dsandler.org

Wow, the VeriSign SiteFinder crap (more) is even worse than previously reported.

“Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Sorry you didn’t go when you had the chance.”

Short, sweet article by Max Cleland, commissioner of the 9-11 Commission, former senator (D-GA), former head of the V.A., Vietnam vet. “Mistakes of Vietnam repeated with Iraq” is straightforward and well-reasoned … and ends with a bang.

I heard the spigot running again. Fortunately, I already had shoes on, so I flew out the front door to see a group of three or four construction workers washing hands, filling buckets, etc., at the side of my house.

I shouted, “Hey! Hey! Don’t … don’t use my water! That’s my water! I pay for that! Stop using the water!”

I was greeted with an equal mix of blank and bemused expressions. I didn’t have the cojones to say, “no robar el agua!” because I can’t really back it up with more (read: “more agressive”) Spanish. So I stuck with my mother tongue, and I imagine the stammered English went un-parsed by some. But my meaning was clear, and here’s where the bemusement comes in: “Who is this kid, playing like he owns this house, and where does he get off shouting at us for taking his water?”

The worker nearest the spigot shut it off. They all backed away slowly, looking at me with the same blank expressions. One of the workers apologized in clear, brief English: “Sorry. Sorry about that. Really sorry.” But his face bore only the slightest glimmer of contrition.

I called the building office again to let them know it was still going on. (Also to inform them that the construction had taken out a chunk of our fence. Minor details like that.)

From murmurs.com, contributed experiences from the 9/20/03 Houston R.E.M. show.

Culled from these messages, I present an (unofficial) setlist: (my addenda are emphasized thusly)

1. Begin The Begin
2. What’s The Frequency, Kenneth? — Actually kind of rare on this tour. We were blessed. Tempo almost slower than on Monster, rather than the one-and-a-half-time version typically played live.
3. Maps And Legends
4. Drive
5. Animal — Another instant-classic Mike Mills chorus.
6. Get Up — I believe this order is incorrect. “Bad Day” followed “Animal” directly, so I think “Get Up” (for whose politically incendiary nature Stipe apologized beforehand) comes before both of these.
7. Bad Day
8. The One I Love
9. Beat A Drum — Played for the first time (this tour). Stipe blows the intro and calls for a do-over.
10. The Great Beyond
11. Sitting Still
12. Daysleeper — One of the few great songs on Up.
13. Electrolite — Best song on New Adventures In Hi-Fi (although, apparently, Stipe prefers “E-Bow the Letter”).
14. Losing My Religion
15. Find The River — Another rarity. Makes up for not having “Nightswimming,” I suppose.
16. She Just Wants To Be — Tour drummer Bill Rieflin nails the fills in a jam-band take on this recent masterpiece.
17. Walk Unafraid
18. Man On The Moon

    ---

19. Everybody Hurts — We were worried that the inclusion of “Daysleeper” would deny us the opportunity to hear any other songs in ⁶⁄₈ time. Not so! [Update: Chris argues that this song is properly ¹²⁄₈ time, or possibly ⁴⁄₄ with triplets. I argue that Chris is overeducated.]
20. Country Feedback — Erin points out that, spoken over the first few bars of the song, is the second verse to Chorus and the Ring.
21. Final Straw
22. Galveston [Stipe acapella]
23. Imitation Of Life
24. End Of The World — Even better than shouting “people in every direction” at a concert: shouting “Leonard Bernstein”. Truly awesome.

Text message from Matt, at the R.E.M. concert in Austin:

Michael just said that houston was the best show on tour! Playing she just wants to be in honor of you guys!

R.E.M. followup: The Houston Chronicle’s pre-concert article. Post-concert review and official setlist forthcoming.

Returned from R.E.M. Pretty much the best concert either of us has ever seen. (I’m sure Erin will have something more specific to say about it.) Setlist not yet up at remhq or RockAthens.

Discovered box of chewable Pepto-Bismol in my glovebox, which was appreciated all around. Came home shortly after 9, and promptly fell asleep next to cooing cats until about 10:30, which helped tremendously. (Now I’m off to reward the cats by buying them more cat food!)

Just got in. Matt and date staged a mercy kidnapping at the end of our interminable office dinner; E and I were dragged out onto the streets of Houston for drinks and fun. To our new friends: I’m sorry I wasn’t feeling well! Something about the meal set off my stomach (Erin’s, too, though she wouldn’t admit it until later), so I was my usual lame self, but (I think) we all managed to have a great time anyway.

Aforementioned “date”, Alex, is charming and fun; she and Erin got along winningly. Evidence: lots of excited chatter, shared shots of something called an “oatmeal cookie”, and highly entertaining dance maneuvers (in an otherwise deserted bar). I mean that in a good way. I, on the other hand, demonstrated my legendary foot-tapping ability. (Had I not designated myself the driver, I might have managed to become self-unconscious enough to oscillate other portions of my body. Not this time.) Anyway, Matt, in case you’re wondering, we approve. Not like you need our approval, but god knows you’ve heard plenty of our disapproval.

Anyway. At this point, I’m just exhausted. And I’m getting up early to take Erin back to campus tomorrow morning for more work stuff! Yeha!

Well, uh, sad!

I got to the end of both Cowboy Bebop and Blue Gender today. I mean, the end end. I really got hooked on these shows because of their stories, and, well, a good story has a good ending. The best stories have great endings, and the greatest endings are usually pretty damn final.

And two of those are a lot for one day.

So, like I said. Sad.

I learned a new word today. shambolic! Thanks, Angle Grinder Man!

Overheard at the office: “biggest BS I ever saw was when I was overseeing EA’s datacenter moves late last year…. moved into the new datacenter and they did an audit of what they still needed and all.. they ended up with a stack of like 20 Sun E250s. and for some reason their accounting regs or whatnot required them to crush them as opposed to letting me have one, even if I paid for it…”

Oh, happy day: Probabilities in the Game of Monopoly®. “I first wrote a C program that simulates a single person rolling the dice and moving around the board a great number of times. It included all of the rules for going to jail and the Chance and Community Chest cards. Although this gave good aproximate answers, I decided that I wanted to write another program that would find the exact probabilities using a Markov matrix…”

Let It Be…Naked to be released in November. “Get Back” was to have been the Beatles’ back-to-basics album in 1969, but was instead released as heavily-produced “Let It Be” … and then the Beatles broke up.

Do you think U2 would have suffered the same fate if they hadn’t succeeded in creating “All That You Can’t Leave Behind” — their own “back to basics” album — in 2000?

Zen koan of the day, courtesy dpeck:

Your instincts are good; you should follow them.

I just heard the construction workers next door stealing water from the spigot at the side of our house. I threw on my shoes and ran out there, but the guy with the bucket (or whatever) was nowhere to be found. There was a telltale drop of water drooling from the end of the faucet, however, so I turned to the nearest worker and said, “Did someone just take water from here?”

I might as well have said it in Japanese.

Salon’s article on McArmy leads me to the following proposition: If, in general, consulting firms and contractors have every incentive to underestimate costs (to get the job) and prolong projects (to maximize revenue from each job); and the world’s militaries are employing special privatized military firms (essentially the same thing) to fight wars and clean up after them; then we are choosing to plunge the world into a perpetual state of low-to-mid-grade war.

Oh, crap, maybe that’s the whole idea after all.

By the way, this has been making the rounds today. It’s a ten-page mini-comic that’s in Al Franken’s book, called The Gospel of Supply Side Jesus. Example dialogue: “Shouldn’t you feed the lepers, Supply Side Jesus?” “No, Thomas, that would just make them lazy.”

Forbes drools over the TapWave Zodiac.

Pirate ↔ Gangsta conversion chart.

Wonderful drawings by Scott Liles. (Link by blar.)

Spaced Penguin: Chromatron meets the n-Body Problem.

fig. 1 Life imitates art imitating life. (more)

Rice (and WRC) alumnus Zach Allison gets a nod in next month’s Wired mag writeup of BigChampagne, the “mistress” of music studios looking to use filesharing as an unprecedented trend tool.

Slashdot has posted a front-page story on the new t-shirts, on sale now. (Linkage: dsandler.org coverage, more about my design, all contest winners.)

At last, when a particularly pained “wwuuuu-AOOW?” emits from the kitchen, you can’t take it anymore and you click on the light. And you see…nothing. You see a cat, or possibly cats, but you don’t see them doing anything, oh no. They just stand there, cats of the damned, trying to pretend they’re waiting for a bus.

Related to recent cat post: life in a two-cat household.

I am unable to account for why Emmaline has decided that she must noisily scratch at every box in my office. She seems determined to open each one, either by lifting a lid, slicing open a flap, or cutting along a seam. Perhaps these Cat Laws can help me make sense of her behavior.

More coverage of the VeriSign domain fiasco: Slava K., Register. Also it looks like the machine that VeriSign has put up to handle all these mistyped requests has either buckled under the load, or has been attacked and is offline.