General

I really like the idea of a vaccine for cocaine. Essentially, if you’re an addict, you can take a shot of the vaccine, and from then on cocaine will have no effect on you, as your body’s immune system will treat the drug as if it were a foreign invader.

On the other hand, I don’t think this will fix this country’s “drug problem” problem.

I personally view dependency on drugs for recreation as a critical weakness: in your compulsively-ordered, over-controlled life, the only fun or adventure you can fit into your plastic-wrapped day comes in the form of a gel-wrapped pill, or a glass bottle, or a stub of paper.

My Nerd Sign: DeepRock, the Water Cooler.

My dad met these guys today in Arab, Alabama: Paraglide America. They are flying coast-to-coast in powered paragliders, in pursuit of a world record. Dad says he spent a good part of the morning helping them with their wings and equipment.

Top 200: The Rise of Corporate Global Power.

Is the rise of super-powerful corporations really such a bad thing? The whole point of business is profit. Profit is the result of successful planning, and the best use of resources. Governments, and government-funded entities, cannot by their own existence be profitable, or exist without waste.

Much to my delight (and to the dispair of my friends), I have discovered a band possibly more irritating than Cibo Matto:

Coin.

The best way to describe Coin’s music is to imagine locking yourself inside a videogame arcade for a whole Saturday, with all the machines on “Free-Play”, while a horde of Ritalin-doped Cub Scouts wage life-or-death Joust tournaments.

This month’s winner of the Link-O-Rama, with 136 clickthroughs, is Networkgeek.org.

Using his mad leet skills to develop high-tech link-clicking cgi scripts, Daniel overtook all others and won the grand prize: this used bottlecap from my desk! Congratulations, Daniel, and be proud!

I’ve officially had the stupidest customer of the year, today.

This customer has had a ticket open with us for over 2 weeks. We kept seeing alarms coming from his smartjack — no signal from his equipment, etc. We kept testing it, and continually saw the same alarms, so we kept sending to him to verify his equipment. Each time, he would send it back to us, saying his equipment was running fine. This went on and on.

Hey kids! Turn that clunky old Macintosh into a shiny new aquarium! Macs make fish happy!

The shoals area, where many of us were imprisoned is on a retirement community campaign. This is an example of the kind of thing going on. we dug up a graphic from the proposed phase 3 of the Propaganada campaign. Full rant on networkgeek.org

Have a spare PC/XT compatible computer and no software to run on it?

Buy a vintage copy of [Windows 1.0][1].

[1]: PC/XT compatible computer