waider

Not really updating this, just injecting a technorati claim code: UBGAJWB45J7G

Well, kinda. In that I made some barbeque sauce, marinaded two pork chops in it, then grilled them and served one (to myself) with some fried potato slices. It did feature some of the best parts of a barbeque, though:

• Somewhat inclement weather, albeit outdoors
• Meat not cooked at the same time as non-meat
• Meat slightly burnt on the outside (although I did manage to avoid the corresponding raw-on-the-inside feature)
• Makings of salad, to balance out the unhealthiness, left to one side

As previously mentioned, I've been going back through old LiveJournal posts applying the Web two-point-oh tags (and thusly building a votagulary); occasionally I stumble upon myself being sufficiently funny to make me laugh out loud, which fact I even commented on back in November 2004. Anyway, I am reposting an excerpt here from a December 2004 entry relating to a loaner car given to me by the garage repairing my own car, because it still makes me laugh:

The car is... fascinating. It seems to handle by suggestion, such as when I press the brake pedal, the car thinks about slowing down, and when I steer, the car makes suggestive moves towards the general direction I indicated. I pressed one of the preset buttons on the radio and the radio switched off for five minutes, then came on and flashed various backlights at me before eventually returning to normal - I presume something's loose there somewhere. The driver's side wing mirror is held on by several screws, which means that occasionally road vibration (and there's an amount of that) causes the mirror to drift out of the position I set it in, giving me instead a nice view of the skyline behind me. There's some unidentifiable goop on the dashboard on the passenger side, which I only discovered after dropping my GPS toy into it. I think it might be a long-discarded Fox's Glacier Mint. I scared the living daylights out of Eoin, who was half-asleep in the back seat, by turning on the rear wiper without warning him. And the front wipers sort of smear the mud and rain around the screen rather than actually wiping it; to this end, there appears to be a reservoir of mud at the bottom of the windscreen that they can drag across. I guess throwing a bucket of water over it would do no harm. Truly an experience, this car...

The more I read Ben Goldacre, the more I'm convinced it's actually the extremely prolific Warren Ellis on another one of his random Internet forays.

The most important take home message here is that I got some very impressive swearing into one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, and I have therefore won the internet. (link)

I'm pretty sure it was on one of Ellis' sites that I first came across the phrase "I have won the internet".

In the past week or so, it has been independantly noted that I am very bitter and I am cynical beyond repair. Sorry if you were on the receiving end of that. Also, sorry if you encountered Cranky Waider this week, as he was in pretty full effect due to some technical stuff that was going the wrong way down a one-way street, and doing so while honking its horn at people coming the other way trying to point out the error.

Having gotten that out of the way, I will note the following (we'll call it "residual crankiness")

• My Amazon Wishlist is now titled "Yes, it's up-to-date". Even though there is stuff on it from 2004 that's no longer available from Amazon themselves, and there's other stuff there that Amazon UK simply won't ship to me due to an ongoing issue with recycling laws in Ireland.
• Twitter comes with a feed. So does your blog. If I'm interested in the latter, you really shouldn't need to tell me about it on the former. Announce your blog, sure. Tell me every time you post? Not so much.
• Daylight savings time can bite me. Twice. And the alleged US energy-saving legislation from 2005 that made things even more screwy can seriously bite me.
• Livejournal posts of your twitter posts: same deal as going the other way. If I'm interested, I'll have subscribed to both. If I'm not interested, I'm not frickin' interested, ok?
• This weather has got to stop. I got snowed on last weekend. I came home yesterday with hands so cold I could barely type. And now it's blazing sunshine, after blowing a storm this morning. Maybe humans were meant to sleep through this.
• Dear local bar, please clean the taps or something. Three beers giving me a headache? That's not right.

In the immortal words of the TBSC:

Whew, that was fun. Actually, it has nothing to do with any of that. I'm just killing time until this Pat tape runs out.

waider: it's nasty and cold out there
lou: --> looks out the window at the sun
waider: yeah, that sun is lying.

And indeed it was. Some hours after the above chat, I was snowed on.

Neil Gaiman answers the question, "Why do you keep an online journal?" and I like his answer. Admittedly, he's someone who writes for a living anyway so he's got different motives to your average livejournal user in, I think, a lot of respects, but I certainly identify with him talking about searching his own site to find out when he was last (his example) in Finland - I've found myself going back over both livejournal and my own site time and again rereading what I wrote and recalling the circumstances.

About the only thing that ticked me off last night was failing to have a drink in hand for "the moment"; not because I didn't have a drink, but because the reason for the lack of drink was that the barstaff had ALL failed to serve our section of the bar for a full fifteen minutes, being too busy attending to people who just swanned up to other sections of the bar while we waited patiently, then a mite frustratedly, and then somewhat angrily, and ultimately decided we'd prefer to schlep on home after midnight and break into some wine instead of giving those losers any more cash for their overpriced alcohol.

Really, though, other than that it was an excellent night.

I've just seen the buzz going around about LiveJournal being sold to SUP, the Russian company that was operating LiveJournal Russia since some time in 2006. I have additionally seen far too many "In Soviet Russia..." gags on this topic already, but handwave. I am curious to see how this develops; various people have expressed concern about their data being owned by Russians, and implicitly by the Russian Mafia ("Tell me something, Jason, you ever hear anyone describe our thing as ‘The Sicilian Yakuza’? Huh?"), but as has been pointed out elsewhere, (a) AT&T wiretaps for the NSA and (b) LiveJournal The Company still remains a US corporation bound by the laws yadda yadda. Which isn't to say they can't just backhaul the data to a secret location in the Urals for folding, spindling, and mutilation, but really I have more concrete things to concern me. I'm more interested in their 100-day plan, which seems rather like they are attempting to turn LJ in Facebook. I also note it doesn't have a timeline other than "we plan on doing this in 100 days", so there's no sense of what's being prioritised, whether everything will roll out together at the end of 100 days or whether it'll dribble out over the course of the 100-day period. And yes, I've seen the 5-year plan jokes, too.

Interesting times, as the man says.

I occasionally find things on my fridge that I don't recall composing. There are a few things that I'm pretty certain other people did, and a few I've done while drunk and forgotten about, but just now I found "dating lies" and I have NO idea where it came from. Or when it appeared there.

This is why the top of the fridge declares, "I never did say all beneath".