Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.

But at least it's cold and damp.

What have I done...

Yes, that's Fahrenheit.

For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!

That is all.

P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.

I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.

The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.

As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.

He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"

I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.

I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.

I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.

I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.

My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.

He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.

In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse¹ in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems² department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.

Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.

The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.

Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.

OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.

I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.

Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.

But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.

But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:

1. Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)

   Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.

2. Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)

3. Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:

   1. Passport or national ID card
   2. Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
   3. Proof of address

   Banks

   1. HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)

   2. NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines

4. Give your bank details to The Company

5. Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice) At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.

6. Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.

   Documents:

   1. Passport

   2. National ID card

   3. Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)

   4. Proof of employment (see 2.)

   5. Recent payslip

   6. Bank statement

   7. Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)

   8. It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you

   As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.

7. If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes¹

8. If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"

9. Get a Tesco Clubcard

10. Get a life ;-)

    Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.

All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.

For those interested, there's information to be had:

Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.

"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.

I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.

I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.

He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”

I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”

“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”

I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.

“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.

“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”

“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.

He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”

I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”

“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”

“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”

He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.

From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”

I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”

I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.

“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”

“A PowerBook G4.”

He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.

“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”

I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.

Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:

Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...

But today, I see the same mug in an advertisement for some random Minnesota state college:

And at an Irish hosting service:

And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?

You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.

It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.

There is almost no line in this advertisement that doesn't make me giggle. I need to grow up.

P.S., the name "Erifylli Makres Studios" is an anagram for "AD IRKSOMELY LIES FRUITS". Maybe this isn't really on the up-and-up...

Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?

It's time. After 7 years, I'm leaving Germany. I'll be flying to England tomorrow for a new job, a new life, and a whole new type of paperwork. Living in a country, you learn the language, the culture, and the people a bit. In England, I don't even know what you call the water works. I'm sure I'll learn, but there's something daunting about moving somewhere, getting an apartment, a driver's license, a library card, and all the other little things we take for granted. They don't even have bakeries over there; what am I going to do for bread?

But what am I doing in Germany, anyway? It's a fair question. So now, I present a little timeline of my years in Germany:

• December 1997 - Selling my shit and saying kiss my ass, America, I move to Europe with my girlfriend, a German lassie whom I met in Atlanta.
• February 1998 - Not speaking the language, not knowing any better, I go for the full-on European experience by buying a Citroen and working as a network support tech for a company in Düsseldorf.
• May 1998 OK, now I speak the language. Man, do Citroens suck.
• July 1998 - I decide that Germany was waaay too cold for me, and decided to move back. Also, Citroens suck. Hard.
• December 1998 - I am convinced by my girlfriend to take a long-term backpacking trip (Weltreise) around Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, and southeast Asia
• August 1999 - Returned safely from my world trip, I decide to stay in Atlanta and get to know my family again.
• December 1999 - Having been reminded that my family is a bunch of toothless, moonshine-chugging waterheads, I decide to move back to Germany with my ex-/re-/new-girlfriend
• New Year 2000 - After celebrating the millennium in Augsburg, we are stalked by a pimply little Italian guy on the way home. My brother, who is visiting, attempts to reason with him, until he pulls out a gun. At which point, my brother takes it out of his hand and beats the fuck out of him with it. The Italian went home with a black eye, a broken foot, and a new respect for Americans. I was, and still am, extremely impressed.
• April 2000 - I start my first job as an immigrant in Augsburg, Germany. My boss is 6'2", has orange-tinted sunglasses, is wearing a pith helmet, and whips out an Apple Newton during our interview. I'm not sure which of these things scares me most.
• June 2000 Working 'round the clock in the German countryside, I drink 4 cases of Bavarian beer with my co-workers. As the clock tolls 12 on my 30th birthday, I tell them all that Germany is a banana republic full of Nazis and everybody can kiss my ass. And I'm stoned on my boss's weed.
• September 2001 - Sitting in my office, I stare at CNN at 3:00 in the afternoon as the Twin Towers collapse. Everybody in the office avoids me for a week. Especially the little Turkish guy from the graphics department.
• October, 2001 - My girlfriend walks out after an argument, leaving me alone in a 1200 square foot apartment. I'm not sure if this means I'm supposed to move back home now.
• November 2001 - Depressed, feeling fat and unattractive, I start my first blog.
• December 2001 - An attractive young German girl comes home with me after a party, then proceeds to kick my ass at a LAN game of StarCraft and leaves. But first, she drinks all my beer. Love is in the air.
• February 2002 - Germany switches to the Euro. My company moves from an attractive office space in the middle of Augsburg to a dank old warehouse in the countryside. My blogging reaches an all-time high.
• June 2002 - I take my first real vacation, alone. I spend a week in Paris in a 1-star hotel; a week in Aachen; a week in Brussels. I come back weighing 140 lbs. Everyone's worried, but nobody says anything.
• September 2002 - The company, having shrunk from 40 co-workers to six, is informed that everyone, from the lowest cleaning lady to the highest-paid employee (me), will receive the same monthly wages from this point forward. Rube thinks of the Twentieth Century Motor Corporation.
• September 2002 - Opening my pay stub, I notice that the boss followed through with his threat/promise. I walk out the door without saying goodbye, and never speak to him again.
• December 2002 - The attractive German girl throws a snowball against my window at three in the morning. Apparently, this is some sort of traditional Bavarian courting ritual. Love is in the air.
• March 2003 - I get a roommate, a skinny little architect who rearranges everything in my enormous apartment into perfect little rows.
• May 2003 - Mom visits and spends a week. The roommate convinces her I'm gay.
• October 2003 - My grandfather dies. On 12 hours notice, I book a flight and drink an entire bottle of Jack. Granddaddy would've wanted it that way.
• November 2003 - Being the fast-mover that I am, I finally make a formal offer of togetherness to the cute Bavarian girl. Offer accepted; there was much rejoicing.
• January 2004 - I get tired of looking for work, and become self-employed.
• March 2004 - Flush with cash from government subsidies, I buy my first Macintosh: A PowerBook G4.
• June 2004 - First quarter of self-employedness over, I realize that taxes in Germany are in-fucking-sane!
• November 2004 - The German version of the IRS shuts down all my accounts. My heat gets shut off. I actually use my oven to heat big plates of metal to 250°C, which I stick under my blankets before I go to bed. A low point.
• December 2004 - Landlady kicks me out of my apartment; I move in with the snowball/starcraft girl. It's probably more than she bargained for.
• April 2005 - I bring the StarCraft girl to America, hoping that the land of my provenance will distract her from the fact that we are living together in a 200 sq. ft. studio apartment.
• April 2005 - I bring the StarCraft girl to the Wreckyll in Jeckyll. Inexplicably, she doesn't call the police.
• July 2005 - I find a great customer who'll give me a steady income. Almost like having a job again.
• November 2005 - Having lots of money again, we move into a new apartment.
• December 2005 - Mom visits again. Hopefully, bizarre noises from bedroom help to convince her that architect roommate was full of shit.
• May 2006 - My visa for Germany expires. I am somewhat lax about renewing it.
• June 2006 - Acidman dies of internal bleeding due to stomach ulcers. Fuck.
• October 2006 - My mentor, Ken, dies of internal bleeding from a car accident. Fuck.
• December 2006 - Large international Linux firm calls from England, and offers me a job.
• February 2007 - Having decided to take the job, I inform my friends and customers they can, starting 1. April 2007, kiss my ass. I think Ken would be proud.
• March 2007 - Realizing that I can't move to England without renewing my German visa, I decide to (finally) do just that.
• April 2007 - Selling my shit and saying kiss my ass, Germany, I move to England with my girlfriend, a German lassie whom I met in a Dot-Com startup in Augsburg, Germany.

A new phase begins tomorrow. I'm as anxious as anyone to see how it turns out.

Heh. It seems as if someone is trying to nudge me out of the limelight, once again. And it seems she has a special little screen shot, eh? Well, let's see what she thinks about this:

Two can play that game, sister. I'm sure you'll notice the beautiful little "200,000" button on the right side, there. Should seem familiar. And as long as you don't have this:

...erm. Wait a minute – that's 200,001? Actually, Lovely Augsburg Anna was 200,000, as you can see by her poor choice of operating system:

That's right: We were sitting in adjoining rooms, and she was 200,000, and I was 200,001. So, she gets the purdy from Elisson.
Unfortunately, there's no snail-mail available, since we're in the process of moving to the UK. But, I'll be sure the Big E gets an address, as soon as one becomes available.

Oddly, I thought I was the only one that experienced that Ghostly Vibrating Leg, but apparently Dilbert author Scott Adams has it, too:

Lately I’ve been experiencing a bad case of Phantom BlackBerrry Vibration Syndrome, or PBVS. With this condition I am positive that my BlackBerry is vibrating in my pocket, only to discover that it is my imagination. About ten times per day I feel the vibration and think “Ooh, it’s an e-mail with good news!” So far, the only good news is that my pocket is vibrating, and that’s okay because it gives me hope that the condition might spread to the rest of my pants.

I've reached for my cell phone many times, thinking that it was vibrating, only to be left wondering, 'did I really just imagine that something was vibrating in my pocket?' I mean, how can you be mistaken about something like that? Either something in your pocket is vibrating, or it isn't. There is no in-between.

Other things with similar, reality-bending effects include:

• Changing my ringtone leaves me in abject confusion whenever anyone's phone rings
• Any innocuous ping! sound makes me think, just for an instant, that I have email
• Blue or underlined text, on paper, makes me instinctively poke it with my finger like a hyperlink¹

Habit is the hobgoblin of tiny minds – My mind is tiny as they come, therefore my pants are full of hobgoblins.

Yes, in a word, badassitude. I don't know much about history, or anything for that matter, but let's face it: If you're a dude wrestling naked with a bunch of other naked dudes, you'd better be Badass Cubed, or you're costarring in prison films for the rest of your life. And these dudes are badasses.

I can only imagine how the casting for this masterpiece of blood, gore, and birth defects went: "Lemme see, I'd be co-starring with that dandy from Phantom of the Opera and that long-haired nancy boy Faramir, and we'll all be naked and hitting each other with sticks? Sounds badass!" Color me skeptical, but I would rather be in a musical. On paper, anyway.

On the screen, however, it's a different story. It's two straight hours of testosterone-filled, pumped-up skull-bashing badness, replete with mutants, war elephants, and hot naked chicks lolling about on drugs, determining the fates of civilizations, as they so often do.

Nevertheless, there are some moments that raise an eyebrow. I noticed a rather troubling tendency of the leading men, and their relationships with their womenfolk. For example:

And later...

Leave it to Spartans to know how to treat a lady. What a bunch of mutants.

And speaking of mutants, Eric seems to see a certain resemblance:

And that big fella with the chains and the filed down teeth?... get outta town…. He reminded me of Velociman at a blogmeet after we’d ran out of vodka….

Since I respect SWG's judgement without question, I've been looking at the pictures. Truth be told, I don't really see the similarites. Here's the big waterhead from the movie:

And here's Velociman at the Wreckyll, right after he finished off the Chatham Artillery Punch:

Well, there might be a superficial family resemblance there, but I think Eric's imagination is running away with him.

All in all, a fine movie to see with a date. For the ladies, there's men in loincloths, and more six-packs than a 4th of July NASCAR race. For the men, well, there's naked chicks and the bodies, they do pile high (literally!).

I guess after the 2006 elections, the Democrats are finally comfortable doing what comes naturally-- Playing Santa with other people's money:

The state is apparently facing a budget crisis--to the tune of $1 billion. On Thursday, House Democrats delivered a spending bill that includes the idea of putting $38 million worth of public funds toward outfitting every student with a digital music player. The plan also included measures to tax soda and satellite TV services, among other things, to raise funds.

...

But, The Detroit News' editorial makes an astute point wondering "how financially strained Michigan residents will feel about paying higher taxes to buy someone else's kid an iPod."

In all fairness, the word 'iPod' wasn't mentioned; still, I have to wonder about state mandates like this. Much like "universal health care" actually means "mandatory health care that costs 3 times as much", this proposally probably actually proscribes "mandatory ownership of a knockoff MP3 player that is indirectly linked somehow to a Michigan lobbyist named Chang".

The Socialists are giving away the store, that they may pat themselves on the back with good warm fuzzy feelings all 'round. But wait a minute; mandating things like digital music player ownership would have certain, erm, multicultural implications, wouldn't it? Case in point, those Michiganders of the Islamic variety. Music is haram. Wouldn't mandating iPod ownership, as well as levying taxes to pay for it, violate their religious rights?

Most multi-cultists forget: Your average moderate Muslim is just beyond Lithgow in Footloose on the wack-o-meter.

Jimbo ponders the big questions, as usual. To wrap, or not to wrap? That is, hygienically speaking, the big question. I personally might put a wafer-thing sheaf of paper between my rosy cheeks and the seat, should it come to that. It's more out of habit than from any hope of erecting a sort of magical barrier, blocking diseases. It is, after all, merely a micrometer-thin sheet of tissue, and not a Trojan.

But it's important a) not to overdo it, and b) clean up after yourself. We had a mystery in our dorm, back in college days. Two or three times a week, somebody would take a dump in the same men's room stall, and leave a protective ring of toilet paper on the seat that was at least 4 inches deep; hundreds of layers of toilet paper, probably weighing 5 pounds. The day or time was unpredictable, there being no obvious pattern other than it always in the same stall.

We pondered often whence the infamous ass-gasket came, and who the builder could be. We were often convinced it was somebody we knew, someone in the clique, and no one was above suspicion. Eventually, every one was cleared with an airtight alibi; Easter vacation, for example, or having failed out of school. Yet the ass-gasket persisted; nay, flourished.

We never found out who had built it, or for what reasons it was piled so high. It remains a mystery to this day, part of the lore of Georgia Tech's Towers Hall for Young Men.

So, the little lady says to me, "Rube, let's go see 300!" And I think, right on! But wha-? She didn't want to go see that last week? Why the change in heart? And then I think, oh yeah:

Oh, and I bet the Spartans did a LOT of sit-ups… I mean, like a LOT of sit-ups…. Like probably a full metric shitload or something….. either that, or their wives woke up sore every morning from being slammed like a screen-door all night long…

The imagery, that is sheer poetry. Well, I know better than look a gift-horse in the mouth. We're off to see 300!

I just got this from my mom, about the Darwin Awards from long, long ago.

The following mind-boggling attempt at a crime spree in Washington, DC appeared to be the robber's first (and last), due to his lack of a previous record of violence, and his terminally stupid choices:

1. His target was H&J Leather & Firearms; A gun shop specializing in handguns.
2. The shop was full of customers - firearms customers.
3. To enter the shop, the robber had to step around a marked police patrol car parked at the front door.
4. A uniformed officer was standing at the counter, having coffee before work. Upon seeing the officer, the would-be robber announced a hold-up, and fired a few wild shots from a target pistol.

The officer and a clerk promptly returned fire, the police officer with a 9mm GLOCK 17, the clerk with a 50 DESERT EAGLE, assisted by several customers who also drew their guns, several of whom also drew and fired. The robber was pronounced dead at the scene by Paramedics. Crime scene investigators located 47 expended cartridge cases in the shop. The subsequent autopsy revealed 23 gunshot wounds. Ballistics identified rounds from 7 different weapons. No one else was hurt in the exchange of fire.

AND THE WINNER...

Overzealous zookeeper Friedrich Riesfeldt (Paderborn, Germany) fed his constipated elephant Stefan 22 doses of animal laxative and more than a bushel of berries, figs and prunes before the plugged-up pachyderm finally let it fly, and suffocated the keeper under 200 pounds of poop! Investigators say ill-fated Friedrich, 46, was attempting to give the ailing elephant an olive oil enema when the relieved beast unloaded on him. "The sheer force of the elephant's unexpected defecation knocked Mr. Riesfeldt to the ground where he struck his head on a rock and lay unconscious as the elephant continued to evacuate his bowels on top of him" said flabbergasted Paderborn police detective Erik Dern.

Spring has sprung early here in the old country. The bees are buzzing, the birds are singing, and the tight t-shirts are adorning the co-eds once again. It's one of the perks of living in a college town, I dare say. Temperatures have once again broken the magical 60-degree marker, and a young man' thoughts and all that.

Spring is also the annual renewin' o' the residence permit time. Even though I'm theoretically moving to England in couple of days, I figured I'd take one last shot at the Permanent Resident Alien status. It's a regular tug of war between me and the Ausländerbehörde (foreigner's office). So far, there have been a few hurdles:

• Expired German residency prevented entry permit to Great Britain (that's why I'm still here in Germany, actually)
• Renewal of German residency denied because my passport expires in August (6 month minimum)
• German residency permit renewal granted because I went to a different person at the same office
• Passport sent off to British Consulate, where it may or may not be at this very minute
• Permanent alien status pondered by new officer at Ausländerbehörde, but doubtful because I don't earn enough money¹
• Both entry permit to Great Britain and German permanent resident status endangered because my passport is now full

Yes, after traveling to every corner of the globe for 10 straight years, my trusty old passport is finally full. And since visas are physically stuck to a full page of your passport, sometimes 2 pages even, the poor government employee who can't find an empty page will probably reject your application outright. There are spaces here and there for a quarter-page stamp; if I could defrag that bastard I might have a shot.

Getting to know people is one of the great things about blogging. With the magic of the Intertubes, you can meet bloggers from all over the world, exchange ideas, and tips about drinking, and revel in the greater human comedy in which we all play a part. Reading someone's thoughts and feelings day after day brings you closer to them on a special level, allowing you to build a bond of trust and friendship with people you've know only a short period of time, or perhaps never even met at all.

But how well do you know these people? I mean, really know them. Despite the friendly, outgoing appearance, how can you be sure that the dude writing about cats and whisky is the person he purports to be, and not the motherloving pigeon of all psychopaths? The easiest way, of course, is to let the Internets do the work for you!

Step One, get a sample of their handwriting. This won't always be easy, but some people slip up and let a copy of it get out where potential victims can find them.

Now, you can't really get much done with this, owing to the skewed angle, which is also coincidentally a tactic associated with drunkards and weed freaks. Luckily, with a little work, you can get rid of the skew, so's you have a clean sample to work with.

Ok, now we have a full-page sample of this (possible) psychopath's handwriting. It's on to step 2!

Second, run it through our trusted ally, the Handwriting Analysis Wizard. This trusty little doodad will tell you where, how, and why this (potentially) murderous ne'er-do-well will strip your flesh from the bones with a rusty awl and dump your carcass by the side of the road in an old yellow Hefty bag. Let's have a look!

Document Spacing

The first test is how the text is fitted on the page. We've found a pretty good match here, so let's see what the Wizard has to say about it:

The right side of the page represents the future and S------- W---- G-- (name obscured to protect identity. -ed) seems unwilling to face the fear of getting started living now and planning for the future. S------- W---- G-- seems to be clinging to past events and spending lots of time thinking about what happened. It would be best to leave the past behind and move on. Stop crowding that left margin.

Hmm...I believe you'll find that Ted Bundy also had a problem with the right margin. Anyhoo, the next step is the letter 'y'. Believe it or not, you can tell an awful lot about a person just by how they write this letter.

The Letter Y

The Wizard tells us:

S------- W---- G-- exaggerates about everything that has a physical nature. Although he may not intend to deceive or mislead, he blows things way out of proportion because that is the way he views them. He will be a good story teller. This exaggeration relates to all areas of his material world. S------- W---- G-- allows many people into his life because he is accepting and trusting. He is sometimes called gullible by his friends. That only really means that he trusts too many people. S------- W---- G-- has a vivid imagination.

There's the rub. Good story tellers usually have good alibis, no? On to the next point, the slant of the letter t.

The Letter T

S------- W---- G-- has a need to be in control of his own life. He is a strong individual that can control situations to his advantage. This person can take control of a situation. He likes control and has the ability to control people without getting them offended.

The second aspect of the letter t, is whether it has a knife point or is rounded off on the ends. Anybody who knows S------- W---- G-- knows what's coming next:

The Letter T Crossbar

A knife point there is no surprise. Survey says:

S------- W---- G-- is sarcastic. This is a defense mechanism designed to protect his ego when he feels hurt. He pokes people harder than he gets poked. These sarcastic remarks can be very funny.

That's putting it mildly. Up next on the agenda are the 'humps' on the letters m and n.

The Letters M and N

Here's a perfect match. And what grisly details does the Wizard give us?

Diplomacy is one of S------- W---- G--'s best attributes. He has the ability to say what others want to hear. He can have tact with others. He has the ability to state things in such a way as to not offend someone else. S------- W---- G-- can disagree without being disagreeable.

Oh, well, jeez, let's just elect him as the first serial murder president, why don't we?! Well, this thing's obviously broken, so I guess we'll have to err on the side of abandon and make a genuine effort to actually show up at a blog meet again sometime soon. Let's just leaves the bullwhips and pigstickers at home this time, shall we?

Now that I've got a gallery, I'm giddy with power! I've put up some pictures of the Wreckyll in Jeckyll, which are suitable for framing. Or blackmail, pick your poison.

UPDATE:

And it only got worse; the second gallery is here.

Hey, there, folks! As you might have noticed, You Bitch! got a new coat of paint. I've been cobbling together a new blogging system in my spare time, using Python and the Django web development framework. If you like, you can see a few technical details over on the Impressum.

It's not quite finished, but it can already do several things that I was hoping for:

• Full metaWeblog, Movable Type, and Blogger APIs implemented, for use in desktop blogging clients like Ecto
• Gallery2's Gallery Remote protocol¹, for uploading image galleries out of iPhoto or another program with a Gallery2 plugin
• Photocasting support
• Comments
• Pingbacks
• Akismet anti-spam²
• Wordpress import script

Some of the things I'm still working on are:

• Podcasting stuff, which you may have noticed doesn't work
• Some online services, like to-do list and calendar, for internal use
• Monthly newsstand-style editions in PDF format, mainly for a lark

This is my second big Django project. The first project was an online software activation and license management server for a customer of mine. Even though I don't really know much about programming, I was able to pack actual functionality in to a few hundred lines of code. I'll probably put the source up, as soon as I've taken the cuss words out of it.

I'm amazed again and again at how easy Python makes it for a talentless hack like me to make things that don't suck.

A female friend of mine, who shall remain anonymous, is busy at the moment taking the final exams for her master's degree. For the past two weeks, she's been running to the university and back, making copies of her study materials at about 5 cents per page. Check out the pile of tree pelts that's accumulated on my beloved colonial dining table:

There are probably hundreds of students over at the university right now who are doing the exact same thing. All told, that's about 5000 pages, at a cost of over $100 in processing and copying fees, for each student taking the exams. Now, I wouldn't presume to tell an institution of higher learning that they're full of shit, but I can't help think that it might have been a better use of their resources to distribute electronic versions of these materials. I mean, as long as they're letting people copy them, why not try to keep the rainforest from getting chopped and cleared at the same time? Note the USB stick at the bottom left of that picture, which would hold 200 times as much information as the stack of folders it's leaning on.

For purely scientific purposes, I combed a few BitTorrent sites to see if any of the textbooks my anonymous girlie was copying were available in E-Book format. Almost all of them were.

(plonk)

Technorati Tags: higher education, Workflow

Everybody from Elisson to Michael Heilemann is memeing this list of 50 science fiction and fantasy books. Not being above using other people's ideas as my own, I'll be posting it as well. I'll spare the 50 lines, and just leave in the ones that I've actually read.

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

I like lists like these, but I think this one's misnamed. Tolkien's books, for example, are not within the 50-year time span any more (the original list is from 2002), and shouldn't be there. And although I'm sure they're all good, I don't know if I'd consider some of them all that influential. Electric Sheep, for example, is nowhere near as good or influential as Dick's paranoium opus Vulcan's Hammer. The only reason anybody still knows about it is because of Blade Runner's hat tip.

Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton, both of whose successes inspired, in their times, a return to 'hard' science fiction (although its science wasn't quite as hard as Crichton made it out to be).

Dungeons and Dragons first edition by Gary Gygax, as long as being a 'novel' isn't a prerequisite–I mean, how many people derived works from that? It completely redefined the way people thought about the fantasy genre. And bathing.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein. It's still Heinlein's best book, in my estimation, and hey, it gave us TANSTAAFL. Better than Starship Troopers, which is probably fightin' words with a lot of people, and number two on my Why the Hell Ain't They Made it a Movie list, right after Satanic Verses.

Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut. My favorite Vonnegut book; it's basically the same as Slaughterhouse-5, just a bit more screwy. I think it's a pretty good bet that drugs played a wee part in the making of this one.

Tarnsman of Gor by John Norman. Although ripped root and branch right out of Edgar Rice Burroughs' ass, this book had more sequels than most of the other books on this list had imitators.

Some I'd remove from the list:

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. I like this book; I've read it at least a dozen times; but it's kind of cheesy. And I think you'd be hard pressed to say that it had a lot of influence in the sci-fi/fantasy world. There's about a million books out there that left a bigger crater than this one.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. I'll give them The Man in the High Castle, but Electric Sheep is crap, and all that Mercerism mumbo-jumbo can kiss my ass. Sounds like somebody thinks it's still hip to over-represent Philip K. Dick. His stuff wasn't bad, but give it a rest already.

Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks. I remember reading the Shannarah books as a fat, lonely teenager. Even then, it seemed derivative.

Technorati Tags: Books for 30-Year-Old Virgins and Cat Ladies, Hobbies

• Mom going outside and ringing a huge metal triangle when dinner was ready
• Having to shoot my faithful hound as a coming-of-age event
• The ol' Tongue-on-the-Flagpole Trick (not really a problem in Georgia)
• Being washed at birth with boiling water by a deaf-mute midwife
• The Dunce Cap

Software Update for 10.4.9 happened to me today while I was busy making other plans. Usually, I trust Steve implicitly, and consider him my spiritual guide and cult leader. Today, out of pure chance, I actually looked at the update:

The 10.4.9 Update is recommended for PowerPC and Intel-based Mac computers currently running Mac OS X Tiger version 10.4.8 and includes general operating system fixes, as well as specific fixes or compatibility updates for the following applications and technologies:

• RAW camera support
• Handling of large or malformed images that could cause crashes
• Image capture performance
• Mouse scrolling and keyboard shortcuts
• Font handling
• Playback quality, and bookmarks in DVD Player
• USB video conferencing cameras for use with iChat
• Bluetooth devices
• Browsing AFP servers
• Apple USB Modem
• Windows-created digital certificates
• Open and Print dialogs in applications that use Rosetta on Intel-based Macs
• Time zone and daylight saving for 2006 and 2007
• Security updates

Doesn't that sound entertaining. I'll have to check that out, at the expense of my three-week uptime.

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, Suck it Bill

Libertarians, and especially the likes of Neal Boortz, like to short-circuit arguments relying on the tenets of democracy as irrelevant in American politics. The reasoning behind this, according to Boortz, is that the United States is not a democracy, seeing as democracy implies the rule of the majority at the expense of the minority rights. This has become a popular meme among Libertarians and Individualist Anarchists alike. According to Boortz' own take on President Bush's State of the Union address in January:

Democracy: Four references to democracy. In one passage he referred to the United States as "a great democracy." Our founding fathers warned us against the establishment of a democracy They were very clear in their fear of democracy. Historians of that era loudly warned against the creation of a democracy after the Revolutionary War ... but here we are in 2007 listening to the President of the United States referring to us as "a great democracy." I know that, thanks to government education, not one one hundred people in this country have a clue why our founding fathers abhorred the idea of democracy ... and that is no accident.

This is obviously more of a pet peeve than an intellectual argument, and it's typical among those who define democracy strictly as "majority rule". Many Libertarian and anarchist sites, for example, harp on an old U.S. Army document that supposedly listed democratic governments among the enemies of liberty and freedom, describing them as "a government of the masses". I say 'supposedly' because I've yet to see a citation to an official source of this document, but we'll assume for the sake of argument that somebody, at some point in time, actually saw a copy of this document, and the information has been preserved through its numerous retellings. Not to mention the fact that the Army withdrew that document, and in my opinion never should have released such a thing in the first place. The Army should not be in the business of defining American political philosophy, any more than policemen should write the laws they enforce.

This definition of democracy as "a government of the masses" is a redefinition of a) the prefix demo-/dema- to mean 'masses', as in demagoguery or demography, when it actually means "the people"; b) the people as "the masses", which is a rhetorical trick to negatively transform constituencies into monolithic systems; and c) government into law. The problem with using old texts as scripture, especially ones that have been retracted, is that they eventually become anachronistic in their language, their symbols, or both. The fact is that democracy, as a system of government, is not defined as "majority rule" any more, if indeed it ever was. For example, the current Oxford Dictionary¹ defines democracy thusly:

democracy |di?mäkr?s?| noun ( pl. -cies)

• a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives : capitalism and democracy are ascendant in the third world.
• a state governed in such a way : a multiparty democracy
• control of an organization or group by the majority of its members : the intended extension of industrial democracy.
• the practice or principles of social equality : demands for greater democracy

America fits snugly into the first definition. By most modern definitions of the word, democracy covers systems such as republics, representative republics, and the bizarre, three-tiered social oligarchy that exists over here in Germany, and also in most Western European governments, in conjunction with the hinky, dysconstitutional spectre of the European Union. As much as I enjoy listening to Neal, his argumentativeness over the word democracy as meaning "mob rule" is intellectually dishonest, because it redefines the agreed terms of discussion in the middle of the debate. He will also slip up every now and then, describing the goal of the Iraq War as the building of a democracy in Iraq, which is supposedly the last thing we'd want to see happen. It reeks of desperation and defeat, distracting as it is from the real point of Libertarianism, that the protection of individual rights and freedoms should be the major role and purpose of government. And that is an argument that doesn't need to hide itself behind pedantic word-play.

Since I finally cleaned up my desk, in my preparations for the selling thereof, I get to see what it actually looks like. Once you get the old coffee cups, whiskey bottles, condom wrappers, and used hypodermic needles off, it closely resembles a healthy, productive environment. So let's see what's on Rube's desk!

(click image for full size)

As you can see, a lot has changed since the last time I cleaned my desk.