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2000.11.19 : 2000.11.25
Saturday, November 25, 2000
Plurp. An apres-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving last night
at Helen's sister's. Fifteen people, including two eight-year-olds with
way too much energy (stomp, stomp, stomp; shriek; giggle, giggle), a one-year-old
who had recently found the exact tone and volume at which screaming brings
maximal attention, and at least one TV that was announcing B[ush-G]ore
stuff all evening long.
I grew up in a family, a much smaller family, in which interactions
were verbal but quiet, in which the decibelometer never got above 60
dB. I'm not sure it ever got below that last night.
And that's fine. Everybody told stories, and laughed, and hugged, and
ate too much. Everybody had a great time. But I, at least, was exhausted.
Retiring, after dinner, to compose this entry, my relatives thought
me reclusive, anti-social. And, in comparison, I'm sure they're right.
I need a few days in a Bhuddist monastery, meditating on what the quiet
sounds like.
Yo. Why is it that the fourth tine on salad forks is both wider
than the others and endowed with a little scallop at the end? (I'm particularly
curious about the scallop. Please Blab me your own explanation.)
Yo. What fraction of the population pronounces it expresso?
Let's ask the Web for a clue.
Expresso - 182,000
entries
Espresso - 465,000
entries
So, you silly 28%, mend your ways!
 Plurp.
At length, Drs. Myerowitz
and Jellinowski
discovered that all incidents of
barking
in recorded history could be traced
back
to the blue dog.
Friday, November 24, 2000
Plurp. You know what I love about holidays? Everybody
leaves New York for somewhere else. It's hard to understand but it's true!
That means The City, which is usually packed with people and clogged with
cars, is vacant. You can wander down the streets as if it were a sleepy
country town (well, relatively). You can sit peacefully in your apartment
without honking horns and sirens on the street below, without the cacophony
of construction workers digging up the nearby intersections for the endless
laying or unlaying of cables and pipes.
So to all of the New Yorkers who have gone to more idyllic climes for
the holidays: please stay there. We like it much better here without you.
Actually, Thanksgiving and Christmas are particularly bizarre in New
York. It's not that lots of people leave. It's that everybody leaves.
The city that never sleeps lapses into a coma. Restaurants that are always
open are closed. Delis that you can go to 24 hours a day are dark. Shops
to whose owners you wave in friendly recognition every time you walk past
are shut tight. Some years ago, when Helen was working every Thanksgiving
and Christmas (that's another story), we tried to find a pizza place that
was even open, much less one that delivered. And that turned out to be
really, really hard! It's like a ghost town.
Come back, New York; all is forgiven!
Yak.
Well there you are.
What's that?
It says right here that young ones
are the most tender, the most easily devoured.
What !?
Pheasants. What did you think I meant?
Plurp. What are we going to do with all of these old photos?
In our continuing quest to unpack the boxes,
we've run into hundreds - probably thousands - of old photos. To reduce
the volume, we've combined several envelopes into one, tossed out all of
the negatives (never did use them anyway) and even thrown out the really
bad shots we probably shouldn't have kept in the first place. But that
still leaves thousands, from before we were born to last week.
We could throw them away, of course, but that's clearly not on the menu.
We are too attached to them as memories, even if we only look at them once
every twenty years.
It seems inevitable that we're going to digitize them, casting off their
mortal, analog forms, transmogrifying them into immortal bits. We've already
made this transition with audio. We just sent to the Salvation Army all
of
our old vinyl record albums (including the Beatles albums over which Helen
swooned as a teenager), adding the few we want and don't already have to
our Christmas CD lists. Of course, in ten years there won't be CDs either.
Music will simply be available on the Net, and no one will carry around
little plastic disks that they think of as music.
We haven't transmogrified our books though. Display technology just
isn't up to replacing paper yet. At least not for me. And, for some reason,
books have a greater emotional hold on me than vinyl albums or analog photographs.
Say - what will we do with all of this bookshelf space when we transmogrify
the books? Hmm, perhaps I should have thought of that earlier.
Surely the display medium for photos ten years from now is digital displays,
not chemically treated pieces of paper. The only questions are How
do we digitize them and When?
Doing it with current scanners would be very painful. You'd have to
shuffle each photo in turn into the scanner, push the buttons, and file
the scan away. Then what you've got is a scan of the photo in the middle
of a scanner background, and you've got to do a bunch of editing before
you get just the picture. Then you've got to color balance it, since the
red dyes in many of the real old photos have faded away, and often sharpen
it in places. That's a lot of work! And even then, all you get is a few
hundred DPI, not nearly the resolution of the photos themselves, so that's
just silly.
Some time in the near future, we'll probably be able to take all our
old shoeboxes full of photos to Fotomat and have them do high-res scans,
color balancing, and all the rest. But not just yet, at least as far as
I know.
So we'll keep the photos, and the shoeboxes, for another day.
Yak.
Have you read Steve's weblog?
No. What's it about?
It's like looking inside Steve's head.
It's Being
John Malkovich, but on the Web.
Yo. For many years, the Darwin Awards were given out pretty informally,
the annual announcement circulated around various Internet newsgroups.
Now, of course, they are dot-commies.
Darwin
Awards celebrate Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by commemorating
the remains of those who improved our gene pool by removing themselves
from it.
And for their improvements, we give thanks. In particular, here's our favorite
nominee for the 2000
Darwin Award:
The Daily Grind. The
owner of a chipping company in Maine was rent asunder by his own wood chipper
when he stumbled into the intake while trying to break up a bark jam without
first disconnecting the power.
But we probably favor this because it's a wood chipper story (always a
local hit) and because it takes advantage of a rare opportunity to use
that wonderful and classic phrase rent asunder.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was frightened
by all the
turkeys.
Thursday, November 23, 2000
Plurp. Today is Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. This
is the traditional day on which we celebrate our good fortune. Clearly,
it derived from ancient harvest festivals, but those early Vespuccians
gave it an extra twist. They were giving thanks for their good fortune
at having gotten free from their persecution or otherwise unfortunate life
circumstances in nasty old England, having survived the long and dangerous
sail across the Atlantic, and having found a land in which to settle that
seemed so abundant in natural resources.
In later years, it might not have occurred to them that they were also
celebrating their great good fortune at having landed on a continent whose
only inhabitants were part of stone age cultures without horses, guns,
steel swords, army-style military tactics or resistance to European diseases.
So to those of you fortunate enough to still be around to celebrate,
happy Thanksgiving!
Blab.
Yes, the zyx's got
lost in the email. Of course, since any arbitrary request takes two
weeks, it took me about two weeks to get it sent to you in the first
place, and now it's taken another two weeks to discover that you never
got them, and to re-send it. Sorry. Sincerely, the zyx lady.
See below.
Blab.
Where's your email address?
I cannot find it anywhere on your site. I had previously found the
PlurpMail@stevewhite.org address, and that's where I sent the zyx's the
first time, but now I can't even find that one. Sigh. Am I missing something?
Sincerely, the zyx lady, trying again to share the glory of the zyx's with
you.
Goodness! How very sloppy of us. We somehow allowed our Mail
link in the left margin to disappear. Perhaps it was dragged off by the
blue dog on one of his many romps around the cyber-neighborhood. At any
rate, there it is again. In fact, we're mea culping by putting it
on just about every page on the site.
What's more, our not-very-attentive
ISP has not been forwarding email sent to stevewhite.org,
as we so politely asked last time. We have just sent off a more, um, clearly
worded note to them.
And, salt in wound, we figured they were forwarding mail, so
we didn't check the mail to that account until tonight, and missed your
initial zyx missive. Shame on us!
Grumble, grumble. Bitch, bitch. Moan, moan.
Sorry, sorry.
I will happily post your zyx's shortly, but not just now; too busy eating
pheasant. :-)
Blab. Somewhere in the vast expanse of the turbulent Internet,
a machine emits this rather enigmatic string:
Ian Whalley, 2S-K23
Curiously, this is a comma-delimited list of Ian's
name and office number at IBM Research. Its deeper meaning, however, has
yet to be revealed.
Blab. In a continuing and perhaps never-ending response to Helen's
plea
for Blabs, a reader with a distinctly Transylvanian name reports:
Oh, yes, Steve. I read it!
I just didn't tell you. Vangyart
That's OK, Vangyart. We write it and we didn't tell you, after all.
Plurp. Bill Clinton pardoned
a turkey yesterday. Unfortunately, our self-imposed
ban on politics on Plurp prevents me from making the many obvious
jokes. But you get the idea.
Yo. Sign seen in Connecticut:
Turkey Grinders
Now there's a frightening image!
Plop. Usually, when you hold your cursor over the blue dog, some
relevant verbiage appears in a little hover help box. David
reports that, in the just-released Netscape 6.0, nothing at all appears.
A bug, of course.
Plurp Maxim # 359:
Never install a point-zero version of anything. Ever.
Remind me to rant at you some time about stirring the bits.
Plurp. What do you think of this?
PLEASE CLICK
HERE FOR LEGAL RESTRICTIONS AND TERMS OF USE APPLICABLE TO THIS SITE.
USE OF THIS SITE SIGNIFIES YOUR AGREEMENT TO THE TERMS OF USE.
Sort of a "click-wrap" agreement, I guess. Can this possibly be valid?
Imagine a near future in which every manufactured object has a clickable
warning on it like this which, when clicked upon, displays page after page
of incomprehensible
legalese. Would manufacturers really get away with carcinogenic cola,
toxic toast and diseased donuts? Hey, you must have agreed to it, right?
Yak.
Welcome, Kevin. Please tell
us what you do.
Thank you, Regis. I'm a DMO - a Dishwashing
Machine Operator in a restaurant near Kent, Washington.
Plurp.
Tonight we have
blue dog
with candied yams
and oyster stuffing.
Wednesday, November 22, 2000
Yak.
Steve: I've gotten
more response to my request to Blab at me from last
Saturday's Plurp than I have from anything else before it.
Helen: That's great.
Steve: Well, I gather that
I have about ten readers. One way to look at it is that I'm producing a
daily magazine for a readership of only ten people. It's kind of sobering.
Helen: Oh, I'm sure there are
more than that.
Steve: I doubt it.
So Helen, always concerned about my well-being and fragile ego, dear sweet
Helen turns out to have a sent a note to absolutely all of her friends
and family, pleading with them to Blab at us. This is, I'm sure,
partly responsible for the Blabfest today (and, consequently, the
astonishing length of Plurp today).
Our apologies for all of these self-serving demands. To make amends,
we promise not to make you do anything at all for a least a week. Except
for the people who didn't respond to these pleas - and you know who you
are.
Blab. An ambitious reader suggests:
A new Helenism:
'getting the project off the road'
We get the part about getting the project off the ground. The second
constituent
aphorism, however, seems more elusive. Skeptically, we await further
elucidation.
The bar for a proper Helenism is quite high, after all; it must be composed
of two constituent aphorisms that mean something similar, and it must cleverly
convey its meaning without seeming out of place
These are not mere mangled phrases, Mr.
J. Fred Shirley-Harold. No siree! These are acts of linguistic legerdemain!
Let that be a lesson to you.
Blab. A reader bubbling over with legalistic enthusiasm writes:
Isn't the Blue Dog copyrighted
property of another author? DO you have his/her permission to use
him on your log?
Shhh!
Blab. A minimalist reader writes:
Turi
... perhaps drawing our attention to the good work of the Toxics
Use Reduction Institute, or to one of the other 103,000 Google
references to turi - we're not sure.
Blab. No doubt outraged by our persistent prodding, a loyal reader
writes:
I understand the editing
staff has criticized the promotions department for not encouraging regular
visitors to this site. I, as a regular visitor, am offended by such
absurdities! Why, I logged on once in October, and once in November!
How much more regular do you want from your cyber-patrons?
Indeed. We want very much to encourage a periodic, if conceptually irregular,
readership.
Blab. A reader with an all-too-intimate understanding of New
York suggests:
...And I too would be distraught
if you threw yourself under a speeding bus. Maybe I'd be ok if you
threw yourself under a gridlocked NYC Taxi, but please try to avoid moving
objects....
You will be pleased to know that we spend the better part of our lives
trying to avoid moving objects.
Blab. A reader concerned with efficiency writes:
I was on vacation, missed
Plurp greatly while I was gone. Please, don't throw yourself under a bus
(or anything else). If, despite the pleadings of your faithful readers,
you still feel you must throw yourself under something, why not a train?
Signed, the zyx lady
Because of the voluminous and heartwarming outpouring of words on this
topic, I am pleased to announce that we have decided against throwing ourselves
under speeding busses. Instead, we now plan to throw ourselves under the
covers.
Blab. A reader who might be the same reader as that last reader
graciously suggests:
I have a perfect solution
to your stuff problems - that is, if you haven't already gotten rid of
it all (I'm reading the archives now so I don't know how things have progressed
in the past week). Just make a big list of the stuff you consider more
valuable, and let your Plurp readers have some of it. They'd pay postage
+ hassle fee for you having to send it to them, the stuff would get a good
home, your readers would have something nifty from you, etc. So, sort of
a web garage sale. Of course, you could go to eBay and try to get lots
of money for it, but it doesn't sound like these are expensive items, just
valuable in a different way. So, what do you say? I'd definitely be interested....
Sincerely, the zyx lady
This is a marvelous idea! We would be delighted to send random samples
of our stuff to any Plurp reader who send us their name and
address. (We promise not to publish your name & address on Plurp.)
You may acquire a valuable artifact or incredible conversation piece that
will define your life from here on out. You may very well learn something
wonderful and important about us. But more to the point, we'll have less
stuff
around here!
Seriously! Send us your address and we'll send you stuff.
Blab. Our Massachussetts correspondent checks in with a bevy
of rather well-defined opinions.
Steve, I think you are getting
to the end of your serial addiction with the log - you worry too much!
I will admit that I sent ONE response to your saturday post requesting
we write SOMETHING if we were reading on Saturday. Then, Sunday night
when nothing appeared all day Sunday, I wrote another Blab. So someone
besides MA is reading your log :). Please just do what you do best:
ponder and communicate the ponderings. MAVA
We can now reveal that our threat to throw ourselves under a speeding bus
was just a shameless attempt to figure how many people we could influence
into doing a strange but seemingly random task - in this case, sending
words to our Web site on a Saturday. This was required for our yearly
renewal of funding from the Trilateral
Commission, which requires us to demonstrate influence over at least
seven non-initiates in order for them to continue to use our Web site as
a subliminal channel
for their social policies. Fnord.
You will be pleased to know that we have now received this funding, so
we will continue to make subtle changes to your belief structures. Thank
you for your participation.
Blab. Our seasonally inspired Southwest correspondent writes:
It's something else to give
thanks for this Thursday. Thanks, Steve. Your Southwest Correspondent
What is?
Blab.
Dear Plurp Just
a note to say that we are out hear reading. But some of us prefer
to be thought of was wblog voyeurs. But we are out here watching
and reading...Rubies61
Ooh! First I have groupies; now I have
voyeurs! Where will it all end?
Blab. A suggestion, apparently along these same lines, but right
over the top.
Happy Thanksgiving, Steve.
Take a lobster to lunch. One for Helen, too. God knows there are too many
turkeys in the world. Eating them just encourages them. --Marianne
No more of that, then!
Blab. Once again, and as mysteriously as ever, Mia
enters the conversation:
Cowled, the exhausted scion
of Mesopotemia drank lead from a nozzle. The bears whirled. There, in the
interstices of the frantic culture, a moment of rest. Mia and the
policemen exchange vows. Cats Bins are trhe same color as toast.
We wish them the best.
Blab. And this snippet, apparently from the
Writers themselves:
Ms. Riegel raised concerns
about the plot before signing her contract, "I wanted to make sure
it was developed properly. I’ve had a lot of personal experience with this
kind of situation-people close to me have gone through similar things --
and I needed to know that AMC was as committed as I was to making it real."
Yow. Seven Plurp points to the first reader who figures
out what this
is.
Plop. Rest easy! Remember those goons
at the FBI that have set up a system called Carnivore that can
read all of our email? Well, they swear to us that it does
not "overcollect" information from us.
"I think that it's fair to
say that it does pretty much what the FBI says it did. For the most part,
it does not overcollect," [said Henry H. Perritt, dean of the Illinois
Institute of Technology's Chicago-Kent College of Law].
Pretty much. For the most part.
The bureau says Carnivore
has been used about 25 times, mostly in matters involving national security.
Mostly.
See? I feel better already!
Plop. Wanna see something really scary? You can find out
just about anybody's birthday. Click here.
All you have to know is their name, maybe the first digit or two of their
ZIP code (i.e. what state they live in), and perhaps their middle initial.
That's it. In fact, you can often find ZIP codes for places they lived
ten or more years ago.
The linked site is a come-on for another site that will give you their
exact address ... for a mere $35 charged on your credit card. Still, that's
pretty cheap for someone to be able to track you down, doncha think?
Know someone's phone number - even if it's not registered in their name
- and want to know their address? Click here.
Yo. Remember those new Internet domain names (TLDs) that were
approved
last week? Here are some of the proposals
that were rejected:
-
sex - an obvious TLD, IMHO;
why wasn't this approved?
-
soup - oh, this definitely
needs its own TLD !
-
antiques - sure; why not also lamps,
floorwax
and christmastreelights
-
factory - uh huh
-
opera - there must be trillions
of these sites
-
sucks - this should be approved
and all future proposals of this quality should be submitted to sites in
this domain
What were they thinking?
Plurp.
The blue dog had
an unlisted number. It
was seven.
Tuesday, November 21, 2000
Blab. An extremely ambivalent reader writes:
Saturdays are a nice touch,
but I wouldn't be too upset if you gave them up. On the other hand,
I would be very distraught if you threw yourself under a
speeding bus.
Thank you. We think.
Blab. Another kindly reader votes to save us from the
speeding bus:
Saturday...on Tuesday.
Our heartfelt thanks.
Blab. Checking in on that Saturday
Plurp
while ignoring it and asking a funny rhetorical question at the same time,
a very busy reader writes:
David
Chess blogged Rich Robinson's rantsome
time ago, so I'll tell you basically the same thing I told him.
Robinson's message boils down to "there are some good weblogs out there,
but most are bad." This is a specific case of Sturgeon's
law: "Ninety percent of everything is crap." My question is,
why does it take Robinson three pages to say what Theodore Sturgeon wrote
in one sentence?
Blab. A reader with a disturbing interest in the blue dog reports:
Blue Dog sighted at Xerox,
and other
pages. Also, don't miss your Blue Dog Christmas
Screensaver.
And, hopefully from the same obsessed reader:
Also available at the bluedogart.com
site, the Blue
Dog & Xerox story!
This, apparently, is what the folks at Xerox are doing while they figure
out how to gut their research division.
Ho, ho, ho.
Blab. A Webwise reader writes:
Clicked on the link to Amazon's
page for "A Blue Dog Christmas"--did you note the
entries in the "People
who bought this book also bought...." section? Sort of a macabre
sesamestreetesque "which one of these is not like the others" puzzle.
Well, some of them make sense, but we were a bit puzzled by the presense
of The
Cases That Haunt Us : From Jack the Ripper to Jonbenet Ramsey.
Unless the blue dog is somehow implicated? Maybe that's what he's doing
when
he runs off !
Plop. Hey! Whatever happened to that talented reader who claimed
to be able to sing the alphabet backwards? We were promised
a rendition. Perhaps it got lost in the email?
Plurp.
Buffalo.
I'm watching NBC this morning, and
do you know what I'm seeing?
Mrs. Riegel?
I'm seeing a goddamn
blizzard in Buffalo, that's what I'm seeing! Thirty-three goddamn inches
of snow! Cars sliding into other cars! People trapped in their houses!
What the hell is going on up there?
Uh, Mrs. Riegel, I ...
Thirty-three goddamn inches,
Peter! Now I also have the script in front of me, and it seems to call
quite clearly for three inches. Children frolicking, building snowmen.
A local human interest piece.
Yes, well, I ...
Now we're having the governor call
for a goddamn state of emergency! Shut down the city! Change the entire
plot line! We can't even put that political claptrap on this morning. Do
you know that I've got sixty-seven writers doing nothing but frantic rewrites?
It probably won't even make sense! It's right before Thanksgiving for crissakes.
We've already had five sponsors cancel on us. Five!
I'm sorry, Mrs. Riegel ...
Peter, I want you to tell me exactly
what went wrong up there.
Well, I ... I'm not sure but, but
... maybe I miskeyed it?
Miskeyed it Peter? Miskeyed it?
You turned an idyllic scene into a goddamn state of emergency because you
can't
type!?
Uh, well, ...
Peter. I want you in my office. Tomorrow
morning. 8:00.
There? In New York? But the roads
are closed!
8:00, Peter. Don't be late. And Peter?
Yes, Mrs. Riegel?
It will be brief.
Plurp. Here's a shocking headline: Security
Problem Found in Microsoft Software. Rather akin, we think, to Baby
Born in California, or Car Sold in Texas.
Yo. It's Take a Box to Work Week here in Plurpville. In
unpacking
the apartment, we found box after box of my packrattery - all of my
notebooks from college, books on economics and philosophy, knick knacks
that used to litter my grad school office. We have no room for all this
stuff, but I can't bear to toss them.
So here's the epiphany: Take 'em to work!
But where will you put six boxes? asks Helen this morning. Here's
where the Master Plan is revealed. You see, I've been preparing for this
day for a long time. Years, in fact. Slowly, insidiously, day after day
for many years, I have accumulated stuff in my office.
Oh, not just books. And not just papers. I mean Books. And Papers!!
Every horizontal surface is stacked waist high in manila envelopes, bags
of magazines, and paper, paper, paper. It's heaped in piles on the floor.
It cascades off the bookshelves. Every chair except the one I'm sitting
in (and sometimes even that one) has a pile of papers on it. Over by the
whiteboard is a stack of wood samples from a failed cabinetry contractor.
And there is an entire dust-bunny ecology beneath it all, breeding and
plotting their own dust-bunny plots.
Do you see the brilliance of this? I mean - six boxes? Who's going
to notice six measly boxes in all of this? Muahahahahah!
Plurp.
The blue dog decided
to be a smarter
breed of inkjet
printers.
Monday, November 20, 2000
Blab. Responding, we think, to our entreaty
to Saturday
Plurpers to declare themselves, thereby averting
us throwing ourselves under speeding busses, one or more readers, all after
midnight on Saturday, wrote:
Save yourself
It is Saturday (or just was) &
here is something, as requested, typed into the tiny box.
The day prior to Sunday and follwing
Friday.
Saturday! Saturday! Saturday!
Traaaaaa-laaaaah!
Plurpless on a Sunday, I sit waiting
on the edge of my ergonomic chair. Were the Saturday Plurp surveys
triple punched and over-charred? Has voter apathy eliminated Weekend
Plurpity?
I almost didn't read your Saturday
log, but serendipity intervened and then I discovered a Friday entry that
I'd missed, and wow, that was neat. Also neat was the experience
of only being able to see five characters at a time of big long words like
serendipity go whizzing past on the screen. - M
Of course I read Saturday's entry!
It is an extra treat when I come to work on Monday! - your Midwest
correspondent
Where do you go to watch Twister?
Or is there a cable channel? TwisterCam!
Hot fudge Saturday! Saturday
drivers! Saturday, bloddy Saturday! Never on a Saturday!
A gratifying response! This seems to indicate that there is at least one
person who reads
Plurp on Saturdays, possibly a very prolific person.
Or several people. Or something.
It occurs to us, however, that we have not done a proper control for
the throwing-oneself-under-speeding-busses vote. So let's do this. All
of you who really don't care what happens with Plurp on Saturdays
and would prefer it if we threw ourselves under the first conveniently
speeding bus, please say so in that Blab box now.
Results of the vote (or a maudlin obituary, as appropriate) to be announced
later this week.
Blab. A prognosticatory reader, neurons tweaked by our
impatience for digital movies, writes:
In the future, movies will
be distributed to the theaters only as concepts, and played on sophisticated
semantic playback devices witrh big red noses!
Yes, well. This will greatly attenuate the production process. One can
only imagine this system hooked up to a program that generates random movie
ideas of the form It's like X meets
Y :
It's like Predator meets
Jurassic Park
It's like Gidget meets Pippi Longstocking
It's like Home Alone meets Edward
Scissorhands
Can you think of similar examples?
 Yow.
In a fit of whimsy, Ian showed up
this morning with a book entitled A
Blue Dog Christmas, which is exactly what you might think. Included
is a "free" Christmas ornament which, I fear, will adorn our tree this
year. Isn't that special?
It is, one might claim, unfair of me to have expropriated a funny-looking
dog for something as silly as this weblog. But, looked at another way,
this may be the very thing that catapults an otherwise obscure Cajun artist
to immortality.
Plop.
Yo. Super-sleuth Dave
actually tracked down the article that I couldn't find that discusses the
distressing fact that the
Internet is almost out of URLs.
According to [Network Solutions
spokesperson] Norberth, repeated complaints from frustrated URL applicants
prompted an official inquiry into how many URLs were actually still available.
After an extensive search the company discovered that only five remained.
They are:
Frighteningly, since this article first appeared in May of this year, www.ButterButterButterButterFrog.com
(my personal favorite) has been purchased (but not be me).
For the last four, the bidding is now open!
Plop. Frost on the grass this morning. Might be a bug in the
summer module. We'll have to delay that beach party until we retest everything.
How annoying.
Plurp. I love New York for lots of reasons. One of the things
I love is its polyculturalism.
At IBM, I've worked with people from India, China, Japan, Argentina,
Germany, Switzerland, France, England, Scotland, Russia, Israel, Sweden,
the Netherlands, Italy, Canada, Vietnam, Egypt, and probably lots of other
places of which I'm not even aware. I've worked with Sikhs, Jews, Bhuddists,
Christians, Hindus, and those of no religious affiliation.
At home, the deli we frequent is run by folks from Korea, the dry cleaners
by folks from China. In our building, one of the doormen is from Ireland,
one porter is from Puerto Rico, another from somewhere in the Caribbean.
When I visited Japan a few years ago, I was impressed by its monocultural
society. I, as a gaijin, really stood out. In Germany, 25 years ago at
least, everyone was German, and even people from Yugoslavia drew notice.
New York isn't like that. Sure, there are racial and ethnic divides.
Sometimes, the Really Stupid People go flail at whomever they think is
ethnically bad. But, by and large, we all get along. We all live here,
we all deal politely with each other, and we all appreciate the diversity.
It's my image of the way the world will be, once we all figure out that
we're all just human.
Yow.
Plurp.
The blue dog was
allergic
to velveteen.
Sunday, November 19, 2000
Plurp. Another day of deboxing
the apartment. As expected, it has gotten much slower and much more
difficult as the boxes now seem only to contain letters, photos, and memory-tugging
artifacts. We only crawled through a few boxes today, but we still managed
to fill several bags and several boxes full of Salvation Army donations
and just plain trash. I don't know how that works, that somehow a few boxes
of stuff can expand to many boxes of trash. But that's OK - we did great.
The hardest part for me was going through a box of photos from a period
of my life with an old girlfriend. There were so many pictures of happy
and loving times. I missed them, as I missed that time, and I cried. We
did not, of course, take pictures of the trying, painful times that were
also a part of that period. I don't know if that's good or bad. In some
ways I would prefer to forget those bad times, but I know how important
it is that I never do.
Yow. For the first time, a major movie has been sent
to a theater digitally, via satellite. This marks the beginning of
the end for major movies being done "on film". And it's about time, too!
I don't know about you, but analog film drives me crazy. No matter how
new the copy is, there are hairs on the film, scratches that jitter back
and forth for many minutes, and splotches that can only be explained by
having Coke poured over the film before it's shown. Yech!
I hated analog "phonograph records" for the same reasons. The most intense
parts of a piece were always ruined after a few playings, becoming them
fuzzy and distorted. And, except for a very few premium manufacturers,
the records always had pops in them that made it seem like the performers
were cracking their knuckles in front of the microphones. Aaaaah!
When CDs finally replaced vinyl records, it happened all of a sudden.
In a single year, "record" stores went from 95% vinyl and 5% CDs to 5%
vinyl and 95% CDs. Today, you can only find vinyl in antique stores. Where
it belongs!
I can't wait for the same transition in movies!
Plurp.
The blue dog is
now on the doorstep of
the Goodwill at 127th St.,
in a large brown box labeled
"Living Room".
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