Category: Mild Lunacy

September 17, 2004 /

Here’s some things.

Thing One I never write about my life in here anymore, because I’m increasingly disconnected from school (a drive-through with occasional stressfalls) and work (a drive-through). Of the interesting things I do in my free time, everybody who’s interested in them is, well, already there (see Blognomic, Anacrusis and Tuesday now Thursday Night Basketball).

Thing Two But there is something I need to write about my life, which is that last Tuesday, Maria and I accompanied her mother on a trip to Sam’s Club. While hungry.

Never do this.

You can pretty much guess the results. We got all American on that place, and will never be able to eat everything we bought before it spoils. Anybody need, oh, an acre of croissants or two stone of grated parmesan? Come on over! We ran out of cabinet room!

Thing C I can’t figure out if I like Buttercup Festival or not, but it’s hard to resist a Sharpie-drawn strip that features Space Björk and mouth harp-loving frogs.

Thing F I have succumbed to clickolinko.

Thing Last Ergo, PUPPY!

September 3, 2004 /

Did you know that the taste you associate with copper, because of pennies, isn’t copper? It’s zinc! In 1895, a federal mandate required that all national zinc begin tasting like copper.

This message has been brought to you, by science!

I feel like getting arrested

September 3, 2004 /

Hey, wanna see if you’re a terrorist? Excuse me–“Specially Designated National or Blocked Person?” Thanks to the Department of the Treasury, you can, in PDF or ASCII flavors! (As stated above, I do feel like getting arrested, so I was going to write a form script that would search the file for you, but it’s 1.35Mb of unmarked-up plaintext, and I don’t want to kill my webhost with that much sequential search.)

I’m aware of this list because today I had to write down some personal info and sign a release form at work. My company could be getting a federal contractor as a client, so every employee name has to be checked against the list. Fair enough. I don’t like that, but it is the law.

I do have a problem, though, with the fact that we contracted an outside firm to do the checking. Everybody in this company had to sign a paper saying that neither my employer nor this firm were liable for any consequence of having yourself checked. Then everybody had to print his or her first, middle and last names, DOB, and SSN. The forms will be sent off to VeriCorp, who of course can be trusted with my SSN and corresponding information! I guess!

Keep in mind that my employers are probably paying thousands of dollars for this: VeriCorp is going to take a list of a few hundred names, then they’re going to take the text file linked above, and they’re going to have some people hit CTRL-F a few times. And if one of those people makes a typo and you go to Secret Terrorist Jail, whoops! Oh well! They’re not liable!

I am making use of hyperbole here, obviously. Nobody’s going to go to jail; if you’re on the SDN list and the FBI doesn’t know where you are, you’re certainly not going to be working under your real name, much less putting it down on that form. This whole thing is a redundancy measure, a legal fallback.

My point is that there is no reason to be sending hundreds of people’s personal info to an outside contractor, liability-free, when the list is publicly available, and we have an in-house software development team who are all experts at data correlation. I guess the potential client doesn’t trust us to verify our own employees, because we’re an interested party in the negotiations. But if they don’t trust us to verify the information correctly, why trust us to send it correctly in the first place?

Some things were meant to be transparent

August 5, 2004 /

You know what would be great, for that logo of yours that is somehow related to comic strips or comic books or “comic-book action” or humor or anything you consider zany? Would be if you took the name of whatever it represents, and put it in a speech bubble. You know! Like in COMICS!

NO! I’M SERIOUS! IT’S NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE!

July 11, 2004 /

On Friday I left work early and went to the lab where Maria is working for the summer, in order to get my brain mapped. Brain mapping means they put a lot of very wet sponges all over your head with rubber bands, so they can go in the room behind you (with a one-way mirror window) and laugh at you until they pee themselves.

It’s a pretty neat process, if not very comfortable. They do some really interesting work there, although Maria apparently disagrees with me on that. I got to be one of the first participants in a new experiment one of Maria’s coworkers has designed. I can’t tell you what it was about, but I might be able to get a printout of my session; apparently my data was “very clean.” That’s nice to know. I should be out of Re-Education And Happiness Camp any day now!

July 5, 2004 /

Happy Independence Day. You know, it’s only a matter of time until we can get our teeth laminated. My mistake. We already can.

June 30, 2004 /

I have indirectly rediscovered A Softer World, which I originally found and enjoyed in the pages of the one comped issue of NFG that I got from Zack’s roommate when I was in California. It was raining at the time. Fortunately, I had a hat.

But! The comic! Is really good. I’m probably going to read the entire archive today, although I don’t know how much quantity exists, since the magazine comics I read (presumably written and drawn in January) did not list a website, and the new ones do. Hopefully they’re all up there. ASW seems designed to appeal directly to me–it’s a three-panel comic built with tightly-zoomed candid photography, lower-case text in odd arrangements, and the kind of dark gray whimsy that I’d love to consistently capture in Anacrusis. I am very glad to be aware of its interweb existence.

Update 1252 hrs: They are all on the site, except the ones they sold to NFG–those were selected from a span of March to July 2003. These strips are painfully good; worse, they started out that way. If I wasn’t enjoying them so much I’d be gnawing my thumb with jealousy.

I know it’s old news but I don’t care

June 14, 2004 /

I’m going to buy this album. In fact, I’m not going to stop at just buying it. I’m going to burn extra copies of it, and I’m going to give you one, hell, maybe two or three. I’m going to come over to your house, and we’re going to listen to it. Together. To every. Last. Word.

June 9, 2004 /

It’s not online, unfortunately, but trust me when I say that the front page of USA Today has the sub-head

U.S. Olympic hopefuls face drug accusations

Battle looms to compete

which, I… I don’t know, might just be the best ambiguous headline ever.

Geraldine kicked her ride into gear and rumbled out of the gate, into the Istodrome and its ambient thunder. The others were already circling the floor: Dallas Gator and his two-treadle rig, Jingo Smith on her lean ShuttleMatic, and Sam Scarwood’s weird upside-down contraption. Geraldine shook her head. Unless he got with the times and added a double back-beam, he wasn’t going anywhere.

The announcer’s boom brought her back to the arena. “Your final contestant… the Tartan Trampler… Geraldiiiiine O’Maaallleeey!“

Geraldine grinned, checked her trigger action, and shot off a salutatory flare from her Battle Loom’s smokestack. The crowd went wild.