Category: Things

I saw a picture on Al Jazeera (couldn’t read any of the text, but the photo series are nifty) of the White House behind some steel blockades. In fact, I could see that they were Blockader Brand Steel Barricades. As with trade magazines for industries I’m not involved in, I like to look at industry safety supplies and specialty catalogs for commercial purposes. Look at the things people want and need, and the businesses that spring up to serve those wants and needs, and you begin to understand the world that goes on around them, commercial and otherwise.

For example, church stores. Nonspecialists work with churches, too, of course. At a conference awhile ago I spoke with the IT director for most of the mid-Atlantic region’s Catholic churches. Powerpoint is big in sermons these days, apparently, and email has made church newsletters much cheaper. And imagine the potential for burka sales! You could shop without having to leave your home and be exposed to the gaze of men. I hear that the burka merchants of Kabul have had some dropoff in sales recently, but I imagine that the Internet could bring them new business from all over the world. Or maybe they’ll branch out into more revealing clothing, like chadors.

I was using the Camino (formerly Chimera) browser, which is based on Mozilla, the basis for Netscape and so forth. But I gave up on a new version coming out, and switched to Safari. Shortly before noticing that there’s a new Camino out. We’ll see which I stick with.

And as to things you can do with that software, I’ve read two web comics recently about violence, lust, and jealousy. One of them is not at all funny and is called Three Men. The other is called
Something Positive, and it’s both funny and wicked.

Public Service Announcement

I’m totally obsessed with fischerspooner right now. Some of the stuff (Emerge, in particular, with the rather encouraging lyrics “you don’t need to emerge from nothing, you don’t need to tear away”) is fantastic and uplifting and just fun dance music. But what grabbed me first was the same trashy, brazen attitude I liked in artists like Peaches and Gravy Train. The song Mega Colon absolutely epitomizes the aesthetic: a sultry woman’s voice singing a song you’d otherwise attribute to a fourth-grade boy. Literally, pottymouthed.

It reminds me of this rant in Vice Magazine awhile back about how the only guys who think thong underwear is sexy are the ones who still think girls don’t poo.

In related news, a black hole is born, and feces befoul our fair parks, our dainty knees, our family homes, and our innocent, sacrosanct childhood memories. Of course we’re going to sue someone about it.

Since I live so close to work, I went home for lunch today and decided to make some toasted cheese-topped open sandwiches. I turned the oven to preheat, and began slicing cheese so forth. A minute or two later, I opened the oven, which had apparently suffered from a lack of oxygen: the gas was on, but not lit, until I opened the door. Then, air rushed in and the gas could ignite. Along with most of the hair on my forearms. Whoo.

Toe food? What’s that?

VersionTracker, meet PerversionTracker. FreshMeat.net, meet RottenFlesh. OK, so the parody sites are funny– I especially like that RottenFlesh is hosted at FreshMeat.

But the subtext behind these parodies is that all the hotfixes and updates are stupid and that the unstable projects are a waste of time. And it’s not true. Everything has an unstable phase. If you don’t want to use it, wait for 1.0.

Sure, there’s a lot of crappy software out there, sometimes overambitious, but more often written for an audience of one or none– an experiment or exercise or tutorial the developer is using to learn new tricks. It’s true that there are a lot of people who are update junkies and want the l33test w4rez or whatever, and that they are annoying. They also help make better software by testing every snapshot and reporting bugs.

In my experience, there are two things customers ask of software vendors: less complexity, and more features. It’s just like at any school cafeteria there are two categories of request: serve more pizza and fries, and make the food healthier. Obviously, it’s not usually the same person asking for both things, but it’s still hard to meet conflicting demands.

It’s a big menu, kids. Pick what you want and recognize that not everyone has the same tastes as you.

I so want to play some of the games that were part of this year’s indie games festival. Looks like a lot of fun. Sure, I’d have to put Windows back on my custom hot-rod but it’d be a good way to pass the time until Star Wars: Galaxies comes out.

Sincerity never fails to confuse and surprise me.

I’d have guessed quirky art and literature, or maybe home crafts, but Bread Pudding Update is actually about bread pudding. If you wanted to start a punk band, you could pick a worse name than Survey of White Collar Crime but it’s a genuine once-per-year scholarly journal. And while it has nothing about shamanism, the Mushroom News does have a review which notes that pest control and labor relations are two separate topics. My favorite title so far, though, is Eurofruit, which is not, as you might expect, a Wallpaper* style fashion show, but a produce news periodical targeted to European grocers.

Samsung is one of the great chaebols, South Korean conglomerates. Someone has put together a commentary on its role in Korean society called Samsung Means To Come. It’s Flash, but uses almost no graphics– just text and flashing colors and a well-timed jazz background. Quite well done.