General

Check out Snow Saver, a cute little OpenGL screensaver for OSX.

When Robert was in tech-support, every day, to amuse himself, he’d try to come up with a Star Wars term to mix into the tech jargon he told to customers. The trick was to say the term without the customer noticing. “Hmm, the THX-1138 could be failing.”

He eventually decided that “Darth Vader” would be the highest-scoring term used in a tech-support conversation. “This circuit is really messed up … looks like Darth Vader got ahold of it.”

After watching Solaris last night, I can state with confidence that, in The Future, people will be using that film as a screensaver.

I’ve stood in DMV lines that were more interesting.

Earlier tonight, I mis-heard a commercial for Acura. I thought it said ‘Viagra’.

It sounded fine. “Viagra — Experience the Performance.”

Your “gut feeling” might be right. We all have two brains, one in our heads, and one in our guts.

“The enteric nervous system is an independent nervous system embedded in the wall of the gut and is also referred to as the “little brain of the gut”. With 100 million neuronal cell bodies the gut brain containes more nerves than the spinal cord. It is in its true sense an autonomous nervous system which has the capability to control gut functions independent of inputs from the central nervous system. The gut is therefore the only organ which exhibits all vital motor functions and reflexes even when isolated. The capability for autonomous control is due to the fact that the enteric nervous system contains its own set of sensory neurones, interneurones and motorneurones and is functionally and structurally very similar to the brain. In recent years the clinical relevance of the pathophysiology of the enteric nervous system has been recognized and together with continous progress in basic research a new discipline called “Neurogastroenterology” has emerged.”

To Nyx, regarding a West Wing recap she was trying to get me to read at 4 AM:

“For me, attempting to read a West Wing recap is like trying to eat sushi at an authentic sushi bar. There’s a ton of pretext and hidden innuendo, and a whole language behind everything, but I just wanted a California roll and I can’t figure out how to get the chef’s attention. Oh, and they keep putting lemon wedges in my water.”

Quonsar, via IM:

“I mean, face it – cellphone companies are selling GI Joe walkie-talkies with a ludicrous backend retransmission system. They all can’t help but suck. They had peppered the face of the planet with poles before some wise guy said “Hey, we could BURY this ugly shit”.

“Then radio was invented. Now they are taking the TV off the air and putting it on wires and the phones are coming off the wires and going on the air.

Because certain cock-holsters on the Internet seem to think that my Referrer Logs are a great place to place fake referrals to porn sites, I’ve had to research ways to stomp on their itty spammer pee-pees.

Once you’ve found the Referrer-Spammer’s IP address [check your http access logs], it is trivial to add a deny statement to your .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 404 "Does not exist."

deny from ---.---.---.---

If you only specify a portion of numbers, you will block a whole range.

Woohoo! It’s time for “Fun With Numerology“!

Hmm… my full name plus my birth date yields “<a href=http://www.hwa.org/Tarot/course/maj22.htm">The Fool“.

How apt.

After about a week, I’ve uninstalled iPulse. I don’t see the point in using a CPU load monitor that uses 30% of the CPU load to report that it’s using 30% of the CPU load.

And Ye Gods! What nagware! For a $10 program, iPulse comes with a suite of “buy-me” irritations that rival security measures used by large office suites, including “register me” panels that pop up once an hour, hopping Dock icons, and the worst: a spoken “register me” alert. I’d used the program for less than four days when, in the middle of the night, I heard a loud, booming voice, coming from my G4, demanding that I “REGISTER IPULSE!!”. After checking System Preferences several times to ensure I had “Spoken Alerts” turned off, I eventually decided that the application itself was simply being obnoxious.