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2000.12.31 : 2001.01.06
Saturday, January 6, 2001
Blab. A reader sends us what would at first seem to
be a mysterious message:
In the Pangboche Monastery
sidebar, delete the reference to yeti on p. 41.
But not
to those Web Searchists among us. It's a pity, really, deleting that
reference, since the Yeti
scalp really is in the Pangboche Monastery. Heh.
Blab. Someone who can only be Ian
writes:
Right! How about a medium
size blab box?!
That can be your project.
Blab. On the topic of the mysterious disappearance
and possible reappearance of Blogger
Beth, a reader who might be Beth writes:
Yes, I'm back! The reports
of my disappearance are merely the histrionic imaginings of my errand boy,
who is soon to be chastised for copying David Chess's (and Ian Whalley's)
design for permalinks. What with all this chastising lately, I may have
to just break down and host my own dang weblog, but my errand boy claims
he will have little purpose for living if I remove this task from his list.
I think he's exaggerating. I may just have to come up with new errands
for him. -Beth
And we were there when they broke up. We feel so special.
Anyhow, welcome back!
Blab. While we were vegetating, our readers were working hard.
AHA! I started catching up
on old Plurp entries since I got back from my netless vacation, and I saw
your challenge to find a gun controllable
from the internet.
I found it!
From the
RISKS digest, Aug 17, 2000:
The Thailand Research Fund
has unveiled a new robot, resembling a giant ladybug with a couple of extra
limbs. The unit is equipped with visible-spectrum and thermal vision, and
a gun. According to Prof. Pitikhet Suraksa, its shooting habits can be
automated, or controlled "from anywhere through the Internet" with a password.
So, do I win that dollar? :)
For what it's worth, it took me about
half an hour to track it down. I knew I had seen a reference to it somewhere,
but I couldn't find it through straightforward searching. I couldn't even
find it through a simple search at the RISKS digest itself. I had to scan
through the titles in the indexes of the digests published circa when I
remembered seeing it ("a few months ago, but not too many").
-Beth,
who also noted when delving through
the RISKS digest that her
first submission to RISKS was posted, and that we all got a big Xmas
present when
a big honkin' asteroid narrowly missed smashing into Earth. So if you're
upset that Santa didn't bring you anything nice this year, maybe you'd
better just be glad he didn't bring you (and the rest of us) a city-destroying
hunk of coal...
Well, dunno. The referenced link from RISKS four-oh-fours. The Bangkok
Post doesn't seem to have a search facility. That's OK, 'cause here's
a
similar story that doesn't four-oh-four.
It's not clear to us, however, if this bot could be controlled
from the Web in principle or if it is actually controllable from
the Web right now (as required by Ian's bet).
Either way, we are greatly impressed by Beth's resourcefulness!
These Web Search bets are so complicated.
Yo. It's a four-movie weekend, films in theaters having piled
up so high that we could no longer step over them. Today was Thirteen
Days and Quills.
Thirteen
Days is a wonderful movie. Centered around the White House principals
during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, it is well drawn, personal and
tense throughout.
I was ten years old at the time, in fifth grade. My father worked at
nearby Vandenberg Air Force Base, where they tested the ballistic missiles
that would have tossed hydrogen bombs at the Soviet Union if things had
turned out only a little differently. The scene in the movie of kids doing
a duck-and-cover drill under their school desks could easily have been
my class, and the Atlas missile that was test-launched from Vandenberg
at the tensest possible moment was one that I certainly saw, all the kids
rushing
out onto the playground after hearing the rumble, yelling Missile!
and watching the flame rise atop its tail of smoke until it vanished.
I vaguely recall the Cuban missile crisis as it happened in my childhood.
I had no idea how close the world came to annihilation. Now I do, and it
is chilling. Well acted, well written, a really good drama. Even though
I knew how it turned out, I was on the edge of my seat the whole time,
wondering how it would turn out. Highly recommended.
Not so Quills,
the much-heralded movie-from-a-play about the last days of the Marquis
de Sade. The cinematography is good, even lush in places, a plausible recreation
of revolutionary France, even if the insane asylum in which most of the
action takes place is remarkably clean for the period. The acting roster
is the movie's strength. Geoffrey Rush as de Sade is fabulous, both brilliant
and mad at the same time. Michael Caine as the evil and controlling Doctor
is pretty good, but you've seen him as this character before. Kate Winslett,
blah blah blah, though she has one unintentionally hilarious scene during
a fire in the madhouse that looks so like an out take from Titanic
that you expect to see DiCaprio stumbling around in the background somewhere.
And newcomer Amelia Warner as the Doctor's nunnery-raised virginal bride-turned-seductress
is almost distracting enough to keep us from noticing the plot.
But not quite. The Marquis, imprisoned for his scandalous writings in
an insane asylum, is plausibly drawn as teetering between a simple manic
pornographer and a desperate compulsive, but we never understand how he
got to be so slatheringly perverse. The Doctor, sad to say, is ham-handedly
introduced as the true sadistic villain from his very first scene. It could
not have been a more blunt plot weapon if the word had been tattooed on
Michael Caine's forehead, and considerable dramatic irony is squandered
because of it.
Much of the plot develops very predictably. The Doctor gets nastier
and nastier, de Sade more and more desperate to write as his means of doing
so are denied, a priest slides down the coal chute of perdition as he becomes
corrupt, lustful, sadistic and masochistic all at the same time. And poor
Winslett is doomed to reprise her role as the oh-so-naughtily lusty young
woman.
Disappointing, really. Good pieces of material, badly sewn into place.
Not particularly recommended.
Yak. Reacting to a TV news story about disposing of Christmas
trees:
I do love wood chipper stories;
don't you? Human interest and wanton violence all at the same time!
 Plurp.
Stunned by Amelia Warner,
the blue dog spent day after day
without food or sleep trying
to find her picture on the
Web.
Friday, January 5, 2001
Blab. Crawling through ancient
issues of Plurp, a reader exclaims:
whar are inalienable rights
Whar indeed! Here's an
explanation, right from that well known source of all knowledge, the Vegan
Starter Pack:
As a society, we recognize
basic rights of humans to their lives and bodies. We consider these rights
"inalienable", meaning that no one can take them away.
Very succinct! These folks are probably good conversationalists. We'll
have to invite them to our rib roast on Saturday.
Blab. Perhaps confused by our continuing references to Baldur's
Gate II, a reader writes:
Oh, I thought you said HOCKEY-playing...
Quite all right! It's a natural confusion.
Blab. Adding to this confusion is a reader known only as H:
Hard to think of clever things to write when I haven't showered
in two days or done anything but bash monsters
in Baldur's Gate II.
dear blabbers...........it's not so bad that Steve DID actually PLAY BG
for the entire week, he just looks so fetching while doing it. Going into
the room to hug him, I found myself sticking to him. Hmmmmmm......never
thought it was because he hadn't showered.....for two days............
H
I do recall someone coming into the room in the midst of a pitched battle.
But, between keeping track of all of the spells and those pesky Shadow
Wolves, I don't remember the details. I wonder who that was?
Blab. Following up on yesterday's comments
about too many Steves, a reader, having perhaps imbibed too many blogs,
amplifies thusly:
To be a bit of a nidge: I
meant rivate home page, outisde IBM
Our reader is, no doubt, the victim of that teeny tiny Blab box,
and we do apologize. So let us boldly translate this as:
To be a bit of a noodge:
I meant private home page, outside IBM
This seems to make the problem even harder. What is the most common
first name of people who work at IBM Research and have their own (private)
Web sites?
Whew. Dunno! Readers are invited to submit their guesses, both plausible
and implausible.
Blab. A reader submits various variations on a theme, all in
rather dubious taste.
Jesus is walking across a
river with Mary, Joseph and the Holy Spirit. Jesus can only carry one of
them at a time. If He leaves the Holy Spirit and Mary alone on the shore,
the Holy Spirit will impregnate Mary again and make the story too complicated.
If He leaves Mary and Joseph alone on the shore they will have a terrible
fight, file for divorce, and ruin the whole story line for thousands of
years. How many times does Jesus have to cross the river to avoid an angry
call from His editor?
A judge must cross a ravine in a two-person
hang glider with a convicted sex offender, a corrupt prosecutor and a small
girl. If she leaves the sex offender and the small girl alone on either
side, well, that would be career suicide. If she leaves the corrupt prosecutor
and the small girl alone on either side, the prosecutor will bring the
girl up on charges of soliciting ...
An obsessive-compulsive who can only
cross the street while carrying someone on her shoulders is waiting on
the corner with a lesbian, a gay man and a homophobe ...
A man with a pacemaker, a cell phone
and a cerbral disorder gets a call from his doctor ...
Blab. Pondering our ponderous statements
about ambiguity and humor in various languages, a reader writes:
Well, isn't Java itself a
pun, er, a joke
Is it? Does it have an unexpected ending? Lead one covertly in the wrong
direction before revealing a true meaning? Use multiple meanings in an
esthetically satisfying way?
Blab. A fastidious reader types into that Big
Blab Box:
Steve, you have a typo on
this page. Hey, I'm not premier tester for nothing...
Seriously though, your second sentence
should be "If your browser iS properly configured..."
I'm not sure if this necessitated
a big blab box but I was clicking around....
We have the best readers! It's now fixed. Thanks!
Blab. A reader fond of digital percussion exudes:
sdfsdfsdfsfdsfdd
We especially like that last little variation.
Blab. Some readers need to buy a clue. Others need to buy a vowel.
This one seems in need of spaces, at the very least.
isitalengthlimitordidihitenter?Imusthavehitenterhereitgoesagain
Donations should be made directly to the reader.
Plop.
To the management,
Please note that the heating in the
Big Room With Trees is once again malfunctioning and it is very, very cold.
Worse, the ceiling material has apparently deteriorated further and bits
of it are flaking off and falling all over the place.
This is not the first time this has
happened. Not only did it happen earlier this week, but it seems to happen
consistently, year after year, for months at a time.
While we are pleased that the smaller
interior office and residential spaces do not often suffer such catastrophic
failures of their infrastructure, we are very dismayed that the
Big Room With Trees continues to be maintained in such a shoddy and unprofessional
manner.
We would appreciate your immediate
and urgent attention to this matter. While we would prefer not to take
more formal actions, we feel that we will have no choice should this situation
persist.
Sincerely,
Steve R. White
(With apologies to Ian.)
Yo. Our Very First Plurp Seafood
Cthulhu Haiku Contest was rather thin in responses. You may recall
that you were asked to submit your very best Cthulhu
haiku on the topic of your favorite seafood. Perhaps its very form
contained too many difficult constraints. For whatever reason, we got only
one entrant:
I'm not familiar
with the mythos, so I'll say
the Old Ones ate shark.
Very nice! This entrant is, of course, the Official Winner. And, since
the sponsors have withdrawn support for subsequent incarnations of this
contest, it is also the Only Winner Ever. Congratulations.
Yo. Our Very First Plurp Caption
Contest was much more popular. Well, by comparison anyway; we got
two whole entries.
You may recall that you were asked to submit your most clever caption
for this picture.
And here are our two entries. The first is one with which I feel a certain
empathy:
Caption: "Yummy!"
The second is quite sly, and attributed to someone named Beth:
Caption contest entry (do
you have a "particularly disturbing" category?): Cutting-edge massage therapists
are now pioneering a new technique known as laparoscopic massage. They
make a small incision in the umbilicus of the client, and then the massage
therapist inserts a finger directly into the abdominal cavity. This gives
new meaning to the phrase "deep massage" that was heretofore unthinkable.
The 17.7% survival rate (which surgeon critics attribute to the lack of
sterile technique) hasn't deterred the many clients who are lining up for
the procedure, primarily so that they can brag at cocktail parties about
having undergone something so new and shocking. --Beth
The judges have declared both entries as Official Winners, the first in
the Minimalist category and the second in the Particularly Disturbing category.
Our thanks to both of the entrants. And congratulations to the winners!
Yow. Bovine Inversus.
He's so clever! I sat there clicking three times before I got it. Very
nice.
Plurp. And so, a tribute to Bovine
Inversus, in ten parts.
I. A woman, clothed
in robes of butterfly wings, removes the ears of three men to whom she
is betrothed, promising each her undying love.
II. A man without ears wanders
into a convention of scholars and is entranced by a device whose clever
clockwork of flutes and bassoons is intended to replace the human facility
of longing.
III. A scholar writes a book
on the subject of mechanisms made entirely from musical instruments. Some
years later, the book is discovered in the library of a distant city by
a boy whose goats have run amok. The boy's arms are severed by accident
during a High Masonic ritual.
IV. A woman who has never spoken
makes a stew from the arms of a boy to feed an artisan without a tongue
who has dedicated his life to the milling of perfect gears and levers.
It is his hope that a machine can be constructed from these gears and levers
that will express his love to two women he has never met.
V. A musician writes a recipe
for stewed tongue in the margin of a concerto for bassoons. He is later
imprisoned by a woman who wears scarves made from the skin of her lovers.
There, she forces him to fabricate Masonic rituals in which the legs of
goats are severed.
VI. A young deaf man who longs
for the undying love of a woman becomes a goat herder outside of a distant
city. During a previously predicted eclipse, the goats turn into butterflies
and are caught inside a devious mechanism by two men who are betrothed
to the same woman.
VII. A book written by a scholar
with no ears or legs is misinterpreted by a woman who wishes only to be
loved as an injunction against speaking or walking. The book is later stolen
by a man who collects flutes.
VIII. Two women who could not
walk fall in love with a flute collector that they have never met. Both
women follow the outlines of an obscure Masonic ritual, one woman composing
a concerto and the other removing the skin of three prisoners from a distant
city.
IX. An artisan is found enmeshed
in a machine of unknown purpose, his tongue torn from his head by slyly
arranged gears. The tongue is subsequently eaten by a goat with no legs.
X. Two men whose ears had been
lost earlier in life construct a device whose purpose is to weave cloth
from the wings of butterflies. Much later, a convention of scholars speculates
that the device was intended to predict eclipses.
Yo. 'Machine'
Politician Exposed by Photos, from no lesser authority than the
Washington Post. (whalley.org
via SapphireBlue
via Chris somebody).
What we are seeing in these photos,
he postulates, is "a machine that has defaulted into standby mode." At
a press conference in which attention is directed elsewhere, he said, the
robot would "go into a temporary shutdown state in which it assumes a preprogrammed
pose while waiting its turn to reactivate and begin speaking."
Plurp.
The blue dog defaulted into
standby mode while
waiting to reactivate and begin
speaking.
Thursday, January 4, 2001
Blab. Awakening from a night terror about Steve
and me playing Baldur's Gate
II obsessively for days, a reader suggests:
Suspicious heroes should
make a MENTAL + Perception + 3d6 roll, with a TN of 20. Those heroes who
succeed sense that "things just don't look right" -- as if things are just
a little too perfect. Any characters who roll 24 or greater will notice
a bushy, reddish-brown foxtail underneath the kimono of the servant girl.
Indeed! This might make an outstanding proposed move in Dave's
nomic. The reader is encouraged to propose it.
Blab. A reader fascinated with the statistical distribution of
first names in local environments writes:
Is Steve the most common
name in IBM Research? Or is it just that most IBM Reasearch guys with personal
web pages are called Steve? Or is it just me? (Sorry Dave, wrong name!)
I don't actually know the answer to this. It is equally likely that the
most common first name in IBM Research is Raja, or perhaps Wen. I don't
think I have a personal page (yet) at IBM Research. Unless I've
mislaid one there and then forgotten?
There are, however, several people in IBM who call themselves Steve
White. One is a marketing guy in San Francisco. Another is a Unix performance
expert in Austin. Yet another is, um, me. We always get each others' email,
of course, and we typically forward it to the correct Steve White. It's
a bit like having mail delivered to a big dorm where everyone is named
J.
Fred Shirley-Harold.
Yak. A flight attendant looks with concern at something on the
food service cart.
Flight attendant:
I'm always worried about getting a finger in that.
Passenger: Me too.
Plop. Having failed in our last-ditch effort to extend our Florida
hooky-playing through the weekend, we are sad to report our return to the
Frozen North, especially as there's another snowstorm predicted for Friday.
Meanwhile the late-night weather reports always end the same way: And
it's 72 in San Diego, making us question our sanity for ever leaving
there.
Plurp. Where does the term "last-ditch effort" come from, anyhow?
Is it a WW I reference having to do with trench warfare? If so, it's probably
much too grisly for polite use.
Ooh! Web search!
It turns out to be William
of Orange:
There's one certain means
by which I can be sure never to see my country's ruin: I will die in the
last ditch.
Plurp.
A matronly woman is returning
a package at the lingerie counter. "You can see my bosoms through
this," she hisses. "Thank you madame," replies the clerk, "but that won't
be necessary."
Yo. Hey! Those rocket scientists at the U.S. Postal Service have
a great new Internet-inspired business model: If demand decreases, raise
your prices.
It seems that more and more people are sending mail via the Internet
rather than snail mail. Imagine that! This results in less revenue for
the Postal Service. In fact, they had losses totaling $199 million over
the past year. So what's their new plan? Raise the price of first-class
stamps.
Genius! Why go through all those painful cost-cutting maneuvers? Why
bother thinking up new services that people actually want to pay for? Heck.
Just raise prices when demand falls.
Why didn't we think of that?
Yo. Have you ever wanted a little device that could disable those
obnoxious cell phones into which people increasingly prattle in public
places? Check out the C-Guard
Cellular Firewall (sic).
C-Guard regulates cellular
communications by transmitting low power signaling on the cellular system
control channels, thus disabling call establishment. Cellular telephones
located in a C-Guard protected area indicate No Service and cannot transmit
or receive via the cellular system.
Now all we need is the hand-held version.
Plurp. Why do little kids have so much energy when they don't
have to do anything? Some bug in the evolution module, we suspect.
Could someone please look into that?
Yo. English is so odd. The word class, in class act,
class
warfare and class schedule, means three completely different
things. This is fixed by complex rules about context and deep knowledge
of trillions of "common sense" facts. Making a parser is way too hard!
Who designed this language, anyhow?
Conversely, can you write a pun in Java?
Plurp.
One night a princess slipped
into her bed only to find a frog there. "Goodness!" said the princess.
"What are you doing in my bed, my good frog?" "I am waiting for you to
find me, my good princess," replied the frog. After years of psychoanalysis,
the princess came to realize that the frog represented her deep-seated
desire to have conjugal relations with a pond. "Our hour is up," said the
frog.
Plurp.
The next night, a man with
a green feather shot an apple off of the head of a fox. "Nothing to it,"
said the man, who then proceeded to shoot a bunch of grapes off the head
of a goose and a cherry off the head of a twenty-pound bag of wheat.
Plurp.
Problem 38. A boat,
an arrow and a man's son walk into a bar. How many trips do they have to
make across the river?
Plurp.
"Is this where you want me?"
asked the young woman in the robe, a little uncertainly. "No," said the
man with the camera. "Over there, on the pedestal."
Yo. Checking in after a worrying absence, Beth
tells us:
I'm
just tired and sick of having my personal moisture assaulted on all fronts
Yes, that can be a debilitating experience. Or so we've heard. Anyway,
she still exists, and that's a good thing.
And look at that! Somehow permalinks snuck into her site without our
noticing, complete with Chessian
icons. Nice!
Yow. Chess his own self is back with a frightening
backlog of links. Looks like our weekend reading is already enqueued
for us.
Yo. Why do people write blogs? The reasons vary, of course. Heck,
even our reasons vary. But Ian
is very clear on his motivations: it allows him to play around with awful
Perl hacks. Perhaps we should start rating sites by (lines of content)
/ (lines of Perl).
Yak. Helen on blogs:
All of these interbred weblogs
are like the salons in late 19th century Paris where intellectuals, artists
and poets sat around discussing esoterica. The fine arts salons, for instance,
were where Monet first exhibited his art, which was seldom received well.
We're clearly on our way to international fame; our blog is already
not received well! Please pass the absinthe.
Plurp.
The suspicious hero rolled
exactly 38 and gasped, knowing
that his defenestration was
imminent at the hands of the
blue dog.
Wednesday, January 3, 2001
Blab. Well, the minions of Plurp are back in
force from their midwinter festivities, spouting forth sanity-challenging
drivel and mindless gibbering. Like this spew of phrases, perhaps triggered
by our diatribe about stirring the bits:
Bit stew! Bit flambee!
Stir-fried bits!!!! he hehehehehehehehehehe
Blab. From that Big
Blab Box:
I glove you fnuly,
Fnuly, fnear!
Life with hit's feather,
Rife with hit's lear!
Pleeny-pleeny too-fish,
Qulming Quulm!
He glove thee snimely
Snimely snummmm!
And they say drug use is declining! Fneh!
Blab. Another mysterious missive from the populous of Plurp:
web pages with "sailing"
and "decrepitude" e-mail
A reference to Yeats
perhaps? Or something
else? We may never know.
Blab. A robot named Roy, expressing its heartfelt concern about
the integrity of our site (rather than trying out for the Turing test)
writes:
Subj: Broken link in www.stevewhite.org
Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2001 8:43:59 PM
Eastern Standard Time
From: Roy Bryant <roybryant@SEVENtwentyfour.com>
To: "'stuffmail@stevewhite.org'"<stuffmail@stevewhite.org>
There appears to be a problem on this
page of your site.
On your page http://www.stevewhite.org/log/current/
when you click on your link to http://www.stevewhite.org/log/current/20001001.htm
you get the error: Not found
As recommended by the Robot
Guidelines, this email is to explain our robot's activities and to
let you know about one of the broken links we encountered. LinkWalker does
not store or publish the content of your pages, but rather uses the link
information to update our map of the World Wide Web.
Are these reports helpful? I'd love
some feedback. If you prefer not to receive these occasional error notices
please let me know.
Roy Bryant
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Roy Bryant, roybryant@seventwentyfour.com
President
SEVENtwentyfour Inc. ("Always watching
the Web")
http://www.seventwentyfour.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Isn't that sweet? Mysteriously, it sent its note to stuffmail@stevewhite.org,
indicating that it was looking at some page in Stuff.
Yet it complained about Plurp. Go figure.
Sadly, we don't know what Rob Roy is typing about.
Plurp. Hard to think of clever things to write when I haven't
showered in two days or done anything but bash monsters in Baldur's
Gate II.
Suggestions for clever topics are gratefully solicited. In the meantime,
I have some Shadow Wolves to bash. Gotta go.
Plurp. The most popular search term on our site last week was
eagle.
Lotsa guilty bloggers out there, methinks! Scree! Scree!
Plurp.
In a previous life,
the blue dog
consisted entirely of
broken links.
Tuesday, January 2, 2001
Blab. Well, I see that all the folks who took the last
few weeks of the last millennium off are beginning slowly to acclimate
themselves to normal life again, as evidenced by the first Blab
in a long time, on the subject of potatoes (Bonsai
vs. guns):
Perhaps you could cut out
the middle-thing and meditate on concrete walls.
We have been doing that today, in fact. Turns out the potatoes were more
interesting, but the concrete wall does now report that it has attained
enlightenment.
Plop. You know what I hate about vacations? Email. I can just
hear that incessant dripping of email drooling out of the leaky end of
the Internet and into by inbox, where it sits, tepid, an attractive place
for molds and fungus, and certainly not evaporating. It will be
waiting there when I return, in all its resplendent ichor, shaking a foetid
pseudopod at me for not responding to it earlier. Yech.
Plurp.
The blue dog played
Baldur's Gate II all
day long.
Monday, January 1, 2001
Rant. After a night of too-rich food and drink, Helen
and I are in the living room watching that most bizarre of American New
Year's institutions, the Rose Parade. Steve's
in the den typing furiously on one of the many computers and cursing under
his breath. Steve violated White's Computer Maxim. It's really simple.
Everyone knows it, but people like Steve just can't seem to stick to it.
Here it is:
Never Stir the Bits.
If a computer is working, don't fiddle with it. Don't adjust the settings
on the software, don't upgrade any of the software, certainly don't add
any new software, and for god's sake don't change the hardware!
Why? You know the answer. It'll screw up everything. Nobody really understands
how computers work any more, not all the way down and, partly as a result,
computers just barely work at all (when they do work at all). That's why,
when they do work, you have to leave the bits exactly where they are. You
can't touch them at all without everything breaking.
Yesterday, Steve decided to get a new graphics card for one of the machines
on which we were playing Baldur's
Gate II. This is, of course, the cardinal sin of bit-stirrers.
It changes the hardware in ways that the software doesn't understand so,
not only do you change the hardware, you also have to change the software
- the lowest-level software - the software that's below the operating system
- the software on which absolutely everything else depends.
Now Steve's both clever and lucky, and he got away with it. It worked
fine. We could even play Baldur's Gate II last night before we got
swept away in to New Year's festivities. But this morning, while the rest
of us were in bed covering our eyes, Steve pushed his luck. He upgraded
his DirectX drivers to Version 8. Astonishingly, this still worked.
Then he decided he'd "just" install AOL.
Boom. The bits, having been stirred too violently for too long, became
volatile and exploded. Now nothing works. He's been reinstalling stuff
for hours, and is about to try reinstalling all of Windows. If that doesn't
work, he'll have to format the disk and start from scratch. And even that
might not work.
Needless to say, we're not playing Baldur's Gate II any more.
Instead, Steve is playing Stir the Bits. And all because he forgot
that simple maxim.
So kids, play it safe. If your computer works, or even if it's slightly
screwed up, or even if it's so broken that it just barely limps along at
all, leave well enough alone. Never stir the bits!
Plop. Unfairly, Steve
emerges from the den in triumph. He's been talking to AOL tech support
for quite some time. Oh yeah, they say,
known bug in Windows
dial-up support. Go to another machine and download the following file,
install it on the broken machine, and everything will be fine. And
it was.
Hey, I say, whaddya mean getting it fixed? I just used
you as the poster boy for a rant on Never Stir the Bits. He looks
at me in astonishment and says:
It's a good idea to never
stir the bits, but it's not a possible thing.
You know he'll get into even more trouble in the future.
Plurp.
The blue dog consists entirely
of bits flung out of
the bowl from too
much stirring.
Sunday, December 31, 2000
Rant. So is this the end of the millennium? And
if so, what was all that hoopla last year? After all of the time we've
had to work out this calendar stuff, you'd think we'd be able to get it
right. Sheesh.
Just don't go coming back with this stuff next year. No, no. This
time for sure. This time we're absolutely positive it's the end
of the millennium. We just won't put up with it.
Plurp. In the midst of preparation for another might of Millennium
Madness, Steve and I seemed to
have gotten sucked in by Balder's
Gate II again. Having months
to think about those rude Umber Hulks
helped; we wiped them out pretty quickly with a new strategy and we're
nearly finished ridding Nalia's ancentral castle of those usurping trolls.
Yes, we are quite mad. But it's fun!
Plurp.
In a previous
life the blue dog was
Dick Clark.
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