News You Can Bruise for 1999 June 18

Fri Jun 18 1999 08:24: Gogol is approaching 100 days uptime. That 100 days includes a major system upgrade including a libc6 upgrade. Yes, here in UNIX land, you can upgrade your system libraries without rebooting. Join us... join us...

The rollover will occur tomorrow at 1600, I believe.

Fri Jun 18 1999 08:36: Oh, yesterday I became the first person to compare drugs to Microsoft Word, rather than comparing Microsoft Word to drugs.

Fri Jun 18 1999 17:33: Woohoo! I am done with finals! Done with finals am I! It's all done with finals!

I predict straight As! No, not really. But I have a better chance of straight As this quarter than any other quarter so far.

Now, I have a week until summer school starts.

Fri Jun 18 1999 20:16: I have a whole bunch of things to complain about, and they all involve movie billboards. Here we go.

First off, the South Park billboard has a Canadian flag on it, but the red parts of the Canadian flag are invisible because the background is red. The person who designed the billboard was looking at it real close up on their PowerMac and didn't think about how it would look as a billboard.

Secondly, the Austin Powers bus billboard says the following:

BIGGER, BETTER FUNNIER
   THAN STAR WARS

The Pokeyfied parts are crossed out in red (thanks Jake for showing me the way to the S tag). Thus, we are supposed to believe that the billboard originally said

BIGGER, BETTER
   THAN STAR WARS

and that someone then crossed out BIGGER and BETTER individually and wrote FUNNIER just where there coincidentally happened to be some space by Austin Powers' feet. They tried to make it look good by indenting the second line, but it doesn't work that way. It doesn't work, period.

Thirdly, the Big Daddy billboard, in which Adam Sandler and the kid who plays his adopted son are supposed to be standing and urinating against the billboard. Fine. But they're just standing there in the male urination position, there's no actual urine happening. It looks like they're too emberassed to pee on a billboard with all of Los Angeles watching them, which is the wrong impression to give if you are advertising an Adam Sandler movie. I mean, I doubt I could do it, but I'm not the wackily obscene Adam Sandler. If the city officials are not going to let you put an actual urination photo on the billboard, you shouldn't go for the urine pose. It's not going to work.

Fri Jun 18 1999 20:54: I updated my music site. All my released songs have lyrics and (if applicable) chords or tabs, except for Techno Schmeckno wit DJ Generik, which I still have to tab. Not that it's hard to tab or anything; that's the whole point.

I hadn't done anything with Techno Schmeckno wit DJ Generik for a long time, and so I was unprepared when I read its silly title this morning. I laughed and laughed and laughed. I laugh really hard at really trivial things. Other people's trivial things as well as my own. There was something Josh said this morning that was really trivial and made me laugh and laugh and laugh. Actually that reminds me of the "this laser has committed an invalid operation and will be terminated" joke which I made at LinuxWorld Expo and which cracked up Scott and Garrett despite being really trivial. So I guess I do it as well.

Musically, I'm putting off Ow, My Prostate! 24,996 Years of Porcelain Puppy Oppression until I am able to record onto the computer (I have a beta version on tape which is in Jake's hands and which he is supposed to be MP3ing). I am writing the songs and librettos for the two follow-up albums, Porcelain Puppy vs. Demon Dog, which is a wacky musical comedy tour de force, and the sequel to that, Revenge of Porcelain Puppy, where it gets really mean and actually somewhat gross in parts. But gross in a refined, artsy way, not in a slasher movie way. I hope. Anyway, those two will also be recorded once I get recording on computer working. Hopefully this will happen during the summer. But we've heard that before.

Fri Jun 18 1999 21:00: You can now thrill to Techno Schmeckno wit DJ Generic, as I have put up the tab.