
I am not so idealistic as to believe that our President can be a good enough example to us all, that we can all become better Americans... But even in his acceptance speech, the time when politicians are allowed to whoop and jump up and down a little, he refrained from tooting his own horn. He was humble, and, as CNN even put it, "somber", about the shit we are going to have to go through; He was definitely accepting responsibility, rather than claiming victory. He didn't mention God and Gay people and Republicans in the same sentence, but they all got some positive air time, which I think is awesome.
Because despite all the comments about "real america" still lingering in the air like stale farts, he was respectful and conciliatory, and pointed out that running America is about bringing together an incredibly diverse population of people. (Not just sucking up to the richest, most easily offended ones, apparently.) He took time to reach out to the people who didn't vote for him, and seemed genuinely concerned about winning their trust. It was like one of those Presidents you only see in sci-fi and disaster movies, the kind who genuinely gives a shit about his people and the issues facing his country, and doesn't lose a lot of time choking on pretzels and falling off segways.
And the voting statistics seem to agree... Not only is this the highest voting turnout in American history, but a vast majority of these people signed up for the first time to vote for him, and It's a pretty resounding victory in opinion polls as well. It has certainly restored some of my faith in America; I'm sure there are people who voted Obama for the wrong reasons, but I have to assume that his voters suffered through the same debate and stump-speech footage that I did without being swayed towards "real america" or freaking out about "socialism". (Hey, kids! It turns out that there's actually a Socialist Party, and they don't endorse him.)
It sounds like he's already put a lot of thought into his agenda and staff selection; Some have called that presumptuous, but he may surprise us by putting more work and consideration into his job by the end of the day tomorrow than our current president has done in the last... Fuck, seriously, what has Bush done in 2008? Anything? (Commenting on stuff and endorsing Republican candidates doesn't count.)
It's going to take me a while to adjust to having a president that I actually respect, but I am willing to make that effort if he, in turn, is willing to continue to be the kind of person who actually deserves the position. I am going to miss the snark and the America jokes, but with time, I could probably get used to not despising my executive government.
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It is now official, that I need to do something cool for Halloween next year. Seriously.
My Halloween consisted of me working late, buying a 2 liter of diet coke at the corner store, noting that I had forgotten to put up any of my halloween decorations, and then falling asleep in my chair around 9:30 PM. It was one of those weeks (and having a really nasty cold didn't help).
I did get to see some drunken college kids on the T Saturday night (apparently that's when all the Boston Halloween parties went down), including the "Other Super Friends", a lesser known crime fighting team consisting of (Christian Bale/Dark Knight) Batman, Eminem, and (circa 1989) Flavor Flav.
I also finished reading Stephen King's "Danse Macabre", which was not so much about writing as it was about Steve-o's view on horror novels and movies. I was hoping for more insight on horror psychology and less of a history lesson, but he does make some good points, tells some great Harlan Ellison stories, and reminded me that I am really behind on Robert Bloch and Fritz Leiber. Like, 30+ years. I read a lot (and I mean, a lot) of classic sci fi and horror novels growing up, completely tapped out the Science Fiction and Horror short story compilation directories of three different libraries, and developed the impression that I had made my way through the "classic" stuff and well into the crap strata, but somehow I missed most of Stephen King's personal favorites on the way down. I definitely need to work on that.
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I haven't really had time to do much for Halloween this year, but I did dig up a classic horror movie on youtube.
Noroi ("The Curse") is sort of the Japanese cousin of the Blair Witch Project. But rather than shaky-cam footage of darkness and bitchy campers, it is presented in "Incomplete Documentary" form, with archival films, home movies, interviews with crazy homeless people, and even clips from cheesy daytime TV shows... Mundane, amateurish, or even tedious in parts, it represents the unedited footage that an investigative reporter left behind before he mysteriously disappeared.
But viewed together, in sequence, a lot of small, very disturbing details start to come together. What initially come across as random clips of bad Japanese television become suggestions of very horrible, unseen, and strangely related events. As it was left incomplete by the (missing) author, there's no overarching narrative, so you're left with the comments he makes "live" during his interviews, and a lot of reading between the lines... Which makes it a little hard to follow at times, but much more disturbing when you start to make the connections.
It's fairly long, and cut up into little chunks on YouTube, but the first couple of parts will give you a good idea of whether it's your kinda party.
Part 1 ... Part 2 ... Part 3 ... Part 4
Part 5 ... Part 6 ... Part 7 ... Part 8
Part 9 ... Part 10 ... Part 11 ... Part 12 There are only a handful of special effects, and they're pretty subtle; Mostly it's about details and sounds, at least until things really start getting weird. And as a lot of the really terrible stuff happens off camera, it's not that disturbing... Unless you have a good imagination, and a talent for filling in blanks and question marks with horrible things, in which case it's pretty awful.
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Just in time for halloween... Scientists are getting ready to check out what some (Halloween Spirited) news outlets are referring to as the Antarctic Mountain Range that shouldn't be there.
Not to be confused with the fictional Mountains Of Madness described in H.P. Lovecraft's story, which coincidentally are also in Antarctica, and also should not exist.
Now for the real question... While it seems clear that they "Were not meant to be", is it also true that mankind is "Not meant to know" about them? Scientists hope to find out real soon!
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Um.... Thanks, guys. I guess.
| My LiveJournal Trick-or-Treat Haul |
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| tenth goes trick-or-treating, dressed up as Richard Stallman. | | alistairenix tricks you! You get a dead frog. | | asmenoth tricks you! You get a block of wood. | | cyli tricks you! You get a rock. | | glyf tricks you! You get a toothbrush. | | hesterwild tricks you! You get a dead frog. | | hippygoth tricks you! You get a 3.5-inch floppy disc. | | ladygwyn tricks you! You get an eraser. | | lilin gives you 16 purple orange-flavoured pieces of chewing gum. | | mirthness tricks you! You get a clothespin. | | murphyzlaw tricks you! You get a wad of paper. | | tenth ends up with 16 pieces of candy, a dead frog, a block of wood, a rock, a toothbrush, a dead frog, a 3.5-inch floppy disc, an eraser, a clothespin, and a wad of paper. | | Another fun meme brought to you by rfreebern. |
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Has it really been four editions? It seems like it wasn't all that long ago that I bought a briefcase full of weird books at a yard sale for like ten bucks... Weird ass books that proclaimed they would let me explore a world of poorly drawn and garishly colored critters and become a legendary hero, at least in my own mind and those of anyone else fortunate(?) enough to attempt to figure out the rules with me.
D&D has come a long way since then, and it's been especially interesting to consider how they'd top 3rd Edition, which was a complete reimagining of almost everything we had grown familar with over the years. Well, it's here... Or it will be, next week. But the first major release of 4th Edition is Adventure H1 (yay for module codes!), more commonly referred to as "Keep On The Shadowfell".
And if this is any indication of what we can expect from 4th Ed products, then it seems that WotC has finally gotten their tabletop RPG act together. In addition to the 80 page glossy color magazine-style adventure book, it also includes a 16 page pamphlet of quick-start 4th Edition rules, five premade adventurer characters, and three large double-sided poster style maps, covering six major areas of the adventure. The maps are notably also glossy and in color, with detailed, painted backgrounds and an overlaid grid with subtle indications of walls, inclines, and difficult terrain. While there are no rules for character advancement, each premade adventurer has annotations for the abilities they gain at second and third level, covering all the levelling that's expected to occur during the module.
Click here for all the glossy colory goodness (on my crappy cell camera)"Keep on the Shadowfell" is a pretty decent introduction to what we have come to expect from an adventure for character levels 1-3... No dragons, yet, but there are certainly some dungeons, minor but vicious monsters to beat the crap out of, a small town, some NPC villagers, some totally over the top Indiana Jones style traps, a few (not very tricky) puzzles, and of course the big nasty villain from the cover of the box. The overall presentation is great; The two books and three maps come inside a cardboard sleeve decorated in the style of an (extremely thin) dark, leather bound tome. The books themselves are decorated to match the design on the sleeve, and it looks great together, even after the postal service folded mine in half and jammed it into my tiny mailbox. The cover is a fine piece of artwork, though somewhat of a spoiler for the plot... However, it also portrays some things that don't happen/appear in the adventure, so whatever. It may just be the inflation talking, but 96 pages of gaming stuff, three maps, and enough 4th Edition rules to start playing the "new D&D" seems like a pretty good deal for under $20. (EDIT: Apparently it has been too long since I actually paid money for a module; The general consensus is that they did an incredibly cheap printing, at least in terms of the paper and binding. I guess I'm dating myself, RPG module-wise, by being impressed that everything was in color. But media quality aside, it does still look nice.) ( Aside from a few minor flaws, it's an excellent product, and a decent introduction to D&D as well, which I think was the main intention here. It also has some tantalizing hints of what we can expect from 4th Edition, which I will go into in more detail behind this Anti-Nerdiness Cut.
)
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Does anybody on my friends list play Puzzle Pirates on Viridian? I really need to learn how to navigate...
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If you are even vaguely familiar with Heavy Metal (the movie, or the publication, or with questionable late 70's early 80's pulp sci fi in general), then you will most likely get some serious lawls from this South Park clip.
It's kind of a long story... The kids have discovered that you can get high from sniffing cat pee (okay, short story) but the resulting hallucination sequence is pretty goddamned classic regardless.
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So, this is really late now; I blame work. And the battle may be lost, but the long, painful war of attrition is just getting started.
You have may have heard that there was some to-do about The ISO recently, particularly about the OOXML standard.
You may have also heard that it's the kind of obscure technical thing that only the most political Open Source geeks would be interested in. And perhaps you caught the article where the ISO appealed to the world at large to stop telling rude jokes about it, a surprisingly sensitive weak-sauce response for an International Standards Organization, especially the ISO itself.
Here's the thing, though... If you do any work with computerized documents at your business/organization/educational institution/library, you should definitely care about what is going down right now.
( Gritty details cut to protect people who have better things to do... )
In short, the OOXML standard is tricksy and false in every sense of the word. If anyone in your organization is discussing it, dare them to read all 6000 busted-ass, legally threatening pages of it before making a decision.
Or just don't even step on that flaming bag of poo on your virtual doorstep at all; Get OpenOffice for free, or even WordPerfect Office if you insist on spending money for your office software. You'll still be able to read and write in MS Office formats, and you can start using an "open standard" that is actually both Open and Standardized.
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tenth's journal
