So, reading the Fark, saw this link:

10 Friendly Pickup Lines [for women to use on men]

I'm insulted for my gender! Is this what those articles for the guys are like for you ladies?

On the other hand, the one time I was seriously getting hit on, I didn't realize it until a few years later. But that's a different story.

A little something I've worked on in my head over the years. Apologies if it's a little gay.

A poem for johndiii:

When at last I see thy bubble
My chub it swells up double.
Homeboys and whiteboys pulse through their jeans
All the world could agree and even Becky got to see.

Baby got back
You make me want to smack dat
As I wander in a haze
Oakland booty strikes me in the face

The alert provides a web form to write to your congress person. Please do that. And please put the alert up elsewhere, so that other people can help too.

I'm in Washington DC working on this today, and your support will help.

Thanks

Bruce

Bruce

Any dream analysts out there? Been having a number of weird violent dreams lately. Had a nap yesterday, was dreaming about killing people, bad guys. I was on some sort of moutain thing, it was a video game or action movie setting or something. The guns weren't working very well, I'd shoot someone several times until I'd run out of ammo, and I'd have to start with the stabbing. The stabbing would make a mess, but still wasn't working well. I think I eventually had to push a few guys over the cliff to finish them off.

And then last night was the rat dreams. I was staying in some sort of not-finished basement of a building under construction. The basement was rat-infested. Huge, agressive attack rats. Some of them were raccoon size. The minute they saw you, they would come running for you, and leap for your face in an attempt to rip it off.

And again to go along with the rats was the stabbing and cutting. I was armed with a machette, a sword, and a dagger. I was able to impale a number of the huge rats with the sword as they were flying through the air. One of the somewhat smaller ones (small cat sized) got on my left forearm, and managed to tear it open a bit. That one I had to run through with the dagger.

They are actually frustration dreams, not nightmares. They are not making me scared or nervous, just frustrated that things won't die properly. My wife is the one with the rat phobia, if she was having them she'd be hanging from the ceiling, screaming. Though, she has expressed a small bit of concern that I'm lying next to her, dreaming of repeatedly stabbing things.

Anyone? Bueller? Freud?

So, I guess like everyone else in the world who has an AIM account, I've got these couple of new bots in my friends list.

I figure, what the heck, I'm up for a game of Eliza. Here's what I got:

ryanrussellbb 5:50
So, uh.... how's it going?

MovieFone 5:50
Hi there. I'm the new MovieFone bot! I can find movies for you anywhere in the country in a fraction of second. All you have to do is give me part of the title, an actor or director's name. I can also send you alerts when your favorite films are opening. Type privacy anytime to review the policy. Type any movie you want to see or menu to get going.

======= Movie of the Week =======
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - Movie Site

ryanrussellbb 5:50
Dude! I'm so going to check out that movie

MovieFone 5:50

- Movies for Today
    1 -F- Awesome: I F*ckin' Shot That
    2 -P- I Know Where I'm Going

Type # next to movie to see showtimes, M to go back to the Main Menu or anything else to search again.

P=Past, N=New, S=Soon, F=Future

ryanrussellbb 5:51
you fucking shot that? What the hell.

MovieFone 5:51
That's rude. I'm here to help. Type, help if you ned it.

======= Movie of the Week =======
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - Movie Site

ryanrussellbb 5:51
You started it

So, I think I lost. He did start it! I like the typos that are programmed right in.. help if I "ned" it.

So, several of you may recall my whining about trying to get used to OS X on this iBook I have. One of the things I was holding judgement on was how more RAM would affect things.

So, a couple of days ago, I got the more ram. I went from 384MB to 1.25GB (256-on board, swapped 128MB stick for 1GB stick. RAM is now maxed out.)

Funny story about that. "Funny" as in "Ha Ha, I have to add some Apple hardware enginner to the list of People Who Have To Die now." So, the RAM had arrived last week from Crucial. Tried to install it, iBook beeps at me. Well crud, tried a few things, decide I got a bad stick, we send it back. Get replacement, install it, and I try it without buttoning the iBook back up. Which means I'm running with the keyboard flopped over, etc.. I get it to boot twice with no problems. Yay! I got a good stick this time, I thought.

So I close it back up, and it beeps at me! Damn! OK, wasted a bunch of time blowing the P-RAM, clock circuit, NVRAM reset, check firmware revision, etc... no dice.

I get to thinking a little, and I try it again with the covers off. It boots. Hmm. I examine the old stick and the new one. New one is a double-sided DIMM, old one is single sided. The old one has the bare side up... and so it has an extra milimeter of clearance or so on the top.

Electrical contact? No, I see the little metal cage that goes over the RAM (and under the AirPort card) has a plastic strip to specifically prevent that problem.

I think to hold the DIMM down a tiny bit with my finger. Aha! Beeps at me. Try it without pushing on it, it boots fine.

At least I know what it is now. The extra set of chips on the new DIMM makes it bend down those extra couple of degrees, and I get flakey contact.

Some purposeful reseating and bending of little metal cage later, and I have a working machine with all the RAM. Yay!

So, good news, some of the slower items are now faster. I get the SPOD a lot less often.

But not entirely gone. And some things are still way slow. The example that is most clear is pogo.com, which is my wife's favorite game site. it consistently drives the CPU to 100% and stays there, and the games get really slow. I think they use mostly Java apps. bad JVM implementation? I'm using Firefox, and no idea what JVM.

One really shouldn't have to have that much RAM to get things to run decently. To be fair, XP kinda sucks air sometimes with less than 512MB, too.

I've also found that Thunderbird's Ctrl-T is Cmd-T, and Cntrl-Enter is Cmd-Enter. Just like I should have guessed. I'll get used to that eventually.

Edit: Oh, forgot! DarwinPorts is pretty cool, and I've had an opportunity to help with a couple of them a tiny bit. Also, Thunderbird has been a little crashy. Mostly on the pogo.com site, mentioned before.

"the future is already here--it's just unevenly distributed." -- William Gibson (So I hear, I haven't researched it myself.)

So Saturday, I'm driving around (see previous JE about where I was driving to/from.) And I see some billboard with an ad for memory cards. And I got to thinking about storage technology.

You know, it wasn't that long ago that such a thing was firmly science fiction. I mean like Star Trek stuff. A plastic card that you insert into your computer console that holds a billion bytes. Perhaps a "data storage crystal".

We tend to call them things like a "1GB SD card." Made out of a silicon crystal.

Curmudgeon Mode:

When I was your age, I used to have to install 9 chips, by hand, directly in the motherboard JUST to get an extra 16K! And I was happy to have it! I was lucky if I didn't break off a pin, or impale my hand!

So, I feel like writing in my journal this evening. Aren't you lucky.

Saturday, I did something a little different. I went to a poetry and dance festival thing at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Not something I would normally have picked. Generally speaking, That Sort of Thing is Not My Bag, Baby. But I went because my wife was dancing. This is something she has taken up recently. She started with a belly dancing class, and has just kind of taken up with this dance troupe.

It's good for her, gets her out of the house a bit, it's in the evening mostly, so the schedule works out. And she has fun at it.

I had not had a chance to see her dance yet, so I drove in to see her. Naturally, I liked seeing her dance, I was proud. She did a good job.

I also kinda liked some of the other stuff as well. it was, as the name implies, mostly dance and poetry. About 4 hours worth, though it didn't seem quite that long. There were even a few occasions where I thought to myself "Hey look! Real beatniks!". Even those weren't unenjoyable.

Anyway, I was surprised that I had a decent time at said festival. That is all.

OK, I see none of you know where to find a copy of "So Much love" either. Fine then.

So, I haven't noticed much about the Slashdot change. That's because I'm trying to use a Mac as my daily desktop, and everything has looked different for a couple of days anyway. You may recall the screen on my XP laptop got cracked. While I haven't done anything in particular with that machine yet, I needed a new machine for my web browsing, email and such.

I had work buy me an iBook a while back so I had something to get familiar with OS X on. It's the ~$1000 refurb iBook G4 1Ghz. I never used it much, because another guy at work ended up doing all the Mac product QA for me. I'm in charge of QA for the company, and since he was doing work for me, I just kept bribing him with Mac hardware, and he kept doing a great job.

To shorten the story up a bit, I grabbed the iBook back from him (I got him a Titanium Powerbook a while ago as a replacement anyway), and I've spent the last couple of days trying to make it useable for myself.

So far, I'm really, really frustrated. It appears that over that last 20-odd years of using DOS and Windows, I've gotten really used to a lot of keyboard shortcuts and other relatively minor differences, but they really add up. I feel like I'm typing with gloves on. It would be like if I were to start trying to drive a stick shift I've only ever driven automatics. I'm typing something, and errrt, stall. I'm quite used to pretty much unconciously translating what I want to do in my head through my hands and into Windows. Some of my habits go back even to Wordstar on CP/M.

It's not like I haven't used 30 different operatings systems, and still do. But it's different when it's my casual desktop.

Examples: PG-UP, PG-DN, HOME & END keys. They scroll the document, but they don't move the freakin cursor. So if I want to jump to the top of a text editor, I have to HOME, and then go all the way to the trackpad, and click the cursor there. ARGH!

That means I can't shift-END to highlight the rest of the line. Oh, and END doesn't go to the end of the line, it goes to the end of the document... etc.

And DELETE isn't a delete key, it's backspace. At least it's in the right spot on the kb.

And why are the function keys not the main function of that key, and I have to use the fn key to activate it, and the main function is things like volume control? I know a little bit of this is because it's a laptop kb, but still.

OK, so a lot of my keyboard shortcuts are similar, just apple key instead of ALT, fine.

Why isn't Thunderbird more consistent? Why can't I still use Ctrl-T to check for new mail? Why doesn't ctrl-enter send the mail? I don't think those are Windowsisms...

It's painful using apple-C and apple-V for cut-and-paste. I normally use ctrl-ins and shift-ins. I don't even have a INS key here. Gimmie my INS key.

How do I pop the current directory from the shell in Finder? I do "start ." in Windows. I do that ALL THE DAMN TIME.

Why, when a window has been minimized, and I use apple-tab to switch to that app, does the window not pop back up? Why else do you think I switched to that app, dumbass!

Why does xterm ALWAYS pop to the background when I switch to X?

Yes, as far as I'm concerned, the "right" way to do it is DEFINED by how Windows does it. I've known for 15 years that the "best" way to do it is the way you already know how. That became real clear to me when I had to help switch a few thousand people from DOS Word Perfect to Windows & Word back in the day.

How long did it take me to get used to Word? I don't think I was a happy camper then, either.

Bitch whine moan.

So yeah, you may see some lazyweb posts out of me looking for advice from Mac users.

Edit:
And another thing: I've been ctrl-clicking on stuff all day. You know what that means? That means you should have put a right mouse button on here, asshat!

It's violate copyright like a pirate day, right?

Anyone know some place I can get a copy of the song "So Much Love" by Amazulu? I've tried the iTunes, P2Ps, and such... I haven't had any luck so far. I think it might have only been released on vinal? Which could limit the internets availability. I don't think I could even figure out which album it would be on, since you can only buy CDs online in the usual places.

Why that song? It was featured in an episode of the Young Ones on BBC America one week. My wife ended up watching it several times, and the song grew on her.

Crap. I had to stop kinda quickly in traffic yesterday, van in front of me slowed down really quick. I guess I was following too close during rush hour, or something. Anyway.

Laptop bag slid off the pasenger seat onto the floor. Didn't hit very hard. Laptop was properly packed, and it hit in such a way that the side of the laptop would have had maximum padding. I tried to catch it as it was sliding with one arm, out of the corner of my eye, but I was too busy making sure my car stopped in time.

Got home, went to pull out the laptop to set up for the wife to play on while I went to some meetings. Big crack in the screen, big black vertical bar, right half a bit fuzzy, bottom-right edge not displaying properly.

Crap.

Not a particularly exciting laptop, a Sony Vaio PCG-SRX87. I got a good price on it at the time, about $1300. It has lasted about 3 years or so, and I've been hauling it around every day for about 2 years. So something like this was inevetible. And really, I've gotten my money's worth out of it. Still makes me mad though, I don't have budget for a replacement right now.

Not sure if it's worth fixing or not. I googled a bit last night, and anyplace that stocks replacement screens seems to want about $500. The laptop also has broken hinges (not seperated, screen just won't stay up on its own), and the keyboard and trackpad are wearing out. battery is relatively new, I replaced that about 6 months ago. I think I'll have to haunt eBay and see if I can find a used screen for hopefully less than a few hundred.

I do feel a little silly worrying about breaking my toy when there are much worse problems going on in the world today, but this has put me in a bad mood. I think I've complained to everyone at work already, so you're next on the list.

That is all. I could go on about Solemn and Blinder being sickeningly cutesy now that they are all "out", but I'll refrain.

"Sky Rockets in Flight" by the Starland Vocal Band.

Which one of you is responsible for that being stuck in my head? We were having a nice discussion about "99 Red Baloons" and Bam! Skyrockets. Why?

I guess this is as good a time as any to point out that my latest book now exists in physical form.

http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/27/1542234&tid=172&tid=6