Barkerburgh

Many will not miss him.

Well, after that post yesterday, I went home, rebooted and found out I had to reinstall everything from the ground up because the Windows 2000 installation died and I couldn ‘t repair, only replace it.

No, I’m not switching to Linux, but I might switch to the Flintstones’ Operating System. Seriously.

Okay, not seriously. But seriously.

Bam. Bam.

And not you.

There’s this stupid commercial that starts with two stupid women at a stupid spa, wearing stupid white terrycloth robes. Now, to show that the makers of this commercial do not think that just white women are stupid, one of the stupid women is black.

It starts out with the white woman saying that the product, some kind of stupid chocolate thing, is like zen wrapped in karma. She’s so stupid that she can’t even use those words in their Western, everyday, nothing-like-the-original-Buddhist-and-Hindu-meanings meanings (sic).

Then, then - God help us all - she states, as a male attendant walks by, that eating this product is like Dating A Masseuse Good. In front of the male attendant. Since it’s just a little too kinky to actually be in a commercial aimed at the obvious demographic during daytime television and prime time, I have to go back to my chosen adjective for this post to describe it; Stupid, Stupid, Stupid. Is she trying to entice him or trying to let him know that she’d rather date the masseuse? (Doesn’t she know that terry cloth isn’t sexy? Even wet terrycloth? Her robe isn’t wet, I’m just saying.)

I mean seriously, when they were writing this commercial and as the script and then the production were going through twenty different hands and minds, was the Stupid Filter made of used toilet paper? Seriously. Okay, not seriously. But seriously.

Still not as bad as Star Trek: Enterprise, though.

A short time after the writing of the above, I thought to google “dating a masseuse good.” Small world.

It appears that for all of you who like to leave comments on my blog all the time, there is a system problem. It will allow you to Submit the comment but then it vanishes into the aether; it does not appear on my admin page to be moderated.

I know this is a hardship for dozens of you and I apologize.

The UberSysAdmin is looking into it.

If all of you will email me your many comments, I will post them myself.

Thanks to every one of you for many great comments over the years and your boundless patience over the next short while. Please don’t let this little blip discourage you from continuing this wonderful tradition once the bugs have been exterminated.

Thank you, and carry on.

Expression of Appropriate Seasonal And/Or Regional And/Or Cultural Sentiments. Please Interpret Reasonably.

I’ve had two livejournal accounts for a while. I had a recent one, forgot about it, created another one, then rediscovered the first one. I vaguely remember having an account way back when it first got popular, but it wasn’t easy or straightforward then so I let it lapse, and it’s worse now, years later.

Is navigation and design ever fucked up.

Often, the labels are vague, misleading, or dumb. There are too many steps from Point A to Point 2 and there are things on the page that are unexplained, misleading or pointless, and I don’t just mean the ads.

(If you’ve been at it for a while and everything is second nature, well and good, but it ain’t chess, it’s a blog. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to get the brunt of the gist of it. Really. Code geeks shouldn’t design interfaces. Neither should co-ops. Or bosses. Or recent graduates of Devry. Christ.)

Some things just don’t make sense at all, like the fact that when I’m logged into my account, there is no easy or obvious way to view the results of a poll, and you don’t seem to be able to edit the poll itself once it’s posted. Sure, it may be right in front of me, but it sure as hell ain’t right in front of me, if you catch my meaning. (You can edit the actual entry the poll appears in, but you can’t edit the poll itself. And the editing page for the poll entry is just dumb…)

Yeah, if I spend a couple of hours clicking around, I’ll figure it out. But a> I don’t have a couple of hours to do that (I’m not that busy but my online time is very limited), and ii] why the fuck should I have to?

Website designers who think they know best about page design should take Thoreau’s advice: run off into the woods and live by a pond. I mean ’simplify’.

Yeah, LJ’s got more features than Wordpress, but that don’t mean I can forgive the design flaws.

For a nicely designed website for a specific purpose, with lots of information and options, see W3Schools. Yeah, of course I know it’s apples and oranges, but it ain’t apples and octopi.

(But to misquote Matt Damon’s character from ‘Dogma’ in the brief elevator scene at the airport near the beginning of the film; “Oh, I don’t mean you!”)

Well, I watched Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds” with Tom Cruise last night.

When I was a kid, I was a big fan of the 1953 “War of the Worlds“, and later, Orson Welles’ radio play, dramatised in 1975’s “The Night That Panicked America“.

I wanted to see this one at the cinema but never did. I wish I’d never seen it last night.

It was worse than then entire second season of “Doctor Who“ and “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” put together.

It had everything that was wrong and silly about Independence Day and Starship Troopers (and ripped off the designs for the aliens from both movies, for Christ’s sakes), and added the fact that Tom Cruise’s Ferrier character was an asshole, Tim Robbins was completely wasted, and the unholy mix-mash of references to both the original book (eg, red weed, badly used) and the 1953 movie (eg, the alien camera on the snake arm, unfulfilled).

One thing that really burnt my toast was that Ray and Rachel were always, everywhere, exactly where all the shit was coming down. Granted there was a lot of shit coming down all over the place but always?

Aliens from underground? TV news cameraman looting a crashed plane for TV dinners? A convenient path for the SUV to drive out of the plane-crash area? The son surviving the firestorm on the hill and getting to Boston all by himself? Fuck right off.

And why was it never established that the aliens were Martians? That’s half the cool about the book and old movie. Martians!

I’ve never really liked Senor Spielbergo movies (with a few exceptions). He’s too much like a film student in a candy store.

Coffee even hurts right now.

I have big wide windows that I love. I have them open all the time year round because I crave the fresh air, and I can’t control the heat in the wintertime; it’s forced water and it’s either on or off.

I have a big oscillating floor fan, that is neither oscillating nor on the floor, stuck in one side of the window blowing out, so that there is a nice wide flow of outside air coming in the the other side. Usually this is highly pleasant. Now it is not.

I also have a small desktop fan blowing at me when I sleep, which seized up last night. It probably only needs a little generic WD40, so no real worries - it’s happened before.

I lost a hard-drive (logical not physical) on one of my computers the other night and I thought I’d lost a bunch of important files (including story files and MP3s), but they’re okay - I just can’t use them right now. However, I need to spend a lot of time restoring the OS on that machine and it’s too goddamn hot to do it now. And seriously, Microsoft, what the fuck is wrong with you people? The COPY command in the Recovery Console won’t handle wildcards or directory copies, even if you use the fucking SET command to tell it to? It’s called the Recovery Console, not the “Fuck You, Fuck Your Files And Fuck The Horse You Rode In On Console”. Not “A Recovery Console for Windows 2000, Mr Gates? ‘Fast, Cheap, or Right, Pick Two’ Console”! It’s enough to make a body want to switch to a Mac or Linux. Jesus Christ on a fucking crutch.

Thank all the saints and angels for television. Cable television. And sudoku. And Freecell.

Anyhoo, I hope you’re all having a nice day. Drink plenty of water and don’t leave your children in a parked car with the windows rolled up, unless you really want to encourage Good Samaritans who have hammers and an urge to use them.

Well, it looks like the policy of the Bush government is to kick start Armageddon.

Condoleezza Rice, an educated woman, is contemptible for not pursuing an immediate ceasefire under any conditions to save lives and infrastructure in Lebanon, and northern Israel. It’s distressing and disturbing that she appears to believe what George Bush said about himself (“I’ve heard the call. I believe God wants me to run for President.”), and seems to be helping him in his bid to bring about Apocalypse, or the Rapture, or the Second Coming or whatever the Fundies are preaching now.

This was supposed to happen with the Gulf War. When that didn’t work, Shrub tried to start it up by invading Iraq* in Gulf War Jr. That didn’t work either, so now they’re trying this.

No, seriously.

Moving hand, moving on.

*Where Babylon is; read the Scriptures and the modern prophets. You can interpret them any way you want, so you can’t be wrong until you are, so you then claim you were misquoted or misinterpreted. It’s easy.

I blame tnir.

That is all.

I finally swapped B5 seasons 1 & 2 for 3, 4 & 5.

I used long-hoarded tokens to go over to Peter and Leslie and Simon’s to get more B5 fixes, that is to say, not repairs, but hits, tokes, doses, satisfaction for my honkin’ B5 jones.

Had an accidental fine barbecued chicken dinner, with very interesting pasta and a nice partly homegrown salad, eaten al fresco on the back concrete, which the neighbour says is good for babies (but, as they say at the funeral home during visiting hours, remains to be seen.).

Well, last week was kinda hot and humid at times. Last year when that happened (45 with the humidity at least once) both my computers went south, pear-shaped, down the dumper. Not only that, but the heat put off by the machines made my place very uncomfortable.

So I shut them right down a few times at night instead of running diagnostics overnight. Well, I guess they didn’t like that plus the heat and humidity. When I got home from L, P & S’s and fired up the machines, then put in the first disc of B5, Season 3, my DVD app wouldn’t work. Now it’s quite good, you can pause and slow-mo it, capture screen shots, all the nice little bells and whistles. So I tried VLAN, that good old dependable workhorse. It worked but the image was jumpy and jerky. Unwatchable. No buffering? I dunno.

I tried a few other apps (Word, Freemind, etc), most worked. ITunes did not. Same error as the DVD app. Rats on rats.

Over the course of the day yesterday (Tuesday) I flushed the registry, scandisked, defragged, uninstalled and reinstalled the DVD app. No luck.

Finally I reinstalled Windows. Partial success. A different error from before (but the same from both) from ITunes and the DVD app (I’ve blanked on the name of the app.).

Then I tried good old VLAN again (open a disc), but instead of clicking on DVD(menu), I just clicked on DVD. Success.

I feel cursed, but that’s nothing new. I’m used to it. I cope. I carry on. I cry, dry my eyes, hike up my pants, and keep slogging on towards my date with Destiny, a tall, red-haired stripper I met in Brampton back in 96.

PS, I am 5 days short of being 1 year shy of being 50 years less than a century. Save the parties for next year. This year just love. (That means presents, because love is intangible and presents aren’t.)