Mikey says (5:48 PM):
   God fucking dammit.
   I have a big fucking sign that says "EMAIL ONLY" on my closed door.
   Why would you fucking knock on it?
   Especially to ask me a question about something that someone else said.

The world's fattest man says (5:49 PM):
   because people like you and respect your opinion.

Mikey says (5:50 PM):
   I want a gun.

The world's fattest man says (5:50 PM):
   good answer.

I was talking with a friend of mine here at work today.  We were discussing some items in the news, like the guy who is suing Apple Inc. because they allegedly put tracking devices in his iPods so that the mob could find him.  And about another guy who lives in the US Virgin Islands (we think... we couldn't remember and couldn't find the article), and is suing the the CIA because they allegedly bugged his phone.

On face value, both of these guys sound like genuine, certified, grade A whackshits.  Totally insane.  Round the bend.  Nuttier than Mr. Goodbar covered in bat shit.

But let's look at these again.

The guy who is suing Apple Inc. claims that tracking devices are not in every iPod, just the ones that he bought - one from eBay, the other from an Apple Store.  So he's claiming that Apple, through some sort of amazing future-predicting, chaos-theory-driven supercomputer, planted those iPods specifically for him, knowing that he'd buy them (either that, or not only are Apple employees in bed with the mob, but so are random folks on eBay).

Ok, yeah.  Still seems crazy.  What about the other guy?

Well, it turns out that the guy suing the CIA (you can sue the CIA?  Is this class-action yet?) actually worked as an informant for the CIA in the past.  He quit several years ago, and claims that the CIA believes that they can legally tap his phones because of his past relationship with them.  Weird, huh?  Combine that with all the news about the NSA's illegal wiretapping program under the Bush administration, and this suddenly seems significantly less farfetched.

So we have two stories here.  Both of them seem like they could only have been born in the minds of the hopelessly insane.  Years ago, we could have safely dismissed both of them as nutjobs, had the nice men with the white coats come to visit with the plaintiffs, and washed our hands of the situation.

Upon further examination, though - taking into account what we now know about what's going on in our country and the world we live in - one of them remains insane while the other starts sounding more and more reasonable.  What a sad state of affairs that we've gotten ourselves into when we are unable to tell the difference between something that is batshit insane and something that is completely possible.

In the mean time, though, all you iPod users might want to look into buying a Zune.

Have any of you noticed a ridiculous upswing in the number of morons driving around with “In loving memory of…” decals on their cars lately?

I don’t mean to go off on a rant here, but I don’t understand the mechanics of this and I don’t think anybody else does either.  While I was driving to work this morning, I passed a car with a decal that read “In loving memory of Leonard Fuckpistol: 1717 A.D. – 480 B.C.” (names and dates have been changed to amuse me).  It’s one of many cars that I’ve driven past in the last few months that have something similar.  I even drove past one that had a decalized picture of the poor fuck who got themselves killed somehow.

Why in the hemorrhaging fuck would you do this?

Did you leave good ol’ Larry’s funeral and think to yourself “You know - Larry would really want me to buy a Honda and rice the living fuck out of it.”  Or did Old Man Fuckpistol die in that car?  Maybe he’s still in there.  Who knows?  But more importantly, who gives a shit?  I know I don’t. 

All you’re doing, you collective heads of knuckle, is trying to make yourselves special.  You obviously know that the modifications you’ve done to your car make you and the vehicle look like something that came out of a 7-year-old’s acid-fueled nightmare.  All you’re doing is trying to excuse it. 

“Yeah, man.  I know I put kitten heads all over this thing, but that’s how Slinky Jim would have wanted it.”

Fuck you, and fuck Slinky Jim.  You and your car are an eyesore, and nothing will excuse that.  If you want to be a pretentious prickass, go ahead, but leave the dead fucker out of it.  Seriously – just put a sticker on your car that says “I’m a tacky douchebag” and you’ve accomplished the same thing.

Emmi and I were in Wisconsin for a funeral this week (sorry for not calling you, guys, but I needed to be with my family), and we saw a really interesting advert for a special on the National Geographic network.  It was about a cave (which I’ve since discovered lives in Mexico) filled with crystals.  And not just any crystals. 

Big.

Fuck off.

Crystals that would eat your face off without even considering the implications, if crystals were the sort to do that kind of thing.  The cave is called Cueva de los cristales, and we’re fucking going there.

...about having to have a Live ID in order to leave comments on my blog?  I'd really like to move over to Live Spaces, but there's no such thing as anonymous comments over there.

So, what say you? 

Are you OK with having to have a Live ID in order to tell me I'm an idiot?

I read this article for a while at work today, and it's spot on.

I've tried to program against Linux before, and it was a nightmare.  I chose to try using a C# compiler from the Mono project, and a free (because everything for Linux is free) IDE called SharpEdit (or #Edit, or something like that).

There were no fewer than 30 steps that I had to follow *before* I could even start writing code.
I had to get specific versions of about 20 different components - none of which were in the same place, and the guide document pointing to all of those components was outdated.

I gave up.

Incidentally, the same thing happened when I tried to use C# on a Mac, so I just gave up all together.  I've looked at Cocoa and Objective C, but that seems like a lot of work, too, for just playing around.   Anyway, read this article.  

Quote

elliotth's blog: Desktop Linux suckage: where's our Steve Jobs?

I'm pretty sure I want this.   Introducing... the HTC Touch HD - MoDaCo

I told Marc about this a long time ago, but I totally forgot to blog it.  And, since I have nothing else to talk about, I figured now would be a good time.

About a month or so ago, I was at a doctor appointment to get a refill on my antidepressants.  The office where my head meat doctor works is … interesting.  It’s actually in a school for “behaviorally challenged” kids (which means that they rotten little fucks).  As such, I’m used to there being the average amount of screaming, yelling, swearing, and general craziness that goes along with rotten little fucks.

But that day was different.

There was another patient there to see a different doctor.  I saw her enter the waiting room, and just sort of hang out at the door looking uncomfortable.  Her eyes darted around the room, and every now and then she would close her eyes and bow her head.  I thought that maybe she was praying, but upon closer inspection I heard her whimpering while she was doing it, so it became obvious that she was crying.  For about 3 seconds at a time.

After a few minutes, she moved to come sit down in one of the chairs.  Her movements were uncertain at first, as though she may have thought that the ground would give away under her.  Then she darted for one of the chairs.  Of course, it was a chair next to me.

Naturally, I was playing with my iPhone (which I’ve given up now, but that’s another blog post) and trying to block everything else out until it was my turn to see the doctor.  He was running late.  The woman looked through the magazines on the table, and decided that she wanted the one sitting in front of me.  She asked me – very calmly and quietly – if I would please hand her the magazine. 

“Oh good,” I thought.  “That seems nice and sane.  Perhaps I was wrong to jump to conclusions.”  And I handed her the magazine. 

Well, that was retarded of me, because then I was fair game for discussion.  She looked at my phone and told me that it was just like her phone.  She didn’t visibly have one, but maybe it was in her pocket or purse, I thought.  Then she reached over like she wanted to take my phone from me. 

I repositioned myself in a way to suggest that I was done with this conversation, but she was having none of that.  She started talking about… something.  I have no idea what it was.  It was gibberish, as far as I could tell, but she was very passionate about it.  Then she told me that her dad had just died the week before, and she bowed her head and whimpered again.  She put her hands up to her face to wipe “tears” away from each of her eyes.  After about 3 seconds, she was done crying again, and smiled at me.

I smiled – awkwardly – back at her, and she stared telling me all about her home on some tropical island I’d never heard of, and her husbands, and how I probably knew them.  She said that her husbands were dead as well.  She did the crying thing again, and was abruptly done with it again.  Then she decided to tell me their names.

They were both named John. 

John Ritter and John Denver.

Then she grabbed the magazine that she had been neglecting, and pointed out a picture of a chair in the magazine to me and made a “yipping” sound. 

At that very moment I saw my doctor coming down the hallway, presumably to collect me. 

As much as a handicapped man can bolt, that’s just what I did.

I'm not sure how many of you were paying attention to the whole "OMG! We found a Bigfoot!" media orgy that happened last week, but it's something that you should have been watching, and here's why.

It was being portrayed as news.

Here's what happened.  A couple of redneck morons claimed that they found a Bigfoot carcass so they tossed that son-of-a-bitch in a freezer trunk and started calling Bigfoot enthusiasts and news agencies.  Now, if you're thinking that this is where the story ends, you're sadly mistaken.  Some company - I think it's called Search For Bigfoot Inc. - bought the rights to show the body to the media sight unseen and started all sorts of noise that resulted in a press conference where photos were shown, and alleged hair samples from the rotting meat in the freezer were to be DNA tested.

CNN covered this.  Days before the press conference, it was mentioned all over their web site and cable news channels. The day of the press conference, they were there.  Live.

Here's where it get's interesting.

It was, of course, a fake.  It was a bigfoot costume that these guys tossed in the freezer, and the DNA from the samples provided were human and opossum (not mixed... there were two hairs submitted:  one was human, the other was a 96% match for opossum).  The guys that sold the rights to We're A Bunch Of Fucking Morons With Too Much Time and Money Inc. vanished with the money.

And CNN covered that, too.  On their front page.  As the front page headline. 

Let me say that again.

CNN's top fucking story - a story that they thought was more important than anything else going on in the world - was that the bigfoot "discovery" was fake.

OF COURSE IT WAS FUCKING FAKE YOU COLLECTIVE HEADS OF KNUCKLE!

WHY the fuck is that news?  Isn't there anything else important you could have spent time telling us about?  The war going on in Russia?  The one in Iraq?  The on in Afganistan?  The one we're starting with Iran?  Some Olympics crap?  How Bush is a fucking nazi and how John McCain is an elderly elitist fuckwad who can't remember how many houses he owns, what kind of car he drives, or how much gasoline costs?

No, of course not.  It's much more important to tell people what they should already fucking know.

CNN - you're worthless.  I knew it before, but you just took time out of your busy schedule of lying to the American people to call us all raging idiots.  And it seems like most of us are.  I haven't seen any of the sort of backlash that should have ensued. 

So, let me say this:  If I ever run across anyone from CNN who decided that this was an actual story, I will kick you in the face as hard as I can for insulting my intelligence.  And I mean it.  It would just make me feel better to cause you physical pain.

You've earned it.

Quick!

I need a word that combines "Creepy" and "Hot" to describe this.

I've been dogfooding Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 for a long time, now.

For those of you who aren't aware, it's basically a service pack for Home Server that adds a few features and fixes some bugs (like the data corruption issue).  Now that PP1 is released, I figured it was time to update to the RTM build.  But I couldn't because I was stupid a while ago.

I was running low on space, so I delete all of the backup files for applied hotfixes because I never uninstall them.

Except, you know, I need to uninstall the beta PP1 before I can install the RTM version.

So I'm boned.

Not to worry, I thought.  I'll just back up all of my files to my workstation (like I've done many, many times before) and reinstall the server.  So I started the backup.  And about half way through, I realized that I didn't have enough disk space - in fact, I was short by about 720GB.  I've been ripping a lot of movies and archiving some TV shows lately, so it makes sense.

I added the necessary disk space to my workstation and restarted the backup.  A day later, the data was transferred.  So I started the recovery procedure.  For those of you who haven't done it, or don't know, HP's MediaSmart Home Server doesn't have a video card or any way to plug in a mouse or keyboard.  The recovery is done from a separate workstation that finds the home server over the network (somehow) and then reinstalls Windows remotely. 

So, my main workstation is Vista x86 SP1.   I loaded up the recovery software, and it abruptly failed. Again, and again it failed.  I rebooted the server and the workstation, and it made no difference.   It just failed.

So I tried my Vista x64 SP1 laptop, and it worked on the first try... sort of.
The software found the server and uploaded the Windows image.  The server rebooted, and then some more software launched on my laptop to help me configure the server.  Of course, that software doesn't work on x64, and I couldn't figure out how to launch it on x86 without doing another restore... so I tried... and it failed again.

Eventually I got pissed off enough to install Vista x86 RTM in Virtual PC, and I'm restoring the server from a VM as we speak.  This is such an amazing pain in the ass.  I have been working on this sonovabitch since noon.  That's six fucking hours.  I've installed Linux twice in that time (I'll blog about that piece of shit later).  I thought that it would be a good idea to get the HP server because it would be a simple appliance as opposed to a computer. 

How fucking wrong was I?

I still haven't gotten the redirection working correctly, and I've found a few things about Live Spaces that I don't really like (namely, you have to have a Live ID to comment on my blog).

So, in the mean time, I'll port the few posts I made on bbg.live over to bbg.com and crosspost all new posts.

Emmi and I are at a wedding for one of her best friends this weekend.  We're staying in this awesome bed and breakfast (aside:  I've never stayed in a "BnB", as I've heard them called, before.  I have no idea what the protocols are.  Also, ".com" looks like ".corn" when I don't have my glasses on).

Earlier tonight we were at the rehearsal dinner, along with copious amounts of people I don't know.  When it was time to get some food, I crippled my way up to the end of the line after most of the traffic had dispersed.  There was a lady in front of me, who I think was an Aunt of the groom or something like that.  It should be noted that I was actually aware of this woman's story, since I'd overheard her telling it from a distance.  She's like a long lost relative who hasn't seen the groom/bride/whatever in about 14 years, which I extrapolated to mean that she likely hadn't seem a lot of the family in that block of time.   I would imagine if you find yourself in a situation such as that combined with a situation such as a wedding, you're bound to be a bit nervous.  Let's see how this all played out, shall we?

So I hobble my way up to the end of the line.   As I approach, she looks me up and down, and looks at my cane. 

"Now, that's not just a trick to get to the front of the line, is it?"  She says.  I just sort of look at her, half expecting her to whip out a hammer and start beating herself about the head with it. 

"No." I manage to say.

"Oh.  So what did you do to your knee, or is there something else wrong with you?"

I just look away.  Ashton's gotta be around here somewhere, and I'm gonna find the little fucker.  I mean, really.  It's none of your business what my ailments are in the first place, but do you really think that I'm going to respond in a positive manner to that specific phrasing?  Apparently, yeah.

"Oh look.  Here comes Betty Steve (I didn't catch the actual name).  She drove today.  I'm going to let her cut in line.   Come on in, Betty!"

"uh..."

"Oh, you don't mind, do you?  Oh!  And here's Diamond Pete Patty Marie.  He was in the car, too.  You guys can all get in front of me."

Diamond Pete Patty Marie looks at me and looks at her, and then starts having some sort of strained internal dialog that was taking a really long time.  He finally spoke, saying to me, "Heh heh - yeah, you don't mind, do you?"  I think he was just trying to figure out what the hell was going on.  I don't actually think he was a shitfucker.

So there I was.  (Brain the size of a planet...)  Standing there, trying to ignore a woman with the apparent brain power of parsley, leaning on my cane with the entire county cutting in line in front of Veggie Jammie Tom Sue.

"Just... go." I said, rolling my eyes and shaking my head. 

Veggie kept trying to talk to me as we worked our way through the line, but I ignored her.  I didn't want to say what was really on my mind because I didn't want to start a whole "thing" at our friends' wedding.  I probably should have said something, but I knew she must have been nervous and feeling out of place. 

That doesn't excuse what she said or did, mind you.  How rude and/or stupid do you have to be to [even jokingly] accuse a cripple - a stranger - of faking it for sympathy, and then once you've established that they're not faking it, making them *stand* there for a while until you've let everyone with a vowel in their name cut in front of you in line?  That's a trick question by the way.

As I was finally walking away, she said something else to me.  I don't remember what it was; I wasn't paying attention, but I do remember that the tone was akin to "We're buddies now!"

I glared at her.  If my eyes could have burst into flame, they surely would have.

She apparently got that message.

After Blogging Mint:

The rest of the night was a lot of fun.  Emmi looked beautiful and her friends are really fantastic people who are fun to hang out with.  I overheard some sort of plan about shaving a goat, but couldn't surface any exact details.  I'll keep you posted as the story develops.

My previous host for BBG was actually pretty cool.  There was program through work that allowed me to host a website for free, as long as it used pre-release technology.  Long story short, BBG was being hosted for free but was experiencing a lot of downtime.

I was really OK with that up until a few weeks ago when I tried to post a blog entry and was told that the database was full.  It's still full now.  The management tools for the site just plain suck, and honestly, I don't feel like fucking around with it.  Aside from that, BBG ran a very old copy of Community Server, and I also didn't feel like upgrading it.

So, I'm moving everything over to Live Spaces.  It's still free (unless I pay to get rid of the adverts), and I still don't have to manage anything.  I've migrated all of the posts (actually, I skipped a few posts because they either had to do with the old BBG and weren't relevant at all anymore, or because they were just pictures and the pictures didn't come with during the transfer), but the comments didn't come along.

I'm working on getting the domain to auto-forward here, but it'll be a week or so, I think.

Emmi is out of town for the latter part of this week, so once again, I am temporarily a bachelor of sorts.

Now, you might ask yourself "Mike - how do you spend your time now that you're temporarily a bachelor of sorts?", but that would be stupid of you.  You should be asking me, because I know the answer to that question.  If you're asking yourself, you'll either already know the answer, or you'll never get an answer.  Idiot.

So, I spent last night hiring and killing prostitutes, and then stealing cash from their limp, lifeless, and broken bodies.

No, really.  In GTA4, if you hire a prostitute and then kill her when she's done, you can get your money back, and occasionally a little bit more.

So, remember kids:  Need money?  Kill a whore and get some more!

Fuzzy sent me a link to this video:

I really don't even know what to say about it.  I actually watched the whole thing. 

I've long been of the opinion that, if you took all of the time that people have used to create things like this, and devoted it to other things like, you know, cancer or AIDS or space travel, the human race would be in a much better place than it is right now...

And I think I'm still right.

So Apple announced their new 3G iPhone today, and I was seriously considering purchasing one.  That is until I read these two articles.

This article posits that AT&T and Apple are making it so that one will need to activate the iPhone in the store, not at home, just like every other cell phone out there.  That’s sort of the pain in the ass, but not as much as a small footnote at the bottom indicating that they’re trying to come up with some way to penalize people who don’t officially activate their iPhone within 30 days of purchase. 

Just like all security features on the 1st-generation iPhone, I’m sure this will be broken in due time, but it’s still shitty.

The second article cuts through the reality distortion field that Steve and Apple tend to generate, and talks about how the new cheaper prices are a complete ruse.  The new phones are more expensive, plain and simple.

Looks like Apple and AT&T are becoming less and less interesting in disguising how they’re trying to fuck their customers.    Which, you know, is nice.  For them.

I’m sure I’ll still end up with one at some point, but I refuse to play by their rules.