Wed Apr 01 1998 12:00: Silliness abounds this April Fools day. As usual, the wackos at Sun have dived head-first into it. Microsoft has taken a more tongue-in-cheek tactic. Oh, that's a real initiative. Never mind. This year has brought a bumper crop of joke RFCs as well, including RITA -- The Reliable Internetwork Troubleshooting Agent, with which Rubber Fish is interoperable, and two RFCs relating to Internet control of coffee machines. Just click on the first link and increment the number to read all the joke RFCs.

    I'm too old and tired to do an April Fool's joke of my own, but there's an interview with Steve Ballmer I did which you can treat as an April Fool's joke if you want.

    Alas, the Cookie Bombardment program may have to be scaled down, as it turns out that you can't set cookies for other people's sites without making arrangement with them. I can still be evil with cookies, but they all have to be sampo.st.hmc.edu cookies. If you know of a way to get around this, let me know.

Fri Apr 03 1998 12:00: I did some updates to this page today at work, but I screwed up uploading the page. Oh well. Enjoy my floating head logo up there.

Sat Apr 04 1998 12:00:

Error 4/04: Day Not Found

    Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated thirty years ago today. If you listen to classical radio, you may have noticed that the DJs all talk like Garrison Keillor, with lots of pauses. Well, the guy on KUSC was talking about Martin Luther King Jr., and here is that happened:

DJ: A group of his followers are making a... pilgrimage to Memphis today to recreate...

Me: [What kind of sick people are these?]

DJ: King's last march.

Me: [Oh, good.]

    I felt like a character in a sitcom.

    I got my first issue of Unix Review's Performance Computing yesterday. I'm kind of steamed, because when I subscribed to it it was Unix Review, but in between my time of subscription and my receipt of the first issue, they seem to have let NT in. Ick. Still, it's not like I'm paying for the magazine.

Mon Apr 06 1998 12:00: Ah, spring quarter. The time of year when a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love. Speaking of love, here's a message Adam wrote me after I told him I have a thing for Rosie O'Donnel. Adam is weird.

    I am psyched about this quarter. Last quarter I couldn't care. I think it's probably the fact that I didn't have any CS classes last quarter. I have a whopping two CS classes this quarter, even though one of them is Logic Design of Digital Systems, which is too EE-ey for my taste.

    Speaking of which, here is my schedule for your viewing enjoyment as well as Adam's and mine.

    Boy, I hope I get into CS180. I have to get a special authorization number for various stupid reasons which I won't go into here.

    James is back from vacation now. I have a class at 4. Budubudubudubudubuduh... oh yeah, check out my computer industry comics. I also have a new episode in the epic adventures of e.

Tue Apr 07 1998 12:00: You know you've been hacking too long when you see chalk graffiti that says "No blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans = UCLA in the year 2000" and think "Well, obviously, if you assign it.".

    What is it about chalk graffiti writers and other student protestors that they must exaggerate? Another chalk graffiti tidbit equates Proposition 209 and Chancellor Carnesdale to "The extinction of minorities." No. Just no. Extinction is not the word. Extinction applies to species and refers to death. I cannot believe the arrogance of these people.

    Even though the reverse discrimination it entails has hurt me severely, I am in favor of affirmative action for the time being. I think a better rubric for preferential treatment would be income level, but ethnicity is fine. But please, chalk graffiti people, stop making yourselves look stupid with these lame emotional appeals.

    I realize that this started silly and turned into me bitching, but incompetent chalk graffiti people really, really bug me.

    I got a PTE override number for CS180, so I should be able to enroll despite being a quarter away from being a junior. James is on the phone right now getting his grades so I can't call, or upload this for that matter.

    There, I'm enrolled. That was annoying. Now to upload this, and wait for my philosophy class at 3:30. Why does it start at 3:30? I don't know. It goes from 3:30 to 4:45. I have no idea why. It's three hours of lecture per week, I guess they just decided to start on the half hour. Hey, it's in Kinsey 51, the same room in which I was tormented by Dr. Doug Durian and his Dancing Dipoles of Death last quarter. Yippee.

    I finally found the IP address for the Linux box over at MAP. It is 207.104.228.11. Bang on it, whatever. I'll try and give it a name next time I go in. Hm, doesn't seem to be working. Oh well. JB said it may not be accessible from the outside but I did a telnet into it from Sampo, but who knows.

Wed Apr 08 1998 12:00: Kris has formally apologized for his contention that there are too many "hey"s in my song Disaster Movie. [He came to life.] Good for him. He also apologized to Jack Horkheimer, Star Hustler, a man deserving only the light-hearted poking-fun-at all members of the human race deserve, for his (Kris') decidedly non-light-hearted jokes about him (Jack Horkheimer, Star Hustler). Catharsis is good.

    K from Australia, upon seeing the new Leonard's Yummy Homepage, remarks:

Bickety bam, your recent web upgrades seem to indicate you've fallen out of your tree. Welcome to the land of those with fucked-up heads.

    As Ed McMahon would say, indeed.

    Read that message, by the way. K has a nice Linux PR site which would be cool even if I hadn't contributed ideas and links to it. I'll add it to my Linux page eventually. Hey, I've done it already. How's that for response time?

Later: Oh man, you've got to check out the latest Ion Technology. Oh man. Oh man. Easily the silliest thing I've written in quite a while. Oh man. I put a "Wah wah wah waaaaah!" trombone in a story and it goes downhill from there.

    I asked Kris today if his use of the phrase "Three quarks for [me]" on his apology page was a Finnegans Wake reference, and he said it was. Cool. Reading Finnegans Wake was my project for most of my junior year in high school. What a great book. I betcha Kris hasn't actually read it, though, since that phrase is where the word "quark" came from. He probably just found that quote reading about the etymology of the word "quark". Not that that makes me any better than him or anything. Well, okay, it does. It does, do you hear me? People who have read Finnegans Wake form a highly elite group superior to all other forms of life! There, you got it out of me!

Thu Apr 09 1998 12:00: This morning Kris proposed the Ass-Kicking Laser Algorithm. It's actually a very boring algorithm, it just has a cool name to make you think "All right! Ass-Kicking Laser Algorithm!" but then you read it and it's boring. This was inspired by the algorithms with cool name in my algorithm textbook, such as the gift wrapping algorithm and Graham's Scan.

    My mother is into vitamin and herbal supplements. She has this wacko catalog full of all these wacko health remedies which she gets her vitamins from. The last time we were going to Bakersfield from LA I was quizzing her on what all the herbs listed in the catalog were supposed to do. It was fun.

    Anyway, she's got me on this ginkgo bilboa stuff. I don't remember what it's supposed to do. Make me more alert or something. We got it from Trader Joe's, land of the huge chocolate bars. But the brand name of the pills is "Trader Darwin" and the slogan is "For the Survival of the Fittest", which I found odd. What sort of selection advantage is ginkgo bilboa supposed to confer on me?

Sat Apr 11 1998 12:00: Check out my list of algorithm running times and my Get Your Bearings Microsoft page. Whee!

    I'm going to try to move into GNOME today. I need to get into GTK programming and the like. Why? Because I feel like it, okay? What are you, my mother? Oh. Hi, mom.

    Hm, that's strange. Writing that sentence triggered something in my mind. I must have had a dream about my father last night because I remember saying "Look, dad...", taking up a point of contention with him, I guess. Weird.

    The Adam-Kris-Leonard morning brainstorming session was particularily productive yesterday. One of the major themes was making fun of Titanic and Titanic director James Cameron. Adam said that Cameron and Steven Spielberg should collaborate on the most expensive movie possible, a movie, in fact, about making a really expensive movie. Kris pointed out that one major way to drive the budget up would be to have the special effects guys show Spielberg and Cameron expensive effect after expensive effect, effects which would have to be actually created, and then Cameron would say "No, go do something else." and they'd have to make another epensive special effect. I pointed out that the budget would also be driven up by the fact that, since it was a movie about making a movie, not only would you have to pay the actors in the movie, you would have to pay the characters.

    I also took umbrage at the ending of The Abyss with the lame preachy use of stock footage. Kris compared it to the A-bomb nightmare in Terminator 2, and we decided that James Cameron is one who speaks out eloquently against evils after the danger has passed. "My God! The Titanic sank! The crew was so incompetent! All these people died!" "James, eighty years have passed." "It's horrible!"

    That's just like a three-minute chunk of the session. We can do this for hours. It's wacky and zany.

Later: Hey, it's Passover. I know this because I remember Adam "Oy Vey" Kaplan talking yesterday about how he had to go do something after class for Passover. I don't remember what he had to do. I must have tuned him out or something. Or maybe he didn't talk about it enough for me to remember it.

    Andy "Enlightenment is a Pain in the Butt" Schile is going to help me set up a window manager today. I'm leaning towards AfterStep. Anything to get rid of this fvwm-95 crap. Try Nathan Hale AfterStep Beer. It's a beer.

Later still: Hey, I'm cookin' in Afterstep. It rocks. The only problem is that my font for emacs is too big. But I can fix that, I think. Eventually.

Sun Apr 12 1998 12:00: You know you've been a geek too long when:
You can't parse the phrase "He was a very significant figure.".

Mon Apr 13 1998 12:00: 37 years ago yesterday Yuri Gagarin made it into space. 1961. Man. Such a short time ago. Now there are people living in space and we don't even think about it most of the time.

    When the Russians announced they had sent a man into space, Americans were terrified. Now, it's something to celebrate. Progress.

    You know what? There's a part in my song Land of the Bad Analogy where I say something like "in the Land of the Bad A-nanal-annalogy" and I have no trouble saying it, but I can't write it out to save my life. A-nal-a-na-nal-a-nal-o-gy. A-na-nal-a-na-nal-a-nal-o-gy. I'm pretty sure that's it. And now that I've written it out I see that it is not composed of the start of the word "Analogy" written over and over again. It's like someone stuttering. Oh well. I don't care. Great song, by the way. I recorded it on Saturday. I don't know if I'm going to finish recording OMP!(25K-4YOPPO) on the karaoke or wait and get a 4-track. I'd really prefer to do it on 4-track. I also have an awesome version of Liquid Crystal I did with a thumb-plucking technique and in which the bridge is played by bouncing a spoon off the strings. It rocks, in a quiet folky sort of way. Took me forever to do.

Later: Here are Lyrics and chords for Liquid Crystal. Enjoy. It's basically a bashing of the "different ways of knowing"/"local truth" school of postmodernists.

Later still: Adam is a constant source of joy for my mail page. Here is his latest effort. It helps to know that we have a bit in which Brian Kernighan acts like Santa Claus.

    I have joined the LinDope mailing list. Our goal is to put up a Linux humor site. The mailing list is called LinDope in honor/shamess rip-off of that fabulous Be humor site BeDope, but it will be changed soon. Hi there, LinDope people visiting my home page.

Tue Apr 14 1998 12:00: Yesterday the Kris-Adam-Leonard entity went to see Very Bad Things. Kris didn't like it. I didn't like it either. The best thing I can say about that movie is that it gave life to my fear of death by impalement on one of those towel rack things. But the Jewish characters were written by someone who either knew nothing about Judaism or who didn't care. Not only did the Daniel Stern character believe in hell, but he actually yelled out "Christ!" at one point. Yeesh. And he wasn't a nonpracticing Jew, either, because he did all these dinky Jewish things that a nonpracticing Jew wouldn't care about. I think that's a good summary of the movie, actually. It was written by someone who didn't care. It wasn't funny. It tried and it failed miserably. And the ending was the lamest thing in the world. Oh well. I don't need to see it again. And Kris, there was no time lapse in the sequence where they were holding the bathroom door shut. I think you just mentally inserted a time lapse because that scene dragged on for so long. Also, the nudity in The Big Lebowski was pretty gratuitous.

Wed Apr 15 1998 12:00: Several items of business today. First, I'm going to change my email address. This won't affect you, since leonardr@ucla.edu will still get mail to me, but it's not the account I'll be checking. I will rather be checking leonardr@csua.ucla.edu.

    Why? Because I got an automatically-generated letter from the UCLA Office of Academic Computing chewing me out for wasting computer resources by having, sometime in the recent past, checked my email more often than twenty times in a particular hour.

    I left the letter at work, or I'd put it up. The letter contains no threat, but it does refer to the dreaded Acceptable Use Policy which states that students shall not make it difficult for others to use the computing resources. An attempt to check an account's email more often than twenty times in a particular hour is apparantly seen by the auditing system as a low-scale denial of service attack.

    Note that I do not, nor have I ever made a habit of checking my email more often than once every five minutes. If you were to graph the frequency of my trips to the POP server, they would probably fall squarely in line with anyone else who uses email as their primary form of communication. At some point in the recent past I was probably busy-waiting for an email of prime importance such that I checked my mail more often than I normally do; I don't check my mail all the time for fun.

    I was going to write a big rant about how much OAC sucks, but this is such a pissy little thing that it's not worth it. But it's the pissy little things that get you. So I'm going to set up a .forward file for leonardr@ucla.edu and move over to using my CSUA account, because whatever you may say about CSUA, they don't really care how often you check your email. leonardr@ucla.edu is a nice mneumonic, though, so I'm going to put that down as my actual email address. If for some reason you don't want your email to be processed by the ben2 monster, you can send it to leonardr@csua.ucla.edu when I give the signal.

    On my stack of never-to-be-finished projects I will push a low-volume Web robot which I can run as I surf. If OAC is tracking my email checking patterns, they're probably also logging every URL I visit, and I'd rather not have that information be statistically meaningful.

    Okay, second, there is a girl in my CS51 class who acts like Anabel Fujimura used to (and still does, for all I know), only it's not cute when she does it. It's annoying. Argh. I also drew the CS fairy, who is a stick figure fairy with 80s rock star hair. In the cartoon she is shaking her fairy dust onto the inhabitants of the Village of Gates, the houses of which look like logic gates. The caption reads "The CS Fairy has come to sprinkle her magical dust on the Village of Gates!". The inhabitants of the Village of Gates are lying on the ground crying out in pain, and the CS Fairy is saying "Take that, lousy Village of Gates!" Then the second panel is a close-up of the CS Fairy as she sprinkles from her wand. The caption reads "Uh, CS Fairy, do you have the wrong dust or something? The villagers are dying!" and the CS Fairy says "No, this is the right dust." It's funnier when you actually see the cartoon.

    I have a Jabba the Hutt action figure now. I've had him for about a week now, but I never talked about him on the News You Can Bruise page. It's the younger, trimmer Jabba from the revised edition of Star Wars, and there's a Han Solo guy who came with him. I have no use for Han Solo, but I put Jabba on top of my monitor along with Morn and Rubber Fish. In fact, Jabba is holding Rubber Fish on his shoulder like a grenade launcher. Crashes, look out! I also gave Han Solo's blaster to Morn.

    You can ping groucho now at 207.104.228.11. You can't telnet in or access the Web server yet, though, because it's behind the firewall. Apparantly we have a lousy unconfigurable firewall so the ping-only status will probably last as long as our current firewall does. There is talk of replacing the firewall with something better. It [the firewall] runs on the Sun. I don't know if it's Sun's default firewall or what, but apparantly it sucks.

    I closed my CD today. I now have a total of about $3600 avaliable for check-writing. Unfortunately, that represents all the money I have in the world, and I have to spend $650 of it right away for this month's rent. Oh well. I'm making about $300 a month from MAP. Not that that's enough, but it'll help.

    Man, I have to finish my CS180 homework. I couldn't get to the LyX site yesterday so I'm going to have to go into 95 and type the homework in Word. Bleah.

Fri Apr 17 1998 12:00: Here's a song I wrote in high school, when I was a messed-up kid (and when I said I didn't like my teddy, you knew I was a messed-up kid): Sea of Irony. I just now got around to writing it down.

    A happier song from the same time period: Civil Neurosis.

Sun Apr 19 1998 12:00: Han Solo now lives on top of the monitor. I don't have anywhere better to put him, and I was finding that I was using him as a chew toy, which makes me uncomfortable. He's standing on his head.

    I put some new stuff on the Leonardonics page. The standard for the Nathan Hale x Beer joke, and a discussion of the effects of The Big Lebowski on Leonardonics, mainly. Jake wants to see your personal slang dictionary, and so do I. So get to it already! I'd link to Jake's personal slang dictionary, but I don't have the URL. Jake. Help me Jake.

    The release of OMP!(25K-4YOPPO) is probably going to wait until I get a 4-track. Even worse, it will probably wait until I get a 4-track and actually do the recording on it. Then I'll send the tape off to Jake, and we'll have to wait for him to get off his lazy hinder and burn it onto CD. We could be talking about a summer release. In fact, that's probably exactly what we're talking about. But oh will it rock when it is finally done. And for those who crave the great taste of the Open Standards Band now now now, I'll toss the Coffee Junction performance and some other crap onto a tape for the b-side of whatever it was that Jake wanted me to do a b-side for where it wasn't an Indian giver situation, whatever that means. One grep later, I realize that the tape in question is the proposed It's Only Ketchup/It's Only Mountain Dew tape, and it's not a b-side I would be doing but a straight split [rack 'em!]. But this is b-side material we're talking about here.

Mon Apr 20 1998 12:00: The tripwire that is the Browser Greeting program was triggered last night, as professional bumbag xraybla.ne.mediaone.net decided to harvest my email address with a bot called EmailSiphon. So today I put in a little script that will generate 20,000 invalid email addresses if EmailSiphon tries again. Ha ha! Screw you, EmailSiphon! There's a better script that both blocks access from all spam harvesters site-wide and generates better fake email addresses, but it requires Apache reconfiguration so it'll have to wait.

Tue Apr 21 1998 12:00: Man, I just slept from 5PM until 9PM. Woke up and had the munchies. As is the custom James made Helper, but it was the lame-o ravioli kind, so I made one of my five boxes of Pasta Roni I have hoarded away in my filing cabinet. Shells and white cheddar, baby. You must try it. Get some. Pasta Roni, Shells and White Cheddar. If you are a minor, do not tell your parents to get some for you; they will try to make you feel as though you have an obligation to share the pasta treat with the rest of your family, possibly as a side dish. Spend your own capitalistic cash money on Pasta Roni and eat the whole thing yourself as a meal. That's the American way. They're only about $1.25. I got four of them at Lucky's on Monday and they were $0.99.

    This is not some postmodern Douglas Copeland/Jerry Seinfeld glorification-of-the-banal thing I'm trying to pull on you here. Pasta Roni Shells and White Cheddar is booze of the utmost quality.

    James is taking a shower. It is 10:30 at night. Why is my roommate taking a shower at 10:30 at night? I guess I'll never {know,care}.

    On KUSC when I woke up there was this piece of music that sounded just like Stravinsky. Only it wasn't Stravinsky, it was someone else. They were totally ripping off Stravinsky. Of course, as Stravinsky himself said, "Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.". He was a very GPL kind of guy.

    You know what? KUSC is great, but for some reason I miss the public radio station in Bakersfield, KPRX. I don't know why. KPRX has some interesting news shows, but that's not the whole story. KPRX has a slightly different style, one that I like better.

    Jake says "liquid crystal rocks my lame ass.". No faint praise, coming from Jean the Pea Queen. Hey Jake, I heard you shot your woman down. Adam says he'll have the Coffee Junction performance on normal tape for me, for you, soon.

    Speaking of Adam, he transferred into my CS180 class. CS180 is cool. The key is to see everything recursively. I drew a cartoon in the style of those lame educational/safety comic books you sometimes got in grade school for Adam to get him thinking recursively. It features The Amasing Recurso, a Tickle Me Carlo Lombardi-type vaudeville stage magician.

Panel 1:
Recurso: I am The Amazing Recurso!

Panel 2:
Recurso removes his hat, revealing numerous rabbits. He points at the hat with his wand.
Recurso: Behold! n-1 rabbits!
Arrow Pointing to Hat: "black hat" ~ "black box"

Panel 3:
Recurso smiles and holds his wand in a thumbs-up manner.
Recurse: Remember, kids... when you think algorithms, think recursion!

    Simple, yet effective. It's very weird what I am doing this quarter. On the one hand I have CS180, which is a totally mathematical approach to algorithms, very abstract, so abstract that recursion is the key to everything. And on the other hand I have CS51A, way down on the bare metal, in which I must memorize switching expressions of the damned and perform gate analysis. Guess which one I prefer. I should change the lyrics to Sea of Irony to make it Sea of Gates to reveal the new source of pain in my life.

    I was going to reproduce RMS' Free Software Song on OMP!(25K-4)YOPPO. But, inspired by the techno remix, as seen on slashdot and heard at the Mozilla source release party, I have decided to do my own version of it, rather than just cat rms.au > /dev/omp!(25k-4)yoppo, as it were. I have a suitably me-ish version worked out. I have noticed that ever since I broke my top string and have been unable to replace it a few days ago, my solos have gotten a lot better. Mainly because now I can do bends on what used to be the second-top string. When you have six strings it's tough to do a bend on the top string without actually pulling the string out past fretboard territory. I'm going to have to do something with wood glue and get this sucker fixed, though, because I have numerous songs that utilitize the top string.

    Wow. Pretty long entry. I'd better try to go back to sleep for a while. I have to go to work tomorrow.

Wed Apr 22 1998 12:00: Jake sent me a very, very funny email regarding some unfounded rumors I posted about him yesterday. Read it and weep was her adjustable slogan.

Later: Thanks to the generousness of Scott James Remnant, I now have a segfault.org email address. leonardr@segfault.org. It just forwards to leonardr@ucla.edu, which as of today forwards to leonard@seas.ucla.edu, but it's pretty cool regardless. I wish they'd given me leonardr@seas.ucla.edu. That always trips me up when I log on.

Fri Apr 24 1998 12:00: Check this out: Wang sues Netscape over their alleged patent on software that decodes files based on extension. I wrote a program for MAP that did that once. Look at me, I'm a criminal! How about the makers of that darn patent-infringin' COMMDLG.DLL? How about all those naughty operating systems that use particular extensions to denote executable files? Isn't it strange that Wang would sue the latest thorn in Microsoft's side rather than the company that is simultaneouly the biggest-volume infringer and the most able to reach a huge out-of-court settlement? Well, maybe not.

Need To Know's IMDB entry for The Big Lebowski: (comedy / crime / mystery / thriller / rug / porn-makers / wheelchair / paraplegic / hippies / police-brutality / paedophilia / dreams / bowling / kidnapping / nihilism / artist / vietnam). Wacky wacky life preservers.

Later: Kris sent me a skit which I found funny. This morning Adam had us go out to his car and fill up one of his tires which was flat and leaking. He claimed he didn't know how to work the air compressor. Then he wanted us to fill up his other tire which was a little low. Kris said "Change your oil, sir?". That was the inspiration for the skit I linked to up there.

Sat Apr 25 1998 12:00: Over the objections of weez, I have upgraded to Red Hat 5. Let it be known that the difficulties I am now having are my own damn fault, and let weez be absolved of all blame.

    It's actually not that bad. I need to get a new version of Afterstep that uses glibc6, and it looks like I need to update my wvdial PPP program. Everything else seems to work fine, and I'm all set to upgrade to the 2.1.88 kernel.

    Also, I have POP mail access again. Cool. Omar made a statement something like "The further off from the main UCLA computing bureaucracy you go, the more options and flexibility you have." I have found this to be true. From the CSUA student machine I can get pop mail, or if I'm not at home I can just telnet in and use pine to read and reply to my new mail. Plus, it's yummy Linux and not the proprietariness of AIX that ben2.ucla and *.seas.ucla depends on.

    Check out all my email addresses. Through judicious application of the .forward files that the Unix-Haters Handbook hates so much (as is, indeed, its job), you can send me mail to any of the following addresses and it'll all get funnelled into my CSUA account.

1. leonardr@ucla.edu
2. leonardr@segfault.org
3. leonard@seas.ucla.edu
4. leonardr@csua.ucla.edu

    You can also send me mail at leonard@mapinc.com, which I check occasionally. I've tested all this and it works.

    There's a hilarious poem about chess on Prarie Home Companion right now. Just thought I'd tell you. I'm getting Afterstep right now.

    I have sent Jake my tape to be the master for the tape he's got a May 1 release date for. Buy the tape. Adam should have sent the other master tape to Jake today. Buy the tape. I can't stress this enough. Chock full of live performances (read: Coffee Junction) and rarities, and that's just our side. Jake's side has all the nutty computer-manipulated goodness you've come to expect from Jake.

    I can't help but notice that a lot of the things said in this BBC story are things that were being said 30 and 40 years ago about what life would be like today. Could we have a steady state situation here?

    My CSUA web page is up. Enjoy it. It's mainly to sucker other CSUA members into coming here.

Tue Apr 28 1998 12:00: You know what? I thought the Need To Know IMDB entry for The Big Lebowski was a joke, but I looked it up just now and that's actually pretty much what the actual category list says.

    Midterms tomorrow. They shouldn't be so tough.

    Just look at all the innovations in Windows 98! Never before seen in any software package, ever!

1. Windows 95 service packages!
2. Internet Explorer 4.0!
3. Your desktop looks like a series of Web pages!
4. Active Desktop allows you to get content from the Web automatically!
5. Automatic Web page downloading and offline browsing!
6. Double clicks become single clicks! Single clicks disappear!
7. Automatic driver updates!
8. The System File Checker makes sure the OS stays in memory!
9. Disk Cleanup Tool removes infrequently used files!
10. Frequently-accessed files are placed on better spots of your hard disk!
11. Incredible speed gains through removing previous two-second "Starting Windows 95" delay!
12. Rather than close open files or drivers, Windows 98 just shuts down!
13. USB support--Microsoft innovation working for you!
14. Integrated digital videodisk player and television reciever!

    What will the geniuses at Microsoft useability labs come up with next? Here's a sneak peek at Windows 2000!

1. Instead of displaying error messages, the system just reboots whenever anything goes wrong to save time!
2. The system can automatically reboot over and over until a problem corrects itself!
3. Mirroring technology allows your entire hard drive to be filled with redundant copies of the Registry, which are deleted on the fly whenever you need more disk space!
4. No more clicking at all! Just wave the mouse over a list of common actions!
5. 20 more keys added to all keyboards, reducing the spacebar to a thin vertical line!
6. Microsoft Office becomes an ActiveX control and can be embedded in other applications!
7. The System Power Checker makes sure the computer's power is on!
8. Unneccessary application splash screens removed to speed up loading time!

    I could go on.

    Check out the amazing Transformer Evolution Debate Page, in which I take Adam's assertion that Transformers reproduce sexually and bonk it on the head repeatedly.

Thu Apr 30 1998 12:00: I drew a silly comic today, entitled Atlas Shilled. I may scan it eventually. I don't know how well it would scan.

Spam I recieved today:

Did you know that any other company or individual can register the .ORG or .NET equivalent of your domain name, such as crummy.org or crummy.net?

    What is the world coming to? I remember when those who registered .com domains held dominion over the corresponding .orgs and .nets with an iron fist.

    I put a quote from Adam in the quotes file. Today he said "If I were to define my week recursively, I would have to perform O(N) acts of violence." It doesn't really make sense, but it was funny. Recursion and induction have become integral parts of our conversation in the same way that Internet Explorer has not become an integral part of Windows 95. Today I was telling a fish story and I said something to the effect of "I catch fish by induction. I first catch a little tiny fish; I then demonstrate that I can use a smaller fish as bait to catch a slightly larger fish. By this method I have been able to catch fish of arbitrary size." I cleaned it up a lot for writing it down to make it sound snappier, but you get the idea.

    Midterms were pretty easy.

Later: In Atlas Shilled, Charles Atlas mentions that his fitness program works through MUSCLE-TONE TECHNOLOGY^TM. I went to the Charles Atlas web site (guess the URL) just now and it turns out that the real Charles Atlas program works through THE DYNAMIC-TENSION METHOD(R). I must have heard that phrase before because those two phrases are a little too much alike to be just coincidence.

    I know what it is. In The Rocky Horror Picture Show, in the song I Can Make You A Man (which I referenced in the comic as well), Tim Curry saucily delivers the lyric "I don't want no dissension/just dynamic tension". That's where I heard it. I just used the word "in" three times in a single sentence. And two times in that sentence.

    As long as I'm riding the Charles Atlas train, I always thought the Charles Atlas schtick was that of the "98-pound weakling". The RHPS script backs me up on this. Yet the Charles Atlas web site makes mention of the "97-pound weakling". What's going on? Did they change their schtick? Or did the reference weakling merely lose a pound?