BunkBlog

The Friday Five makes a triumphant return!

1. What’s your favorite piece of clothing you currently own? Funky blue shoes
2. What piece of clothing do you most want to acquire? What am I a girl?
3. What piece of clothing can you not bring yourself to get rid of? Why? Class As, because they’re part of my personal history
4. What piece of clothing do you look your best in? Perhaps someone else should answer that
5. What has been your biggest fashion accident? Um, white socks with black shoes, maybe? Who freakin’ cares?

The Friday Five this week is brought to you by the word lame and the number zero. I guess they ran out of ideas or something…
current_music:
current_mood:

On the cover of the latest issue of Los Angeles Magazine, there is an absolutely gorgeous dessert, which is called a Triple Chocolate Marquis Cake.

Anyone have a Marquis Cake recipe? I tried Google and found nothing. I looked through my Mastercook collection, and found nothing. It looks amazing. Anyone?
current_music:
current_mood: hungry

I never bothered to set a “robots” text file for my site, which explains some of the peculiar search results I get occasionally.

I noticed that I’d gotten 50 hits for “windows xp activation crack italian” as a search term, so I entered it into Google. Amazingly, my site is up toward the top of the hits, but the page it goes to is the stats page itself. It appears that once one person gets a strange search onto the stats page, it ends up being self-fulfilling, since the robots that index web pages hadn’t been told to exclude the stats directory. That’s been all fixed now, though. Of course, the Google cache won’t expire for months or years, so I’ll keep getting strange hits but at least now they won’t continue to multiply I hope.
current_music:
current_mood:

So your ex got a mansion where you kick it on the hill,
your boy comes to see you, he’s your Hollywood thrill.
He’s a Spanish fly, that bucks like a stallion.
In the suits that you got him, he looks more Italian.
You worry bout your tan when the weather’s gettin’ clammy,
summer in the city and winters in Miami.
You get so high on the high life pills,
cruisin’ and boozin’ and rockin’ on the horse size pills.
You could even take more thrills- you could even take more spills,
pills, thrills, chills and ills man, kills.
And rockin’ on the horse size.
Butt’s gettin’ bigger, do you think he’ll notice maybe?
That’s ok, don’t worry bout it baby!
Cause everybody knows he pumps you for your money, that’s alright,
don’t worry bout it honey!
In your itsy bitsy teenie weenie riding up your butt bikini.
Keepin’ on the heels cause you’re saggin’
just a teenie bit more than the girls he pretends he doesn’t thrill.
Rubbin’ on the lotion, and rockin’ on the horse size pills.
You could even take more thrills,
you could even take more spills, pills, thrills, chills, and ills man, kills.
And rockin’ on the horse size.
Sometimes you feel like Moses, that’s when you’re toasted.
Yeah, kick it.
Yo bitch.
That’s right, yeah.
Rockin’ on the horse size…
current_music:
current_mood: amused

Finally trashed the cascading menu-tree metaphor for the site, replacing it with a frame-free DHTML-based menu system. Love that DHTML.

Anyway, hope it is easy to follow, I thought it worked pretty well. I even tested it in several browsers. It works in Opera, Netscape 6, IE, and Mozilla. Coolio.
current_music:
current_mood:

I’m thinking of leaving my current webhost (a thought that occurs several times a year as I encounter roadblocks in their service). I’m looking at DownTown Host right now, but I’m open to suggestion.

For about $100/year, I expect to have POP/SMTP support, as well as Perl/PHP and other CGI abilities. For some reason, Virtualave has gotten dumber and dumber over the past year or two that I’ve used them. Their email auto-responders no longer work, they claim POP and PHP but don’t actually offer it, and so on.
current_music:
current_mood: annoyed

Happy Birthday, Liz!
current_music:
current_mood:

Backdated from the 23d. Must have been busy that day.

1. What is your current occupation? Is this what you chose to be doing at this point in your life? Why or why not? Defense contractor. No. Rather be a computer geek, but they all want degrees now. PHBT!
2. If time/talent/money were no object, what would your dream occupation be? I suppose beachcomber is not an occupation?
3. What did/do your parents do for a living? Has this had any influence on your career choices? 80 different blue-collar jobs. No.
4. Have you ever had to choose between having a career and having a family? No
5. In your opinion, what is the easiest job in the world? What is the hardest? Why? Coroner – surgery on dead people. Bank teller in Alaska – everyone is wearing ski masks!

current_music:
current_mood:

Jimmy Fallon’s Idiot Boyfriend video is hilarious. hehe
current_music:
current_mood:

The total amount of sweetheart insider loans doled out to John Rigas (Adelphia), Bernie Ebbers (WorldCom), Stephen Hilbert (Conseco), Dennis Kozlowski (Tyco) and Ken Lay (Enron) was $3.9 billion.

With $3.9 billion, you could:

Fund Habitat for Humanity to build 83,691 homes at a cost of $46,600 each for America’s homeless.

Send 35,583 poor but deserving students to Harvard Business School.

Buy 390 million tickets to see “Austin Powers in Goldmember.”

Lend United Airlines the $1.8 billion it says it needs to avoid bankruptcy — twice. Or you could just flush the money down the toilet. The results will be the same.

Foot the bill for you and the 195 members of your high school class you really liked to ride a Russian rocket into space. The downside is, two of you will have to sit next to ‘N Sync’s Lance Bass.

Finance 39 equally priced sequels to Eddie Murphy’s $100 million flop, “Pluto Nash.” You could … but please don’t.

Buy every WorldCom shareholder a Xerox copier, some aspirin from Rite Aid, a year of long distance service from Qwest, and a share of Enron stock (suitable for framing).

Fund the SEC’s new, greatly increased annual budget for five years.

Still having a little trouble with the figures? Well, consider this: According to Fortune magazine, the total amount of money raked in by corporate executives selling company stock even while their companies crashed and burned was roughly $66 billion.

With $66 billion, you could:

Fund the annual budget of the FBI, corporate crime-fighting included, for 16 years.

Give 74 times what America currently gives in foreign aid to all of sub-Saharan Africa.

Cover the entire $25 billion America has spent fighting the war against terrorism in Afghanistan. And still have enough left over to give every Afghan more than two times their average yearly income.

Spend 132 million nights with Julia Roberts at the nightly rate she charged as the hooker in “Pretty Woman.”

Buy 3.3 billion copies of “Who Moved My Cheese?” But even if you read each and every one, you still couldn’t explain why it’s been a bestseller for over two years.

Pay President Bush’s $400,000 salary for 165,000 years. Although, if he’s anything like his dad, you’ll only be on the hook until 2004.

Pay the $1.08 million sales tax on Dennis Kozlowski’s artwork and still have $65.99 billion left to buy every masterpiece in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s impressionist collection at its assessed value.

I imagine your blood is really boiling now. But maybe still not enough to take action. Then try these numbers on for size:

The total loss in market value of WorldCom, Tyco, Qwest, Enron and Global Crossing was $427 billion.

With $427 billion, you could:

Fund the United Nations for the next 263 years, and still have $164 billion left over for unforeseen famine relief and peacekeeping missions.

Get Argentina back on its feet by paying off its external debt three times over.

Give $356 to every man, woman and child on the planet living in poverty.

Build and deploy 2,702 comet-hunting Contour satellites. The cost to track them down is extra.

Buy 61 billion packs of cigarettes, now $7 each in New York. Or you could transplant the lungs of 1.7 million patients — at $250,000 each — suffering from irreversible emphysema.

Order 34 billion prime-cut filet mignons from Omaha Steaks. Baked potato not included.

Pay the combined salaries of every player in baseball for the next 237 years. Although I don’t know why you would. Despite your generosity, they’d still disappoint you and go on strike.
current_music:
current_mood:

In the course of a completely random meandering talk with Kit (covering the NSA and Mountain Dew cans, Southern cooking and paperfolding), it came up that you buy flatware in settings for 4 (most of us do anyway – if you have “a pattern” you don’t count), yet steak knives in sets of 6.

Hot dogs and buns. What is the point? I now have 8 sets of dishes except for steak knives. I guess I’m unlikely to be serving steak to more than 6 people, so I’ll let it go. Otherwise, it ends at 24. Imagine buying 2 dozen sets of silverware just so you have an even number. Even I’m not that nuts.
current_music:
current_mood:

Pretty darned good day today. Only 90 minutes of work, a nice lunch with at an Italian restaurant I’d never have found on my own, a shopping trip through a bookstore that had a bigger magazine section than some bookstores have books, and some good tunes. I thought it entertaining that the first song I heard after lunch with Kit (yes those eyes do have their own gravitational pull) has the phrase, “I love the way you smack my ass.” 🙂

Now, to deal with the joy of flying back home tomorow. Woohoo.
current_music:
current_mood: happy

On this day in 1920, Christopher Robin Milne was born, an only child to A.A. Milne.
current_music:
current_mood:

The hotel I’m in this week has free ethernet hookups in the rooms (capped at 1.5Mbps but still faster than a modem by far), yet they charge for local calls. Huh?

Wonder what combination of morons came up with this plan. “Let’s charge extra for calling out for pizza hut, but let them use a high-speed telecommunications system for free.” Not that the $110/night is free but still…
current_music:
current_mood:

When my sister said it, I thought she was being weird. Now I’ve seen someone else using the word, so it must be a known slang term. But, why would you say “spendy” when “expensive” is not much longer? Really, spendy? Of course, the two people I’ve heard use this term are from Minnesota and Iowa, so maybe it’s regional (I can hope).
current_music:
current_mood:

Even better – they were live on the radio at the time. Makes Howard Stern seem tame…
current_music:
current_mood:

In a sign that Microsoft is not as invulnerable in every market they enter as the anti-MS fanatics would like to claim, Nvidia has lost a lot of money on Xbox chips. The Register has a story about the seven million dollars the graphics chip manufacturer has lost on the chipsets sold to Microsoft. Since Nvidia’s chips are the largest piece of the Xbox, they must be thrilled at the contract they signed with MS on this one. 🙂
current_music:
current_mood: amused

I’ve put up a new tutorial for budding userpic designers – transparent layers.
This is the method used to make the following userpic:

I used Photoshop, but if you’re using Paint Shop Pro, you should be able to adapt the concepts to the different menus.

Let me know if there are other tutorials that may be helpful.
current_music:
current_mood: accomplished

I’ve recently been getting a lot of viruses sent to me. Since I’m not an idiot, I don’t open every attachment sent to me (which is a good reason to avoid Outlook Express since it does that all by itself), and I run my antivirus updater regularly so I’m relatively safe.

What is wrong with the rest of you morons? I know there are some LJ users that are infected with Klez, because you idiots have been sending it to me. What’s truly insidious about some of the newer virii is that you can’t tell who sent you the damned thing because they spoof the headers. All I know is what machine it came from (usually AOL – go figure).

For those of you that are unsure of your antivirus protection, go get Norton, pay the 30 bucks and run it religiously. You know what Klez will eventually do to your computer? Erase every single file. You know when Norton began protecting against it? November of 2001. Yet it’s the most common virus on the net right now. How can you be online in 2002 and not have an updated antivirus program running? How dim can you be?
current_music:
current_mood: annoyed

In 1994, the advertising agency Chiat/Day launched a program called the Virtual Office, where the employees didn’t get a desk and chair of their own, but had to find an open seat when they came to work and log on. The theory that Jay Chiat had was that this would encourage his ad execs to be on the move, and the office paradigm was outdated and useless. With cellular phones and portable computers, who really needed an office anyhow?

He was wrong. In 1998, the virtual office experiment was abandoned and Chiat/Day moved back into a normal office. Nobody liked the hunt for a desk, it became a big joke among the other ad agencies, and they finally gave up on making people do things that were unnatural.

Now, Scott McNealy of Sun has a similar idea, named iWork. Using smart terminals with server-based programs and data storage, McNealy expects to double the number of people per office. Wonder if he ever reads Wired or AdAge?
current_music:
current_mood: amused