From here:

A scorpion wanted to cross a river, but could not swim. So he asked a frog to ferry him across on his back. “Certainly not,” said the frog, “If I take you on my back, you’ll sting me.”

“No I won’t,” said the scorpion, “because if I do, we’ll both drown.”

The frog saw the logic in this, so he let the scorpion hop on, and struck out across the water. Half way across, he felt a terrible pain. The scorpion had stung him. As the two of them sank below the ripples, the frog asked the scorpion: “Why on earth did you do that?”
Replied the drowning scorpion, “Because this is the Middle East.”

Also: An interesting article examining the prospect of any renewed war on Iraq.

Met up with roastporkbun and tromped around parts of Arlington and DC. Ballston to McPherson metro, and then from there, Dupont Circle, to the Mall. Looked at (the remnants of) today’s portion of the Silk Road exhibit. Seems it was mostly closed up for the day, with the (convenient) exception of the food stands.

Had a pretty good sandwich at xando today. It lasted me the whole day, pretty much.

(-1, Off-topic): Here’s a simple picture I took last night with the camera. It’s suitable for a desktop background, especially if you have transparent windows. Click the sample for a larger version.

This is a QA test of Livelizard version 1.6. (Assuredly, it’s Quality stuff)

Also, I am (perhaps) finally stepping out of the stone ages, and am using a graphical mail reader. Mozilla is rockin’ more and more, every day.

Posted with Livelizard

…there are none!

We got to the cricket field for kickball, and it was starting to rain… I dunno what happened. The league coordinator was there, told us, “you all would be safer in your cars” and then she — and most of the rest of the people, including the team we were supposed to play, drove off!

Shortly thereafter, the sun came out, fragments of different teams showed up, and we had a good time, with a scrimmage game created. What fun. And most of you were sitting at home on your arses!

Or something.

Stupid tripwire, arbitrary line in the sand

Come out today to the Cricket fields at Lake Fairfax to cheer on the Crazy Kids against the division leading, ape of a team, the Monkey Balls. We’re half a game out (We’re 3-1-0, they’re 3-0-1); Our only loss was a forfeit and they tied a team last week that we’d previously destroyed.

I was 0-2 last week, experimenting with some new kicking styles. Not this week, it’s tried and true, down and dirty Adult League Kickball time.

Our game is at 6.30 (although, based on past experience, it probably won’t get started till 7). Show up and support the Crazy Kids!

“The markets are not a math quiz anymore … in bear markets emotion dominates so we can’t be as precise as we were during the bull market for turning point projections,” notes Thomas R. Peterson, chief market strategist for Bulls Eye Research.

–CBS MarketWatch

And markets aren’t emotional during bull sessions? What were all these predictions of AMZN hitting share prices in the thousands of dollars, amongst other asanine comments?

You’re a silly, silly man, Mr. Peterson.

“Despite decades of social change, the general perception remains that technical workers, scientists, and engineers are unusually intelligent white men who are socially inept, absent-minded nerds.”

–From “Land of Plenty” (July 2000)
(Summary of the Report of the Congressional Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering and Technology Development)

Well, I’m glad they cleared that up.

Ran across a website today that had the following note across the bottom. Name changed to protect the inane.

xxxxxxxxx.com is best viewed with Internet Explorer 5.X and 1154 x 864

If there was any hope in the first place, it’s all gone. There’s no way I’ll ever get broadband now.

In retrospect, I guess this pissed-off letter I recently sent to Verizon now looks a bit foolish

I didn’t post it here because I was too lazy to make special “friends” groups, and thus couldn’t post it in any way shape or form, without giving away the secret…

Friday morning, I left from Reagan National Airport to Toronto. Why’d I head up there? Because it was chinchin‘s birthday today (Sunday), and I wanted to give her the best birthday gift and weekend ever.

In any case, I arrived in Toronto pretty darn early — I got to the airport very much ahead of schedule, and thus got to leave two flights early. Arrived, navigated my way west-to-east across the city on an amalgam of transportation modes: bus, train, foot, to my hotel room.

From there, I got my stuff ready — but here it was, around 1.30, and she wouldn’t be off work till much later! So I hoofed it around the city… it’s amazing how clear all the sites were in my memory, and how easy it was to find my way from my hotel on Ryerson and Queen, to the intersection of College and Yonge, based solely on visual cues that correlated with mental notes.

Roamed around. Stopped into a cigar shop, a few drug stores, and into a Pizza Pizza and had… a stuffed burger (ha ha, fooled you!).

Had a few coffees throughout the day, each time correlating with different Second Cup stops, and each involving a phone call with her, taling about the boring “meetings” etc., which were my excuse as to why I wasn’t online on a work day ;).

Rain poured down Friday afternoon, so I dodged heavy pockets of rain, using carefully timed hops across the streets when traffic lights permitted. Made it to her apt., the same apt. where her cousin lives. The same apt. where they were going to get together for a “girls’ night out”. However, she was the only one in the family that didn’t know I was arriving.

Needless to say, the rest of the weekend was fun. Saturday involved a trip with the family out to a sichuan hot pot restaurant, which, after the beijing trip, is by far one of my favourite Chinese dishes these days. Headed back to DC today, after dealing with some intense security checkpoints in Toronto.

It was such a good time, so much fun, and so good to see her so happy.

And I’m happy too

Seriously, how hard is it for people to read bugs entered into the database? I make specific effort to give plenty of detail; I do so as to not get the dreaded “please clarify” message, and because I, too, dislike ambiguity.

But why do I waste my time doing that, when they’re just going to glance over a bug, perhaps see a reference that looks fleetingly like another bug — like the term “modal alert” — and then hastily mark it as a duplicate? The two are nothing alike.

I dunno, I guess what annoys me most is that the time I’ve wasted looking for the duplicate is time that I could have been using much more constructively.

I never much knew about it before, but I love Farmers Market season.

[Click for larger, more tasty images]

Five bucks for three pints.

Simple pleasures, I tell you.

If you’re using Mozilla, you can download my new theme, Ribbit. It’s basically a variation on the Orbit theme, but the colours are a little different.

Should work in Mozilla 1.0. May not work in NS, I don’t know. It is untested.

I think that this ad and story combination on Yahoo is a bit much, don’t you?

Yes, I realize it was a coincidence… but firms heavily dependent on ad revenue generally make great efforts to avoid such situations.

Last night was quite a party. Went to Ned Divine’s for writegeekgirl‘s 30th birthday bash. Quite fun. Had a few Guinnesses straight up, and an Irish Carbomb. I’d never had a Carbomb before, and it was yum. I’ve never been able to chug regular swill beer, but strangely enough (at least for some people), I can chug Guinness pretty well — and even better when it’s got a little sweetener (Irish Creme) in it.

The band who played the bar that night, Hot Buttered Elvis, was surprisingly fun… we skeptics were (what else) a bit cynical at first, but they were good. Did a lot of covers, and showed quite a range, even though they hit a few that I didn’t particularly like. Metallica, 311, Creed, Beatles, Soft Cell — and sounded a lot like the appropriate band. Played a few others too, in a hepped-up beat… like a hard rock version of “Candle in the Wind”, which was amusiing. In any case, a lot of us, particularly CM and I, were rockin’ out, singin’ and dancin’ the whole night. CM and I actually unabashedly did the air guitar thing much of the time.

In any case, a happy birthday to writergeekgirl, and a shout-out to lazygarden and anyone else who was there that might be reading this. What a night! So what, if today I have a little bit of a scratchy voice and smell a bit like cigar and cigarette smoke…it was a good time. Seeing as I’m not hungover, though, and it’s a nice day, I should spend sometime outdoors.

This submission has, thus far, gotten me the most votes I’ve ever received in a Fark photoshop contest. Even that number is, as of last check, a mere 8 votes.

<nick> well, feline leukemia comes to mind
<chaley> ah
<nick> very contagious, and common
<Unfurl> http://www.tica.org/deseases.htm
<Unfurl> [sic]
<nick> you might want to limit the amount that new kitty and S. Marie touch
until the blood work comes back
<nick> which, if I remember Speedy’s attitude toward i386-unknown-kitties,
shouldn’t be much of a problem
<Unfurl> here’s a better one:

<Unfurl> http://www.petservice.com/libraries/rl_feline.html
<nick> feline-unknown-kitty-gnu
<nick> bbl
<Unfurl> hah
<chaley> nick: no, they’re already friendly
<chaley> there is bumlicking
<Unfurl> yikes
<Unfurl> hopefully kitten doesnt have worms or anything…

<corey> no one wants an iCat

No, I’m not speaking tomes to you, I’m mumbling fragments to myself. That’s what a journal is about, no?

One of those kinda moods. You know, when you’re all about the Matthew 11:29, but you’re feeling more like Numbers 11:14.

Talked with the girlfriend for a long time on the phone tonight. Pretty in-depth discussion that kinda turned into an examination as to why I tend to look so negatively on American society. Yeah, I guess I do. However, I cannot help but think that, along with all the other aforementioned “evaporating culture” voodoo, the zeal for money has so much to do with it. Such a generic excuse, it seems. An easy scapegoat. Yeah. I feel like I have to find the root though. You can’t kill a weed merely by chopping off its leaves.

Now, I’m pro-capitalism. I’m all up for investing, as I want to live a comfortable life. However, I can’t help but have a concience. Safeguards need to be in place. Capitalism is, singlehandedly, the largest force in creating wealth, the world over. However, it has also proven its ability to “draw a line in the sand”.

It just seems that people love their money so much that it’s all they care about, or that they love their “illusion” of money; That is, they overextend themselves on seemingly cheap credit, and spend their whole lives trying to play catch-up with their own spending habit.

People do this of their own volition. That’s nothing I can control, nor anything I want to control. Nonetheless, it’s this constant little imp biting them all the time. People get stressed. This stress has an adverse affect on their life — but also on the people around them. The guy leaves a heavy day at work, gets stuck in traffic. Has to go to the grocery store on the way home, and again, has to wait in line at checkout. Already short-tempered, he accidentally goes off on the cashier. The cashier, having heard this several times today, already, goes home completely ticked off. She ends up taking it out on her kids, who she beats several times a week, because she has no more strength or will to do the right thing.– despite feeling guilty about it, each time afterwards.

The stress we bring into our daily lives is directed, with stealthy accuracy, at those around us. People worry about EMFs. Or UV waves. Or the negligible radiation that might be emitted from a “dirty bomb”. I think what people really need to worry about is those stress waves. try as you might, I don’t think there’s any sorta emotional lead shield that can block all of them.

I’m not trying to write a happy-go-lucky text here. I’m just trying to root out the cause of our ills.

So we end up perpetuating this stressful lifestyle. What can we do about it?

During tonight’s conversation, my girlfriend said I worry too much about these things. Maybe she’s right, to a degree — maybe my worry comes out, expressed in negative vibes. However, is it really possible to worry “too much”? “You think about too many things,” she says, “You can’t help everyone.”

But can I? Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do? If people are unhappy, am I not supposed to try and figure out what I can do to help the society as a whole? Am I not supposed to take up the burden? How is that burden defined? How can I possibly take up one tiny microcosm fragment and leave everything else aside? Isn’t that neglect? If I am truly, seriously concerned with the state of things, how can I just leave it all alone?

At one point in the movie Scent of A Woman, Slade (Al Pacino) yowls, “I’m in the dark here!” This utterance, being of course literal, was also meant figuratively. I think a lot of people are in the dark. Not necessarily in a religious sense, but culturally and socially. We’re social animals, yet we’re developing pack — or worse, predatorial — mentalities.

Sometimes I feel like it’s just too intense. Like I need a less active place to start. As if I could come back later, as a galvanized veteran in the war on societal ill, and do my best Mighty Mouse impersonation. Whatever the case — right now, sometimes it just seems all so overwhelming that I think it comes out as negative energy. Rather than be able to harness any ideas for good, I spout epithets, cynicisms and just plain bad karma. It’s not that I want to be negative. I just feel, I guess, like that’s the easiest way I can express my opinion and frustration — even if I do so, knowing full well that it’s not exactly the best way to drum up the support of the intended audience.

I’ll look more at this later. It’s bedtime now.