criticize.
Don’t hate the player, Dave, hate the game. And put some damn posts on. You’re looking bare.
All posts by MattK
Sam and I stopped into paragon sports and I got to…
Sam and I stopped into paragon sports and I got to hold the Team Series Flow snowboard bindings. They are so damn amazingly light.
I am thinking about spending a ridiculous amount of money on them. More than I’ve ever paid for a board.
sooo sexy.
Slave narratives
While Sam and I were in charleston for the wedding, she picked up a book called “My folks don’t want me to talk about slavery” filled with stories by former slaves of what it was like for them and what emancipation was like. Thes stories came about because of one of the things governments can do that are good, public works projects. During the Depression, the government hired a bunch of out of work writers to travel across former slaveowning areas, find former slaves, and record their stories. Project Gutenberg has just published online, for free, an etext about the administrative process that led to this project and how the writers went about it. Sample text in in it also goes in about the religious beliefs and superstitions of the former slaves.
Interestingly, like a lot of old folks, many of these people reminisce fondly about how much better life was during “Slavery time.”
The Icon Creation Process
An icon starts off as a puppy, then all non-icon bits are stripped away by an iconizer which leaves only a clear concise visual expression of an idea, completely unlike what I have done with paint and the gimp.
The joy of more weddings
I got rung up out of the blue today by a great friend from college. Kiran and I hung out a lot during my senior year, figuring out compilers and such. She’s getting married this December and will be having a real Indian wedding. I’m so excited to go, I’ve never been to one!
Let’s not applaud yet.
I’m just waking up on sunday morning and I throw on the news. NBC has found this family of butter trolls and given them a nutritionist and a physical trainer man. It’s three months later and they show the before picture of dad. He was 303 pounds, 6’3. Three months and he’s lost 28 pounds. He looks essentially the same. Maybe his big toe is smaller. Same fat face, same man tits, same jiggly neck.
This little stick of a human interest anchorwoman, so chirpy you can practically see the coke eating her nasal passages away, she asks him what the reaction from family and friends has been. He looks exactly the same.
“Oh, they are all saying ‘Wow!'”
I bet they really did say wow to convince him he’s doing well.
Internet Explorer, Firefox Preview release and porn.
I’ve recommended to a number of my friends and coworkers that they get firefox for a nicer time browsing this here interweb.
If you are still using Internet Explorer, it’s important that you get it updated rightnow. There is a current vulnerability in IE that means simply looking at a .jpg can let bad guys do nasty stuff to you. Since the web seems to have a whole lotta images on it, it means that it’s impractical to browse with images turned off. So go get that fixed.
Firefox coincidentally has a similar issue for .bmp images in an older version. The current version is all good, but if you don’t have it, best go get it now. I looked into all the technical hoo ha and it comes down to a single library with an error in it.
Called libpr0n. What’s up with the name?
From their FAQ:
- Why the name “libpr0n”?
- The main goal of the library is to render pornographic images in an efficient way.
Phone Adventure
I went to the beach with my phone. When I left I no longer had it. Sam and I thought maybe it was just misplaced somewhere. But I got an email that led me to think otherwise…
From: Kira
Reply-To: Kira
To: Matt
Subject: stop prank calling me! or start.
uh, have you been calling us? or have you programmed your name to
appear on some crazy lady’s number when she called us? i just talked
to her. she sounded indian.
whats up?
k
From: Matt
Reply-To: Matt
To: Kira
Subject: Re: stop prank calling me! or start.
I lost my phone at the beach!!!
Someone is using it?
From: Kira
Reply-To: Kira
To: Matt
Subject: Re: stop prank calling me! or start.
apparently. your name comes up on the caller id, anyway. the first
time i called back, i just got yr voicemail, so i left a message, then
it called again, but there was no one on the line when i picked up, so
i called back and asked what sounded like an old indian lady for you.
she said wrong munber and hung up. thats so random and weird. did
you somehow have my boston number programmed into your phone? if not,
the coincidence is overwhelming. are you sure your not just prank
calling me?
maybe i’ll call her again tonight, see what she has to say.
k
From: Matt
Reply-To: Matt
To: Kira
Subject: Re: stop prank calling me! or start.
It was my phone. I programmed your number in after you sent everyone
your “I give up I’m getting a cell phone” email. A coworker also got a
call. He probably comes up under K. I called and finally got them!
They answered, but they wouldn’t talk to me. When I called back, they
wouldn’t pick up.
So I’ve cancelled the service. I think when I get the bill I’ll have
to go through and call those numbers…. Maybe the people they gave
the phone number to will call it.
I wonder what happened… Sam thought she had just lost the phone in
the sand. Maybe someone stole it?
So I’m waiting to get a new phone. The wistful part of me kind of wishes that they would’ve talked to me. I’d love for it to have been a great random intersection, but hey.
Ooh heaven is a place on Mars
I think that Project Gutenberg is a great idea – unfortunately most of the titles are the likes of “Rides on Railways by Samuel Sidney”. I do keep up with what they are doing via their handy rss feed though. It is thusly that I happened upon The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars by L. P. Gratacap. I haven’t finished it, not by a long shot but the gist of it seems to be that when you die you go to Mars.
And before you are born, you come from Venus.
So another interesting part is that he and his father engaged in a series of experiments to contact his departed mother by Telegraph.
Oooh emergency
First incident so far – the plaza is blocked off. There are men in white suits in the fountain blocking it off. something’s afoot.