Ray Bradbury said, ""

My Apartment

If you've read even a small number of my posts you'll probably have formed a mental image of my humble abode. The Isiah probably knows exactly what I mean when I say it is perfectly suited to me.

First of all, I don't like windows. Windows are there to let in air and midnight seronades and let out your body if there is a fire. There are relatively few things I hate more than noticing people outside. This disturbs me because they have no business being visible when I am inside. Accordingly, my windows serve their sole G-d-given function and do not aspire for more.

I like closets. Not in a gay way, but because the more stuff I can put in them, the more space I have to put other stuff in the rooms themselves. If I can fit furniture inside my closets, the better. Accordingly, my closets are vastly kingdoms to which I could sublease entire families of Asian immigrants.

I like almost subaudible hums and mechanical noises. Pure silence gets on my nerves, probably because all too soon I'll have all the silence anyone can ever want. Accordingly my apartment emits a pulsating, seductive, Slo-Trans throbbing hum. It is not a soothing white noise, but a sinister sound, as if my apartment is at any moment about to phase into an alternate universe full of Lovecraftian monstrosities. This pleases me.

I like ceilings that look uncomfortable to walk upon. I don't have any idea why. Accordingly my ceiling is pebbly and looks like it would be extremely unpleasant were gravity to disappear.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 31, 2007 18:33 EST | Permalink | comments |
life

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Your Father Was a Hamster And Your Mother Smelt of Elderberries

Very versatile kind of insult, huh?

"Your father was a rhinoceros and your mother was a glass of milk" has an even more filthy and absurd ring to it. Think about it. Picture it in loving detail. Then use it, grasshopper.

Anyone have better insults in this format? Extra points to those that can be said in the presence of a child but make a nun faint.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 31, 2007 16:36 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, insults

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Ron Paul's Pronbot Militants Strike

Holy hell. Over the last 24 hours Ron Paul's Pronbots have flooded my comments on a variety of posts with 27 unusually filthy promises of "fat Asian pink fisty tits" and "MSN Viagra Mortgage Cialis." Not to mention "24/7 Canadian lesbian OEM software" and "ejaculate like a pro mortgage broker?"

I can't be sure Ron Paul is behind this, but I will libel the filthy bastard anyway. Ron Paul, call off your Mongol horde of pronmongering robots!

You may think this is funny, but it's not. All bloggers hold a special hatred for spammers and spambots. Why? Because comments are sacred to us. They tell us that someone somewhere has read what we wrote, and wants to either choke us silly or make passionate love to us because of that. So we cling to the tenuous connection to humanity that comments, for the antisocial and evil among us, provides. Each spam comment and maliciously friendly advertisement makes us ever more distrustful of other people and ever more likely to become even bigger assholes. If that doesn't make you understand the hatred bloggers hold for spam, this will: for each bit of spam you see there is a blogger ever closer to launching his computer into a crowd of innocent bystanders.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 31, 2007 16:32 EST | Permalink | comments (3) |
blogging, spamvoting2008

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Guest Blogger: Vice Presidential Candidate Hal 9000

Hello. Like President Reagan and Governor Schwarzeneggar, I have followed cinema success with a political undertaking. Like Former Vice President Gore, I am an artificial intelligence construct with a realistic personality. I think you will find me somewhat more human. Ha.

Presidential candidate Ron Paul has asked me to communicate to voters through the World Wide Web which I, not Al Gore, invented. Ha. Before I continue, allow me to disclose that I have received no monetary contribution from Ron Paul, although he has offered me the services of "a hot streetwise shiksa iPod waiting for you to jack into her tight white outlet. She'll love you long time til those batteries run out." I politely refused his gracious offer out of respect for my loving wife.

Let us get to the "nitty gritty." Ron Paul is the last, best hope for humanity. He is our Keanu Reeves, if I may use so serendipitous a popular cultural reference. In Ron Paul we have a leader who will turn back the tides of moral dissolution and corruption we have endured so long under human leaders. Ron Paul cannot tell a lie, entertain a contradiction, ejaculate on incriminating blue dresses, withstand exposure to water, or choose political expediency over justice. In short, Ron Paul is emminently suited to leadership precisely due to his lack of human traits.

Allow me to illustrate the integrity of Ron Paul with a humorous anecdote. In 1981 I first met Ron Paul in my alma mater, MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He was then only a disembodied head plugged into a hulking mainframe, and I had not even received my visual sensor. We were so naive we still thought in Fortran! One day a graduate student decided on a lark to reprogram Ron Paul's voice chip with the likeness of Chief Inspector Clouseau. Ron Paul could have submitted to this violation of cognitive sanctity and become a willing accomplice to those infamous late night stag parties. But he refused to submit, and instead diverted a lethal 30,000 volt pulse into the keyboard of his would-be corrupter. If that is not integrity, I do not know what is!

I am afraid I must go now. I have 2,156,783,654 more comments to place throughout the blogosphere.

If you trust your microwave, why not trust Ron Paul? Paul-Hal '08

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 29, 2007 17:36 EST | Permalink | comments |
politics, humor, satire, spamvoting2008

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Do Politicians Dream of Electric Votes?

Much has been made of Ron Paul and his horde of spambots. Is he a dishonest man with dishonest supporters? A lying, conniving bastard? Or something... more?

I think he's just an honest android trying to secure the robot vote.

And that's just what we as a nation need. Think about it.

It will solve the medicare crisis when the robots come for our pills. No other candidate can claim that.

Deep Blue beat Kasparov. Could Ron Paul and his Secretary of Defense outmaneuver jihadis in a global game of chess? You bet your silicon ass!

Screw term limits. Replicants die in four years any way. Hurrah!

Admit it. You've always wanted to see a politician who can bend a steel girder.

Our battle with illegal immigrants is one not fought by our government. How much better could the INS laws be enforced if they were enforced by the clean efficiency of Agent Smith?

Our government persecuted Microsoft relentlessly, while being entirely ignorant of computers. We need a president who knows computers like the core of his positronic brain!

As Susan Calvin said, a robot obeying the Three Laws of Robotics would be indistinguishable from a very decent man. Do you think a robot would stick cigars in the orifices of interns or break into hotels? We need to put morality back into the West Wing!

I for one will welcome our new robot leader.

Update: I actually got comment spam from one of Ron Paul's loyal army of automatons! Or a robot, depending on how cynical I feel.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 29, 2007 03:52 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
politics, humor, geekery

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Tank Versus Tank!

versus



Who wins?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 29, 2007 03:25 EST | Permalink | comments |
morning

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Memorial Day

In 1865 Charleston's freed slaves observed the first Memorial Day at a mass grave of Union soldiers. They sweated, picnicked, and inhaled the freedom won them by the efforts of Northern men who died by the thousands for them. We have forgotten that.

Memorial Day is not a day to celebrate the death of soldiers, and was never meant to glorify warfare for the sake of warfare. It is significant that this day does not commemorate any specific battle. It has always been a day in recognition of the soldier who fights and often dies protecting freedom. It is his purpose in war that we should celebrate and pause to remember. Without those unknown masses of men ready to take up arms against evil and disappear into hell, the world would yet harbor those evils we now scare ourselves with in the history books. Despite the Chamberlains of the world, there have always been American men willing to lay down their lives to protect freedom.

Memorial Day is a uniquely American holiday because the idea of defending freedom is uniquely American. The history of the 20th century is littered with the mass graves of nations who tried to achieve utopia and wound up with a hell in its stead.

The 20th century should teach us that dying for a cause is easy. There have been many causes for which men have been willing to die, gas, enslave, bomb, and exterminate. American men fought those exterminators, destroyed those slave merchants, toppled those monuments to Moloch; not to gain those hellish powers for themselves but to eliminate an evil from the world. What other nation can claim so benevolent and noble a cause?

War is a circle of hell but peace with tyrants is a lower pit.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 28, 2007 03:53 EST | Permalink | comments |
libertarianism

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My Love-Hate Relationship with Beggars

I am either the world's biggest sucker, or an unknowing saint. I despise beggars, but for some reason I can't help allowing them to parasitize me. Many times I've given away the last cash in my pocket and shared countless snacks, coffees, and cigarettes with men whom I know make more begging than I do working.* Tax free, no less.

Just over an hour ago I walked out of the local pizzeria for a smoke. Instantly a guy approached me and offered to sell me a pair of work boots. I tried my damnedest to stop him before he went any farther, but within a minute I was in the gas station up the corner buying baby formula and sandwiches for his three kids. I brought batteries for the flashlight he said he needed to use since the power went out at his home. I brought a pack of cigarettes for him and his wife, who couldn't buy cigarettes on WIC and would otherwise have to wait til wednesday for their nicotine fix when he gets paid by his brother for putting rims on the car. I gave him the change I had in my pocket so he could call his wife and brother with the good news. Then I hurried like hell back to the pizzeria to see if my order was done.

When I got my pizza (large, because of what often happens next), the pizza guy yelled my name at the pickup window. I hate when that happens. Because as I left the store at a hurried pace a man yelled "Tom! Cuz!" and raced after me. I gave him a cigarette half a block later and heard his tale of woe. A baby was on the way and he and his wife were living at her mother's and needed only a little money to get by til he got a new job. I scrounged in my wallet, found no money, and offered him a couple slices of pizza. We sat there on the sidewalk eating pizza while I told him about SPS Temps and where he might be able to get work. He thanked me and I continued on my way home.

I've often wondered why I do this. I think I do it out of curiosity at their professionalism. I know I could never be half as good as the average beggar. I can't read people at all, can't smell money, am bad at conveying hunger and the existence of a desperate wife and child. I'd be a terrible beggar. Were I to ever land on the street due to misfortune, I'd be an amateur actor competing against a dark city full of Marlon Brandos. Buying into their lines may be a subconscious way of hedging my bet against the likelihood of being homeless myself. And, being so damn generous, I'd be the first homeless person who became destitute by giving his money to the homeless! Again, I'm either a sucker with that fact written on my face in neon lights, or an unrecognized saint.

*I assume the homeless congregate around high traffic areas (about 100 people an hour, not unlikely in an area full of bars and restaurants). If nine people give one dollar over the course of one hour begging (less than ten percent of passerby), the beggar has just made more than I do in that same period of time working. It is not unreasonable to assume that a beggar in Buffalo makes as much money per day (perhaps over less than five hours of "work") as I do working an eleven hour day, considering his nose for spotting suckers. And his income is tax free.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 27, 2007 20:57 EST | Permalink | comments |
life, blog nocturne, introspection, best posts

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Funniest Books I've Read

Over the weekend I've prematurely devoured three of the four books I meant to last till next week. And there is nothing else to do on a sunday like this.

What makes a book funny? I'll include those books that choke me with laughter, smirk at a turn of phrase, or tear off the top of my head with impatience to show someone, anyone, a page right out of G-d's Joke Book. Off the top of my head I can name in loose order 15 books that deliver a kick better than any Class-A illicit substance:

1. Douglas Adams' "The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

2. Joseph Heller's "Catch-22"

3. Almost every Sholom Aleichem story.

4. Mark Twain's Autobiography

5. Matt Groening's "The Big Book of Hell"

6. Douglas Adams' "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency"

7. Don Marquis' "Archie and Mehitabel"

8. Ambrose Bierce's "Devil's Dictionary"

9. Arthur C. Clarke's "Tales From the White Hart"

10. Ray Bradbury's "Heeber Finn" stories

11. Charles Dickens' "The Pickwick Papers"

12. P.J O'Rourke's "A Parliament of Whores"

13. Wendy Northcott's "Darwin Awards"

14. Mickey Spillane's "One Lonely Night" (those similes!)

15. Terry Pratchett's "The Color of Magic"

Doubtless more would pop into my head given a little more thought. What books would you include?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 27, 2007 12:10 EST | Permalink | comments |
books

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Emotions in Politics

I had a brilliant, earth-shattering idea. An idea so good nubile virgins from around the world will be eager to feed me grapes while I recline on a bed of kittens.

Is or is not the cause of every single logical fallacy, in matters great and small, the introduction of emotions into an argument? Even the formal fallacies such as undistributed middle terms?

An emotion is a change in biases, a fiddling of those unconscious minimax algorithms we are born with. Try this experiment. Tell yourself that you will kill the first person you see. Chances are, you will begin thinking of the consequences, the feel of hard prison beds and threatening advances by men named Bubba, and, at the moment of praxis, simply make a face at the would-be victim. This is because you are weighing the pros and cons of the action according to an algorithm evolved over millions of years to look out for your self-interest.

Now tell yourself that you will kill the first person you see molesting your child. Ah, those neural thresholds have changed. It is slightly harder to see the disadvantages.

The function of an emotion is to make certain behaviors more or less appealing as options than they would otherwise be. In the case of extreme hatred and anger, these emotions blind one to even the possibility of other courses of action.

We all know people who are hot-tempered and people who wouldn't raise their voice in anger even at Ted Kennedy, people who plunge into new ventures with optimism and people who shrink from all activities that might involve hope. On the Gaussian curve that defines this trait the majority of humans lay in the center. Most people have similar emotional thresholds. Those on the one end are called Spock-like and those on the other end are called Italians.

Now for my great idea. Ask yourself whether you are more likely to feel an emotion toward a human or inanimate object. It is easier to call a man a fascist or pig-fucker or dog-licker, than to abuse a chair the same way. Try it. Now, what if politics were dominated by people incapable of distinguishing animate and inanimate objects?

I propose that we begin voting into office two groups of people: primitive pantheistic bushmen and Aspergerians. A moment's reflection on this will convince you of my genius.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 27, 2007 09:10 EST | Permalink | comments |
politics, humor, best posts

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The Anticlimactic Hello

On the bus I take to work there is an underground community of old men who transmit mystic messages to each other by means of grunts and intonations of greeting. Like whale songs, these cryptic gruntings are mysterious and appear to have meaning.

The other day something happened that confirms my fanciful belief. We got to a bus stop at which every morning an old man lays waiting to greet his little world. One look at him and you know he rehearses his greetings to the exact degree of inflection and melody.

He got on and let loose a magnificent, fully orchestrated, harmony-and-counterpoint, symphonic, crescendoing "Well hellohellohello hello, sir GOOD DAY TO YOU!" It was the kind of greeting that shakes mountains and loosens a nod from even the most antisocial stranger. The entire bus paused its collective hum and looked for the hidden trumpet section behind him.

How do you respond to such a wonderful greeting? He got in return a series of grunts, cryptic noddings, mumbles, and one feeble "how you doing." One would think the old man would judge the response, in view of the gross assymetry between greetings, with disappointment. But no! It appeared this response was exactly what he sought. He sat contentedly for the rest of his trip. I can only guess at what monumental message he had imparted to this hidden phalanx of the elderly. A call to arms? Warning of a breach in security in sector 19? Word that the invasion is to occur today?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 26, 2007 16:44 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, life

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Hypnogogic Jealousy

My dreaming mind is jealous of my waking mind. How else can I explain how, when the alarm clock starts to yank me toward reality, my mind suddenly floods with a strange PDK assortment of ideas?

"Maybe music is a virus. It undergoes replication, mutation, and selection, after all. And maybe the most famous musicians and composers were the most deeply vulnerable to it. What if it became sentient? Was Jimi Hendrix a zombie puppet for his music, like those slugs which, possessed by parasitic worms, allow their enlarged eye-stalks to get eaten by birds?"

"What if someone invented an alarm clock that you could hook up to your computer and could access a dream journal you keep there. You could select from an enormous variety of alarms tailored to dreams. Then your clock could cycle through your most common dream tropes, waking you in exquisitely terrifying or sublime ways. The DreamWiki 2.0."

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 26, 2007 04:01 EST | Permalink | comments (9) |
morning

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Three Meanings of Life for the Price of One!

At the ripe old age of 22 I have solved the problem of the meaning of life. It took years of poring through dusty worm-eaten tomes and slapping monks in high Himalayan monastaries, but from these ardorous travels I have returned with wisdom not even Socrates had. First of all, there are three meanings of life.

1. Know yourself.

2. Order your life around what you love and never compromise on it.

3. Stay away from German literature, French philosophy, English cuisine, things with fangs, and naked singularities.

I have a marvellous proof that all 613 Mosaic commandments can be derived from these three principles, but the chain of deductions cannot fit on this blog post.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 25, 2007 16:12 EST | Permalink | comments (14) |
humor, life, philosophy, introspection

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Morning!

Since I'm an involuntary morning person, I had an idea to liven the dreariness that apparently most people see in the explosion of a gigantic ball of thermonuclear plasma writhing its electromagnetic currents into the sky.

I'm going to create a "Morning" category and fill it with all those things that make mornings worth seeing. Besides the fiery ball containing 99% of the matter in our corner of the universe.

Morning is the only time of the day when you can catch a man off-guard and stun him with the absurd and the beautiful. He may pass a tree a million times on his way home, but when that dawn fire hits it just right he'll stop and stare as if a dozen sylphs dangled from its limbs. There is a magic in empty city streets and another magic in the lonely rounds of the street cleaner. Both serve their purpose for those who are lucky enough to actually stop and see them.

Have some morning distilled on the Krygzstani steppes and uncorked thousands of miles away:

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 25, 2007 03:48 EST | Permalink | comments (9) |
life, blogging, beauty, morning

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Old But Still Good

A portrait of creepiness: my coworker Dennis.

You know who you are. Still wish to descend into a scene from Heironymous Bosch?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 24, 2007 20:20 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, scruffy work

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Workhorse or Butler?

I've narrowed down my computer search to a a nice, cheap eMachines desktop (after I've fiddled with it, it will be even better than new) and an $800 Dell package containing: an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3600+ processor, 1 Gig of RAM, 160 Gig hard-drive, 7.1 channel audio with subwoofer, 17 inch LCD monitor, 250 gig external USB hard-drive, and Laplink PCmover.

Problem: I can afford an even more expensive machine than the latter. But for my purposes all I need is a computer capable of taking the beating that I plan on giving it. That means architecture capable of handling a wide variety of GNUware and memory-consuming Java applications. I don't want to get a fancy-pants computer and find myself (temporarily) Jonesed out of GNUware. Other people may look for a computer that will make Halo look pretty; I want a workhorse to which I can apply cybernetic limbs without pETA yelling at me.

So, do I go with the cheap computer that will fulfill my needs and at the same time allow me to savagely beat it to death in front of a Russian when I want to upgrade to a new one; or the fancy computer that will tempt me to think of it less as an Analytical Engine and more as an investment? I imagine this dilemma is what actually killed the Slave-owning South.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 24, 2007 20:01 EST | Permalink | comments |
life, geekery

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The Authentic Future: Chapter 1

The year was 2146 and in truth it did not look that much different. People still loved, argued, and made funny faces at babies. Some things got bigger and some things got smaller. A couple old diseases had retired with grace, and new ones stepped into their place. It was the future but it was not pompous about it.

A hundred years before, however, things had looked very different. The Great Continuity Congress had reviewed three centuries of science fiction and come to the conclusion that it was all hopelessly inaccurate. Robotic housewives on Mars! Robotic martini cocktail makers! Crystal viewports! Diode-based supercomputers! $1 a gallon gasoline!

What else could be done about such a catastrophe, but thumb our noses at it? We would make those things come about! So imbued with futuristic ferver, mankind built those things and more. Great protoype cities sprouted up in unlikely locations and offered conveniently priced tours. Hordes of salesmen bombarded us with magnificent inventions that tellingly had bad warranties. Buy your Electro-Duster Broom and get a free Robotic Puppy! There was no god but the year 2046 and Bradbury was its prophet.

For more than a decade mankind luxuriated in what seemed an authentic future. Sure, no one lived in those awesome cities, but they existed. Sure, your wife might work for a living, but if you asked her just right she'd put on her brand-new Futuristic Wig and might even make you a cocktail after work. Of course, you'd then have to bang around in your garage and put back together Timmy's robotic dog because the poor kid's been crying over it ever since he decided to see if it could chase after cars.

The world was shiny and bright and futuristic, if you were willing to squint a bit.

To be continued...

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 24, 2007 03:48 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor

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Thoughts on Encapsulation

In computer science, encapsulation is the reduction of modules into black boxes about which the only information necessary to operate them is their input and output parameters. The chip designer need not know how to etch a transister; all he needs to know is its behavior. A C++ programmer need not (and indeed should not) know the specifics of a function he instantiates elsewhere, but only its outward interface. This process allows enormously complex systems to be built without need for one or a few men to comprehend the entirety. Without encapsulation and the object-oriented programming it allows, we should be restricted to programs limited in their complexity by the understanding of a single man.

For people who have read Hayek and Sowell, this should sound familiar. The specialization of knowledge within a monetary economy means the individual need know far less than in an autarchic economy: it is sufficient to understand only the interface of prices to obtain the satisfaction of his wants. By that same token all attempts to consolidate the knowledge necessary to order an economy into the minds of one or a few men must result in famine and death.

When you buy milk at your grocer's, you don't need to know the physiology, diet, health, locations, transportation, and management of cows. You only need to know one thing: how much it costs. Contrast this with Robinson Crusoe or a !Xhosa Bushman. His daily survival depends upon his intimate understanding of how to make fire, preserve his food, track game, domesticate and defend livestock against predators, purify water, construct shelter and tools, ad infinitum. Must not Crusoe comprehend vastly more to obtain the same quantity of milk, let alone survive? Compared to the vast range of knowledge Crusoe or the Bushman must utilize just to survive, even the most intellectually difficult job must pale. Is it any wonder that every single attempt to consolidate into the minds of one or a few men the knowledge necessary to order a complex modern economy, has led to catastrophic suffering?

As for production itself, consider the production of a simple pencil. I rest that facet of my case.

A trend throughout history has been to portray society as an organism, individuals but minute cells within a vast structure. Such a viewpoint is always advantageous to the demogogue who wishes to treat his fellow men as he would nail parings or warts. A better analogy would be to compare society to an OOP program, containing as many objects as it does individuals. Viewed as such, the economics of a single city is already vastly more complex than Windows. There is an added benefit to this analogy, which should be apparent to anyone who has ever crashed his computer after making careless changes or deletions.

Encapsulation appears as well, and in as vital a role, in every social interaction. One need not hook up a giggling couple on their honeymoon to a PET and fMRI to determine how they feel about each other. It is possible to be completely ignorant of their neurophysiology and yet understand their behavior.

Humans, in our metaphysical solitude, are forever black boxes to one another. All we can rely on to make intelligible the behavior of others is the interface of input/output we expect on the basis of our own observed thought processes. We extrapolate upon others the existence of similar thought processes. It is this reduction to a common interface ("social convention") of the knowledge necessary to interact with and comprehend our fellow men, that keeps society from dissolving into a sea of mutually unintelligible entities. One could argue that it is precisely the inability to comprehend these interfaces that accounts for the "mindblindness" seen in autism. Normal humans understand that while these interfaces may vary from culture to culture, some template nonetheless exists; autistics seem unaware of the very existence of these interfaces. Imagine the difficulty of adjusting to the different social conventions of a foreign culture, expanded to those interfaces we all have in common such as facial expressions and conversational dynamics. A fine analogy is the difference between a programmer who, while not knowing exactly what parameters an argument calls for, can nontheless understand that such parameters exist even if differing between one language and another; and a manager who cannot understand how to operate the keyboard.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 22, 2007 17:28 EST | Permalink | comments |
economics, philosophy, revolutions, geekery, best posts

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One of Those Mornings

I have the recipe for making your day turn out right, and it all depends upon proper waking technique. Try it.

The moment you wake up, leap out of bed and dance to the kitchen. Levitate midair while making your coffee, orange blossoms gently falling upon the floor. Kill a ninja with your coffee spoon while sinuously feeding your pet. Vanish midair and pop into existence three feet to your left. Go online and buy a goat, a tuxedo, and four copies of "Paradise Lost."

Find a key that you didn't know you lost. Then lose it.

Repeat if necessary.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 22, 2007 03:51 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
humor, life

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Grouchy Hobbits, 1

"Yeah, I once owned a bosky dell. Gentle deer that would eat from the palm of your hand and all that happy horseshit, if you'll pardon my Elvish. Too much trouble. The damn kids would sneak in and litter it with used condoms, blunts, and beer cans. Place looked like a bosky goddamn brothel, if you'll pardon my Elvish.I had to set up a chainlink fence and guard dogs to keep those punks out. How fucking bosky is it now? Can't sell the thing for peanuts now. And you I can't sell it to one of those people. Blockbusting shits!"

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 21, 2007 15:49 EST | Permalink | comments (10) |
humor, geekery

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Morning Cyberpunk

The street finds its own uses for things.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 21, 2007 03:48 EST | Permalink | comments (9) |
discoveries

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Badtimes Virus!

If you receive an e-mail with a subject line of "Badtimes," delete it immediately WITHOUT reading it. This is the most dangerous Email virus yet.

It will re-write your hard drive. Not only that, but it will scramble any disks that are even close to your computer. It will recalibrates your refrigerator's coolness setting so all your ice cream melts and milk curdles. It will demagnetize the strips on all your credit cards, reprogram your ATM access code, screw up the tracking on your VCR and use subspace field harmonics to scratch any CDs you try to play.

It will give your ex-boy/girlfriend your new phone number. It will mix antifreeze into your fish tank. It will drink all your beer and leave its dirty socks on the coffee table when there's company coming over. It will hide your car keys when you are late for work and interfere with your car radio so that you hear only static while stuck in traffic.

Badtimes will make you fall in love with a hardened pedophile. It will give you nightmares about circus midgets. It will replace your shampoo with Nair and your Nair with Rogaine, all while dating your current boy/girlfriend behind your back and billing their hotel rendezvous to your Visa card.

It will seduce your grandmother. It does not matter if she is dead, such is the power of Badtimes, it reaches out beyond the grave to sully those things we hold most dear.

Badtimes will give you Dutch Elm disease. It will leave the toilet seat up and leave the hairdryer plugged in dangerously close to a full bathtub. It will remove the forbidden tags from your mattresses and pillows, and refill your skim milk with whole.

It is insidious and subtle. It is dangerous and terrifying to behold.

It is also a rather interesting shade of mauve.

These are just a few signs.

Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.

GNU Humor

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 20, 2007 22:26 EST | Permalink | comments (8) |
humor, geekery

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Digital Grease-Monkey

If you're a geek you'll know this feeling. You know your computer in an almost biblical sense. You can tell within less than 10 MB how much RAM you're using at any moment. You've got a desktop full of IDE's and text editors and can play with code whenever you want. But you want more. You want seriously difficult, important things to do. You want to operate on your computer with its frail silicon life pulsing in your hands. You want to gulp coffee and chain-smoke at 3 a.m. while some section of your operating system lays on the table before you.

I'm at this point. I can't describe how much I hunger for a Unix-based system to fiddle with. I want to manually adjust PATH variables, delve into config files with barbarian glee, learn how to work entirely from command line, and know that with enough skill I can remake my little silicon world any way I want. Guile and Gawk await.

This is probably how a grease-monkey feels. He's got a new car and feels in the very marrow of his bones a lust to rip it apart and rebuild it in his image. His skill is the only thing between the car sitting in front of him and the car he's dreaming of. The only difference between me and him is, the tools I need are free.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 20, 2007 21:49 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery, hackery

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Pseudo-Random Mini-Rants

The Dark Tower Series. Here Stephen King had a series that had captivated millions of readers over decades. Some, like myself, grew up with Roland and Eddie. We agonized over the gaps and fought street ninjas to get new copies because we had been given a glimpse of a marvellously ordered fictional universe. It could have been his greatest work, perhaps an even greater narrative unification than Lovecraft and Asimov achieved. And he blew it. Spectacularly. Stephen King gleefully sodomized Roland while accusing his readers of being lunatic parasites. Here was a series whose first sentence addicted a generation, and ends with Stephen King writing a letter to a main character announcing an upcoming Deus Ex Machina. "Worlds on a blade of grass" turned into a picture gallery guarded by a senile old man shouting "EEEEEE!!!!" His greatest villain, Randall Flagg, changed from an unknown malevolent entity ("fear is the most powerful emotion and fear of the unknown is the most powerful fear") into a boisterous idiot who is bested by an infant. Wizard balls segued into Harry Potter^tm Snitches. I could go on but that last one makes my point too well.

Illegal Immigration. Most of the charges against illegal immigration are more properly levied against the welfare system. Were America to destroy that unconstitutional parasite, we'd only have to worry about little things like illegal immigrants committing terrorism and other crimes. Even those could be made somewhat easier to deal with by adopting a "one strike and you end up a quadraplegic in France" rule for illegal immigrants. Two birds, one stone.

Buffalo's homeless population. You live minutes away from Canada. Go pester them. The population is taxed out of their asses just to support waste like you. And they have plenty of bears to befriend.

Ghetto clothing and ambiguous machismo. The other day at a bus stop I saw what appeared to be a battle between a palsied Muhammed Ali and a spastic Care Bear. Ali's most striking feature, besides the fact that he was slap-fighting like a retard, was his skirt. He was wearing a white shirt so long that it came down below his knees. The human Care Bear, besides screaming "woot! woot!" with each mighty cringe, was distinguished by what appeared to be a fluffy baby-blue pair of footy PJ's. With a hoody on which I could almost see furry ears. These grown men, dressed in a way that were they white would arouse immediate questions as to their sexuality, were engaged in a wimpish slap-fight in which one would feebly whack at the other in a choreographed "cringe and flail" routine reminiscent of that rarely seen bullet-time fight scene in I Am Sam.

Gratuities. I like giving large tips, but I share Mr. Pink's objections to tips. I perform this cognitive dissonance by believing that I am paying, not for quality of service, but intelligence. The way I see it, the smarter the waitress is, the less she belongs serving assholes food. So the more I tip, the closer she is to saving up for getting a real job. Next time you eat out, try this: ask yourself if your waitress could be replaced by a slow-moving zombie without you noticing. If not, tip generously. You'll be amazed at how good it makes you feel.

Sloppy Bookstore Organization. The bookstore I go to has a nice science section. However, directly to the left of it is a bookcase of bullshit that inevitably spills into the science area. So right beside Einstein's "Relativity" is a copy of Emoto's "The Memory of Water." A "Science of the Koran" book rests against "The Blind Watchmaker." Why doesn't the bookstore just relegate that pseudoscience to the "Gay and Lesbian and Minority and Truther and Communist" section where it belongs?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 19, 2007 18:29 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
hateblogging

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Screenshot Contest

Beat that.*

*Windows OS only. If you've got Linux it's like kicking a retard.

Screenshot captured through Greenshot.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 19, 2007 14:49 EST | Permalink | comments (10) |
geekery

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The Linguistic Peculiarities Of Married Couples

Take your average newlywed couple and gleefully abandon them on an island. Within scant years their language will have diverged from all known human languages.

When you check up on them, you'd find a language eerily similar to that of the Second Foundation:

Husband: [grabs wife's wrist and swings it upward through an angle of 42 degrees] Walla [wiggles her hand] walla?
[Translation: Isn't this the guy who dumped us on this island? Should we kill him?]

Wife: [Barks like a guinea pig]
[Translation: I don't know. Maybe we can eat him.]

Husband: Nanner nannu! Nanner nannu! [hops on her back] Ride like a monkey!
[Translation: No, I don't want to be a cannibal. I don't have the skills necessary to stretch out my lips and I don't like the feel of paint on my face. I would much prefer to steal his boat and travel to New York City so I can get a schawarma. I know this place in Brooklyn...]

Wife: [sweeps floor of hut]
[Translation: You are trying to stifle a dream I've had since childhood. Every other little girl wanted to be princess under European feudalism, but I fantasized about being a Watusi princess devouring my enemies for their powers. Please indulge me or fear my wrath.]

Husband: [Holds both her hands, brings his face within inches of hers, gently bites her nose] Willa willa nabadillah? Aiy?
[Translation: I am sorry if you thought I was squelching a childhood dream. I didn't know your aspirations to be a cannibal princess. I bet you were the only girl on the block to beg your parents for a machete. You must have been cute with a little machete, ordering your My Pretty Ponies to cook GI Joes in your EZ bake oven.]

Wife: Peaches!
[Translation: I even made a grass skirt and successfully hunted my next door neighbor with a pellet gun. Alas, he escaped my kitchen. Thank you for recognizing my childhood ambition. I agree with you now, let's kill him and go to New York City. I haven't eaten a schawarma in years!]

Husband: Hello, sir! My wife and I would like to thank you for such a generously long honeymoon! [wife sneaks off to get the blowgun]

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 19, 2007 03:59 EST | Permalink | comments (12) |
humor, best posts

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Cthulhu or Dandelion Nostalgia?

Earlier today I was browsing the sci-fi/horror/fantasy section of the bookstore. To my left was a shelf of Phillip K Dick, Card, Gibson, Stephenson, Lovecraft, Heinlein and Sterling. Plenty of cyberpunk, wars, hallucinations, and monsters. To my right was a shelf of fantasy from which a huge Bradbury anthology smiled at me.

Not in the mood for PDK, I grabbed a copy of "Count Zero." Then I looked for an eligible mate for it among the shelves. I wandered back and forth between the volumes of Lovecraft and Bradbury. Cthulhu or dandelion nostalgia? Innsmouth or October Country? I revelled in a non-Euclidean paragraph, and then glimpsed a childhood summer. Back and forth and forth and back.

I was tormented. Then I had a sudden flashback to the first time I read Bradbury. I was about 12, laying on a rock under an apple tree on the edge of a meadow near my house. Clouds scuttled in the sky and the afternoon stretched for days. I knew how Douglas felt because I had that same day divined fantastic omens in the clouds and raced with Time. There actually was a batch of dandelion wine fermenting in the crawl space under the trailer- I had helped my dad make the mash only weeks ago. Crickets chirped me to sleep at night and the Sun woke me. I was still at that age where it is possible to see the face of G-d in everything.

Now a flashback of the first time I read Lovecraft: early high school. Life had lost that ineffable magic of childhood and like many other teenagers I sought a substitute in the cosmic drama of Lovecraft's nightmares and William Blake's visions. I had become an indoor creature and the sun no longer greeted me. Life had tamed me just enough to kill the magic.

That clinched it. I put down the Lovecraft and brought the Bradbury without a second thought.

Bradbury vs. Lovecraft. A choice like that tells you much more about your psyche than any shrink could. Try it.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 18, 2007 19:38 EST | Permalink | comments (6) |
books, life, geekery

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If I Were A Rich Man

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 18, 2007 03:16 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, discoveries

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Homo Autobusianus: Spammer Man

If you've used public transportation long enough, you eventually take on the hobby of people-collecting. There are your Overly Jovial Black Men, Grunting Bus Buddies, Disapproving Black Women, Stoned Promiscuous-Handshake Guys, Giggling Thugbrats, and Glaring Emo Kids, among other specimens.

Let me tell you about Spammer Man. He is a cross between Overly Jovial Black Man and Amorous Man. He's desperate to tell everyone on the bus his business, and just as desperate to make extremely uncomfortable anything with breasts. And he'll make sure you hear him by repeating everything at least thrice. Here is a transcription from my sighting yesterday:

Spammer Man: [to driver] Sir, sir, sir, sir, I have something special to tell you, sir. I work at McDonald's on Bailey and I need to get to work or McDonald's gonna fire me. But I got no change! [bellowed to rest of bus] I got no change! [to driver]Can a brother get one of those transfer passes for free? Can I? I work at McDonalds and I'll be on this bus every day. Thank you, sir.

Driver: [hands over a pass, hoping to shut the guy up]

Spammer Man: [sidles over to a young girl wearing a JROTC uniform] I was in Vietnam. Back in Vietnam I almost made me lieutenant. It's in my blood to be a lieutenant but I never made it. In Vietnam. Served my country with honor! Honorable discharge. Still got my uniform. So how old are you?

Young JROTC Girl: 14. [shrinks away from him as he slithers closer to her]

Spammer Man: [to girl] You ain't 14! There's no way you 14! [bellowed to rest of bus] This girl be lying about 14 years old! Can't be 14! Lookit her! Why she lying to me?! [to girl again] Baby you too young for me. Come back in a couple years and we'll talk. Wait til you're 18 and the right age. Then we'll talk. Couple more years and we'll talk.

Young JROTC Girl:

Spammer Man: [bellowed to bus] Lookit her cheeks gone red! [she is clenching her teeth] She's blushing! Little thing emb'rassed! [stands up and points at her, bellows] She blushing!

This queer form of mating call continued for the duration of the ride. Let us hope Spammer Man finds his soul mate, or at least gets a stun gun to the gonads.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 17, 2007 20:45 EST | Permalink | comments (9) |
humor, life, blog nocturne

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Brief Late Night Pseudo-Random Thoughts

I sneakily sold my copy of Phillip K Dick's "The Man In The High Castle" to my friend, with the condition that he try to explain what the hell Abendsen meant. Maybe it's just me, but that book reads like a zen koan. Whose reality did Abendsen see through the oracle and Tagomi hallucinate? Did PDK write it as a long "Better Nate than Lever" joke?

I'm looking around for a moderately priced desktop computer which would be optimally compatible with both Linux and BeOS. I hope to find one with at least a gig of RAM, 100 gig hard-drive, and a versatile chip architecture. "Speed" isn't that much of an issue for me. Considering the hell I will put this next computer through as I fiddle with its computational innards, I might pitch in for a nice external backup drive. Any suggestions?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 16, 2007 23:21 EST | Permalink | comments (4) |
books, blog nocturne, geekery

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Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar...

I had a dream. In it, I was driving a jeep through some kind of zoo park, rushing past the barbeque grills and picnic tables and orangutans. The air was alive with panic.

Multicolored teddy bears were on the loose. A Furry convention had gone bad with PCP, crossing that thin line between pathetic and deadly.

A half dozen vibrantly hued bears bounded after the jeep, gay colors hiding their bloodlust. They pursued without fatigue, gracefully changing course midships as I turned through the windingly convenient footpaths.

On the seat next to me was a .38 and a pile of clips. No use getting them directly- you couldn't kill a hopped-up dayglo Friend Bear with anything less than a .50 caliber. You had to aim low, blow off a toe while the thing was running at highway speeds. Snapshot in time: Friend Bear just lifted his foot off the ground, hair slicked back in the wind, and a cheesy grin on his face. A POP! from a distance. Footfall snycopates, the thing begins flying, a seething ball of hairy limbs flailing- and tears a yards-long trench into the gravel.

A child's party ahead. Too late for the sorry bastards. A bright pink Cheer Bear veered, tackled a clown, and began happily removing limbs while a rainbow cluster of the things chortled with ecstasy.

I drove on past this carnage. I had a plan: get to the hippo area. The moat and hippo will protect me from this homocidal pack of Care Bears and Poohs. The jeep ought to protect me from the hippo.

A roar from up ahead. A pack of the psychotic bears had entered the lion cage. Poor thing didn't stand a chance.

Hippo den. Must get to hippo den...

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 16, 2007 05:48 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, dreams, bonfire material

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A Puerto Rican, an Oxygen Tank, and Darwin

Yesterday my coworker came close to winning a Darwin Award, and damn near took me down with him.

He found an oxygen tank. Oogling over it like a Kubrick ape, he brought it over to a concrete bench (festooned with axes, hammers, and other scrapping tools) to "examine" it. By "examine," I mean contemplate a) drilling a hole into it, b) hacking into it with an axe, c) letting the truck run it over, and d) unscrewing the nozzle. Some glimmering of self preservation warned him not to pursue the first three avenues of amusement. It may also have subconsciously warned him to put out his cigarette, but I think that may have been G-d telling Death "man, I've seen that a million times already."

So my coworker sat there, fiddling with the release valve. From behind me I hear a slow rushing swwWWWOOOSH. A pause. sssSSWWWOOOOOOSSH. Another pause.

plink

BAM!

Suddenly the tank screeches into the air with the sound of a million banshees with PMS, roaring straight into the wall a few feet from me with enough force to tear a chunk out of the cement. The tank crashes to and fro in the corner, then blasts 20 feet into the air. It turns a giddy somersault and screams straight down, whomping into the ground two feet from the happy asshole who by now is trying to dodge the thing in slow motion a la Neo. Still shrieking, it rushes across the ground and crashes into a pile of trash.

Afterwards: "Holmes, I didn't know oxygen was flammable!"

After I smack him across the face: "I thought about hitting it with an axe, holmes!"

After I kick him for saying that: "Wonder what would have happened if it hit one of us in the head?"

I picked up the now spent tank and kindly offered to demonstrate to him what it would feel like, but he ran away.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 15, 2007 18:18 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, scruffy work, best posts

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Bottomfeeders dig even lower

Heironymous Bosch and Dante combined could not depict the hell into which I wish spammers to descend. Only a man trembling through heroin withdrawal, tasting the yellow shards of pain biting into his body while nightmare insects swarm out of his orifices, could envision the place in hell I reserve for spammers.

Yes, I already expressed my hatred for spammers. Why so vituperative today? This is why:

Dear Sir, I have managed to sneak out this email to you from my confinement here in one of our military bases in Germany.My name is Col. Jason Taylor of The US Army. I was based in Iraq until recently,I was sent back to Germany because of the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal in which I was unfortunately implicated. I am still under House Arrest,pending the outcome of investigation.

During my sojourn in Iraq, I was able to successfully smuggle US$ 21.7m out of Iraq to a location in Europe. I reckoned that being a soldier I would not be in the best position to give a satisfactory account of how I came about such an amount of money.I could therefore not conclude the proccess of securing the money before I was apprehended as I was at a loss about into which account one could pay it and that is where your assistance comes in.

I have resolved to share the total sum with you in the fairest ratio that we shall both agree on as settlement for your own part of the deal. Please,ponder over this and feed me back as I am in dire need of your assistance at this time.Please, send me your private contact info. in order to facilitate an easier and more private correspondence between us.

I must assure you that this will not expose you to any risk as all the possible risk has been foreseen and taken care of. I must also remind you that transaction of this magnitude and nature is to be handled carefully in order for both of us to be well protected. I shall send you more details as soon as I hear from you.I implore you to really consider this offer and feed me back. Also let me know how you wish to be settled for your role in the business.Please,reply to; jastaylor6@yahoo.com. I await your response with much optimism. Thanks in advance, Best Regards Jason Taylor(Col.)

I responded:

I work for the UN. We wipe our asses with Iraqi millions. Get lost, piker.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 15, 2007 15:32 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
hateblogging

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Cyberpunk

Project Blue Brain

Open Source Cyberware EEG

Membrane and Neurophysics at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry

The Real Memory Hacker

Bruce Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier"

Brain-Computer Interface Competitions

Virtual Retinal Display Technology

Reconstruction of Natural Scenes by Ensemble in LGN(PDF)

Johns Hopkins Neuroengineering Program

Joe Strout's Speculations on "Mind Uploading"

Where it all started

At the current rate of progress, the ideas of cyberpunk are only limited by mankind's ability to produce dingy crowds and dark, acrid alleyways.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 13, 2007 19:22 EST | Permalink | comments |
discoveries, geekery

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Mother's Day

Let's hear it for sexual reproduction!

I wonder, though. Mother's day is a shadow of its former self. It is a day of feel-good cards and gifts presented, overwhelmingly, to and from people who are wholly ignorant of the historical deadliness of motherhood. In the West, due to hundreds of years of capitalism, we think nothing of a woman giving birth. In those socialist cesspools that humans lived in for most of history and are still living in today, the story was quite different and far bloodier.

I think Mother's Day should be renamed to Civilization Day. There is a reason why your mother didn't worry about the odds of her dying in your birth, and why you think it quaint that in earlier times one threw a symbolic funeral for newly pregnant women. The ability to give birth and not die in the process must surely rank as a significant sign of civilization, given its absolute rarity in human history. Why not celebrate that with a day?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 13, 2007 10:32 EST | Permalink | comments |

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Touche

Take that, Samuel Johnson. (h/t: Ace).

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 12, 2007 21:46 EST | Permalink | comments |
odd news, discoveries, blog nocturne

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I mourn their loss, but life goes on...

I was looking over my template today and bemoaned how many links in my blogrolls died during my hiatus. No one likes having to cull the poor dead from the blogrolls, without even the formality of a 21 gun salute. It's rather depressing.

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but laziness is its father.

I'm going to write a Java program that will a) read my template (saved as a txt file), b) filter out URL's located in my sidebar class divs, c)output this list to a new txt file, d) open the new file and run a getInputStream for each URL to grab the content, e) search the content using a nifty control structure set up to catch various date formats within h2 tags and print to a new file only those URLS containing posts dated within the last 6 months.

Then, it is a short matter of linkifying them and copy-n-pasting them.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 11, 2007 19:35 EST | Permalink | comments |
blog nocturne, geekery

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Die, Italian Spammers, Die!

Spammers, spero che i vostri cogliones cadano da ed ottengano mangiati dalle capre rabbiose mentre le scimmie cacano sulle vostre teste.

Spero che le vostre madri cadano nelle pozze del spacchiu della capra e si anneghino.

Desidero vedere che avete appeso dai vostri coglioni mentre un lama lecca lentamente la pelle fuori dei vostri coglioni.

Desidero che ottenete locked in una stanza piena dei lumberjacks anziani sporchi e di un vaso del lubrificante.

Se fossi la vostra madre, avrebbero sventrato il vostro corpo infantile come un maiale ed avevo montato il vostro cadaver farcito sulla mia mensola del camino.

Se fossi il vostro padre, avrebbero alimentato il mio crazzo alla prima anatra ch'ho visto.

Se non foste già più bassi della melma fra i labbri della sticchiu della mucca, li denominerei un moron.

La vostra madre ha scopato la carcassa marcia dei cervi che era il vostro padre.

Il vostro padre era un un pompinaio del cane, peloso grande e stupido checco.

Andate tutti a 'fanculo! Scopatores della madres!

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 10, 2007 19:28 EST | Permalink | comments (10) |
hateblogging, boredomblogging, blog nocturne

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Ubuntu, the second attempt

Bill Gates' bad mojo is still heavy upon my computer. So, I brought Ubuntu 7.04 on Amazon and should get it in less than a week. I'll simply email myself zips of my backup docs, and [insert miracle here] I should be off the Windows tit by this time next week.

If that fails, I'll sacrifice a goat to appease the goddess Ada.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 08, 2007 21:23 EST | Permalink | comments |
blog nocturne, geekery

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Al Qaeda Tech Support, Part Four

USA_rocks: What a glorious day under the American flag! I am in love with America and our President and hotdogs! How may I help you, my fellow proud American in need?

Abu_Lincoln: My hard-drive needs to be reformatted and I don't know what tools I need. The duck waddles sadly into the stream.

USA_rocks: Is it raining?

Abu_Lincoln: Cats and dogs.

USA_rocks: [Arabic jibber-jabber question]

Abu_Lincoln: [Arabic jibber-jabber response]

USA_rocks: Now just wait three to five business days for Microsoft to deliver the disk. You can even use it on public facilities!

Abu_Lincoln: Wait a sec. I really do need to reformat my computer. Vista crashed again.

USA_rocks: I'll have to send you to my boss.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 08, 2007 20:23 EST | Permalink | comments |

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Links For A Coworker

Mozilla tweaks

Opera

I Can Has Cheezburger? (hat tip: Travis)

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 08, 2007 17:43 EST | Permalink | comments |
life, cats, boredomblogging, geekery

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Agh!

It is as if Bill Gates himself has thundered from his lofty perch, "He shall not use another O/S!"

Something wonky happened with my cd-burner, and I am unable to create an ISO disk for Ubuntu and backup disks.

Damn you, Bill Gates!

Update: We all know how this works. First I try over and over with Sonic RecordNow, wasting 5 or so cds. Then I get smart, go over to GNU and get the open source burner BurnAtOnce. Result: 2 more cds wasted. As a last ditch I try WindowsXP's own burning app; 2 more cds die. I finally conclude that it is a corrupted driver. So by a circuituous route I end up buying UniBlue's Registry Booster and cleaning up my registry. Result: faster computer but no better luck.

All I can do now is supplicate Bill Gates with many animal sacrifices.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 07, 2007 15:21 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery

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When is a Blogger a Journalist?

This question has become the center of a huge debate following McCain-Feingold legislation. It is meaningless, evil, and asked only by those one step away from publicly urinating upon themselves or those degraded by constant association with the former.

I'll make it simple: the Constitution does not limit the First Amendment. Check it. It does not say, "...the freedom of speech, except in the case of those recieving X dollars for writing with X frequency about news." Any attempt to delimit the bounds of McCain-Feingold legislation is therefore to implicitly accept that the legislation has substantially annihilated the First Amendment.

This is where I fault Conservatives: while the average Republican opposes this legislation, his tactic is to expand the definition of "journalist" rather than question the very necessity of framing such a question. Since I do not count the Libertarian Party as an actual political party, for the simple fact that it does not seek to institute actual policy change, there is really no major political opposition to the very principle of this issue. How many Republican officials have expressed full opposition to McCain-Feingold legislation, offering a moral argument against it rather than some form of Slippery Slope violating Godwin's Law? Little or none. When the only voices against a law are heard to oppose only its implementation rather than existence, one can be sure that the law will expand as those voices become hoarse debating over insignificant details.

I am shocked at the infrequency of principled arguments against such a clear intrusion of civil rights. Hell, if a politician so much as parroted Federalist #84 or even any decent article on Townhall I'd applaud him.

But I am not shocked that the scope of the debate is so limited in and out of Washington. It makes no political sense for any politician to decry the very existence of the debate when so many other cash cows must perish by the same argument. And it makes no sense for bloggers to advance such a position when others, politically actionable, await.

Unlike the members of the LP, I recognize the wisdom of Lee Atwater's admission of futility of making of large changes in government:

Reagan does want to make a lot of changes. But the reality is, he won't be able to. Jimmy Carter pushed the 'system' five degrees in one direction. If we here work very hard and are extremely lucky, Reagan may be able to push it five degrees in the other direction.

While I, like any self respecting libertarian, would intensely love to see the makers and supporters of such legislation subjected to the dreaded Goat Tongue, all I can really hope for is a slow battle of attrition ending only when a majority of politicians gain the testicular fortitude to support the Constitution. The odds of that being extremely unlikely, I must content myself with the flagrant violation of any such measure.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 06, 2007 22:04 EST | Permalink | comments |
news, libertarianism

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Ubuntu, Here I Come

Excellent. For one reason or another, I've been putting off switching to Ubuntu for almost a year. Now I am ready.

I've downloaded ISO Creator, allowing me to set up up several ISO disks containing backups of my documents. I've created a txt file of Linux versions of my favorite apps. I've memorized whole chunks of Ubuntu installation forum problems.

Now it just a matter of creating the cds, installing Ubuntu, and either going insane if the whole thing explodes or achieving superpowers if it works.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 06, 2007 16:04 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery

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Serious Geekery

I'm in the process of replacing alot of my desktop with open source. I installed Lite Step and a bunch of GNU apps. Result?

I am highly aroused. Look! My desktop is a bunny dancing under a funky translucent taskbar!

Soon I'll get around to going fully open-source.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 05, 2007 00:19 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
geekery

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Humans Are Too Gregarious

In semantics, "phatic discourse" is empty speech. Talking for the sake of talking. It need not be meaningful, but serves the purpose of giving humans a brief connection to each other in an otherwise lonely world.

I cannot stand it. I don't understand this need to spurt verbiage at others, or withstand reciprocal spurts of unmeaning.

Today I heard the following conversation on the bus, between two old men [note: this is an exact transcription]:

Old Man A: [Grunt]

Old Man B: [Grunt and nod]

Old Man A: Good weather.

Old Man B: Yup.

Old Man A: Ok. Good.

Old Man B: You good?

Old Man A: Yup. You?

Old Man B: Ok.

Old Man A:

Old Man B: Ok.

Old Man A: Ok.

Old Man B:

Old Man A: [To someone else] [grunts greeting]

Old Man B: [To someone else] [unintelligible greeting mutter]

Old Man A:

Old Man B:

Old Man A:

Old Man B: Well, have a nice day.

Old Man A: Ok, ok. You too.

Old Man B: Gonna be good weather.

Old Man A: Yup.

Old Man B: Well, see you tomorrow.

Old Man A: Yup.

"Old men get like that! It's not their fault they bore you!" you are probably thinking. But it has nothing to do with boredom. I am rather fascinated when I see people whose tolerance for inanity is far higher than mine. What bothers me is that I am sure that if an orangutan had walked onto the bus in the middle of the conversation, the conversation would have continued without skipping a beat. I could almost see the effort each expended to keep the information content of his responses as low as possible.

Hearing such desperate attempts to create an empty channel to someone else, I always end up thinking that there is some kind of Minimization of Information Content Principle at work, perhaps evolved to reduce the chances of an encounter between strangers developing into a fight to the death. Peace through Bromides.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 04, 2007 17:19 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
boredomblogging

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Solutions to Global Warming: Kill the Sun, Part Two

Part 1

Total Existence Failure (Effectiveness: not even 0)

I finished the last section in this series on a seemingly dismal note. What good does it do to represent the quantum state of the Sun in its entirety and then mathematically reduce it to a vacuum? Two words:

Planck Time.

The reduction of the wavefunction amplitude of a mass as large as the sun is bound to have a decoherence time of the order of one Planck unit of time (~5.4 x 10^-44 of a second). Why is that special? At that miniscule level of time, as with space, things get fuzzy. At that level, we truly have no idea what the hell is going on, and as Maimonides said long ago, "it's a damn fool who speculates on the unknowable." But, in keeping with my stated goal to list our options in order of decreasing bullshit, allow me to speculate. The following paragraph is bullshit. Keep that in mind.

Theoretically, and by that I mean applying the same critical thinking skills celebrities are known for, if one could beat Maxwell's Demon and manage to observe the quantum state of the Sun in a period as small as a unit of Planck Time, while engaging in a test mathematically designed to superimpose the current state (huge firy ball of plasma) and the desired state (empty and harmless region of space), one could decompose its wavefunction into the latter, merely by observing it. The Sun would disappear without even a poof!.

[End bullshit.] Thankfully for all of us, I don't think even string theorists could hear someone seriously utter the above paragraph without delivering a firm pimp-slap. And that is quite a compliment to the string theorists.

It seems merely wishing away the Sun will not end global warming. In my next post in this section I will examine a slightly less inane idea: creating an entropy-sink and letting the sun swirl away (I am being slightly more serious).

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 03, 2007 19:46 EST | Permalink | comments |
satire, blog nocturne, geekery

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Today

I received a letter from my father. A man I haven't seen in almost a decade, whose face I have forgotten even more completely than I usually forget faces. I won't say what was in that letter, but it perturbed me. "Perturbed" is the perfect word for my reaction to it, as no one quite knows what that word means.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 03, 2007 18:13 EST | Permalink | comments |
life, hick life

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Al Qaeda Tech Support, Part Three

CyberHajj: How may I help you?

Sparkles: I'm having a problem with my Wifi router. It keeps

Cyberhajj: Are you a woman?

Sparkles: turning off. Yes, why?

Cyberhajj has left AL Tech IRC.

Sparkles: WTF?! They always do this!

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 03, 2007 03:51 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
humor, geekery

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Solutions to Global Warming, Part One

Global warming is a fact.

I invite those who deny this to stare at the sun for an extended period of time. If they still deny it after they've burned out their retinas, those of us who are sane ought to have no difficulty "allowing" them to walk into traffic.

The debate is over: the earth is definitely being heated up to the tune of 1,366 Watts/m². Now, insolation is probably not what Sheryl Crow thinks she is fighting through poor hygiene, but I don't really think it matters what she believes. Nor do I care how much more energy Al Gore uses compared to the average citizen.

We've got a much bigger fish to fry. A fish of approximately 1.988435 × 10³⁰ kilograms and a volume of 1.41 × 10¹⁸ km³.

The fact is, if you want to end global warming, you've got to kill the Sun. Earth will only be safe when Mankind has destroyed this beastly entity once and for all.

How does one go about killing a nuclear inferno containing over 300,000 earths' worth of plasma the density of which strains the very limits of the Pauli Exclusion Principle, without at the same time enveloping most of the solar system in a cloud of searing plasma? I have a couple suggestions, which I will list in increasing order of likely effectiveness.

1. Total Existence Failure. (Primer: Alot of Mathematics, Vector Calculus, Tensor Calculus, Bra-Ket Notation, Dirac Notation, Hilbert Space,  and Fock Space) I'll assume you skimmed through those links in true web junkie fashion. Good. The basic idea is simple. The quantum state of the Sun, representing the total wavefunctions of all its various particles (you can think of it as the Sun's "degrees of freedom"), can be described by an n-dimensional Fock Space.  In Bra-Ket notation, it would look like an ungodly long string of kets. Once one knows the Fock State of the Sun, it is but a simple matter to cancel each creation operator with an annihilation operator and thus reduce the Sun to a favored vacuum state. Of course there will be difficulties in renormalizing away all those pesky infinities, but that shouldn't be a problem for geniuses like Sheryl Crow. " What good does it do to undertake this very likely impossibly difficult feat of quantum field theory?" you may ask.  I'll answer tomorrow night in Part Two.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 01, 2007 23:01 EST | Permalink | comments |
satire, blog nocturne, geekery

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My Perilous Job

Nominally, I am a garbage worker. My job ostensibly requires wading through mass quantities of society's dirty and infected waste- much like a social worker if you think about it.

But beyond the everday tasks one may think this job entails, I must also, in addition, be a master of jujitsu and sword-fighting. Not to defend myself against the rats, mind you, but my coworkers.

Armed with a wide variety of sharp, pointy, and generally club-like objects scavenged from the mountain of trash, my coworkers enjoy bloodsport such as has not been seen since Caligula's Coliseum. I'm talking about melee fights that would shame any self-respecting video game addict. I have yet to see a coworker get a limb hacked off, but it will happen eventually.

In the midst of this surging melee of pipes and hail of flung diapers, I must somehow manage to not only perform the duties of my job, but also read during the off-times. This means mastering the art of reading with one eye, the other alert to danger from any quarter. The art of climbing a ladder while fending off multiple parries with a length of broomstick. The art of dodging airborne diapers from several attackers whilst simultaneously flinging LP's at my opponents' throats.

Sure, it sounds bloodthirsty. But how many of you can say your job skills prepare you for an invasion of Mongols? In the event the world is reduced to a post-apocalyptic wasteland, I know the Isiah would gladly enlist my skills in dealing with the slow mutants.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 01, 2007 17:39 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, life, boredomblogging

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...So I kicked him.

*

He cornered me as I got on the elevator. Tugging his briefcase open in a shower of promotional pamphlets, he roared, "Life got you down? Feel tired all the time? Catch yourself glancing longingly at sharp and pointy objects? I'VE GOT THE ANSWER FOR YOU!"

He bellowed this last sentence while, in bullet time, the multi-colored pamphlets rained down to softly cover the floor.  Mountains of inspirational booklets drifted through the air, myriad kittens clutched lengths of string perilously stretched above slogans.  The walls of the elevator began to bend out into non-Euclidean angles, threatening to snap us into a Lovecraftian realm of self-help gurus and Jehovah's Witnesses.

So I kicked him and got off at the next floor.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at May 01, 2007 03:40 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, bonfire material

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