BunkBlog

Remember, LJ Rabbit Hole Day is tomorrow, the 27th of January. In case you normally make sense on your blog, tomorrow you are not supposed to.

Be surreal.

1. what is the total amount of music files on your computer?

Around 10000 tracks, taking up 45 gigs of space.

2. the CD you last bought is:

Five for Fighting, I think.

3. what is the song you last listened to before reading this message?

Freewill, by Rush

4. write down 5 songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you:

Dandy Warhols – Pretty much anything
Siouxsie and the Banshees – cuz it’s in my CD player at work
Yellowcard – Ocean Ave – it’s on the radio nonstop
Barenaked Ladies – cuz it bugs Ang
Bach Concertos – for those less-annoying times

What year was it? 1988
What were your favorite bands or musical artists? Prince, Oingo Boingo, Big Country
What was your favorite outfit? Jeans and t-shirt
What was up with your hair? Kind of Macgyver-ish
Who were your best friends? Jason, Joey, Cynthia
Where did you work? The family janitorial business
What did you do after school? Work, read, play on the computer, eat Cool Ranch Doritos and drink Mountain Dew. Not much changed. 🙂
Did you take the bus? No school bus for my school, and I had a car (shitty as it was).
Who did you have a crush on? Jeanette, maybe? Don’t really remember.
Did you fight with your parents? Who didn’t? Ok, maybe not too much with mom.
Who did you have a CELEBRITY crush on? That was a long time ago.
Did you lug all of your books around in your backpack because you were too nervous to find your locker? Locker.
Did you have a ‘clique’? The Geek Crew – slacker prototypes
Did you have “The Max” like Zach, Kelly, and Slater? Hmmm…Maybe VietNorms
Admit it, were you popular? Nope, but not too many people wanted to beat me up.
Who did you want to be just like? Can’t think of anyone.
What did you want to be when you grew up? Great American Author. Or super geek with cool robotic house. Whatever.

I owned the Battlestar Galactica Boardgame, when I was young. I remember the black holes were used to sneak behind your enemies and shoot them with your tiny plastic Viper fighters.

I also remember having a Viper toy that shot a plastic dart out of its nose.

So, with that in mind, is it any wonder that I’m really digging the remake? Yes, I am a big geek.

The brain comes up with some really strange stuff as you awake or fall asleep; the transition must do something interesting with electrochemical balances I’d guess.

This morning the name of a new canine hip-hop group came to me unbidden: Barky Bark and the Stinky Bunch.

Making your morning slightly more surreal….

Just a few thoughts bouncing around my noggin:

• People in San Angelo accelerate like sailboats.
• We finally got MTV2 on our local cable and they seem to have stopped showing videos. WTF?
• Why in the world am I tired? I’ve only been up 13.5 hours, I have no business being tired.

Cya

Disseminated by superflow

A few months ago, I had a dream in which LiveJournal and everyone on it went completely nuts for a day. The entire world had turned upside-down and inside-out and nobody was their normal self anymore. And it was such a good read, that I think it should happen for real.

January 27th is the birthday of Lewis Carroll, author of ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND. Alice fell down a rabbit hole into a place where everything had changed and none of the rules could be counted on to apply anymore. I say, let’s do the same: January 27th, 2005 should be the First Annual LiveJournal Rabbit Hole Day. When you post on that Thursday, instead of the normal daily life and work and news and politics, write about the strange new world you have found yourself in for the day, with its strange new life and work and news and politics. Are your pets talking back at you now? Has your child suddenly grown to full adulthood? Does everyone at work think you’re someone else now? Did Bush step down from the White House to become a pro-circuit tap-dancer? Did Zoroastrian missionaries show up on your doorstep with literature in 3-D? Have you been placed under house arrest by bizarre insectoid women wielding clubs made of lunchmeat?

Let’s have a day where nobody’s life makes sense anymore, where any random LJ you click on will bring you some strange new tale. Let’s all fall down the Rabbit Hole for 24 hours and see what’s there. It will be beautiful.

For consideration: this only works if you spread the word, of course, but three and a half weeks is forever in LJ Meme Time.

It’s been twenty years since the year 1984 ended. In memory, I finished re-reading the novel 1984 yesterday. It seems Orwell was about fifty years off in his predictions, looking at his explanation of how the societies of Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia coexisted.

Orwell made the assumption, common to many novelists and (especially) politicians of his time, that socialism/communism would be an unstoppable force for change in the coming decades (remember he wrote 1984 in 1948). The doctrine of fear and hatred and constant war, on the other hand, sure seems like it’s moving in. Using words for their opposite meaning is a fun little game, as well – anyone feel more secure with the Homeland Security Department’s announcements of fear and dread?

War is peace

I realize Livejournal is a young place, but I’m in the 97th percentile? Dayum.

LJ Age was bought to you by imran and MemeLand.org

If you haven’t read Coventry, go buy Revolt in 2100. Tell me that theocratic dystopia is not possible with the way the country is heading.

I’m worth $2,655,050.31! How much are you worth?

Had a conversation with one of my cow-orkers today which was quite surreal. It’s like I’ve had a similar conversation before…

One of the geeks at work is the only person who really understands how some of the tools work. This is because he’s the one who wrote the tools, and he uses the strangest user interface non-standard widgets seen since Kai’s Power Tools. So my cow-orker says the problem we’re having is that Mike just is so smart he thinks differently than we do.

This is insulting and wrong. It’s insulting because it supposes that Mike is smarter than I am; I’ve seen no evidence of this. It’s wrong because smart people need to remember to make their projects accessible to the people who will be using them. If you’re a designer and you break every convention that people expect to see, you’re an idiot or an artist. If you’re an artist, get off the Intelligence Training System. If you’re an idiot, stop being dumb.

And why do people continue to lump me into the group that does not include the “crazy smart people” anyway? Is it because I’m capable of a normal conversation? Is it because I try not to pepper my speech with too many obscure references? Is it because I’m not a prick, as so many of these people who are perceived as “crazy smart” are?

Maybe I should start insulting people gratuitously and then they’ll think I’m smarter than they are. Still won’t make any more money, but they’ll stop asking for my help anyway. 🙂

Name a CD you own that you think no-one else on your friends list does.
Ofra Haza – Kirya

Name a book you own that you think no-one else on your friends list does.
Mel Gilden – Surfing Samurai Robots

Name a movie you own on DVD/VHS/whatever that you think no-one else on your friends list does.
Grey

Name a place that you have visited that you think no-one else on your friends list has.
I really doubt that I can, but how about…
La Bufadora, Baja California Norte, Mexico

Google has introduced yet another search tool – Google Print. This is like Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book” feature, which lets you do full-text queries of any book in the database.

Neither of these two services cover public domain works, over 10,000 of which are already scanned in and converted to readable ASCII text. I guess if you can’t make money at it, Amazon doesn’t see a benefit; but Google probably isn’t making much money off of this to begin with, so I don’t understand why they haven’t hooked into Project Gutenberg in some official way. Yes, I know that Google can be used to search PG archives, but linking it to the print.google.com URL would be cooler.

Shoot, with the availability of print-on-demand machines, Google or Amazon actually could make money off of public-domain books. Wouldn’t that be an interesting profit-generating idea?

You are Shockwave. The fact that you don’t have a face says it all. No one really knows what your true intentions are but you, and your intentions are dictated totally by logic. You approach everything with a cold and objective approach. You think you should be in charge because you believe it’s only logical. It has nothing to do with ambition. However, if you are faced with anything emotional, you just can’t understand it. Rock on with your logical and secretive self.

Transformers Generation One Personality Test
brought to you by Quizilla

Driving down a four-lane one-way street this morning, I had the interesting experience of watching someone turn left from the second lane right in front of a motorcycle officer of the local PD. The officer, sensing an easy ticket, did . . . nothing at all and drove away.

This is such a typical move by the police here. The only laws they enforce seem to involve speeding in school zones. Park on the wrong side of the street? No problem. Park on a corner, rather than the required 15 feet away? Still good. Run every stop sign in town? Hey, you’re from Texas. Never use your turn signal? That’s okey dokey. Go 22 miles per hour in a school zone, with no children within a mile? Busted!

Is it any wonder we have more accidents in this small city than in the much larger Midland-Odessa area? Our drivers suck and the police let them.

This poster is one example of why so many people in the non-coastal states think that lefties are communists. Capitalism isn’t necessary, with the implication that you would like to get rid of capitalism then? Replacing it with one of those nice systems like centrally-controlled economies or anarchy, I suppose. Those work so much better.

Category IV – The Musketeer
a small, highly edited social group, and you like it that way.
What Type of Social Entity are You?
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Ya gotta love Kurt Vonnegut quotes.

bq. Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
Kurt Vonnegut, “Cold Turkey”, In These Times, May 10, 2004