clevermonkey.org: a life in progress

Things I notice

I've had the same remote directory mounted on my desktop for a few days now to make it easier to do some light web hacking. Since I don't mess about with my system icons, what this means is that I have the same 48x48 icon in the upper right-hand corner of my screen all the time:

For some reason I've been experiencing a little cognitive dissonance with this image. Specifically, it keeps reminding me of the repurposed mudflap girl icon used by the infamous sport/football Kappa brand:

I mean, now that I look at it, the similarities are not all that apparent. It was more my memory of the Kappa brand conflated with the classic 70s mudflap image such that the vague multiple figures in silhouette pattern was invoked.

Or something. Perhaps by waxing on so ridiculously I will have managed to exorcise this particular minor distraction.

What is it to you?

I've never seen Olbermann so choked up. I love that his primary role is as a sports pundit, but that he regularly delivers these searing socio-political comments.

(Text transcript for those of you who are bandwidth-poor.)

Canada did the right thing. The only thing. A democracy must extend all rights and privileges equally to all citizens, regardless of their minority or majority standing in the republic. Failure to protect one of us is a failure to protect all of us.

Via Bitch Ph.D.

Puffy shot first.

OpenBSD 4.4 is out, which means it's time for some scheduled downtime.

I've actually had the 4.4 media in my hands for some time (if you purchase early, they send it early) but kept putting off the upgrade because the last thing I want to do is more work at the computer.

However, tracking each release every 6 months is not unreasonable, and there are all sorts of improvements to various daemons and drivers I should pick up.

I'd like to just schedule downtime for a specific date and time, and stick to that schedule, but I'll probably just get fired up and decide to do it at the last minute sometime this week or over the next weekend. This means that every Eco-Monkey World Domination hosted service will be unavailable for about an hour or so.

I'll post an update here about an hour before I down the server.

Wherein the author decides not to really be an author, but just use the language and trappings of authorship to make a sarcastic comment in a throw-away blog entry.

November is National Novel Writing Month, which is something I didn't really know about until Stross mentioned it, and now it seems that I'm seeing references to NaNoWriMo everywhere.

Apparently, one can participate by blogging daily on a subject, as well. At least, this is what The Flying Squirrel suggests.

While it looks like I missed that particular blog-boat this time around, I did actually toy with the idea of actually writing 50,000 words this month, just to see if I could do it. If I were to participate, I'm about 3333.34 words behind already. And, of course, each idle day is another 1666.67 words in the hole.

Those of you who know me well may recognize that this, more than anything, is an ideal situation for me to throw up my hands with an excuse like oh well; not this year. It's true: I am one of those folks that can be described as a quitter. I just don't handle adversity or challenge well, and as soon as I perceive something to be a race or contest (even with myself) I usually just quit. A bit perverse, I know, but it's always been this way. I mean, in order to change I'd have to take up the challenge of personal change.

So, for one more year at least, I'll maintain my role as slacker observer, with a side of underachiever. Do you want internet snark with that?

So: oh well; not this year. Consider this my official public rejection to the challenge that is NaNoWriMo.

Six Random Things

Six things you probably did not know about me:

When I was a kid I was crazy about animals and natural history; I was sure I was going to grow up to be a veterinarian.
I can sort of play the banjo. Sort of.
I kept a writing journal for years, and rarely went anywhere without my notebook, or day without writing. I still have a milk crate full of short stories and poems I actually intended to publish.
I was licensed to own and shoot a gun before I had a license to drive.
I was once chosen to be in a Christmas Parade on a float with (an actor portraying) Ronald McDonald. It was so cold we had to warm up in the University of Manitoba band bus, where I watched them defrost the valves on their horns with tequila.
I had an honest-to-goodness kissing-and-playing-house girlfriend when I was in first grade. We moved to Northern Manitoba between grades 2 and 3, and I was crushed when I came back for a visit a year later and she had moved on.

Via Grace Undressed. I'll continue with the laissez-faire tagging, and just say you should nominate yourself if you want to play. Let me know if you do.

Mobilespace/Meatspace

[QR Code]

Without a mobile phone that can take photos and decode QR Codes, this is admittedly a little abstruse.

Melt Me Baby, One More Time

So, iTunes Essentials collections on the iTunes Music Store are sort of like the K-tel collections of our time. They are very often typical best-of items arranged into a specific theme by Apple to promote tracks and artists to a targeted audience.

One such theme, I kid you not, is Soccer Mom Chillout. Intended, no doubt, to be listened to in the mini-van on the way to soccer practice, or in the bathtub, perhaps during one of her rare moments alone from the demands of This Modern Life. This last scenario likely involves scented candles and bubbles, I'm guessing. Cue the loveable, but hopeless, husband.

This, by itself, is not all that interesting. Of minor interest is how your writer ended up at the iTunes Essentials: Soccer Mom Chillout entry on the iTMS. In my defence I was merely perusing the Lucinda Williams catalogue when I espied the eponymous collection. Following the link I discovered the usual assortment of radio-friendly artists performing their famous lovelorn odes to love lost and regained, never to be found again, except in love, where love lives in the sweet illusion of love where passionate kisses rained down like a landslide of crazy love, so won't you lay me down easy.

What I found interesting (again) was how Apple managed to make this inoffensive little collection just a little durrty by blanking out the naughty words with asterisks.

Apparently, that Sarah McLachlan song is not what we thought it was about. Furthermore, it appears that someone had to deliberately edit the title of this song for this collection. No other combination of cream or ream in the iTMS seems to have been violated in the same manner.

Again, those three little stars turn a completely innocent list into something totally different. All I can see is the word ream which, in this context, forms a weird three-way (!) intersection between suburban motherhood, romantic pop songs and porn.

Not that there is anything wrong with that. I just don't think this was quite the response they might have been looking for. But you never know with Apple. They are from California, after all.