I’d have to get up two hours earlier every day if I wanted to be any more awesome. 😆

I can’t decide whether this is gaudy or not, and I don’t care if it is because it’s pretty. I have the Emerald theme that goes with it, but can’t be arsed to turn on desktop effects ATM. Besides, I almost like the plain GTK Black and Gold better than the Minimal Golden for Emerald.

I used to like DayQuil/NyQuil and for years, that’s what I always bought for colds and flu, but in an effort to keep it on the shelves instead of behind the pharmacy counter where people would have to ask for it (and might not bother), they changed the pseudoephedrine that did work for phenylephrine, which may as well be in suppository form (because it’d be equally as useful a decongestant if you shoved it up your arse). After suffering since Monday, hoping I’d get better in a few days, I finally broke down and submitted to the bullshit involved in buying pseudoephedrine (Christ, it’s easier to buy Jack Daniels), and today, I almost feel human. Well, except for the fact that pseudoephedrine would be a very effective diet aid because it completely kills your appetite, and it’s Claritin-D 24h, so it’s timed release and knocks me out for two hours at approximately four-hour intervals. My sleep schedule is all fucked up, but it did mean I finally got to say, “GODMORGON SVERIGE!” I’ve felt like shit for so long that at this point, it really doesn’t take a great deal to amuse me.

Cool! I’m listening to RixFM and the news is on. I normally ignore it, but I heard “John McCain”, so I stopped to listen, and although I didn’t understand every word, I got enough to know she was talking about his suspending his campaign because he has neither the brains nor the balls to debate an intelligent opponent…uh…I mean “to address the economic crisis”. Yeah, the economic crisis…that’s it. Anyway, I did understand what she was talking about, which I think is kind of cool. Again, I’m easily amused. 🙂

I don’t know whence comes the quote and even the mighty Google couldn’t find the original source, but…

“Never, in the over fifteen hundred years of continual evolution and refinement of the English language, from the barbaric yawps of the Angles and the Jutes to the eloquent farces of Oscar Wilde, has it ever been necessary to use repeated punctuation marks to express yourself. It is the sole domain of comic strips, AOL users, and football enthusiasts. I condemn your practices, ma’am, as I might condemn those of a drunkard violently sodomizing a dog in my parlour while I attempt to serve tea.”

Once the whole file is loaded on the browser, look in the root of /tmp for the file with the funky gibberish name (j-whatever, usually). Copy that somewhere, then give it an FLV extension. Terminal command: mplayer -dumpaudio foo.flv -dumpfile foo.mp3 To check quality, it’s file foo.mp3 (I didn’t specify, but mine came out as 128/44).

P.S. Riva FLV Player works fine under Wine. 🙂

Please let even half of this be true. Hell, I’d settle for a third; that would still be a vast improvement. Please let this man get elected in spite of the right-wing idiots who’ll see, “Viet Nam war veteran gook-killer! USA-USA-USA!” and “Creationist, militantly pro-life hockey mom, former Miss Congeniality who believes Jesus will return in her lifetime”. (I wish that were an exaggeration, but it isn’t) and vote on absolutely nothing else. Please let this man not get assassinated by some lunatic with a rifle who thinks The Rapture is coming and Jeebus wants his help. Please let enough people vote on stuff that matters, not on flag pins or columns, or what school someone went to when he was seven, whether or not Adam and Steve want to get married, or the supposed “elitism” of someone who can actually string together sentences in an intelligent manner, knows it’s the 21st century, can use “the email” and “the Google”, understands that middle class Americans do not make half a million dollars a year, probably wouldn’t fit in at a football tailgate party, and can find Spain on a map. Don’t let average Americans elect themselves because the average American is a fucking idiot. Universal health care isn’t “them libruls turnin’ Merrikuh into commies” or even real socialism; it’s giving the citizens of a wealthy country in the Western world the chance to go to a goddamned doctor when they’re sick, even if they do work for a cheap-ass company that will do anything to squeeze another dime out for the shareholders. Reaganomics didn’t work…nothing trickled down and the few crumbs thrown to us by the wealthy are not enough. Supply-side Jesus is not helping us. We can’t just keep doing what we’ve been doing for the past eight years and expect different results. The results we’ve got have been horrific and…our own fault. You keep doing the same things and you’re going to get the same results; it’s that simple. We’re destroying ourselves because all it takes is for good people to do nothing when the not-so-good people get out of line. No politician is perfect, and they all lie to one extent or another, but if nothing else, Obama has the ability to motivate and inspire what has become a cynical, jaded and (dare I say) bitter populace that doesn’t believe itself capable of anything anymore and is so busy pitting Red vs. Blue over stupid shit that we’re no longer the “united” anything. Please, America…the world is watching. China and India are catching up. Do the right thing.

Barack Obama, Green Bay, WI, 22-09-08

Oh yeah. When I forget…. självbevarelsedrift means “self-preservation” or “self-defence”. I think it’s self-defence more like “I ran from the knife-wielding mugger” than “I shot the burglar before he got both legs through the window”, though. Not sure of that and forgot to ask, but it is a real word even if it does look like half the alphabet. I like it! 🙂

EDIT: A little fully bilingual dude clarification….it means “the drive to survive”. I (heart) Lars. 😆

I won’t remember what I posted, but I half-watched almost half an hour of that shite, waiting for How It’s Made. It’s here so if that happens again, I will think of new insults instead of repeating myself. 😉

Google, SmashLab sucks, etc..

Inane “challenges”, idiotic and overly complicated “solutions”, incredibly annoying hosts with zero chemistry and not a blessed clue what they’re doing. Where the hell did Discovery find these people? The woman’s shrieking and gyrating gets on my very last nerve and somebody needs to tell the old guy that the hipster hairstyle isn’t fooling anyone. Comparing this ridiculous rip-off to Mythbusters is an insult to Jamie, Adam and the build team. SmashLab is just half a step short of “Ow! My Balls!” and presumably aimed at that demographic. For the love of all that is good and right, kill it with fire, take it off the air, or at least move it to a slot after How It’s Made so I can turn off the TV, blissfully unaware that it still exists.

I just watched the whole 30 minute interview of Vladimir Putin done by CNN. I think the version we got was edited down to six minutes of sound bites (of course it was–the average American’s attention span is about two minutes), but the whole thing was on Russian television, and put up in three parts on YouTube with English subtitles. First, I am struck (as I am always) by seeing someone in power who is obviously intelligent and articulate. Yes, Obama gives a helluva speech and certainly appears to be intelligent, but he’s only the Democratic nominee; the idiot we have now says “nukular” like a fourth-grader and can’t go anywhere or even open his mouth without embarrassing us. The Republican nominee is no better, and potentially a whole lot more dangerous. Don’t get me started on militantly pro-life (not even in the case of rape), abstinence-only, Creationist, book-banning, earmarking hockey mom. Anyway, aside from the fact that Putin is intelligent and articulate, if even half of what he says is true, he’s not the monster he’s made out to be, and either way, the interview was very interesting. Why can’t we have someone who can do an interview like this? Why do we have foam-finger waving dumbasses who get all worked up over flag pins and fake columns and how to field-dress a moose? Who gives a shit about any of that stuff? We need someone who can get the country off the dangerous, destructive and erosive track it’s on now and has been on for years. We are the last remaining super-power, and we do have the world’s most powerful military, but right at this moment, it’s being stretched pretty thin, and potential new recruits aren’t exactly knocking down the doors. Mind-boggling deficit aside, we can afford to be everyone’s big brother (note: not Big Brother), but we cannot be the schoolyard bully. There are about 300 million of us, but that’s 300 million of 6.5 billion. Every country must serve its own interests, and rogues must be restrained, but we all have to share the same world. If we are represented by people better than bullies, just maybe, we can do it. Christ…this probably doesn’t even make any sense; I get so goddamned frustrated when I even think about it because it is simply beyond my comprehension that so many people don’t seem to understand this. Elite? Hell, yes! When it comes to representing the American people, and representing the country on the world stage, you’re goddamned right I want elite. I want the smartest, most articulate, most diplomatic person we have to put up there. Good looks aren’t critical, but would be a bonus (Anders Fogh Rasmussen, anyone?) I don’t care if it’s a man or a woman, I don’t care about the race, I don’t care about the political affiliation; I just care that it’s our best. I don’t want a president I can have a beer with, I want a president of whom I can be proud when I hear him or her speak, and one whose decisions I believe are the ones that best serve not only our domestic interests, but our international interests. The US is a big country, but it’s not the only country in the world, and there are concerns to be considered outside our borders. No, I don’t mean property in South America.

When I can’t find it in my shit-ton of favourites:

Putin interview, Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

P.S. Is it wrong to think Putin is sort of hot in an expressionless, former KGB kinda way? 😆

For Christ’s sake, why do you have to keep turning up and hanging around? I know you own their house, and we’ve been here a while, so you know us, and you know I’m here during the day. None of that means we’re pals or that we should hang out and chat. The fact that I know who you are and could probably pick you out of a crowd of two doesn’t mean I have anything to say to you. Do what you need to do and then GTFO. Go home, go anywhere, just don’t bother me or expect me to talk to you. Unless there is a good reason for it, I don’t want to talk to you. “You’re here and I’m home” is not a reason. If you need a flashlight or a shovel or something, and you think there’s one in our basement, just go fucking look. I’ve told you enough times that if I’m here and awake, the back door isn’t locked, and you can go straight down to the basement from there without disturbing me. Operative words…”without disturbing me.” We don’t have guns, so it’s not like I’m going to shoot if I hear a noise down there, and we don’t have anything worth stealing, so it’s not like I’d be worried you were a burglar and call the cops. Go get whatever you need and leave me the hell alone. If you want to come into the house proper, then yes, you do need my permission, but I don’t care about the goddamned basement. You should know that by now, and yet…here you are. Don’t bother with the words, “Are you busy?” because the answer is always, “Yes.” Supposing I was sitting here at my desk, staring at my desktop wallpaper and making little church steeples with my fingers, the answer would still be yes. Park your truck in front of the house–I’ve told you I don’t care. Gosh, I guess you’d be blocking my view of this beautiful street, but the blinds on the front windows are closed because I don’t give a shit about the view, or my neighbours and indeed, I don’t actually want to see them (or hear them, or acknowledge that they exist). Park a whole fucking fleet of trucks out there; they won’t be in the way because we park at the side of the house anyway. You know that because we’ve been here long enough and the only time you’ve seen cars parked on the street was when the alley was physically blocked by the oil guys’ gigantic goddamned truck. I don’t want company, I don’t want to talk to you, I don’t want to be friends. I want you to go the fuck away and stay away. Unless my house is on fire and you think I should know about it, or I’m in the path of an oncoming tornado, just do whatever you’ve got to do, don’t talk to me, and then GO…AWAY. FOAD. If you dropped dead tomorrow, I wouldn’t notice, and if someone told me, I really wouldn’t care that much. Go. Away. Even if I did want to hang out with someone (I don’t), it for-fucking-sure wouldn’t be you. Leave me alone…I’m busy staring at my desktop. If I had icons, I’d rearrange them. Christ, I can’t stand people.

What the flaming sweet Jesus Christ on a skateboard is Sourceforge hosted on….A FUCKING 486 with a dial-up connection running over 50-year-old copper? I don’t get anything from there unless I really must because IT LOADS LIKE MOLASSES RUNNING UPHILL IN JANUARY but I don’t have much choice if something on a particular site is hosted there; I just have to wait until whatever data finally makes its way (via blind and crippled pigeon, I think) from Sourceforge’s server. Who in the name of all things holy and unholy uses Sourceforge for anything that might be slightly important and that one might need….oh, let’s say THIS FUCKING WEEK?

Oh, and while I’m thinking of it, if there were a hell, I’d want MS to burn in it, die painfully in the fire and choke on a bag of unwashed dicks. They’ve apparently changed something so that none of aMSN, Pidgin or Kopete can connect to it, or at least it seems that way because I can’t connect most of the time, and when I can, I get booted. I don’t know whether Live Messenger can still connect because I haven’t tried, but I’d be willing to bet it’s going to demand some updated version and I won’t fucking install it until I have time to get to Mess.be and get the patch to strip out all of the annoying shit that I don’t want. Maybe never. MS, just fuck off. Fuck. Right. Off. If it comes down to never chatting with any of my contacts again or letting you tell me what I must do to use your protocol, you can just give yourself a high colonic with your protocol, your IM client, and your attempts at blocking those who don’t want to use the latest and greatest bloated, advertising riddled version of your crap-ass software. Fuck your IM client, fuck your shitty OS, and fuck you, too.

I spend a lot of time online. Way too much time, really, but that isn’t my point (really–I do have a point). I don’t live in my mother’s basement, or play WOW long into the night while washing down CheetOs and pizza with Red Bull. I do get outside as often as I can, I do have a husband who is a real person and very much alive, I do call my friends and family fairly often, and I do interact with real, live people face-to-face (when I must). Still, I spend a lot of time in the virtual world, and that’s the way I like it. I get news not from just one or two MSM cable channels that spoon-feed infotainment and do their level best to keep everyone terrified and waiting for “more at eleven”, but from a variety of sources on both sides of an issue, and I sort out my own opinions. I read articles, and read user opinions of them, just to see what other people think. I listen to music; sometimes my own, but just as often, online radio or FÃ¥gelnörd i Sverige. I can communicate with people all over the world, and can even see some of them on video feed if I want. I can also shut them off any time I want, which is one bonus the virtual world has over the real one. Heh.

One of my favourite aspects of the internet is that it’s filled with user-driven content. I’m not limited to whatever photography makes it to be published in a book or displayed in an art gallery; I can go to Flickr or Picasa and see a huge collection of all kinds of photos…and make my own choice as to what I like and what I don’t like, with or without HDR bokeh (Jesus wept). I’m not limited to reading articles written by professional journalists who have to make the finished product such that it will ultimately benefit the shareholders because anyone with a keyboard and a bit of web space can write an article, and I can read it or not…my choice. Regardless of what’s on TV or available at the local Blockbuster, I can watch videos of anything from adorable kittens discovering that they fit under a door to raunchy bukkake on a pool table…again, my choice. I haven’t listened to ordinary (read: ClearChannel, since they own it all) FM radio in years, and I have no interest whatsoever in it. When I do listen to online stations, I choose something that plays mostly-English music, but which has commercials in a language I don’t understand, or at least not well enough that the advertising annoys me. I can check out new bands and decide for myself whether I like the music without having to wait for them to get a recording contract, much less get MS radio play. The great thing about user-generated content is that it allows absolutely anyone with access to the hardware and software, and a place to upload it, to create practically anything, just as I’m doing right now by writing this. Granted, I go out of my way to not have this content really made public, but most people don’t, and the result is a huge, almost unending “buffet” of choices that I can accept or reject, based upon my own criteria, not someone else’s. I can choose who I communicate with, what I want to hear, and read, and see, and at any time, I can change my mind for no reason beyond, “I fucking felt like it”, or I can simply shut down the portal that allows it into my home and make it all go away; temporarily, or forever. It’s an extension of my strong aversion to being told what to do or what to think, which may or may not say something significant about my psyche, but that’s okay–it works.

Lowering the bar to entry, though, does have its pitfalls because you end up with stuff like YouTube comments (if you ever want to despair for the future of humanity, take a look through those sometime), and the entire cesspool that is MySpace. MySpace may have begun as a pretty good idea–a way that even grandma can have her own web site even though she can’t code–but it’s evolved into an online repository for pages designed so horribly that I want to poke forks in my eyes, with background music, and animations, and videos that auto-play if you don’t have scripts disabled. It’s like GeoCities 2.0…only with more than just bad background MIDIs. There are some good bands on there and you can listen to their music, but for the most part, it’s just a huge, steaming, fly-blown pile of digital dog crap. Sometimes, it’s both music you can listen to and digital dog crap. I didn’t find this on my own because I avoid MySpace like the plague that it is, but “Shana” does indeed have a MySpace page, and featured there is her techno music. I have nothing against techno–I can take it or leave it–but this is just so…very, very fucking horrible. Sunrise sonata…Christ, I’d rather listen to heavy equipment outside my bedroom window at 6AM. Proof positive that sometimes, it isn’t a bad idea to raise the bar a little.

Shana – Sunrise Sonata

Oh yeah, and when I forget (again) how to turn off that annoying fucking Google Suggest without allowing cookies to be saved or being logged in all the time (well of course anyone who can see my computer should have access to my Gmail and Picasa albums because I happen to have left my desk), it’s change the URL to this:

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0

Who ever thought that was a good idea? If I wanted an invasive annoyance popping up in my face, assuming it knows what I intend to type EVEN THOUGH I HAVEN’T FUCKING TYPED IT YET, I’d just use Yahoo!. Note that I do not…Google became my home page in 1999 or so because it was simple and did a good job. Still does a pretty good job, but the simplicity is slowly being eroded. The doodles are kind of cute, and sometimes even interesting, but for Christ’s sake, leave it alone. Google ain’t broke–don’t fix it. Oh well, at least it’s not “Cuil” or whatever the hell that useless site that got so much hype a while back was called.

Well, so much for the house outside town. I don’t know where the hell the owner thinks (s)he lives (maybe California?), but I do know that he’s not getting that much money for that house…not here. The housing bubble has burst, ladies and gentlemen, and if you own a “pretty nice” house in an almost rural area of south-central Illinois, you are not going to be a millionaire anytime soon. Call yourself “property owner” if you like, but forget about making the big bucks because the people here just don’t have the big bucks, there’s nothing here to draw people who do have the big bucks, and the mortgage companies got caught trying to scam dumbasses into believing they do. There are three kinds of people living in this area now: old people who don’t want to move (or can’t afford to move), young people too stupid (or too broke) to get a decent job somewhere else, and the fortunate few who are proud possessors of the handful of decent jobs left here. We fall into the last group; technically, it would be more efficient for us to live in Mt. V. because that’s where P’s job is, and the majority of my clients come to me. Some wouldn’t if we were 35 miles away, but some would, and in any case, there are computer-illiterates in Mt. V. as well as here. Most of the reason we haven’t moved there yet is because we’re used to being here and too lazy to change that. For me, part of it is the enormous task of moving so many tanks and fish (most of my tanks are glass, too), and part of it is that P. would have to get up early on weekends to make tee time. True that he’d need less gas because it would be two days driving versus five, but somehow, getting up early during the week and driving 35 miles to work doesn’t bother him as much as getting up early and driving 35 miles to play disc golf. I can’t say I’d much like it, either, and Mt. V. has nothing even close to Foundation Park. They’ve got a park or two there, of course, but they’re like Fairview Park near my house; just an ordinary city park with manicured lawn, baseball field, pool, playground equipment…no real insect or wildlife habitat. Meh. Besides, on weekend mornings, we’re both usually tired and hung over, so the last thing we’d want to do is drive. Anyway, the owner of that house should grab a clue, lower his expectations, and reduce the asking price because otherwise, he’s gonna be sitting on an empty house for a long, long time.