Well, crap.

I have tried (oh, how I have tried) to keep this from ever being a whiny, gripe-y type of blog. Oh, I’m not above the occasional entertaining rant, when the mood strikes, but I’ve never especially cared for stumbling into information about someone else’s personal problems online in whatever forum –; it gives me a creepy feeling. So I generally try to avoid creeping anyone else out with my woes and sorrows.

Tonight I’m making a brief exception. The occasion is that Sydney the dog (who, despite what I’m about to relate, remains an utterly wummish puppalina, dear to my heart) did snatch Lorie’s eyeglasses down off the coffee table and so did begin to play and chew and gnaw upon them. I was able to snatch them back before too much harm was done; the main frame and lenses are all intact, but she did manage to mangle one of the earpieces pretty good.

The kicker is we have an unusual (for us) amount of travel coming up, with both a family reunion in Arkansas, and then a wedding in Chicago, all in the next 8 weeks or so. All of which is stretching our budget way too much for comfort as it is. It’s hard to see how we’re gonna manage to pay for eyeglass repair right now. Damn damn damn.

In happier news, I wrote the most ass-kickingly flexible and well-tuned stored procedure of my career to date today. I’m pretty proud of myself about that. Now I just have to write a data dictionary for a 150-table quasi-dimensional data mart (I say quasi-, that is, because although it’s alledged to be a star-schema-ed decision support system, but Management doesn’t seem interested in allowing time and other recsources for a proper taxonomic analysis of data elements, so the result is sort of arbitrarily denormalized here and there into somewhat less-than-fully-articulated categories. For all that, it works pretty ok. that.) in two days, and then I get to go on vacation. If you can call visiting in-laws in the hottest time of the year in Arkansas a vacation. Meh.

Spam names again

More of these amusing fictional names, from headers of actual emails I’ve actually received from spammers. I’d really like to see the seed list(s) that are been fed to Markov to come up with these. (Not clear at all on whether the authentic source of these spams is all the same place, or if several spammers are using this technique.)

From: Beckstrom Bugge
To: Linger Callicoat

From: Harr Aines
To: Fundis Mimaki

From: Eves Tjandra
To: Stasia Elliott

From: Wanous Lesly
To: Culbertson Lawver

Nigerian Uranium

Meg Hourihan has written pretty much the only blog entry you need to read about Those Sixteen Words and associated fallout.

I say “pretty much,” because James Macdonald’s “Confidential Business Proposal” over in this Making Light thread is worthy of note, as well. (Seriously, that whole thread is worthy from the top down, but Mr. Macdonald’s satire is spot-on.)

Valid

It took a fair amount of work, and I’m not even entirely sure why I should care, but I made it so that the blog index page, all the archive indexes, and my general home page all pass muster with the w3.org HTML Validator. For blog pages, the CSS checks out, too. (The home page doesn’t use a style sheet, at least for now.) I can’t promise that the writeback pages will validate, as I don’t want to get into too much policing of what others might post there.

In case anybody’s wondering, 90% of the work to achieve this compliance involved going through old entries putting in “&” for all the ampersands. The other 10% was some tweaks to template code, for which I should offer up some props to the nice people who made and maintain Tidy. In fact, if it weren’t for Tidy, I might not even have bothered.

Mr. Pibb

So, the other day, I went into McDonald’s to get a bite for lunch. As I was on my way there, I started thinking that I’d really like to have a Dr. Pepper with my Big Mac, although I couldn’t remember if McDonald’s has Dr. Pepper. I don’t drink Dr. Pepper very often, but once in a while it’s just the thing.

So, I get there, and I while I’m waiting in line, I check out the soft drink selection, and notice that they don’t have Dr. Pepper, they only have Mr. Pibb. Now, I realize that there are Dr. Pepper snobs who won’t touch Mr. Pibb, but I think Mr. Pibb may actually be even better, although of course I respect that Dr. Pepper is the original, and realize that Mr. Pibb is just a ripoff. So and but anyway I do like Mr. Pibb just fine in any case, and like I say maybe even more than Dr. Pepper.

But there’s just one problem. This McDonald’s is not the sort of fast-food joint that has self-serve beverage selection. If I want a Mr. Pibb, I’m going to have to actually ask for Mr. Pibb, by name, when I place my order. I’m not even halfway through the line before I realize that this will be simply impossible. No matter how tasty and refreshing it might be, I just cannot bring myself to say “Yes, I would like a Mr. Pibb, please” to the nice teenager behind the counter. Again, I would happily drink the stuff if I could fill my own cup from a tap, or buy it from a vending machine, or even off the shelf at a store. But something in me fills with shame at the idea of asking for it by name, and balks at saying “Mr. Pibb” out loud, particularly to a stranger in public. It’s just to damn silly to live with, the idea that I would actually have to admit to drinking something called “Mr. Pibb”.

I ended up just getting a Coke.

I wonder if the Mr. Pibb people realize that this could be having an effect on sales.

Independence Day

A good day to reread the Declaration.

Yep

It’s just as you probably always figured: the universe is giving you the finger.

(Note to work-surfers: it’s probably safe to click; it’s just a Hubble Telescope photo from NASA–;although it does depict the Carina Nebula making a rude gesture. At you.)

Dear God, there’s more

Don’t call it a comeback! Ulli’s Roy Orbison in Clingfilm Website has been updated. Although the new front page makes it seem clearer than ever that there is no Ulli, and Michael Kelly is writing these himself. Nevertheless the new stories are hilarious:

‘You are completely wrapped in cling-film,’ I tell him. ‘To get the full benefits you must remain so for several hours or until someone comes and finds us. To keep you company I will stay in the room and breathe heavily.’

I can’t say that I found any of the “Other People’s Roy in Clingfilm Stories” to be nearly as good, but I do hope there’s a film mogul out there somewhere looking to get into “clingfilm-related business”.

A few sound bites today.

There are some who feel like that conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is: Bring them on. We have the force necessary to deal with the situation.

–; United States President George W. Bush

I am shaking my head in disbelief. When I served in the army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander - let alone the commander in chief - invite enemies to attack U.S. troops.

–; Sen. Frank Lautenberg

I have a message for the president: Enough of the phony, macho rhetoric. We should be focused on a long-term security plan that reduces the danger to our military personnel.

–; Rep. Richard Gephardt

I don’t have a lot to add. I am just staggered by the badness of our President. It’s staggering how bad he is, I mean.

Astounding Sounds

I don’t really have a lot to say about 365 days except that I think you should go there, now. And bring your mp3 player. April Winchell’s Multimedia page appears to have some stuff worth hearing, also - but for my bandwidth it’s 365 that has the bigtime funny. Wow. (All via memepool, so there’s a good chance you already know about this. Still.)