…how you can’t get a decent McDonald’s hamburger any more?

I mean, I know that the word “decent” is relative when you’re talking about McDonald’s food, but still: The quality of McDonald’s has slid steadily for the last five years or so, and the service has tailed off as well. Nowadays, if I’m the only one at the register I still expect to wait ten or fifteen minutes to get my burger,a nd it’s always a pleasant surprise when they get it right.

I have a weird relationship with McDonald’s. Even on a good day, their food sucks, and yet…and yet…I’ve met no fewer than three lovers at McDonald’s, and I still eat there at least four times a week. McDonald’s has played a very weird role in my romantic life as well as in my culinary life.

The decline of McDonald’s over the past few years might have something to do with the fact that the unemployment rate is so low that a blind, one-legged ex-con can get a job as a security guard, so it’s virtually impossible for McDonald’s to hire anyone. (Why work for McDonald’s when with the same experience you can get venture capital for a dot-com startup and be driving a Ferrari by next Tuesday?) So perhaps the economic downturn will set things right under the Golden Arches.

In the meantime, I’ll just eat my overcooked burger on its stale bun and dream…

Just got back from watching a violent, moody movie whose main characters were a drug addict and a prostitute, and no, it wasn’t a Quentin Tarantino flick.

From Hell. Excellent flick, and I particularly liked the sidekick police investigator who quotes Shakespeare.

In other news, my wife and I are going to Atlanta to spend Thanksgiving with my girlfriend in a couple weeks. I’m looking forward to the trip; it’s been a long month, and I’ll really enjoy the time off.

Got my plane tickets, got my hotel reservation, I’m headin’ to MacWorld San Francisco in January! Neener neener!

Heading out a few days early; going to spend a couple extra days running around SF doing some photography. I’ll be meeting my girlfriend out there as well; it should be a lot of fun, seeing the new crop of Macs and eating in Japantown.

Saw Training Day this evening. Kick-ass movie–the kind that really sticks with you.

Just uploaded a new version of Onyx, the game of sexual exploration, to my Web site.

It’s a computer-mediated board game. The players move around the board, buying properties; land on someone else’s property, and you have to pay rent or–er, work off the debt…

Anyway, the new version is here.

Goddamn Bill Gates anyway.

I’ve just spent the entire night trying to install Windows 98 on a HP Pentium 4 machine that shipped with Windows 2000 installed.

Think it’d be easy? Oh, no, no, no. See, the Windows 98 installer doesn’t support the P4 chipset directly; you need the Intel chipset drivers for that.

And first, of course, you have to get them on the computer. Which you can’t do–not directly, because the machine ships with a “wipe your hard drive and restore it to factory original state” Restore in Place CD, not a driver and Windows installer CD.

Plus, of course, without the IDE drivers, the machine won’t even see the CD-ROM drive.

So:

Put in a second hard drive. Boot Win2K. Install Win98 on the second hard drive. Go on the Web. Download the chipset, IDE, graphics, LAN, and sound drivers. Swap hard drives. Boot Win98. Remove the BIOS system devices from the device manager. Run the chipset driver installer.

Reboot. Run the IDE driver installer. Reboot. “Windows has detected new hardware. Intel chipset to IO controller bridge. Please locate the driver…”

You already have the goddamn driver!

Reinstall chipset drivers. Reboot. “Windows cannot locate the driver for: Intel Firmware Hub.”

*&%#.

Reinstall chipset drivers. Reboot. Reinstall IDE drivers. Reboot. Install video drivers. Reboot. Install LAN drivers. Reboot. “Windows cannot locate the driver for: Intel real-time clock.”

This is getting goddamn old. Swap hard drives. Reboot Win2k. Start from scratch. Reinstall Win98 on second hard drive. Swap drives. Reboot. Install chipset drivers. Reboot. Install IDE drivers. Reboot. Install video drivers. Reboot. “Windows cannot locate driver for IRQ Steering. Windows has detected a device conflict with DMA controller. Windows has detected a device conflict with Intel PCI-to-PCI bridge controller.”

And so on. And on and on and on…

It amazes me that, as poorly designed as Microsoft software is, people will put up with it. The Office “suite”–a bunch of programs with the same menus, but the same commands are in different places in each program! Bad design. IIS–so buggy and riddled with serious security flaws, you have to budget a full-time employee just to administer it. Bad design.

Yeah, Microsoft products work. But badly, and barely. Apparently, that’s good enough.

“Psychic litter” is a term used to describe an act of immorality so small, it falls below the conscious threshold. As, for example, wasting small amounts of time of a large number of people. As, what Microsoft is doing when it isn’t committing large acts of immorality.

Spent part of the evening last night in the darkroom, making contact sheets of the photo shoot I did Wednesday.

You know, even as jaded as I am, there’s something about the girl-on-girl thing that just gets me where I live. Which puts me, I think, pretty solidly in the majority; I don’t think you can ask for a more typical “guy thing” than that.

Yeah, I know, I hate to be cheesy and cliched, and I am at least a reasonably enlightened guy, but, I mean, damn!

So what is it about the “hot lesbian action” thing, anyway? It’s a cliche that guys are into this sort of thing because…well, we are into this sort of thing. It’s depressing, really; there’s nothing rational about it. It just grabs us by the back part of the brain–the part that knows nothing of reason–and says “Hey! Hot girl on girl action! Gimmee some of that!”

I had a cognitive science professor back in my college days who swore it was biological. Said it crosses all cultural and educational lines, and theorized about how humans are the only primate whose females don’t have an obvious outward sign that they’re sexually receptive, but that guy-on-girl action is more likely to raise a territorial/competitive reaction, whereas girl-on-girl behavior is clear and unambiguous evidence that the females are sexually receptive and there’s no male there to represent a challenge…

I dunno. I think that’s a difficult theory to support.

But still. Damn!

So there I was, in the shower this morning, stretching, trying to wake up and face the day…

…and I discovered a few bruises left over from the weekend’s activities, put there by the other girlfriend while she was flogging me.

Mmmm. Love when that happens.

Not all that much going on today. Last night, I was up late doing a photo shoot with a couple of lesbian S&M friends of mine, who’re setting up a Web site; haven’t had a chance to develop the film yet, but when I get an opportunity to go into the darkroom I may post some pictures here.

I really want to see the movie “Training Day” before it leaves the theatres. maybe tomorrow.

The most recent issue of Xero magazine is finished!! It’s done, it’s printed, it looks great, I tihnk it’s the best issue yet, and I’m very, very happy with it.

We brought it to Necronomicon, an annual science fiction convention, last weekend, where it was a hit; we sold a good number of issues.

The convention was fun, not the least because I got to make my friends lenda and Kiersten run around passing out flyers for the magazine…something about making cute chicks do what I want just really does it for me. Does that make me a bad person? 🙂

Saturday night we gave a demonstration of Symphony, the Internet-controlled sex toy…which generated a lot of interest. Lots of fun, too!

Sunday after the convention, my wife and my second girlfriend and I had sushi with a group of friends, then went to a local S&M club. THAT was a good time. I brought the girlfriend up on stage and lingered over her with a violet wand for a while; it’s always so much fin to see her wiggle and hear her yelp… Later, she returned the favor by putting me against a St. Andrew’s cross and giving me a very intense flogging while my wife watched.

It was incredible. For the second time, she made the entire world fold up flat and disappear. I was on such an endorphin rush by the time she was finished, I could barely walk. I felt like I was floating for the next half hour.

And Monday was back to work. Pity, that…

Well, let’s see. With four days left until the new issue of Xero magazine has to be out the door, and no sign yet of a printer who can do the job, and a few pages still left to write, things are coming right down to the wire…

Well, hell. I work best under pressure anyway. Right? Right?

And a client who’s having a whole nest of network troubles, because they went with a network vendor who underbid me, and those people screwed the pooch, and naturally now it’s my problem…and the fact that it looks like we’ve been done wrong by the manufacturer who was supposed to be making the plastic case for the Internet sex toy we’re trying to get finished…

Surely would be nice if someone, somewhere, would actually do the job they said they would do.

Doesn’t help that I didn’t get any sleep last night–I spent a good deal of the night having a good, but exhausting, and perhaps overdue, talk with the other girlfriend.

And stuff.

I will be very, very happy when this week is over.