I’ve always thought that andy46477′s Ebay feedback was fantastic. There’s a new man on the prank feedback scene though. He goes by the name tryork5ifp and his effort is getting accolades from the Web 2.0 crowd. Nevertheless, I feel that tryork5ifp’s stuff is pure drivel. His “Bag of Blood” routine is a blatant Jack Handey ripoff. The folks on reddit seem to disagree though. Am I going insane here or is this one of those phenomenons where every new generation scourns their elder’s prank Ebay feedback?

UPDATE: R. Crumb confirmed that I was right on this one. Todays kids are a stupid, know-nothing generation of brain-dead morons who want nothing more than to be ‘BAD’.

As a wee nipper, I was one of the very few kids around who could reach World -1 on the original NES version of Super Mario Brothers. World -1 was rather pointless because it was just an endless water level where you would swim around, run out of time, then die. Apparently, the Japanese version of Super Mario Brothers had worlds -1, -2, and -3. I feel kind of ripped off now.

Over at cricketschirping, old boy has stumbled upon a new and fantastic Web 2.0 ideavirus meme. You just fill in the blanks to “It’s like blank, but for blank instead of blank”. This is something like a wacky start-up elevator pitch gone madlib. I offer my following creations to the Lazyweb.

• It’s like catnip, but for the elderly instead of helldogs!
• It’s like Hobnobs, but for squirrels instead of the corpulent!
• It’s like the Internet, but for pensioners instead of the underemployed!
• It’s like IRC, but for your phone instead of your computer!
• It’s like VOIP, but for a grapefruit instead of an eraser!
• It’s like Cheezits, but for weimaraners instead of octogenarians!
• It’s like Ruby on Rails, but for mathematicians instead of the incandescent!
• It’s like elevators, but for anthills instead of buildings!
• It’s like Captain A.H. Bogardus, but for Jenga instead of shooting glass balls!
• It’s like a shovel, but for candy corn instead of dirt!

I went on a new book buying rampage yesterday using Rachel’s mom’s credit cards. I love consumer products like a hungry man loves a basket of wings (also a consumer product).

AWDwR2
Purple Cow
Dreaming in Code
Derrida (DVD)
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days

Within the past two days, I found a torrent of the big Derrida thing that I’ve been searching for and learned that The Bad Plus’s new album, “Prog” comes out on Tuesday, May 8th. Unfortunately, TBP are releasing preview songs through myspace (the Chernobyl of websites). Derrida would not be pleased at this turn of events. That’s not quite enough to keep me from buying the album though. I still consider Dave King one of the good guys ever since he signed my copy of “Blown Shockwaves and Crash Flow” outside of the Blender bar in 2004.

The idea of trying Nicorette has always appealed to me. I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life, but I’ve always wanted to try nicotine gum. For a while in high school, I plotted with one of my delinquent friends to see what would happen if we put nicotine patches all down our arms, chewed Nicorette and smoked three cigarette all at the same time. Nevertheless, due to lack of initiative and courage, this little stunt never came to fruition.

So, at the new place, I’ve been watching a jubilant young coder from New Zealand named Jonathan Gifford fight off his bad smoking urges using Nicorette. Feeling my oats, I asked him for a hit after lunch today. He obliged and broke a piece of the nicotine-laced confectionery off the blister pack, adding “knock yourself out, kid”. I unwrapped the gum and started chewing . Mmmmm, minty! Jon then started on about “seating” the gum between my lips and my gums for a while, chewing and then reseating. I did this for about thirty minutes or so, it had no effect on me whatsoever. Around this time, Jon let Jochen, the spry German CTO of the company, in on my experiment. Jochen warned me that this wasn’t going to turn out well. I scoffed, “Nicotine is just like caffeine, THEY’RE BOTH AMINES!”. He shot back, “So is strychnine!”. This blew my mind.

One hour into the ordeal I had to fax a letter. I got up off my chair, but felt rather light-headed and stumbled. No one noticed though. As I was walking, I started to sweat more profusely than George W. Bush at a math test. Then, I felt the familiar pre-heave, just-stepped-off-the-merry-go-round loss of equilibrium. I bee-lined for the bathroom and hid out there for about twenty minutes hoping that this episode would subside quickly. It didn’t. I stumbled back to my desk, with Jochen quipping, “you look green, man!” He and Jon were both laughing at me as I resorted to using one of my running towels to soak up the gallons of perspiration leaking from my pores. This was my body’s way of punishing me for being retarded.

After about 10-minutes of being berated, I made a second trip to the bathroom and donated about $20 worth of Henry’s Hunan to the big white telephone. One month in San Francisco and I’m already tossing my cookies on the 16th floor of a skyscraper in the financial district. How far I’ve fallen. I waited for over a year before heaving-on-the-clock at IBM. Finally, I declared defeat, left the bathroom, picked up my Macbook and what little dignity I had left, and headed home. Later on, the CEO got wind of my calamity and sent an email that read, “I know you are interested in having life experiences, but come on!!”.

So, I moved out to San Francisco last month, and lo and behold I come to learn that Wilmer van der Gaast and Andrew Grimm followed me out here. I hadn’t seen Andy in something like seven years, and I’ve never seen Wilmer before because he’s always lived in Europia. Wilmer finally smuggled himself out of that dreadful land of castles and dragons in a shipping container. A few months later, he wound-up working for the Google! They’re busy indoctrinating poor Wilmer over at the Googleplex with free ice cream, GFS internals, and a new regime for living that will optimize how fast he can transform coffee into code. Once that’s finished though, we’re going to boostrap a Web 3.0 startup that will monitor and control all folksonomies and taxonomies through a most powerful ncurses interface to the semantic web.

One week ago, Sterrance, my Windows desktop computer refused to start. Touching the switch did not result in the comforting fan whirring and hard disk clatter that used to happen. The switch didn’t do anything now. In some ways, it was just like the mystery switch in my last apartment at Gables Grandview that performed no action that I could perceive in my own reality.

I found this problem quite peculiar since I built the computer to crazy specifications (solid gold ram sinks, spinners on the caster wheels, coffee can fan exhaust, NOS and massive VTEC stickers ever on every possible flat surface). My first assumption was that an electrical surge must have fried the power supply. This seemed rather implausible because the machine is plugged in to a UPS which is plugged in to a surge protector. Going through the motions, I earnestly took both spare power supplies that I have on hand and tried them both and got no love from Mr. G. While sitting on the floor with the case open, I noticed something rather queer. The LED on the motherboard and the IDE LED on the case stayed on whilst I was unplugging the power supplies. I started to become perplexed, and dare I say, a bit angry. So, I unplugged every possible Molex connector from the original power supply thinking that it must have been holding a charge in a capacitor somewhere. Even after that, the motherboard LED stayed on. The video card is sometimes troublesome and complains about its power adapter not being attached even though it is. Grasping at straws, I unplugged the video card. Still the LEDs shone like the twinkle in my dad’s eye on the day I was born.

Thinking I had somehow entered the twilight zone, I then physically unplugged the new and old power supplies from the wall. Still, the LEDs were lit up worse than a fraternity guy at a kegger. In my confusion, I somehow remembered that printed circuit boards hold some parasitic charge in their capacitors. Then, I shorted the “reset” jumper thinking it would clear any possible charge stored in the board. Still, the LEDs were glowing with the intensity of a neutron star. I was starting to get scared and irrational at this point, and I deleted all of the mp3s that comprised The Police’s “Ghost in the Machine” album on my iPod. Still, the LEDs were dutifully glowing like my glimmering life gem after I eat a whole pack of Hobnobs. As a last resort, I started unplugging USB peripherals, speakers, a USB Das keyboard, and finally an additional Model M PS/2 keyboard with marked letters on it that Rachel needed because she’s afraid to learn how to touch-type.

Eureka! It was the Model M PS/2 keyboard that was somehow injecting a current into the motherboard. So, as I went take the keyboard off the desk to examine it for the presence of gremlins or perhaps small trolls, I realized that the mouse portion of the cable was attached to my Linux machine. It was physically connected to two machines! The Model M PS/2 keyboard has a Trackpoint nipple nestled snugly between the G and H keys that I caress sometimes when I get lonely. To reiterate, the mouse cable for the keyboard was plugged in to the Linux machine that was on, and the keyboard cable was plugged in to my Windows machine which refused to boot. After disconnecting the extra cable and hitting the power switch, Sterrance booted-up like the clappers!

I realize now that it is a bad idea to have peripherals connected to two machines simultaneously unless they are designed for that purpose. I blame this oversight partially on the Electrical Engineering curriculum at Ohio University where it was never explicitly mentioned to _not_ do such a thing and on Rachel for not wanting to learn how to type on a keyboard with no letters.

On January 22nd, to appease my glimmering life gem, Rachel and I moved from Austin, TX to San Francisco so I could join forces with a new stealth mode start-up company. In December, a leprechaun operating a mangle outside of Mother Egan’s shot me a grin, and I realized it was time for me to take my wife and all the consumer goods that I owned for a nice vacation across the southwestern United States. Serendipitously, I got the job offer in San Francisco just after that and promptly sent my furniture and most everything else by way of All Star Moving. As the name implied, the movers were indeed all stars. Unfortunately, they got stuck in the ice storm for a day as did we. So, on Thursday, we learned of the All Star calamity, and realized that we’d be sans sofa bed until the Tuesday next. Rachel just said, “Fuck it, let’s go to Idaho!” So, we did, and then west to Oregon, and then back south to Klamath, California for a night. After that, we finally arrived in San Francisco on Monday, January 29th. The entire trip took seven days. It was mostly fun if you don’t count the flat tire outside of Junction, TX and the ice storm that closed down I-10. Since when did it snow in Tejas anyway? Also, I should note that said sofa bed wouldn’t fit through either door on the new place, so I had to pay two nice men $260 for 35 minutes work to remove a second bedroom window by way of crowbars, allow me to move the couch in, and then subsequently reinstall the window. (You can’t outsource crowbar window remover guys either!) As always, there’s way too many pictures on my Flickr account immortalizing the event and serving as a constant advertisement of my own importance.