I've even raped and killed a mountain panda in the hills of Shaanxi.

At the age of 33, I still hate wearing glasses. Part of this is probably because I haven't gotten a new pair since 2000, but that's partly because I hate wearing them, not just because they cost $300 or so. Even when I've had money or insurance I've been reluctant to upgrade. I really should, but I just don't think that I'd wear them, so why spend the money?

I have a theory that near-sightedness is more of a consequence of civilization than genetic. I think it's like height, you have the potential but it only comes out if certain factors are in place. This is not a unique theory, that reading in dim light - or just reading a lot in general - ruins your eyes. But in my family, where everyone but me is over 6', the kids who read a lot when young need glasses, the others don't. Don't even ask about the numbers of Opti-Free bottles I saw at Duke.

Despite this, I can't erase the programming of my youth that glasses=nerd. Even funnier, on some level, I have really negative connotations of that term. Granted this is after fully getting into the nerdstyle and subsequently pulling away. Anyone who gets into it can be pardoned afterwards for not liking the subculture, I feel. But the whole experience of getting-into-it-and-rejecting-it doesn't always come across when I say that I think glasses make me look nerdy.

(No, Laural, glasses don't make you look nerdy. Setting up a PDC on Red Hat makes you look nerdy. Ahem.)

(But is it less nerdy or more nerdy to get paid for it?)

I tried to pay my insurance when I got home, and it denied my credit card. An hour ago, it worked. WTF.

My hard drive with all my music on it appears to be dead. Well, hopefully I can partition it over and it will work, and I do have backups of 95% of the music. But ugh what a royal pain.

At one point during the weekend Katie, Dougie and I engaged in a fullscale slug salting. It was a big green tough guy though, so it was really damn hard to kill. Later, I saw one by a fallen tree trunk, and as my bladder was full, I peed on it. It didn't seem to care.

(or, why I only have a 1G mp3 player)

Let's estimate, if you are anal about quality, that you have 100MB per full album that you encode. So that's about 10 albums per gigabyte of hard disk space. The smallest iPods are now at 30G but started at 10. So that's between 100-300 albums at the low end. Average album is about 60 minutes, so let's say you can listen to your iPod all 16 hours of your waking day. You can't, of course, since you need to talk to people and shit, but let's just assume you can. Two hundred albums would take you close to two weeks to listen to. Let's try the more reasonable assumption that you only want to listen 8 hours a day, and we get the more reasonable 25 days, almost 4 weeks. Well, you get the idea.

Now for some people this is great and totally awesome, but I personally only listen to mp3s on my player typically on the way to and from work, no more than 2 hours a day. I figure this is when most people use theirs, or while walking/at the gym. So that's more like two albums a day. Or three months to get through your collection. But who wants to do that? If I like an album, I want to hear it at least once a week, right? Until I get tired of it and want to take it off my rotation. And I certainly know people who just listen to the same album or playlist over and over and over and over and over. Having more than 4G for these circumstances just seems like a hassle.

On Windows: set any AJAX type page (for example as your active desktop, maximize the window, and voila. you get to move things around full screen!

I've been inspired by tag cloud to do the same for LJ. I've got bi-level tags already so this is my new goal. Of course the fact that tags don't have any idea how many entries they are attached to won't help...

firewall busted at work today. My brain seems to stop working when I am in front of a computer that can't touch LJ.

reg's computer got haxx0red so he will not be online for a while. phone him or use the SMS messaging if you need to talk to him (be sure to sign your name, as otherwise he will not know who it is).

My computer started doing that thing where it freezes for ten seconds, then works for five seconds, repeat until I either kill the net connection or the external hard drive. Or both. Whatever, I decided I was sick of it and pulled out the IntelliStation steve gifted me seven months prior. It refused to boot the XP disk from the CD drive, so I had to put the Zip disk in and run it from 2000. Which means it wasn't a "clean install."

The real problem was reg's worthless KVM switch. It was only switchable through a USB keyboard plugged into it, and as I am oldskool i do not own such a fucking thing. So I was just like "Fuck it" and copied all my crud that I might need onto the aforementioned external hard drive and then hid my old nasty computer forever. BYE BYE FUCKO.

Anyway this machine is five million times better than that outdated-in-2000 piece of shit. I am still missing Office and Nero but that will soon be remedied, yesss. Otherwise all is good, Soulseek and Trillian and Livejournal are beautiful, and that's really all I need for immediate gratification. Downloading music is my heroin. Booyakasha.

baldghoti: Midgets

Midgets are funny, yet sad. Don't they realize that the world isn't even designed for normal-sized people who happen to be a little short, let alone them? They should therefore kill themselves.

jette: Dogs

I used to like dogs, when I was a child with no friends, but then one bit me. It was shot and killed, of course. A cat could never ever bite someone so violently that she'd have to get 30 stitches on her face, side and leg respectively, and yet we allow these animals to baby-sit our children? That's brilliant. Even if they aren't very bitey, they still can overpower you with their giant legs and tongues. And they smell bad.

pokemyeye: Clogged drains

Clogged drains totally suck. I mean, think about it logically. We live in the 21st century, all we want to drain out is WATER. Can a drain not be invented with holes so small all the get rid of is the water, and maybe a trap in-between for the nasty gunk that clogs drains? What is the difficulty here? Why is the bathroom more than a match for modern technology?

llarian: the tech industry

The tech industry attracts the most unattractive, uninteresting, uncool people it has ever been my distinct lack of pleasure not to avoid meeting. This ranges all the way up to the boring normals. Because of this, you are expected to put in 60+ hours a week to fulfill requirements. I mean, everyone else has no life and is doing it, so why don't you?

liquid915: Andrea Dworkin

The misinterpretation of Dworkin's writings to say "All sex is rape" has totally fucking led to the hatred and devaluation of feminism. And I think she's really fucking gone mad, but otherwise I can't say anything else about her.