I pity the person or persons responsible for the search engine on Best Buy’s site. Someone discovered that if you searched for “cybershot 7.2” (I’ll presume they were looking for a Sony camera), it didn’t find you a camera, but did make rather a rude suggestion. BB fixed that one right away, but hours after the glitch was discovered, it still worked with any word that contained “shot”.

Actually, I was under the impression that Sony’s Cybershot line wasn’t bad quality at all. Certainly not cybershit, at least. 😉

I’m not a control freak. I’m plenty fussy, perhaps even bordering on obsessive, but I do understand that there are just some things that are outside my control. WHY ARE SO MANY FUCKING CONTROL FREAKS ATTRACTED TO THE FISHKEEPING HOBBY?! Jesus H. Christ–relax a little. You aquatic micro-managers are batshit, and you drive me batshit! A seed shrimp doesn’t give a flying fuck on a rolling doughnut whether you want him in there or not, and neither does a worm. If he CAN live there, he’s going to live there and you can stick your thumb up your arse and whistle Dixie for all he cares. You don’t have control of the bacteria, either. Get it? You get the good guys you want, and some not so good guys that you don’t want, and that’s just the way it fucking goes, so DEAL WITH IT. Snails, shrimp and fish are NOT going to remove every single scrap of algae. You’re going to have to do some of it yourself, period. If you don’t like that, then choose another hobby because that’s how it is. This may come as something of a surprise to you, but the point of having an aquarium in your house is to have a little piece of nature inside. Nature…as in “man will never tame Mother Nature”, and by man, I mean mankind, which includes anal retentive freaks. It’s an aquarium with real, live plants and animals, not The Sims.

P.S. Why is there no commercial bakery that knows how to make muffins without peaks on top, tunnels in the middle and sticky, underbaked crusts?

I hate AOL (who doesn’t?), but I absolutely loved Perfect Strangers and wouldn’t mind watching Wonder Woman, Alice, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Chico and the Man, Welcome Back Kotter, Eight is Enough, Growing Pains, Pinky and the Brain and even Freakazoid. I watched all of those shows at one time or another, and I liked them. Maybe I wouldn’t now that I’m older (in the case of some shows, a LOT older! :lol:), but I don’t know because I can’t watch them anymore–they’re no longer aired. In a rare display of doing something at least apparently aimed toward the benefit of people outside its own corporation, AOL has made some full episodes of these and other shows available on its In2TV, and although the quality isn’t A-1, they are free (as long as you don’t mind the odd and sundry deafening 10-15 second commercial, which I don’t). Well, let’s say they’re free IF you are using MSIE with ActiveX turned on or FF with the ActiveX plugin, and IF you are running either browser on Windows XP. I have Windows XP (because Adobe doesn’t make Photoshop for Linux), but it’s icky and I don’t use it unless I NEED to use a Win-only application. I saw the “download high quality” link and thought, “Aha–I’ll just buy the episodes of shows I really like and play them with VLC!” No dice–you can’t even buy episodes unless you’re running 32 bit Windows XP. Fuckers could’ve at least made the “buy” option available to non-Winblows users. Then again, this is the company that considers AOL an “upgrade” from using a computer without it. Anyway, nice try, AOL, but you still suck big, fat donkey dicks.

The RIAA is involved in a lawsuit with some poor bastard, but he inconveniently died. The ever-generous RIAA is allowing his children 60 days to “grieve” (quotes are not mine) before deposing them. Christ. The guy is DEAD, and what kind of children AREN’T going to say, “I’m really not sure (or I don’t remember). You’d have to ask my father. . .only he’s gone to his Eternal Rest”? What’s the fucking point of continuing? He’s dead. D-E-A-D, as in no longer living, heart no longer beating, brain no longer functioning. Worm fodder, permanent vacation, not coming back. Anyone alive who even MIGHT be able to give you the information you seek to win the suit for damned sure isn’t going to do it. Give it up. Only in America. What a country! Bleh. Well, at least he did own a computer while he was alive, so this is one of their more sensible suits.

P.S. Google DOES have the right to defend their trademark. If they don’t, people will be googling MSN or Yahoo!. You can’t google MSN, you can google only Google.

they didn’t have konotex so i got the jungle fever tabs.

Exactly when did I start teaching second grade and having to decipher non-English English? As far as I know, there is no fish medication called Konotex, so unless he means Kanotix the Linux distro, I’ll have to presume he meant KanaPlex (or Kotex, but let’s not go there). Unless his betta is still living in its natural habitat in SE Asia, chances are pretty good that the fish does not have anything that could be called jungle fever, and he did say “tabs”, so I’m going to hazard an educated guess that he really meant Jungle Fungus Clear. I almost snarfed my Mountain Dew when I read:

hopefully the jungle fever tabs will help.

Fevers–jungle or otherwise–are generally not helpful. 😆 Oh, and those two keys with the word “Shift” printed on them are for making capital letters. In English, the accepted method is to place a capital letter at the beginning of the first word in each sentence. The sentence is the bit before the dot that looks like this: .

The internet is not for hand-holding.

As much as I hate malware (not that I get any on my shiny clean Ubuntu system), I don’t want anyone playing URL police. I don’t care what “goggle.com” does or how sleazy it is, and I don’t care whose fat fingers type that when they mean to go to Google. That’s their problem, and if they’re dumbass enough to use a browser (and OS) that will automatically run some random executable on the internet, then it sucks to be them. If we automatically redirect Goggle to Google, or even put up a warning page, what’s next? Do we start redirecting everything that might be harmful to the unwashed masses? What’s harmful? Who decides? Won’t someone please think of the children! As far as I’m concerned, if you can’t learn to protect yourself online, then unplug your modem (if you don’t know what it is, call my ISP and the friendly recording will tell you how to find the modem and which is the power cord) or have Geek Squad take out your wifi card because I don’t want your stupidity to interfere with my freedom. The World Wide Web is here, and it’s here (in some incarnation, neutral or not) for good. If you couldn’t drive, you wouldn’t have a car. If you can’t stay safe online, then buy a Mac or install Linux. If you can’t do that, then just get the fuck off my ‘net and go watch American Idol.

Kittens are cute. Puppies are cute. Baby hippos are cute. This is just flat-out nauseatingly cute. If it were one iota cuter, I’d have to throw up on the keyboard. 😆

Animated emoticons are kind of cute, as long as they’re small and not overused. Animated avatars should be considered an offense punishable by drawing and quartering. So should stupid pictures of your homely brats, but animations are even worse. I don’t even care if it’s funny or cute because it’s only funny or cute THE FIRST FIFTEEN TIMES I HAVE TO FUCKING LOOK AT IT. Jeezus, I’m there to try and help you; can’t you do my eyes a little favour and choose something that doesn’t flash and move around on the page? No, you make me take time to drill down and get the location of the actual image, then put it in my already groaning-under-the-load Adblock filter. I block adverts because most of them are animated. I block scripts so stuff on the page stays still unless I say it can move. I block flash content because it’s animated, too. I can disable GIF animations, but it has to be all of them or none of them, and all I want to do is make your stupid goddamn avatar stay still so I can answer your questions without the light show. Animated shit stopped being interesting back in 1990-something. Dumbasses.

The Riddle

*****

I got two strong arms. Blessings of Babylon,

Time to carry on and try for sins and false alarms,

So to America the brave, wise men save.

Near a tree by a river there’s a hole in the ground,

Where an old man of Aran goes around and around,

And his mind is a beacon in the veil of the night,

For a strange kind of fashion there’s a wrong and a right.

And he’ll never, never fight over you.

I got plans for us, nights in the scullery,

And days instead of me,

I only know what to discuss,

Oh, for anything but light,

Wise men fighting over you.

It’s not me you see, pieces of valentine,

And just a song of mine to keep from burning history.

Seasons of gasoline and gold, wise men fold.

Near a tree by a river there’s a hole in the ground,

Where an old man of Aran goes around and around,

And his mind is a beacon in the veil of the night,

For a strange kind of fashion there’s a wrong and a right.

And he’ll never, never fight over you.

I got time to kill. Sly looks in corridors without a plan of yours.

A blackbird sings on bluebird hill.

Thanks to the calling of the wild, wise men’s child.

Near a tree by a river there’s a hole in the ground,

Where an old man of Aran goes around and around,

And his mind is a beacon in the veil of the night,

For a strange kind of fashion there’s a wrong and a right.

And he’ll never, never fight over you.

*****

Very strange and cryptic lyrics, but what do they mean? Many, many people tried to decipher the meaning of the song. Fans, journalists and even linguists were sure they’d discovered its secrets. Kershaw received literally thousands of essays about it, yet he said nothing…until an interview twenty years later, at which time he revealed that the song meant, in fact, nothing at all. He’d intended it to be an instrumental piece, but was urged by others at the recording studio to write lyrics. He simply threw together a collection of random words that rhymed and sounded good. He hadn’t said anything before that time because he didn’t want to disappoint anyone. I think that’s hysterically funny; proof that it doesn’t matter what something is, only what it is perceived to be. 😆

I thought I was going to have to wait until tomorrow, but it arrived about twenty minutes ago. The dumbass driver didn’t even knock (I know because I was right in the fishie room and I can hear a six-year-old Brownie knocking to sell cookies from there), just left the box on the front porch, out of sight from the street (though not from the little bastard next door). Anyway, it’s here, it’s gorgeous, and as soon as it’s had a chance to cool down a little, I’m gonna fire ‘er up and see what kind of pictures this bad boy can take. I’ll read the manual, too….eventually. 🙂