Author: brain

Fishbots!

As detailed at nixiepixel, a fishbot is a AIM bot that picks two random strangers and sends them each provocative conversation openers. The strangers are connected and have a conversation, each thinking they have been contacted by the person they are talking to.

Kind of annoying. It’s bad enough when absolute strangers try to chat you, but having a bot connect an unwilling person to you kinda sucks.

On a positive note, you might be thinking, “isn’t that clever!” or “how nice, a way to connect with strangers!”

But over here in real life it usually doesn’t work that way.  Here’s an actual transcript which is pretty representative of how these chats go:

malnourishedcoho: Have you ever been diagnosed with a mental illness?
BRAIN: and is bulemia a mental illness
malnourishedcoho is now known as malnourishedcoho.
malnourishedcoho:  whos this?
BRAIN: you are a coho victim
malnourishedcoho: huh
BRAIN: anything ending with -coho is a bot
BRAIN: that randomly connects strangers on IM
malnourishedcoho: i see
malnourishedcoho: get a ffucking life idiot
BRAIN: see to me it looks like you IM’d me first
malnourishedcoho: how
BRAIN: you said:
BRAIN: malnourishedcoho: Have you ever been diagnosed with a mental illness?
BRAIN: and I responded
BRAIN: but see it was actually this coho bot
malnourishedcoho: did not
BRAIN: yes, do you understand, it’s a bot
malnourishedcoho: stop being such a loser and go do sum worth while nerd
BRAIN: you are not very smart
BRAIN: I feel sorry for you
BRAIN: but you are probably a teenager
BRAIN: with low reading comprehension

On my commute this morning I was talking to myself, running through a hypothetical Star Trek: Enterprise fanfic I’ll never write, because I think fanfic is stupid.

But for fun I did all my lines as Jeremy Irons playing Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune. His accent and delivery are so awesome in that movie.

The Innowave UVF3 is here in this office.
It’s a water dispenser that doesn’t use bottles. Instead, it takes water from the tap (green!) and then filters it (sorta green) and then irradiates it with UV light (uhm…). Which may not be very Green but it’s pretty damn cool.

However it has a pretty bad interface design. The major problem is that it has buttons on it I cannot identify.

There’s 5 buttons: a giant one with a drop of water on it, two identical ones that have a glass with ice in it, and two on the other side, one which is a mug of hot drink, and the other the same mug, but with a “+” on it.

• When you press the drop by itself, it dispenses cold water.
• when you press the drop with the mug, it dispenses hot water
• when you press the mug+ button, it says “warming”

Since there is no manual, this is unnecessarily challenging.

Al I can figure is it’s using a mass-produced shell used for other models and this is why the (at least) 1 extra button

Am I the only person who’s confused Drew Peterson with Scott Peterson?

Drew Peterson is an ex-police officer who is in the news these days for maybe killing his wife, STACEY Peterson.  This is in Illinois.

Scott Peterson is a dude in California (pretty close to me actually) who was convicted of killing his wife LACI Peterson.

DIANE: If you petition to change your name to Peterson I’m leaving the country.

It’s the modern version of the Stairway to Heaven scare. A bunch of apes hear “Islam is the light” and “Satan is king” in a baby toy gibberish. Then they demand the stores pull the babies off the shelf. What is especially humorous: they complaint says the Islam message is “spouting hate.” And by humorous I mean humorous I don’t live near them.

Even the hypothetical Satan message isn’t “spouting hate.” It’s saying how much you like Satan! Yay!

Morning DJ’s should have all played “I Got You Babe” just to be funny.

In other news Diane is reading Replay, which had a similar premise.  I remember reading it in junior high school, and I still think of the premise every so often.

“The sheet you are copying has cells that contain more than 255
characters.  When you copy the entire sheet, only the first 255 characters in
each cell are copied.  To copy all of the characters, copy the cells to a new
sheet instead of copying the entire sheet.”

On what planet is this desirable behavior?!  Fucking Microsoft laziness.  I’d like to meet the Microsoft engineer who can tell me to my face that this is acceptable user experience, so I can punch him straight in the mouth.

John Updike died two days ago. I was hearing some archived Terry Gross interview from the mid 1980s in the car yesterday.

I suddenly realized that this must have been the reason I saw “The Widows of Eastwick,” which was the sequel to “The Witches of Eastwick,” prominently displayed in the bookstore in LAX. It stood out at the time because until then I hadn’t even realized there WAS a sequel to that book.

But wait… I was in LAX on Sunday, Jan 25th. That was 2 days BEFORE he died. Does this mean I had an opportunity to predict the future?! If only I had read the signs!!

I wrote up some notes for my friend about shaving paraphenalia. So here they are.

Do you have a good brush? I think that’s one of the most important parts. Get yourself a Super Badger. I got mine from Taylor’s of Old Bond St in Mayfair, but note they have an online store.

This lets you get away from alcohol-based creams. They also sell a variety of soaps– I use the Shaving Cream Bowl, which has concentrated soap in it. You use seriously a tiny dab of soap to lather your whole face with the brush. I’m still on my original bowl and we visited London something like a year ago.

I have a straight edge razor, but it’s a pain to keep sharp. To keep one of these suckers sharp you need a leather strop AND a whetstone. Not for the timid. Plus getting your skin taut enough for the blade to find purchase is very tricky. I learned (and am still learning) about this off of YouTube.

For day-to-day, I’d like to upgrade to a Feather double-edge. Samurai steel! How can you go wrong with that! Shaving specialty stores usually stock the whole line of these.

But in the meantime, I have been using the Gillette Power Fusion, a 4-blade with a single blade on the back for detail. It also vibrates, although I’ve had varying success with that.

When I’m in a big hurry, and only then, I use shaving gel, Jack Black Beard Lube.

A little goes a long way, and it has oils in it to not dry out your face. I bought this in Chicago at this wacky barber place where hot girls shave you while you drink martinis and watch sports TV and stock tickers. Seriously.

I’m almost out of this stuff, so I may experiment with something else. I’ve been looking for more mentholated shave gel (like I used when in Brazil) but still no luck.