a warm place

Wandering Around The Community

Unfortunately, I don't wander around the TypePad community too much because I tend to forget about it. This evening, however, I decided to get out and see some sites, visit with some neighbors, and record a few of my findings below, complete with links to photos:

• a sign that reads "Spitting... is Unlawful... Offenders are Liable to Arrest". I wish signs like that one would make a comeback. Seeing someone spitting is disgusting, especially if they chew tobacco.


• a girl who both works at an Apple store and wears bunny ears. Wow. I want to send her a Thank You greeting card.


• another Apple reference, but someplace that normally wouldn't come to mind: three palettes of Apple's Dual 2 Ghz PowerMac G5s arriving at Microsoft.


• one of my favorite product logos: Napster's groovin' kitty. I'm still a fan of the iTunes Music Store, though.

Mousing Around Best Buy

Stores can be silly sometimes. After work today I scouted around Overland Park, KS for external IDE to FireWire hard drive enclosures. Exciting, non? These enclosures can be purchased with or without a hard drive pre-installed, and I aimed to score the latter. Best Buy, however, only yielded the former, and while that's all fine and dandy and not entirely useful to me, what caught my eye was a sticker they had on the package of each one. The sticker said something to the effect of "Let Us Install This For You!". Keep in mind that the drive is external; it has at most two cables, one to your computer and maybe one to a power source. There's nothing to install! It's like installing a generic mouse - you just plug it in and start mousing around!

Questionable Fortune Cookie

Last night I received the following in a fortune cookie:

"The path of life will lead upwards for you."

Does this mean it's all uphill from here?

A Lazy Butt

I slept in till 2 pm today. Yikes. Perhaps it was coming, though, even though I don't believe in 'making up for sleep'.

For the past two days as I would lay down to sleep I've thought that I'd probably sleep in, though it never came to pass. At 1.30 am Friday morning, right before going to bed to bring Thursday to a close, I got paged for work and wound up having to troubleshoot an issue till 6 am. Then Friday night, after I got off work at 11 pm, I went to hang out with a girl (online buddy) and her friends and didn't get home to bed until sometime in the 3 o'clock hour. In both cases I awoke five hours later - the kind of awakening where your body tells you it's ready to go and to not even think about trying to sleep anymore.

Last night I did stay up pretty late, till around 4 am, spending my time goofing around at home (watched Conan the Barbarion, installed Mac OS X Panther, played Tetrinet). Now that we've fallen back an hour and have entered a season of shortened days, at least now one doesn't have to stay up late to spend plently of time under a night sky. However, I'd rather have more daylight. Can't we just have daylight savings year round? Save the daylight!

I Own Vegan Porn

One of the perks of having a presence on the web is referral logs, those wonderful logs that show where people are coming from when they visit your site. Today while checking my referals I saw that someone had visited my site from blogshares.com. Unfamiliar with that site, I visited it. Here's what I found:

BlogShares is a simulated, fantasy stock market for weblogs where players invest fictional money to buy stocks and bonds in an artificial economy where attention is the commodity and weblogs are the companies.

Neat idea! Turns out someone bought shares of systmc.com. To our first investor, thanks! I felt compelled to make a purchase, too, so I became a shareholder of veganporn.com.

One Blog To Bind Them.

In the third week of October 2002, a mean spirited netizen made the decision to get his next ego stroking by hacking a web server that I had been running. The web server he targeted, named Tangie ('cause it's orange-ish), served as the home of my online journal for several months of that year.

Fast forward to just two days ago. On Tuesday I finally felt like setting aside some time to power up the dusty ol' server and figure out what was done to it and come up with a means of fixing it.

Surprisingly, it only took about an hour and a half before the web server was just like new. "Wow, that's it?", I thought. Using a known exploit, the evil doer gained access to the database that ran my site and inserted code into one of the tables to render the site unusable.

With the old site functioning again, I've begun the process of moving everything from it over to my current home here at TypePad (hopefully they'll do a better job of maintaining a secure server!) This morning I've finished importing all of my posts, dating from July 2002 through October 2002, from Tangie. Along with the posts I imported from Blogger (dating back to March 2001), all of my online journal entries are now consolidated right here. If you feel like looking at them, the bottom of this page has links to the last ten months (and from there you can go back further).

Bowling for Columbine

The other day I rented Bowling for Columbine. I kept hearing occasional references to it over the past year and wanted to see what it was all about. It was a fun documentary to watch. The opening sequence sets a good theme for the film: Michael Moore goes to a bank in Michigan, opens an account, and as a promotion the bank gives him a free rifle. After receiving his rifle, he asks the bank personnel, 'Is it a good idea to be handing out free guns at a bank?'.

The opening song 'Take the Skinheads Bowling' is worth a mention, or rather, a warning. Be prepared for it to get lodged somewhere between your not-short-enough-term memory and your obsessive-replay gland. The following lyrics will occupy the voices in your head for weeks to come:

Some people say that bowling alleys got big lanes!
Got big lanes! Got big lanes!
Some people say that bowling alleys all look the same!
Look the same! Look the same!

Oy!

Three Cities In Seven Days

Today I returned to Kansas City after having been on the road for the past week. I visited San Antonio, TX (the Alamo doesn't look the way I remembered it from Pee Wee's Big Adventure), New York, NY, and Bangor, MI. It sure is good to be home again.

Despite my short stay in New York (1.5 days, I'd say), I was able to see a handful of sites, including Times Square, Grand Central Station, ground zero of WTC, the outside of Wall Street & the New York Public Library, the Statue of Liberty (from a distance), and an official NY subway rat. There's something about seeing things in real life that really adds to life, y'know?

One place that really stands out was the bar / lobby of W (a hotel) near Times Square. From the street, you enter into a small room that has water flowing from the ceiling and down the walls, with a reflection of the water dancing on the floor. From this room you step into an elevator that has a surprising sound system (a subwoofer in an elevator? wow!) that brings you to the lobby. The interior design of the bar was awesome (I'm a sucker for good design, you know) and the people were, by and large, dressed sharp.

Being sent to Bangor, Maine was a last minute reroute - I was suppose to spend the weekend in NY. I knew I was going to fly out the day prior to leaving for The Pine Tree State, but I only found out *when* I was going to leave *one hour* before the plane was to take off. It was like an action scene in a bad movie, me getting to LaGuardia from my hotel and reaching the gate in time to claim the last seat in the plane. But, when all was said and done, I was in the home town of Stephen King.

I was hoping to get some sight-seeing in... maybe see the Atlantic coast via Bar Harbor or Camden, ME, or do as one pharmacy technician suggested and take a ski lift over the changing foliage. But, nay, work lasted from sunrise to sunset.