Spotted this when I was shopping a couple of days ago. Yes, the grocery store has a “toys” aisle. No, I don’t know why either. (Something to keep the kiddies out of Mom’s hair while she shops, perhaps?)
Anyway, take a look at the advertising copy on this toy. Liteup Wheel Lights Up!
…err, as opposed to doing something else, for example. Like, I dunno, invading France.
A liteup wheel that lights up. What ever will they think of next? Tautological cat is tautological.
OK, so I know a lot of folks out there will be at Dragon*Con this month. Who’s doing what? Who wants to try to get together?
I’ll be on two panels–the cryonics panel (dunno when it is yet) and the Sex and Blogging panel (Saturday at 10 PM). Saturday afternoon, I’ll be trying out a new macroscopic disassembler on one or two of datan0de‘s clones as well; the submicroscopic disassemblers are okay, but not as much fun to watch.
So. Who else will be there?
Imagine a car. Doesn’t really matter what kind of car; a blue Ford Focus, say. Now, imagine this car hurtling down the interstate at the exact moment of a full solar eclipse. Imagine the person in the driver’s seat knitting.
Imagine that at the instant of totality, a truck in the oncoming lane has a blowout and skids across the road. Imagine that it swerves into our blue Ford Focus. Imagine that just as the vehicles touch, a meteorite comes flying down from space and crashes through the roof of the Focus.
Imagine that the meteorite startles the knitter so much that she throws her hands up in the air. Imagine her knitting needle soaring in a graceful arc across the car, until it finally comes to rest underneath the driver’s brake pedal. Imagine that this prevents the driver from braking, which would surely have doomed her, and her passenger, and the unfortunate truck driver who’s wrestling to control his careening eighteen-wheeler in sudden and unexpected darkness. Imagine instead that the car hops up on two wheels and blasts past the truck, averting by mere inches the space that scant milliseconds later will be occupied by thousands of pounds of roaring steel.
Got it? Okay, good. Hold that image in mind; we’ll be coming back to it in a minute.
I’m being audited by the IRS. They say they have never received my 2006 tax return. Those of you who know me will know that I tend to be a bit, err…
Hmm. What’s a charitable word here? “Scattered.” Yes, scattered is charitable.
I tend to be a bit scattered about keeping track of things like paperwork, and taxes, and all this other ordinary sundry stuff that makes up two-thirds of a life that’s two-thirds not worth living. You know, the part that’s totally divorced from the other one-third that’s made of win and awesome, and involves rope and rubber gloves and KY and…
But I digress.
Anyway, the IRS says that it didn’t receive my 2006 tax return, even though they cashed the check. They’re asking me to provide copies of my return to show that, yes, I did in fact file the damn thing.
In a miraculous confluence of events as bizarre and unlikely as the near-tragedy with our knitter in the imaginary blue Ford Focus, I actually found my 2006 tax return.
Yes, you read that right. Not only did I make a copy of it before I filed it–that itself a near-miracle of the kind more normally heralded by angels–but I put that copy in a filing box, and then after I moved I even remembered where that box was.
So you see, boys and girls, I have actually put my hands on my 2006 tax return.
Unfuckingbelievable. Somebody’s watching out for me, and given my habits and predilections, I’m pretty sure it’s probably not an angel. In titling this entry, I lied.
For those who used to read her old LiveJournal and miss it since she took it down, she’s back! Her new journal is at aclaro.
The very first thing I saw when i opened my eyes this morning.
Taken from the camera in my cell phone, which I leave next to the bed at night; it’s my alarm clock, too.
So in my ongoing exploration of my new status as a consumer whore, I’ve discovered that the Internet, long the place of porn and open source software, is also a most remarkable innovation in the field of finding things that I never knew existed but desperately want.
First on the list is this chair, made from the jaws of a torpedo loading crane on a nuclear submarine.
I want this chair. More precisely, I want to fuck in this chair.
Next on the list is Luis Berumen’s Zero Point Zero watch, made from a pair of handcuffs. The display built into one cuff shows the hour; the other shows the minutes. Who says digital watches can’t be cool?
And finally, Kacper Hamilton has designed a set of drinking glasses around the Seven Deadly Sins, each glass in the set embodying one sin. This particular glass is for Wrath.
So. One of the guys who I work with has an external FireWire hard drive on which he has hundreds of gigabytes of stuff. Business stuff, personal stuff, original artwork stuff, photography stuff, company Web site stuff, corporate flyer stuff, and much other stuff.
This stuff is not backed up.
Today he tells me the drive won’t mount. A quick sniff with a disk repair program suggests that the drive’s partition map is gone. Not corrupt, not garbled, gone.
I’m running a surface scan with a file salvaging program now. It’s gonna take all night.
*sigh*
I will be in beautiful, sunny Los Angeles visiting Gina from September 18 through the 23. Anyone on my LJ flist in the LA area and interested in getting together for dinner or something? You can let me know here or at tacitr (at) aol (dot) com.
Also, I know at least a handful of you speak and write Russian. David and I have been bothered by door-to-door religious peddlers multiple times over the past couple of months, and plan to make a “no solicitation” sign for the door. While we’re at it, I figured it couldn’t hurt to put “No Russian Mafia” on the sign as well, just ’cause, you know, computer viruses and stuff. So how do you write “No Russian Mafia” in Russian?
I just got back from lunch at a popular seafood chain restaurant called Joe’s Crab Shack. There are public restrooms in this restaurant; the restrooms are down a hallway. A sign helpfully points the way.
However, the sign does not say “Restrooms” on it. Instead, it says…
Well, see for yourself.
So I have an iPhone now, which places me firmly in the ranks of the coveted “hipster” segment of the “consumer whore” demographic. One of the neat features of the new iPhone is GPS; in fact, it’s the reason I got the phone, since I was in the market for a GPS device and the iPhone plus GPS is actually cheaper than stand-alone GPS units.
Anyway, my roommate David also got an iPhone, and has been busy playing with the GPS on it like…well, I don’t really have a metaphor. Like a guy who’s having a lot of fun with a GPS gadget, I suppose.
The iPhone is now open to third-party developers, and the Cocoa API has been extended dramatically with all sorts of calls related to power management, Bluetooth, and GPS functionality. In other words, the GPS system is exposed to third-party developers.
David, who actually isn’t a perv, came up with an interesting idea, that he calls the “Virtual Leash.” His conception is of a sex toy like a vibrator, preferably Bluetooth-enabled (though I suppose USB would work as well), designed to be locked into place in one’s girlfriend. The device would be controlled by software on the iPhone that would monitor the wearer’s position via GPS, so that if she left some pre-determined area, the vibrator would start running. At full speed. And not stop until she returned to that area.
Neither my mad Bluetooth hacking skillz nor my iPhone development skillz are up to tackling this project, but I know several folks on my flist could probably make it work. Any takers?