The live version found on all the best-of albums is far superior to the original studio version.

I know there are people who cannot wrap their heads around allegories, apologues, and abstractions. For them I will just relate an incident I may or may not have just witnessed.

A crowd of people files into an elevator. As the doors are closing, an elderly woman dashes in, and stands in the line of the door sensor, thus holding the elevator hostage. She yells to an elderly man, at this point out of sight, and continues to stand firm. Behind her, the rest of the passengers fume silently and exchange dirty looks. When the man finally arrives, the pair steps inside, allowing the doors to close.

The End

I was going to write an allegory here in the form of five cinquains, but rumor has it that I have been a bit too subtle. Consequently, this is not an allegory at all.

There is a request for audioscrobbler support in vux, and what with audioscrobbler suddenly becoming trendy, I decided to write some preliminary support in Z-Shell, which I have sent to the bug report.

Audioscrobbler 1.1 uses timestamps in the form YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS (which then must be url-encoded). Audioscrobbler 1.2 uses seconds since epoch, so I will refrain from ranting about that further. However, because of the silly timestamp format, I discovered a problem with the strftime built-in.

I am lying; the problem is with the handling of the TZ variable. Luckily, I can mention it here so I can avoid bringing it up in an appropriate forum.

Once upon a time, crystalscomfyland.com provided numerous eCards for impertinent individuals to send, free of charge, across the great and vast Internet.

From time to time I mourn for www.crystalscomfyland.com and the delightful eCards hosted therein. Were it still around, I would not hesitate to send an eCard with the picture containing the phrase « Uncle Larry touched me in the no-no place! » to someone who needs cheering up.

I would send one to Crystal too.

The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005 gives movie theater employees the power to detain people. Title II protects families by keeping illegal the deletion of commercial advertisements.

It has been suggested that the parable-to-allegory ratio is a bit extreme. Thus, what follows is an apologue of very poor quality.

A shark, a Pomeranian, a squirrel, and a kernel hacker walk into a bar. The shark, who was wearing a fascinating breathing apparatus, exclaimed that the chocolate cake was better than the panacotta. « Yeah, I'd hit that » agreed the kernel hacker. They were not very surprised when the Pomeranian and the squirrel ripped out their throats.

The moral of the story is that chocolate cake is a potentially-dangerous substance.

I first had kiwi in 1983, give or take a year.

A giantess said to a man, « Son of Earth, regard my Blog, and fear it, for it is the Wave of the Future. »

The man replied, « You are indeed enormous. What is a Blog? »

The giantess scoffed. « Puny one, » she said, « how can you live in this land and be so ignorant? Blogs are the New Media. I shall furnish you with the URL. »

The man typed the URL into his Web Browser, and absorbed the information displayed upon his Screen. « This is mildly interesting, but I would much rather read about Ali Davis working as a porn clerk. »

« FOOL! » she fumed with disgust. « My Blog entries are so magnificent that all creatures big and small will Link to them. Then my Blog will be read aloud on cable news, and soon I will be invited to share my Opinions on talk shows. » she proclaimed, and like the ebb of the tide, she returned to her Day Job.

Time passed, and a dwarf approached the man. « Did you see what the Grumpy Old Djinn wrote in his Blog today? » she inquired.

« No, » the man replied nonchalantly. « I don't read Blogs. »

Looking at him levelly, the dwarf said, « You should. Get an RSS Reader. » Then she continued on her way.

« Hey, you're kinda short, » he called after her.

She looked back to yell, « You're fat! » and vanished behind a tree.

The man, weary from all this socializing, decided it was time to go to a party. At this party he ran into his friend the Monkey. « Yo, dude, » said the Monkey, « did you check out my sister's Blog? »

« Uh.. your sister has a Blog? » grunted the man, for he was as uninterested as he was irritated by the neighboring conversation about the critical importance of having an advanced degree in oncology from a reputable university.

« Yeah, dude, » said the Monkey, somewhat incredulous that anyone could have missed his Blog entry Linking to the Blog of his sister. « It is really interesting. Just follow the Link from my Blog. »

On his way home, the man thought carefully. If he openly refused to read the Blogs of the Monkeys, they would hurl feces at him. That is why, when he reached his abode, he procured for himself an RSS Reader. He subscribed to a variety of Blogs and proceeded to wade through them. There were fascinating observations about how people had put on their shoes in the morning, and recommendations about what blogs to read, and speculation about which soap opera characters would marry one another this week, and very personal thoughts about which the writers sincerely hoped that their close friends would never read. So the man sent the RSS Reader to the Bitbucket In The Sky.

The giantess stopped by the next day, and when the man inquired as to whether or not she had gotten invited to any talk shows, she shouted in anguish, « Worm, you really don't read my Blog, do you? »

« No, I do not, » he admitted as she flayed him with a cat o' nine tails.

When she had gone away, the man procured another RSS Reader and subscribed to the Blog of the giantess, which happened to use Movable Type. « What the hell is this shit? » he mused poetically, for only a very small portion of each entry was readable. So he subscribed to another Blog using Movable Type, and found the same problem. He subscribed to another, and yet another. Finally he discovered one that included the entire entry and did not force him to follow a Link to get to the real content. It was a good Blog, and it gave him Hope, but every MT Blog he found after that had the same problem as that of the Blog of the giantess.

They found him six days later. He had clawed his eyes out before realizing he could have unsubscribed from the problem Blogs.

Recently I had the pleasure of sitting next to a conversation entitled “Foucault vs. Sartre”, and despite my efforts, I was not able to block out the discussion entirely.

A few days later, I was tricked into talking about Philosophy. While I was stunned and stewing about this, I was tricked into talking about philosophy, which is not as reprehensible, but can still be irritating.

Every now and again someone explains to me that a failure to believe in a supreme being results in a meaningless void in one's life, or a dearth of moral fortitude, or a funny accent.

I wonder if they'll stop.

Ian Murdock: Wil Wheaton: "Why do you think so many Americans are turning to the BBC or Guardian UK for news about our country? It's not because we hope to catch the latest cricket scores between stories; it's because the Mainstream Corporate Media in America is a miserable failure."

Complaints that http://example.com/ goes somewhere different than http://www.example.com/ (for domains which are not literally example.com) annoy the hell out of me.

If you want to improve this situation, implement SRV record support in web browsers.

[09:05:23]       Welcome to WeeChat, the geekest IRC client!

Minnesota is..

I think I need a better picture of this.

I am half-tempted to buy this book for some reason.

Occasionally I have recommended Ubuntu to people because I had been under the mistaken impression that great strides had been made in terms of usability for the Windows crowd. I am probably responsible for much of this misunderstanding because I still cannot fathom that anyone with half a clue would use GNOME, even though there is evidence to the contrary.

Whatever the reason, I have lost some credibility, because neither Ubuntu 4.10 (warty) nor 5.04 (hoary) are as usable for some people as Windows XP.

In one case, a poor computer was unable to get onto the network (its only NIC is an Atheros 802.11g card). On the plus side, the non-free madwifi driver was installed without issue. However, this did little good because of Ubuntu bug #6882 which causes the WEP key entered in the happy little GUI to be written to /etc/network/interfaces in the wrong format. Consequently, the computer is unable to associate with the access point unless the admin happens to prepend « s: » in the WEP field in the GUI, edit /etc/network/interfaces directly, or set the key with iwconfig.

When the admin has no idea what « s: » means; or that /etc/network/interfaces exists, or what it does; or what iwconfig does; then this problem is impossible to diagnose, much less to work around.

While I was able to point out that this was a known issue, and to provide a workaround, I was unable to explain why this was not treated as release-critical, why it had not been fixed, or why the file browser was unable to mount a vfat-formatted floppy.

So now I have nothing to recommend to those for whom Debian is too difficult.

I wonder how many people will be able to spot the amusing things about this link.

Erinn Clark implies that a cell phone habit is more expensive than a cigarette habit. The numbers are a bit different here:

New cell phone: free with annual contract
Nationwide coverage (600 minutes/month): $40/mo - $480/yr
Total: $480/yr - $40/mo

Pack of cigarettes: $7.50
3 packs/week: $22.50
Total: $1170/yr - $97.50/mo