While reading the WaPo (read:procrastinating) I came across this comment:

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Following up... Byron up near the top of the thread seems to be making stuff up. There's no such thing as iTunes Pro, and iTunes is free. Also a 3rd generation iPod actually looks quite different from the new ones (in the relatively restricted range of such things) -- the third gen were the ones with the circular buttons above the touch wheel (and to me the least elegant and appealing of pretty much any iPod design so far). New iPods are considerably thinner, have bigger, brighter, color screens, and lack those horrible buttons.

Posted by: JJO | November 15, 2006 02:33 PM
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gnaa first post

gnaa.us FTW

Posted by: Gary Niger | November 15, 2006 02:48 PM
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Who wants another device to carry around anyways. Ipods and Zunes both are pointless, my cell phone plays MP3s and its smaller than both players, plus its a phone has Wifi, bluetooth, and games. So I guess if you want more crap to carry around get an Ipod or Zune.

Posted by: J | November 15, 2006 02:56 PM
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"For Teh Win", indeed!

But do they have a Timmies?

/Unimpressed.

Its creepy and hysterical

What's better than the "noooooooooo!" ? the smackery, of course. (If I watch this one too many times I laugh so hard I cry and then I hyperventilate and can't breathe, and then I die. (probably))

Is it Cosby? or Lyrics Born? who cares

WInifred discovers the ugly truth

classic song, classic hair cut, classic safety not gauranteed.

it's only funny because it's a compendium of cliches.

ulitmate suffering

SO blah blah blah, I don't like SuDoKu. I have no smarmy comments on how its teh dumbxx0rz or how its adherents are the lamxxz0rz... (if you came here looking for that, I apologize and admit that I'm slipping) infact on paper it would seem that "this would be right up my alley." A puzzle? With numbers? Sounds cool.

But it leaves me cold. Which is too bad. Because The WashPost has an enormous "funny dog comic" section (Big ups to "Mutts" and Hillary Price's "Rhymes with Orange") and SuDoKu features prominently. Even the Jumbles aren't enough.

So imagine my surprise when I came upon Terry Stickles Sticklers... which was just a thinly veiled Algebra problem!
"What positive number has a square who, when subtracted from its double, equals 24?" Man, did that make me miss grammar school. I'm not sure if that is better than SuDoKu, or far, far worse. But for what its worth, I did it anyway.

Then while getting my haircut today, my barbzardrist(strong bad link left as an exercise for the reader) asked me for some help on her kids homework (one of those "you have a week off from school, so do some work!" packets). There was a relatively easy one: "find 5 three digit numbers, between 300 and 600, where the middle digit is odd, the first and last digits are even, and the sum of the digits is 13." Simple enough. (and it only took a little while before I realized the pattern...)

But here comes the hubris part; there was another puzzle; 5 names, 5 cars. By process of elimination, determine who drives what cars. I believe there were 4 clues.

BUT I TOTALLY READ WAAAAAY too far into it! Like, the first clue had "Yesterday, Church and Stanley went to lunch with a guy who had a silver car.", the last clue had "Stanley has a dull car colour" (gray), and the second clue had " A gray and a red car drove past Stevens house yesterday"

So I link all those together and say "A ha! Those TWO cars were on their way to lunch with the silver car guy, and they MUST have driven past Stavens house, and Stanley has a gray car, Thus Church drives a Saturn! Err, I mean the RED car!"*

*This would be a totally valid conclusion for an LSAT logic games test puzzle. They really have a thing about Saturns.

But this was not an LSAT question. This was a first graders homework.

After a couple of other answers didn't add up, I realized "Oh, none of these clues are temporally/causally connected. Infact each clue is just ' this name does/doesn't have this colour car. figure it out.'

I tipped extra on the haircut so she wouldn't tell anyone about that.

Why? and Who's got the Money?!? being the top two.

something tells me she's gonna get SBLOUNSKCHED!

Its monday, and my back is sore from ditch-diggery.

Lawrence Weiner and Brian Jungen.

Jungen's Prototypes for new understanding comes really frickin' close... like an Airline Industries rave flyer made flesh (RIP Todd Baldwin).

I hope you get your five bucks worth. Much obliged! Even if you are a convict, I'll still use the power of TF against Mrs. Haversham. I've got no shame.

For you /.'ers, I'll probably be scarce round these parts. I hear Total Fark can lead to complete mental breakdown.

So if you found yourself in Vancouver, BC for a period of weeks, WWYD?

/Hat tip to RW

My dark meat piece was awesome; however the breast meat of the Coq was dry. Such a shame. I'm not sure what to do when the recipe says "simmer for 1.5 hours" _ I guess at a lower temperature?

Pommes Anna could have used a tad less salt but it was great; no undercooked potato hardness.

Wife threw out the first batch of baguette dough, claiming it was too tough. Glad she did, the finished product came out great.

Apple tart was supa' sweet and the crust was perfect.

Cambria pinot noir was a good choice, too.

The Village: thank god my wife snuck it on the queue. This was a fun-ass movie. A period piece, a hero quest (with a blind girl as the hero), a commentary on communes and the base nature of greed within humans, and just a little bit of spooky thrown in. All of you who said it sucked are stupid. Like, totally! And the moment I saw the red-cloaks I fell in love. I now know what my halloween costume will be next year!

Through a Glass Darkly: I was soo not feeling this movie. What is it with "auteurs" throwing incest into a movie for no apparent reason?! Does this make them edgy? Worst place. Whats-her-faces physical performance of her hallucinations was cool. Winter Light is up for next week. Lets hope for better.

Tipping The Velvet: You can't go wrong with olde timey lesbians. There were parts where it was good, which is probably a reflection of the book. There were parts where it was cheesy, probably a reflection of the adapters (this was a bbc telly series).

the system is 6, 7 months old?

512 mb ram, 1.5 ghz processor.

so I hit the enter key, it wakes up from sleep, I type in a url, it says "your fat fingers mistyped, moron" and then I get the spinning beachball of death.

I'm in a hurry, trying to look up a phone number on Der Intertronn.

And that beach ball is still spinning.

So I turn to my right and boot up my win XP box; 512mb ram, 1.1ghz celery-ron processor.

Beach ball is still spinning.

I get the windowz boot up screen.

Beach ball is still spinning.

I select my WinXP account.

Beach ball is still spinning.

I get the desktop.

Beach ball is still spinning.

I double click Mozilla; Which takes FOREVER to load because even though you get the desktop, there's still work being done under the covers.

Beach ball is still spinning.

Mozilla springs to life.

Beach ball is still spinning.

I type in the address.

Beach ball is still spinning.

I get teh website, and have it search for a couple of names.

Beach ball is still spinning.

I forget an extension, so I re-look up a name.

Beach ball is still spinning.

At this point, I disconnected the powercord from the Mac.

I am LIVID. WTF is going on?!

If this were an AIX system, I'd make sure the AIX trace facility had a big ass buffer, I'd load a kernel extension (with a highly favored priority, so I always ran) that registered for the EPOW signal (or whatever signal happens to connote "wake up from sleep"), and on a 1 or 10 second period find out who the top cpu users are and log that, and then once things calmed down I'd stop trace and write it out to a file and find out who's ganking the CPU. (I suspect some stupid swap madness and the memory is thrashing, or I'm hanging on some device driver somewhere)

Perhaps there is an easier way of doing this on a darwin based system?

But yeah, I'm totally pissed.

This is a Poll:

A) Big phat 0

b) Big phat 0 because I shut off the lights and put up a sign saying "NOBODY HOME"

C) <10

D) <20

E) <25

F) <30

G) <40

H) < 50

I) < 100

J) > 100???

For me, the sweet spot woulda been 'round 25 unique kids, or 5 groups of kids (approx 5 kids in a group) instead of the big ol' goose egg I got.

I don't need to make turkey for thanksgiving this year. Because I already did and it came out great (unlike last years disappointment). (NOTE: when I say turkey, I mean turkey breast. We can't eat a whole turkey for weeks straight, thats just cruel)

Saturday was the day chosen for no apprent reason to bust out the china and do up a 5 course meal. Cooking Light October 2002 had a "Harvest Menu"; Curried Butternut Squash soup, Pears with goat cheese and fig preserves, Leek and Potato Tart with Gruyere, Pear and Gruyere Strata, and Raisin-Rosemary Rye Bread. I added in the Mahogany Turkey breast with vegetable gravy (from Cooking Light December 2002; The annual recipes book is great to have) to add some meat to the deal.

I was apprehensive; Last years turkey was a project. It simmered in a gigantic stockpot to ensure it wouldn't be dried out. It was lovingly basted. And it was dry as heck. All that hard work went to waste.

I think the key this year was that it was a smaller breast (3.6 lbs instead of 5-6). So it lived up to its mahogany name thanks to the molasses baste, and the gravy (thick with vegetables) was delightful. Whats interesting is that this 3 lbs breast cooked for as long as the instructions said for a 5-6 lbs breast (nearly eating up all the time buffer I put into the schedule!) Once the in-breast thermo-temp-popper popped up that was my queue that it was done. I tented and let it sit. But upon cutting, large swaths of the breast were still pinkish; Is that normal?. We only ate the white parts (we had so much damn food, the turkey was just there for show). And for left over sandwiches and such, I'm giving the meat a good microwave. But whats great is that its still not dry. Even in my sandwich for lunch yesterday the turkey was moist. Good show!

So this thanksgiving; NO TURKEY. We've done it, it worked* (I think...despite the pink?), and we've gotten it out of our system.

This november, it'll be Coq Au Vin!

Dario Argento sucks. Suspiria is such an insanely bad movie I want to demand my money back from netflix ($1.41). It is highly stylized. And that is all that can be said of it. It is non linear, and by that I mean the scenes don't flow, they make no sense on their own, and are gigantic non-sequitors. Upon reading Dario's very inflated bio on the dvd, I can only assume the thing that propelled its cult status back in the day was its overt violence. Which is really no great shakes.

When thinking of older movies that have aged well, I compare with The Shining and Clockwork Orange; mood and tone feature heavily. Dario's answer to mood and tone is a lot of red and green lights. This is not an oversimpification; he seems to have "broken lots of brain" over complex lighting that does nothing. It simply confuses the viewer and obscures things in a non-positive way.

The performances are un-believeable. While reading the bios apparently few of the actors spoke the same language; many were 'speaking' italian phonetically. Such beginnings don't bode well. And they aren't supported by the words that do exist in the script, nor by the inhuman actors. The "Freaky occurences" aren't really that freaky at all. Had any of us been in the movie, we'd be completely unawares that the coven of witches existed; we'd have overlooked the maggots, we'd have disauded sarah and flat out called her a crazy conspiracy theorist, and we probably would have enjoyed taking dinner laced with tranquilizers in our room. We'd would have enjoyed it more than this movie.

I can only assume that the performance of the blind pianist was supposed to be comic relief; his un-believably bad impersonation was so overwrought and outright incorrect that while being berated by the head mistress he kept not facing her, despite being 8 inches away. But it subtracts from the drama of the moment; Dario has sabotaged himself. (regardless, fans of industrial music will recognize the sample)

Now the demise of the pianist does show some skill and we have a bit of hope for our boy Dario. The chiaroscuro light work has something; we almost start to believe. However the overtness of the dog attack snaps the spell; its an itriguing idea to have his own dog betray him but we're back in our living rooms. The magic is gone. Had all previous lightwork been this effective the movie would get a much higher rating from me.

The Mod/Bauhaus 70's fashion and architecture are really the only reason to watch the film. That, and for the hysterical video of an italian goth-bands take on the theme music. Oh man, that was a howler.

F--.

See me after class!

This chat has been hit by the dreaded /. page-wideners!!!

ACtually, thats not the case. The lame host has posted a HORRIBLE, login-only nexis link (air head!@) and it breaks firefox 1.0.4.

IE has it looking good!

Open source; you can't compete.