I received the following email at 4:00 in the afternoon today, the 7th of March:
We at Ubuntu Forums would like to wish you a happy birthday today!
Well, at least they’re more accurate than my mother. The Ubuntu Forums are only off by about eight hours, while Mom called three entire days early. Still, I appreciate the sentiment, automated as it may be…
I just upgraded this site to WordPress 2.1.1. I’d be happier about this if a) I’d had much of a choice in the matter, and b) the upgrade hadn’t broken the most important set of sidebar widgets I use. That’ll teach me to use seldom-updated German code, eh? At least I’m now protected from the known vulnerabilities in the core software. Yay.
Links and buttons and a few other things are broken, and will continue to be broken until I can spend some quality time making things work again. I imagine I’ll have to do the fixes the hard way… dammit.
If you’re anything like me, which in this case means “a geeky weirdo with a fascination not only for the physical sciences but also anything which involves what Marvin the Martian once called an Earth-shattering kaboom,” a description which probably applies any number of Mythbusters fans, you might want to read up on how to destroy the Earth.
Here’s a sample quote to whet your appetite.
The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you’ve had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.
I believe I’ve found my new favorite bedtime reading…
Well, everyone else is jumping off the cliff doing one of these so I might as well join in. Mind you I will probably just leave the silly thing in this entry so eventually it’ll scroll right off the main page…
I have some non-meme content in the works, but I’m not promising a delivery time. Thank you for your patience while I get my life back in order.
Define funny:
I leave work at 5pm and step onto the snowy streets of Hillsboro, Oregon with my little iRiver portable music player going and a jaunty spring in my step, and the second song I hear is Dada’s “Spinning My Wheels.”
See, it’s funny because I don’t have any wheels, and because I watched a lot of wheels spinning in futility on the roadways and in the parking lots.
(The first song? New Order’s “Guilt Is A Useless Emotion.” Make of this what you will.)
And then there’s the advertisement I heard a couple of times on Friday:
“Feel like curling up on the couch and watching a movie tonight? Go buy The Illusionist, coming out Tuesday on DVD.” Wait, what? Do they assume everyone’s got a blue, dimensionally transcendental police box stashed away so they can hop a few days into the future to make a shiny-disk purchase?
Crazy, I tell you.
Maybe I’ve simply seen “Hamlet” too many times, but while enjoying lunch at the Pizza Schmizza near the office this afternoon I looked up at the TV screen and saw a news crawl about the poisoned spy and the first thought that flashed through my mind went something like this:
“Polonium? What, is that the chemical element that gives trite advice, entices lesser elements to spy on its isotopes, and ends the last of its half-lives in a misadventure while eavesdropping on the Danish royal family?”
(For the record: No, Polonium was so named by M. Curie as a political statement. Those wacky scientists!)
