Jun 23 2008
George Carlin died yesterday evening. He was 71. He was also my favorite comedian, hands-down. George would be the first person to remind us that when comedians are making the most logical arguments, shit is truly fucked up. But for the last few decades his satire has been closer to sanity than the actual truth.
Fuck, folks, I will really, really miss this man. Here’s a couple bits. I’m gonna go cry now.
This one is probably my favorite Carlin clip of all time.
May 04 2008
There’s something special about a trainwreck. And I don’t mean some bastardized reality-show definition of the word, I mean when somebody’s spent a lot of money – or better, a lot of time – only to find out their work was a colossal fuckup. So several months back when I saw a post on MeFi talking about bacon lollipops, I had to at least look.
(I know, I should have had this posted a month ago. but I’m also lazy.)
I’m a big fat guy. If you ask a guy if he likes bacon, odds are good he’ll say yes. But ask a fat guy if he likes bacon, and he will always say yes – if he doesn’t he’s lying. So bacon in any context is intriguing. Plus the potential for trainwreck is extraordinarily high. Like Campbell’s french onion soup huge. Ultraviolet huge. All these things together meant I had to spend money testing this shit out.
So I headed over to lollyphile, where they make specialty lollipops. Currently, they only have two flavors: absinthe and maple-bacon. After reading their description (“The salty chunks of bacon make a delicious and unique counterpoint to the subtle sweetness of the maple…”) I had to try some. They don’t come cheap: I opted for the 4-suckers box. $2.50 a sucker. Eh, fuck it, I figured; it’s only money.
I kept an eye on the site, and after being featured on MeFi and passed around the Net, their supply sold out pretty damn quick. I was glad I got my order in when I did.
A few days later, in my mailbox appeared a cardboard box, occupied by four maple-bacon lollipops. I wanted to wait a few days before trying anything that epic. Finally the moment came one weekend day, when I was sitting around watching a movie, so I opened one of the carefully-wrapped lollipops and tasted it.
My first taste was rather underwhelming. But as the lolly melted, I started to really get into the simple, light flavor of the maple. However, after you get a few minutes into one of these motherbitches, you start to run into these wonderful salty, smoky bacon bits, and biting down on one of them along with the smooth maple flavor is a really compelling experience. The bacon pieces taste amazingly good; how much of this is actuality and how much of this is the really compelling description that Lollyphile wrote regarding the quality of their ingredients remains to be seen.
Likely the first thing you notice, other than the actual eating of the product, is that the texture varies pretty dramatically between lollipops, depending on the size and quantity of bacon pieces that ended up in each one. This is probably the single most intriguing thing about the whole experience; there’s absolutely nothing at all mass-produced about these suckers. The size varies pretty dramatically too; some are thin, some thicker. If you’ve got an obsessive-compulsive streak like me, you’ll find yourself pulling all of them out of the box and trying to come up with some sort of ranking system that combines both the thickness, amount of bacon and size of pieces so that you can set aside the one that best meets the criteria for the ideal specimen so you can eat that one last.
Yeah, I’m aware that I have problems.
The second thing you notice is the ingredients list printed on each sucker: sugar, corn syrup, maple syrup, bacon, cream of tartar. That’s pretty damn straightforward. While you’re noticing things you’ll also notice that these things have an expiration date; yes, it’s cooked, unrefrigerated bacon, and it has an expiration date. While I haven’t seen an official reference, you’ll probably have somewhere around a month to eat your maple-bacon lollipops before you have to worry about whatever evil unrefrigerated bacon diseases that exist.
So, having eaten my way through a few of these things, I can say this without reservation: these things are fucking wicked rad. They’re kinda pricey; so much so that a box of 12 of them costs more than buying a whole box of Tootsie Pops at Costco. But they’re unique enough that when the chance came to order more, I ordered a box of 12, and am currently enjoying another one right now.
Mar 27 2008
I went to check the repair status for my Macbook and, fuck, it’s already done! Damn, they’re really fucking fast. Like lightning. It’s gonna be back before I know it.
I figured, after the big revelation last night on the media center, that I’d throw Vista back on it and see what happens. So that’s what I’m doin’.
And that’s about it.
Feb 20 2008
In other news, the successor to Windows Vista has been announced; “Windows Not A Giant Pile of Shit, We Promise”
Jan 30 2008
It’s comforting to know that every once in a while someone can still surprise you.
(This one is good also, a much better recording but there’s something about the piece of music in the first one that just does it for me.)
Somebody posted a link to this on SA and I felt the need to share it. It makes you feel happy, and there’s so little of that these days. It’s in the same vein as that video I posted a while back of that video of Imogen Heap. I don’t “get” a lot of traditional visual art, but this sort of stuff just makes me go all fucking tingly. It’s probably the closest thing I’ll ever get to art appreciation.
Technology just never ceases to amaze me. In a world full of DRMed media, systemwide debuggers isolated from binaries to protect enforcement, sealed boxes, Internet filtering, legislation and clickwrap EULAs on every-fucking-thing it’s just so wonderfully refreshing to watch somebody take a bunch of tech and make something wholly original and unexpected from it. I can’t quite put it into words.
And while we’re on this topic, this absolutely insane motherfucker glued together a MIDI drumpad and XBOX 360 controller tool with a custom piece of software and plays Guitar Hero 2 with his drumkit! Now I KNOW this is violating a EULA or two. Comforting people aren’t letting this shit stop them.
Jan 08 2008
So it seems that the smelly ballsacks at NSI snatch up any domain you search for, ever. Well, they are a big bag of cocks. They say they’re trying to defend you from other asswipes that snatch up domains you search for by snatching up domains you search for. Curious. Perhaps they’re applying the Bush doctrine to domain names, they’re just protecting us from the domain terrorists.
Any rate, they now own hadouuuuukennnnnnnnnnnn.com, if only for a few days. I guess they like Street Fighter.
I always liked Blanka better anyway.
Nov 12 2007
Recently I’ve been thinking about building another computer. For various reasons, not limited to but including
See, I figured that my Athlon 64 4400+ would have enough oomph to at least play back 720p HD content. 1080p still seems a little out of reach but it would be a good start. I wanted to play around with LinuxMCE as it seemed to show some promise (even if it is ass-ugly) and give Media Portal another run.
I mean, I got my xbox almost two years ago, and I was pretty late to the party. Those apps I had tried before had 2 years to improve. It’s gotta be all sunshine and rainbows by now, right?
I spent part of yesterday (don’t ask) and (after getting a working power supply from RD) all of this evening working on it, and you know what I found out?
XBMC is so much better than both of the aforementioned products it’s not even fair to compare. LinuxMCE, Mediaportal, it’s like the Special Olympics of media center software.
You know what? Neither of those fucking pieces of worthless shit was capable of browsing a network. LinuxMCE found every single share on my Linux server, individually, and proceeded to bug me about each of them, individually. Then it put them somewhere on that godawful menu and didn’t tell me where. Media Portal isn’t even capable of browsing a network at all, from what I can tell.
Listen, dammit. All I want is a little menu that shows me the whole fucking workgroup, and lets me navigate through systems and shares some sort of traditional folder structure. I should be able to find a fucking file directly on the network. And get this: when I mash some stupid button, it should play! It should be so simple I can even do it when I’m drunk. This shouldn’t be so fucking hard.
Then again, if you’ve ever tried to access Windows shares under Linux maybe you wouldn’t be so surprised.
So I’m not sure why I am.
What I did find is that these software programs are absolutely jam-packed with stupid shit that at best only tangentially relates to actually playing media.
I couldn’t give a flying rat’s ass if it can control lights, alarms, talk to video capture devices by itself, play games, or show me the fucking weather report. (Hint: If you’re not dead, there’s still weather. The sun didn’t bluescreen between 2 and 3 AM.) Perhaps while we’re on track with all these features that are at best gratuitous and at worst silly and useless we could consider improving actual functionality. Or perhaps we can consider adding the ability to feed a dozen Taco Bell burritos into the fucking optical drive and have the goddamn thing fart the Star-Spangled Banner while drinking a beer, blowing some shit up and donating ten bucks to Ron Paul, because in his Rand-esque free-market utopia four dozen competitors would all have media centers that gloriously interoperate and they’ve packed in so many features that they can’t pack in any more actual useful stuff so the only thing that differentiates each one is the amount of stupid, gratuitous features each one can add in. In this world your media center will do everything including control your toaster and remote-flush your toilet so people basically choose the superior product by the color of the box, and don’t forget every sale includes a one dollar donation to the “Right to Life Fund,” because having abortions would be having too much freedom and we wouldn’t want that.
While I’m on the subject of “too much freedom” we should talk about corporate-funded censorship (the opposite of which is curiously called “Net Neutrality,” because apparently “GET YOUR FUCKING HANDS OFF MY GODDAMN PACKETS, YOU SOULLESS CORPORATE FUCKS, BEFORE I SLAUGHTER YOU EN MASSE AND MOUNT YOUR CORRUPT FUCKING HEADS ON PIKES IN THE TOWN SQUARE SO EVERYBODY CAN SEE WHAT WE DO TO EVIL, MONEYGRUBBING CENSORSHIP-SELLING MOTHERFUCKERS” was too on-point.
Wait, how did this turn into a disjointed political rant?
Regardless, XBMC does all the shit I want and it does it all with a controller on five-year-old hardware, and if I could make the fucker play HD video I’d never have to trade up.
Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame.
Oct 22 2007
I really should stop watching documentaries.
If you’re one of a zillion or so people on the Net you may have recieved an email that looks an awful lot like this today. Apparently Sara Cho and Michael Lazar, two really dumb motherfuckers who can’t understand the difference between base-2 and base 10, and who, it seems, don’t do any research before buying a product (thus making them typical ignorant American consumer whores,) filed a lawsuit against Seagate. Because of their inability to perform simple calculations that one learns in primary school, think that somehow they are entitled to more drive space than they purchased.
They are wrong.
Continue reading “Money-grubbing greedy fucks will be the end of us.”
Oct 05 2007
it’s still a bucket of shit.
In a move sure to inspire me to say “Naah naaah naah, I was right you suckers” way too damn much, Microsoft removed the WGA check from IE7 today.
Why, you ask? Because Microsoft has always (and continues to now) depend on piracy for marketshare. Casual piracy of Microsoft products has always been a win-win for them, increasing market share with every Office.2007.Pr0P3r.1337D00DZ.part01.rar. Vista is falling into this trap, as it’s so damn difficult to copy (not that I’ve tried, but seriously, it’s not a huge secret) they are depending on, instead of piracy, new system sales to spur their shit-covered OS on to victory.
But there’s one problem – the PC biz is declining right now. People aren’t replacing their PC’s as often because Office and internet apps aren’t causing the kind of massive slowdowns they did in previous years. Systems are ridiculously fast. And gaming is moving off the box into consoles.
I hope this idiotic move isn’t enough to convince people to actually use IE7, but it might be. Although I really doubt it – those who couldn’t get it before probably moved on to a real browser, like Firefox or Opera, so I don’t know what they really have to gain with this move other than giving me fodder for my crazy conspiracy theories.
Aug 30 2007
This week sucked major sack.
Another completely useless fucking team meeting. I don’t know how they could be more frustrating, but I’m sure my boss will find a way.
My tooth (or rather, gaping hole where my tooth used to be) started aching on Wednesday morning. It hurt bad enough this morning that had planned to stay home, but we were too short-staffed. I finally fought my way out of the center at 1 to go see Dr. Williams, who informed me that I had a dry socket. Fucking wonderful.
To make things REALLY fun, not only was it an absolutely brutal day, but I have an early-morning callback that I won’t have time to research. I have to go into setting up Storage Server iSCSI blind, Not like we have any docs, training, or any way to get any assistance… Hey, everybody, ths is what OEM OS’s get ya! Happy “I learned something” day!
And I get to do at least part of, if not the whole goddamn day with a horrible toothache because despite what doctoring was done today my un-tooth still hurts A FUCKING SHITLOAD.
On top of it all, I mist two days of the gym, and I am so fucking sick to death of eating little measured portions I want to fucking start slaughtering people for meat. God damn it, I can’t see how I can possibly eat like this for the rest of my natural life.
So I’m watching Sin City. I have to admit, there are days when I truly long for some Sin City-style justice.
Say, that’s one mighty fine coat you’re wearin’.
