BunkBlog

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!

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Jimmy Fallon’s Idiot Boyfriend video is hilarious. hehe
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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.
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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.
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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.
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On this day in 1920, Christopher Robin Milne was born, an only child to A.A. Milne.
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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…
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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).
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Even better – they were live on the radio at the time. Makes Howard Stern seem tame…
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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. 🙂
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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.
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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?
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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?
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According to this article, the recently uncovered SSL vulnerability in Internet Explorer is actually a bug in every Windows Operating system.

Microsoft officials said it makes sense for the operating system to provide cryptographic services to any application that needs it, instead of each application having to include its own cryptographic technology.

But Culp said that the SSL flaw doesn’t affect any other application outside Internet Explorer and that it’s a client-side issue only.

Sooooo, if the only program that uses the crypto functions is IE, why are the functions not part of the browser again? Please explain this to my poor confused brain…
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This is the kind of story that you hope couldn’t happen in North America…
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According to the Washington Post story about a study in Nature, scientists have narrowed down the gene that allows humans to speak instead of grunting like chimps.

Now, they’re going to put that gene into mice. Stuart Little?

I think they’ll have better luck putting the gene into something a bit brighter than a rodent, like a chimp or orangutan. What will they think of next?
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Hey, check it out. Space Imaging has a picture of the week page, where they showcase a crisp piece of satellite imagery. This week’s photo is Toronto. Can you see your house? 🙂
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I’m going to be in Fairfax next week, for four days. The big problem with my business trips is the lack of daytime free time. Last week, I intended to go up to the city and hit the Smithsonian or one of the monuments. Didn’t happen. Closest I got to playing tourist was going to the Springfield Mall.

Any DC-area folks have ideas of what I can do in the evenings next week? It seems such a waste to spend four days in DC and not actually go to DC except to catch a plane.
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Played some more Sims this weekend, after avoiding it as if it were heroin. Maybe crack. Anyway, after much wasted time, I realized the logic behind the game is bizarre. The burglar has this magic bag, which he uses to hold his ill-gotten gains. This guy can throw a lamp, big-screen TV, and a damned chair in that thing and still toss it over his shoulder like Santa Claus. WTF?

And why don’t these morons get to have weekends off? What kind of life involves 7-day work weeks?
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Well, the orange shoes were just fun to play with, and the blue was added for an ugly contrast. This pair, though, I set out from the beginning to make UGLY. If you like this design, you have serious problems.