Saturday, October 18, 2003
THE SLASHDOT EFFECT: So I was reading this article from Slashdot to the collection of outstanding individuals that is the Thread aPa Friday chat, since it was about a computer glitch that may very well leave the state of Mississippi in the dry next week or longer, when Doom asks me if they were running their distribution system off of Windows ("If it's windoze based, they is screwed"). So I say to myself, "hmmm, that should be easy enough to check," and clicked on one of the main links from the original Slashdot article.
Some of you are way ahead of me on this one, so I'll just cut to a half an hour later when I was still waiting for the page to load, presumably because it was choking on a Javascript control that got stuck in the pipe. Now take just a second to look at the page right now, if you already haven't. It's THREE SENTENCES LONG, gang. I can understand the evil ogre known as the Slashdot effect visiting a webpage with a lot of complicated elements and balloon juice, but three sentences? That's just not right
RANDOM WHATNOT: In an attempt to pretend to be productive today, and to pad this entry enough to make people question my sanity, here are a few thoughts we ran across in the early chattin' hours last night.
--Ska tells me that Evel Knievil turned 65 years old the other day. His take: "Depending on your point of view, this either proves or denies the existence of God." He also found some interesting quotes about the famous Snake River Canyon jump:
Jim Rome: "What did you think your chances were of surviving the stunt?"
Evel: "50/50."
Rome: Are you kidding me? If you knew there was a coinflip's chance you were going to die doing this, why did you go forward with it?
Evel: "Do you know who the hell I am?"
I'm old enough to remember Evel doing his Evel thing on ABC's "Wide World of Sports" back in the 70s, and all the Evel toys that came in the wake of Snake River Canyon, including one that my brother had of the famous Kinevel motorcycle. You'd mount that sucker on a platform with a side-mounted hand crank, wind the crank as quick as you could, trip the trigger, and let Evel go, scaring the house pets in the process. If you lived in a house as small as we lived in at the time, the next step would invariably be trying to fish him out from under the sofa with you spindly kid arms as he ricocheted off a few walls and slid under the furniture. Still, it was a great way to kill a bit of time.
--The #1 story on MSNBC's Countdown yesterday was the study which "proved" that tall people made more money than short people over the course of a career. Their "expert interview" to go with this story? Mickey Rooney, which was who I expected, except that he also slipped in a few plugs for his new CD with his wife. Oddly enough, it was called "One Man One Wife Show". Think about it for a minute, if you will; in his prime, Mickey would've been the all-time marriage record holder if Liz Taylor hadn't been invented. Maybe "One Man, Last Wife"?
--There were two (count 'em, two) hepatitis-C support chats on Delphi last night, and what's more, there are actually THREE hep-c chats active as I type, probably excluding any private forums on the subject. I'm a bit confused as to how this many hep-C communities have sprouted up in the Delphi community. Was there a schism at one point? Did a few, inspired by Martin Luther, nail their complaints to the virtual door and stomp off to meditate in secrecy before dedicating a new forum to their radical new approach to whole-patient care and general existence? Or, God help us, is one of these chats dedicated to hep-C flirters? It's the Internet, it's a chatroom, so the odds are very good. All that I know is that there was one hep-C sufferer alone in one room, unwilling or afraid to join two other sufferers in the other room, and that's just not right. Unless the one was asleep, since it was 4:30 in the morning.
--I also taunted the select few that the latest Kobe Bryant case developments might set off a new "is it news?" rant, which is a subject I haven't really treated in this forum (although I did give it a half-assed writeup elsewhere). Consider this statement your only advance warning.
Some of you are way ahead of me on this one, so I'll just cut to a half an hour later when I was still waiting for the page to load, presumably because it was choking on a Javascript control that got stuck in the pipe. Now take just a second to look at the page right now, if you already haven't. It's THREE SENTENCES LONG, gang. I can understand the evil ogre known as the Slashdot effect visiting a webpage with a lot of complicated elements and balloon juice, but three sentences? That's just not right
RANDOM WHATNOT: In an attempt to pretend to be productive today, and to pad this entry enough to make people question my sanity, here are a few thoughts we ran across in the early chattin' hours last night.
--Ska tells me that Evel Knievil turned 65 years old the other day. His take: "Depending on your point of view, this either proves or denies the existence of God." He also found some interesting quotes about the famous Snake River Canyon jump:
Jim Rome: "What did you think your chances were of surviving the stunt?"
Evel: "50/50."
Rome: Are you kidding me? If you knew there was a coinflip's chance you were going to die doing this, why did you go forward with it?
Evel: "Do you know who the hell I am?"
I'm old enough to remember Evel doing his Evel thing on ABC's "Wide World of Sports" back in the 70s, and all the Evel toys that came in the wake of Snake River Canyon, including one that my brother had of the famous Kinevel motorcycle. You'd mount that sucker on a platform with a side-mounted hand crank, wind the crank as quick as you could, trip the trigger, and let Evel go, scaring the house pets in the process. If you lived in a house as small as we lived in at the time, the next step would invariably be trying to fish him out from under the sofa with you spindly kid arms as he ricocheted off a few walls and slid under the furniture. Still, it was a great way to kill a bit of time.
--The #1 story on MSNBC's Countdown yesterday was the study which "proved" that tall people made more money than short people over the course of a career. Their "expert interview" to go with this story? Mickey Rooney, which was who I expected, except that he also slipped in a few plugs for his new CD with his wife. Oddly enough, it was called "One Man One Wife Show". Think about it for a minute, if you will; in his prime, Mickey would've been the all-time marriage record holder if Liz Taylor hadn't been invented. Maybe "One Man, Last Wife"?
--There were two (count 'em, two) hepatitis-C support chats on Delphi last night, and what's more, there are actually THREE hep-c chats active as I type, probably excluding any private forums on the subject. I'm a bit confused as to how this many hep-C communities have sprouted up in the Delphi community. Was there a schism at one point? Did a few, inspired by Martin Luther, nail their complaints to the virtual door and stomp off to meditate in secrecy before dedicating a new forum to their radical new approach to whole-patient care and general existence? Or, God help us, is one of these chats dedicated to hep-C flirters? It's the Internet, it's a chatroom, so the odds are very good. All that I know is that there was one hep-C sufferer alone in one room, unwilling or afraid to join two other sufferers in the other room, and that's just not right. Unless the one was asleep, since it was 4:30 in the morning.
--I also taunted the select few that the latest Kobe Bryant case developments might set off a new "is it news?" rant, which is a subject I haven't really treated in this forum (although I did give it a half-assed writeup elsewhere). Consider this statement your only advance warning.
|| Eric 7:13 PM#
