Argh. KENTUCKY.
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We’ve officially been in Louisville long enough to hit a residency landmark: The Favorite Restaurant That Always Seems Packed But Now It’s Closing. That’s right. The Mayan Gypsy is going away in a little over two weeks, and the world will be poorer.
To get in while we can, Maria and I are telling you to come eat with us there at 6 pm EST this Sunday, June 25th. Update: Not Sunday, they’re not open on Sunday. Monday? Call, email or comment if you want in on our reservation. We’ll get corn cakes and chocolate. I envision a pitcher of sangria and an 18% gratuity. Walls will tumble. Men will die.
After almost exactly three years here, it finally happened: my work internets have locked everybody out of LJ, Blogspot, and every message board I even tried to keep up with. Curiously enough, Facebook and Myspace remain unaffected. The same disparity means that Flickr is banned, for being “remote network storage,” but GMail is untouched. Wait, did I say “curious?” I meant “blind and stupid.”
Anyway, the man remains unable to hold me down, and I’m learning Lynx. The guys in IT, by contrast, are learning nothing.
Actually I was just frequently late, and tired
On the back of my wallet there’s a ring imprinted into the leather from the inside, perfectly centered, about an inch and a half in diameter. It is very obviously a condom. Except it’s not, it’s the BBC I got as a souvenir on my trip to San Francisco in 2004. I’m serious.
I wonder if anybody ever notices it, when my wallet’s sitting out, and if they assume it is what it looks like. That’d probably be the biggest gap between assumption and truth I’ve ever presented about myself.
Except maybe when I always showed up late and tired for my freshman-year research assistant job, and my professor decided I was a pothead.
Last of three posts about work, I promise. I just got conferenced into a call with our old buddy Grumpy Man.
Grumpy Man: Right, I’m putting you in on this to talk to their systems guy. Just follow my lead.
Me: Sure.
(click as he adds them into the conversation)
Grumpy Man: Okay, I’ve got Brendan Adkins from development here. Brndan, we’re talking to Ruth and… what was your name, sir?
(cold pause)
Grumpy Woman: Deb.
We got new evacuation instructions for our building today. Before, we had to alternate in the east and west stairwells by floor, which was a pain to remember. Now, the instructions are to go to the east stairwell if you’re on the east side, and the west stairwell if you’re on the west side. You got to whichever stairwell is closest. It’s that simple!
In the last ten minutes, I’ve heard two people come up and ask the Lady in the Next Cube whether we’re on the east or west side.
HEALTH CARE IN AMERICA
At work, we have this client we pay for data. The client likes to know that only humans are seeing this data, presumably because they are stupid and bill by the hour rather than the byte (and maybe because of HIPAA, whatever). My employer likes to have computers get the data for the humans, so we can stop paying the humans to do extremely tedious copying work. This is why I have spent a significant amount of my time over the last year creating and maintaining a kludgy application that gets the data by pretending to be human. It can trick another computer, but you would probably not be fooled.
As of this weekend, the client in question deployed a whole new method of connectivity: a tiny embedded custom applet that works okay for humans, but doesn’t have the features necessary for our kludgy impersonator. They disabled the old connection, of course.
This is why my boss and I spent two hours, this morning, trying to hack in to a system we are paying to access.
I need a new job.
Sumana, is this the party that bored you?
Hey, look guys! Guys, look! A major label is sponsoring a P2P service! It’s KillAweCellent! Let’s look at all you have to gain by switching from your current P2P network:
- Download one of literally hundreds of songs, in just hours, from another QTrax user!
- That means hours of fun avoiding “rollover to annoy” Flash ads for the Motorola BoxKuttr!
- Then listen to your music a certain number of times!
- And every time you listen, there’s a flashing ad on the screen telling you how to pay more money to listen to it again, or pay a monthly subscription fee!
- And you can’t put it on your iPod!
- Or listen to it in Winamp, iTunes, Windows Media or MusicMatch!
- L-Linux? Gnrt! Mpf! GnaHA HA HA HA! That was pretty funny. You’re funny!
- Our poor, hungry artists get compensated! Where by “compensated” we mean “a fraction of the profit we make off the ad displayed while you’re downloading, which was already less than one cent!”
- Now, if you have ever used any other P2P network, you will be aware that certain software tools will break the DRM on QTrax songs and allow you to listen to them as long as you want. The tool for QTrax files, called “mpq2mp3,” will be available roughly ten days before the service launches!
- Don’t get it or use it!
- Because we’ll still try to sue you!
So what have we got here? A service that offloads bandwidth and hosting costs onto you, that allows you to do what you were already doing, only with broken legs and a leaky gut wound, and you can watch ads or pay to do it. Sounds like a BitTorrent killer, guys! WHOO HOO! Champagne enemas all around!
No one outside of EMI will ever use QTrax.