News You Can Bruise for 1999 April

Again, I had nothing to do with it.

I have new socks, a new VCR, and a new tape deck. And my mother has a new Zip drive and a new scanner. Hooray for consumer goods and services!

This is real weird. I have a little birthmark or mole or something on the side of my head, just by my ear. I've never noticed it before. My sideburns were there but last weekend I got a haircut and got them shaved off. Weird.

My schedule seems to be settling down. I have a contigency plan for every possible... contingency. The best contingency gives me three-day weekends... every single week! Now that's innovation! Hm, the only problem is that then I miss the Memorial day holiday.

I haven't said much about the mega project, SLIME, but it is mega and it is a project, and it will benefit society. Scott and I are busy writing and documenting it now, but will explain it eventually.

I read Focault's Pendulum on Friday and Saturday. A bibliography is one of those things that you're too lazy to write in PHP or Perl but which will be a snap in SLIME.

But at any rate, a thing that drives my mother crazy (the book is my mother's (The book is my uncle's, borrowed by my mother), borrowed by me) is that when I borrow a book I take off the jacket so I don't ruin it. Actually any book I take off the jacket while I'm reading it. Because if I read a book of any size that has a jacket on it, I just know that that jacket is going to get torn.

Actually, the thing that actually drives my mother crazy is that I leave the jacket on the floor. I can understand that.

It occurs to me that you might want to know something about Foucalt's Pendulum the book. It's pretty good. In the same vein as Illuminatus, but less off-the-wall 60s and more cereberal.

Scott has been unaccountably having fun, so I had to publish some segv articles myself this morning. So, you have proofread articles. I am pleased to learn that Scott has also unaccountably written 90% of the SLIME authentication code, with a nice badge system which I don't fully understand just yet, at least as it relates to my idea.

DAILY POKEY!!!

Leonard's [my uncle's] computer now has Debian on it. I don't know why I was afraid of an install-over-dial-up. Maybe it was just making all those floppies for the base system.

Also, the tiny 486 laptop now has Minix on it.

I like circa-1994 writings about the Internet.

The sickening click sound made by Microsoft Internet Explorer is the same sickening click sound made when you push in at the part of your eye closest to your nose.

I updated my LWE travelogue, which is too long to link to. (Maybe I shouldn't have given it such a long name). Now has deconstructions of Mae Ling Mak, RMS, and myself in relation to those two.

MST3K has changed. The MST3K people have changed. Read this convention transcript with Mike and Kevin. If you can. The schtick has turned from light-hearted self-depreciation to real, true, bitter hatred of self and others. Judging from the transcript, anyway.

I had a dream involving my father last night. It started out okay but then it became really disturbing.

The weather here has been very interesting, as weather goes. Last Thursday we had spring. It was incredible weather. Now we are into summer and it's just hot.

I'm really itching to finish the groundwork of SLIME, but Scott is very hard to get a hold of. I have some sites lined up to do the beta test, and will eventually implement Crummy itself entirely in SLIME (it will be implemented on linux.ucla.edu once linux.ucla.edu exists).

Hm, Pokey the Penguin seems to be back on the air.

I saw a movie poster for a movie starring Jeff "Lebowski" Bridges today. The tagline: "Your paranoia is real". At the risk of nitpicking, might I suggest "Your paranoia is justified" instead?

Hey people and CEOs, get a clue! When you buy Red Hat Linux, you are not buying a license! You are not paying for the privilege of using the software! You are paying for a CD, a manual, and a box! You are buying physical objects, like bread, or cake mix! There is nothing wrong with charging money for physical objects!

$50 is a ridiculous price to pay for a CD, a manual, and a box, but if people are willing to pay, no one's stopping them.

I finally fixed the links in the "me in the lounge" page, which someone sent me a bug report about back when dinosaurs ruled the earth. That whole section needs an overhaul but that won't happen until I SLIME this [porcelain] puppy.

There is a misspelling in Wednesday's Zippy. A MISSPELLING!

I made some fixes to the browser greetings program. In particular, bots are properly logged now. The bot log (not Notlob) is publically avaliable, even though right now it only has the test entry.

Also I realized that the stats on the character for the Frank Zappa Nethack tribute are a little out of whack. Oh well.

Argh! I've been wasting my time doing my AI homework with scheme-elk when I should have been using guile! Well, no more. Finally I get stack traces.

A year ago today, I dreamed about buying the Games issue for April. I know this because I am going through the huge masses of paper that I have, typing in the stuff that is the reason I saved the paper in the first place, and then putting it in the recycling.

My question is: if I want to buy a domain name, how much will it cost me? This vital piece of information has never been given to me. Perhaps prices have not been set yet.

OK, it seems that SCO CEO Doug Michels is intentionally being a bonehead about Linux because he's tried everything else to stop Linux from taking away SCO's market share and nothing has worked.

Frankly, I'm not impressed.

witten had the unmitigated audacity to bring up the s/y/k/ joke. I attempted to mock him by showing him how far ahead of him I was, and the link didn't work! Curses! Well, that'll never happen again! AH HA HA HA HA! Because I fixed the link.

I had a good conversation with witten about moderation schemes, though, so that made up for it.

The best headline I've ever seen: Torvalds: Linux is fun

I know why that's the best headline I've ever seen. Because it's just like the "Playtime is Fun" headline cranked out by Rod Flanders in episode 3F01 of the Simpsons. I had to look up that number, but I knew which one it was.