links for 2006-01-18

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This week's Savage Love

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The Onion A.V. Club | Savage Love bq. I've never actually seen an extremely beautiful goth girl myself; most of them seem to have weight problems, which has always struck me as strangely contradictory. From the neck up, the look cultivated by goth girls seems to say, "O, we despair of this world and long for the sweet embrace of death!" From the neck down, their look seems to say, "I'll take the bacon cheeseburger, two orders of fries, and a Diet Coke, please."

(giggle snort)

youth (or, it's a small world after all)

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so, in the spirit of valentine's day, i saw a post on gawker that linked to the black hearts party. i started reading through, looking at pictures, and then realized that it all seemed a tad familiar. i went and looked at the archives, and came across BHP IV. "New Brunswick, NJ"? waaaaaait a minute... i was totally at that party! oh yeah, that part about the impromptu penis viewing? yeah, that was me. what can i say? i was young and silly. anyway, i was quite pleased to see that i made the writeup.

nothing too exciting happened on

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nothing too exciting happened on monday. i made my way down to philly, took ryan to an interview, went to king of prussia mall (um... BIG!) for an hour or so, wandered around urban outfitters w/o finding anything to spend money on (must be my new thrifty outlook on life), and then we were on our way back to lovely pittsburgh. on the ride back i talked to my dad, who wanted to know what i wanted for my impending birthday, so i basically just gave him my bike wishlist to pick and choose from. oh, i know something exceptional about the weekend... saturday, sunday AND monday morning i had a porkroll and cheese sandwich for breakfast. dee-licious!

game, set, match (or, 'ow ow ow ow', part 2)

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sunday i slept in pretty late, and then went to go visit my mom. i would have gotten to her place before she was back from church, so i went and blew an hour or so walking around at the mall. i thought i found a really cool thing for the slf at williams-sonoma, a french press for coffee. i thought i had heard her and brian talking about it when we were at dinner a few weeks ago, and her saying she didn't have one. turns out she does, but just not one that also is a travel mug. oops. got to my mom's, we swapped belated xmas presents, and then my mom suggested we go play a game of raquetball. i've never played before, and i didn't even really have the right clothes, and certainly not the right shoes, but i borrowed sneakers from my stepdad, and we were off! let me just tell you; if you've never played raquetball before, it is hard! my mom is in her 50s, and she ran my ass into the ground! granted, she has been playing for quite a few years, but i still wasn't adequately prepared for the slaughter. she seems to think that i did great for a first time, and i'll get much better if i keep playing, but that might have just been her being nice. i ran full-speed into walls, took dives on the floor, you name it. i'm actually writing this a couple of days later and pre-dating it in blogger, so i can tell you that things still hurt; i'm having trouble raising my raquet arm above shoulder-height, and my ass hurts from repeatedly falling on it. all that said, i really enjoyed it, and i definitely got a good cardio workout. i'm loathe to take up another sport, but perhaps next winter it'll be a nice thing to keep me in enough shape to eat what i want when it's not bike season.

'twas a good weekend. friday

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'twas a good weekend. friday night i went and did a tiny bit of climbing at tcw, and then went to hang out with the slf, who has been fighting a bit of a cold. saturday morning we went to go get my carb load on at the original pancake house, and then went over to the mall to look for climbing shoes for the slf at ems, which was one of my xmas presents to her. saturday night was the comp, and it was a lot of fun. i was climbing well, much better than i expected considering how fat and lazy i've been over the last few weeks. once again, my strategy was horrible... i did some really hard stuff, but then was working on some other hard stuff that i didn't do, and didn't bother to fill out my scorecard with more moderate climbs in between tries on harder stuff, so i was running around like a loon in the last 15 minutes trying to squeeze some stuff in, which of course didn't work. so, my final score probably doesn't reflect the fact that i climbed really well. jen took a nice picture of me climbing... thanks jen!

yesterday was a really mellow day. slf stayed at her parents' house because she still was feeling like poo, so i bummed around and did some laundry, played bf1942, and watched the steelers pull out a squeaker against cleveland. it's a horrible thing for me to say after living in the 'burgh for 4 1/2 years, but i really dislike the steelers. perhaps it's not that i dislike the team, as much as i dislike the fans. i understand civic pride and all of that, but the undeserved optimism and enthusiasm gets a little old after awhile. every year, the local rags talk about what a great team they are, and how they're going to win the super bowl this year "for sure". the problem, as i see it (being really out of football since the joe morris-era giants), is that they play in a fairly weak conference, and usually play poorly against the worst teams in that conference, so when they play other teams, they get socked because their game just isn't at the level that it should be. they were lucky to win against cleveland yesterday (as much as cleveland was lucky to be so close to winning themselves), but, as pat put it, "unless jesus comes back to play cornerback, they're going to get crushed next week."

after the game, the slf finally made it back to her place, and i stopped at whole paycheck for some soup for her and some umi sushi for me, and went to go keep her company.

couple of notes about the weekend: --i live on a really dangerous corner. there were two auto accidents there, one saturday and one sunday. the problem is that people come flying down the main street, and other people trying to come from the t-intersection and make a left on to the aforementioned speedway get socked. i only heard the one sunday morning... heard something come down the street at a pretty good clip (probably a big dumb suv), and then i heard the horn honk, a quick slide (it was pretty slushy out, and 4-wheel drive doesn't help you with that, jerk), and a crunch. i didn't hear any sirens like there were at the accident saturday, so i went back to sleep. --i've already made progress on a few of my resolutions

--i cut up 3 of my credit cards so i won't be tempted to use them in a pinch. --at the comp one of the problems i did was V6/7. --also at the comp, i was working on a harder problem with two other guys, when one of the staff came over after i had just fallen off at the crux move and asked us (but directed at me) if i had done the climb. unable to stop myself, i opened my mouth and said "if we had, i don't think we would be working on it still". it was one of those moments where you're sort of across the room, watching yourself do or say something. anyway, i immediately apologized profusely to the kid for being a big fat dick.

boring (or, if you don't have anything nice to say...)

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couple quickies: --verisign is the biggest bunch of ninnies ever. i get an email reply to my fax yesterday, and then say they need proof of my former address. excuse me?!? what about my huge, blown-up drivers license that i faxed you. i sent them another fax today, and this time i included not only my driver's license, but a copy of my old car lease statement, my wireless phone bill, and my insurance statement. we'll see if those pigfuckers can get it right this time. i already looked around for another domain registrar to switch to to get away from the hulking corporation that is verisign. found a nice local one that will only charge me $8 a year to hold my domain for me. --construction for the second section of wall at the co-op was completed last night. excited about that, but it's tempered by the fact that when i was at the gym the other night, they informed me that my membership had been expired for about a month. so, that's about $300 that i have to drop, and right around x-mas time, too. i'd love to be able to just do the co-op; but i like the variety of having two different places to climb, plus they're building a new bouldering-only area at the gym, and i have a feeling they're going to raise prices, so i'd like to have my membership locked in for the year before that happens. --going with the slf tonight to see the penguins play montreal. haven't been to a hockey game in awhile, so that should be fun.

errata (or, a little bit of this, a little bit of that)

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friday night went out to tram's kitchen for dinner; my first time there. it was really tasty, and i saw things on other people's plates that i really want to go back and try. after food we met up with some people at the sharp edge to help jen celebrate getting old. saturday was nothing too exciting... went to the gym for a little while, but mostly just lounged around, watched tv and played gta:vc. i also spent a bit of time hunting around for my next bike.

yesterday morning the slf and i went over to courtney's for a little while to watch the steelers get humiliated. i wasn't there for long, because i went over to the co-op to help finish building the next section of wall. got all the sheets of plywood up, which means that it's pretty much done. we ran out of long wood screws, but we'll be getting more tonight, and tomorrow should be the big cleanup and setting party.

last night i broke my washing machine... i was washing my bathroom mats, and the water just wouldn't drain out after the wash cycle. i had noticed that the health of my washing machine had been steadily declining for a few weeks now... it was making strange noises on the wash cycle, and sometimes it wouldn't start the spin cycle unless you opened the lid and shut it again.. otherwise it would just sit there and make sad grinding noises... kinda like it wasn't quite slipping into gear. so i had to pull all the sopping mats out of the washer and run them (quickly!) over to the sink... whee! called my landlord to see about getting that fixed, and we'll see how long it takes. he's usually pretty good about that sort of thing.

those fuckers at verisign seem to have completely lost my authorization fax from about a week ago, so i re-sent it this morning. i want them to hurry up and get me my domain access back, so i can switch to my new host, and people can stop seeing the "server error" message where my geek quote should be.

a few weeks ago, both brian and myself were out of the office one morning. our boss came in, took a look around our department and said "oh, there's no programmers here today.", which was especially funny since the other developer was sitting right there, probably with a "what am i, chopped liver?" look on his face. we've been breaking his agates about that ever since, and to make him feel more like a "real" programmer, my mgr. and i each kicked in $1 to get him this lovely pin. we were going to try for a "p" letterman jacket or sweater or something, but we want him to do just a weeeee bit more coding first; you know, to prove he's actually a programmer and all.

occupational hazard (or, snoop doggy dogg)

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so, the latest hot rumor here at work is that they're going to start (if they haven't already) monitoring internet usage. i'm not too worried about it, since apart from the occasional aim usage, i don't really do anything that i wouldn't want people seeing. i wondered further if it was going to be some sort of terminal services monitoring, where someone could just log in and see everything i was seeing on my machine. that got me thinking about ways i could get around that... i started thinking about the end of cryptonomicon, where our protagonist randy has some data on his machine that bad people really, really want to look at, but they don't know how to decode the encrypted information, so they have a device set up to do a little bit of van eck phreaking and see the data when it is on his screen. so, he writes a little program to send the contents of the file in question in the form of morse code to his computer's LED lights, thereby reading the contents without anyone knowing, albeit very slowly. (i guess even that technique wouldn't be safe nowadays.) so, in short, if they're "screen eavesdropping" then i've got no hope, but if they're just checking what goes through our proxy server then i think i'm ok. i changed my browser preferences to skip using the proxy and connect right to the net, and they haven't turned off non-proxy internet access (yet). even if that happens, i'll probably be ok.

if we step in the wayback machine to my days at my former employer, they deployed a very restrictive internet access policy after i had started. i couldn't get to a lot of the sites that i read on a regular basis, like suck, among others. what's a poor web surfer to do? well, i had just gotten dsl from bell atlantic (now verizon), and since i was in early enough to be a beta tester, i had a static ip address for myself. what did that mean? it meant that i could install a copy of pcanywhere at work and at home, log into my home machine and surf out from my home machine! granted, it was 16 colors and fairly slow... but i still felt like a world class hax0r.

so much stuff to write

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so much stuff to write about, but i can't seem to find the time to put it all down in a logical fashion. real quick, tho; i had my scariest ride home to date last night; cruising down liberty ave. in the twilight down the double yellow between two busses. dave said "big deal; i used to do that while eating a subway sandwich." i guess i should have known i couldn't impress a former bike messenger with that story. by the time i got home it was full dark, which means i think i need to run to the local bike shop tonight on the way to the wall and pick up a taillight or something.

weekend update (or, that's my story, and i'm stickin' to it)

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brief update. good weekend all around. went down to w.v. friday night, and bouldered at hawk's nest saturday. didn't think we were going to be able to climb at all, tho. when we first got down there, both the dam's floodgates were open, and they had released high water, and most of the problems' landings were underwater,. and the ones that weren't were all cummy from the spray. the things we were working on were actually dry, however, so everything worked out. it was a good day for everyone; we all sent. i did two really good, hard problems myself. one was a tall, gorgeous one-move problem that had you lunging up and catching a hold with two fingers, backhanded... then step up and get your other hand on it. it was probably the most satisfying boulder problem i've done to date. looks like brian enjoyed his send, as well. yesterday night was the wedding for the slf's good friend. it was at this historic landmark building in pittsburgh... gorgeous old victorian house, and apparently it's even haunted. the priest gave a very strange speech during the ceremony... he somehow wound up talking about the virginia snipers and the hostage tragedy in russia. the reception was fun, and interesting. there was a guy there who was probably about my dad's age with a woman who was so young that she had to be a paid escort. one girl who was manning the video camera for most of the night taped an older couple putting napkins from the reception into the woman's purse. needless to say, they were less than pleased about having that hallmark moment caught on tape.

ch-ch-ch-ch-changes... (or, a little housekeeping)

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quite a productive morning. with brian gone and no longer yack-yack-yacking in my ear all day long, i'm free to turn my attention to other important matters. sent in my money for my high school 10-year reunion, so i feel like i'm locked in now to going. swapping emails around with the two other people besides ryan that i've stayed friends with, and we're all making each other go, so it might almost be fun. i also decided that i'm a bit fed-up with my current hosting provider's lack of .net support, so i've spent some time this morning looking for other hosts. i've found a few that look ok, but i think i'm going to go with alentus. 400mb space, 8gb transfer, email, etc. for $25 a month ($27 if i get the webtrends add-on). i'm more into updating my site than i have been since i started it 4 years ago, and i can't keep trying to hop back and forth between my brinkster account and this one everytime i want to do something. it would be nice if i could get a site that also did perl so i could host my own Movable Type site, but i think that blogger is just fine for me.

of course, moving a site means moving the domain. i have long since forgotten my network solutions (now verisign) account info, so i went to try and retrieve all that stuff. of course the email address for my admin contact is my defunct forwarding address that those mail.com fuckers changed their pricing policy on after i had paid up that address for 3 years. oh, well... it was a nice side benefit to drop that email, since it was getting a lot of spam. anyway, finally retrieved my account number and got to their "forgot password" page, which gives you a choice of questions, and want you to pick the one you picked when you signed up, along with the correct responses. i had completely forgotten which question i picked, so i started answering them in order. of course you get only 3 tries, and there were 4 questions listed, so my account is now locked. sent an email to them to find out how to get my password back, and we'll see how long it takes to get that all sorted out.