newer log
So a rabbi, a priest, an Irishman, and a blonde walk into a bar, and the bartender says, "What is this, some kind of a joke?".
Hahahahahahahahahahaha!
FROM:PRNCSS. L ORGANA
DEAR friend.
I AM PRINCESS LEIA ORGANA ONLY SURVIVOR
OF THE ROYALFAMILY OF ALDERAN (ALDRN).
I AM MOVED TO WRITE YOU THIS LETTER,
THIS WAS IN CONFIDENCE CONSIDERING MY
PRESENT CIRCUMSTANCE AND SITUATION.
I WAS FALSLEY IMPRISONED UPON THE
IMPERIAL BATTLESTATION ("DEATH STAR")
WHEN MY PLANET WAS HIDEOUSLY DESTROYED
AND ENDED BY THE BVERY BAD SITH LORD
VADER. I ESCAPED ALONG WITH THE AID OF
BRAVE REBELS AND WOOKIES, AND AM NOW I
AM LYING LOW DUE TO THE SITUATION IN
THE 4TH MOON OF YAVIN TILL WHEN THINGS
GETS BETTER. I HAVE CONTROL HERE OF
THE SUM OF $25, MILLIONNN IN IMPERIAL
CREDITS DEPOSITED WITH A SECURITY COMAPNY
FOR SAFEKEEPING ON TATOOINE. THE FUNDS
WERE SHIPPED BY A
COURIER SERVICE AS DIPLOMATIC ITEMS OF HIGH VALUES TO
PREVENT THEM FROM KNOWING THE CONTENT. WHAT I WANT YOU
TO DO friend IS TO INDICATE YOUR INTEREST THAT YOU WILL
ASSIST ME BY RECEIVING THE MONEY ON OUR BEHALF ON
TATOOINE AND ASSIST IN INVESTING THIS MONEY IN ANY
LUCRATIVE BUSINESS LIKE MOISTURE FARMS AND STOCK IN
MULTI-PLANETARY COMPANIES AND OTHER SAFE LUCRATIVE
INVESTMENT IN YOUR SECTOR.
MAY I AT THIS POINT EMPHASISE THE HIGH LEVEL OF
CONFIDENTIALITY, WHICH THIS BUSINESS DEMANDS,
AND HOPE YOU WILL NOT BETRAY THE TRUST AND
CONFIDENCE WHICH I REPOSE IN YOU.
IN CONCLUSION,IN THE EVENT YOU ARE INTRESTED TO ASSIST
ME I WILL LIKE YOU TO CONTACT MY LAWYER WHO I HAVE
STATIONED IN MOS EISLEY TO WITHNESS THE TRANSACTION TO
IT'S CONCLUTION.YOU CAN REACH HIM ON HIS DIRECT LINE
VIA MAIL watto39@aol.com, HIS NAME IS
WATTO THE TOYDARIAN, I HAVE THE FULL TRUST IN HIM.
FINALLY,I HAVE SET ASIDE 15% OF THE TOTAL SUM OF THE
FUNDS FOR YOUR ASSISTANCE,AND 5% FOR ANY ESPENCES THAT
SHALL BE INCURED DURING THIS TRANSACTION.PLEASE BE
FREE TO DISCUSS WITH MY LAWYER.
I SINCERELY WILL APPRECAITE YOUR ACKNOWLEDGMENT AS
SOON AS POSSIBLE.
HELP US, friend, YOU ARE OUR ONLY HOPE.
BEST REGARDS,
PRNCSS. L. ORGANA
That was someone's idea at lunch, quite likely not mine, but hopefully I'm the first one to publish. *8) The original idea may have been Ian's or Ed's or Bill's or Alla's.
how do i get funlove virus
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what has been cited as the main reason deaths have occured from a airbag?
what is Smoky Bear famous for saying?
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what is the FunLove Virus?
what is the funlove virus?
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what makes me a girl or a boy genes or environment
what method funlove virus use
what we have to do to be free
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where can i find good pornography
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why people find mental illness scary
why there are laws against pornography
Why, indeed?
"So I'm just going to close my eyes and relax my mind, and let things flow. Graceful spontaneous curves.""You're going to smear paint on the front of your car."
"It's art. Why shouldn't I create art on my car if I want to? Why do cars have to be boring."
"You shouldn't do this."
"Pheh, here I go! Eyes closed, mind blank... There!"
"Mm!"
"Is that art, or what?"
"Buttocks."
"What?"
"You've painted buttocks on the hood of your car."
"Everyone's a critic."
Oh, and yesterday's entry was improperly labelled "Monday" for awhile, so if you didn't read it because you'd already read Monday's entry and you thought it was that, you might want to read it now. Or after you go see what that strange noise is.
Today's random Klez-provided image:
A tent? A wig?
Today's iBook complaint: the mouse button on the trackpad is loud!
From Medley to Freedom to Tinker (Neat, Ed Felten has a weblog) to this entry and thence to Law School in a Nutshell, an extremely good idea by the one and only James Grimmelmann who, Google informs me, was also a contributor to Median Strip, which was a Very Cool Thing back when the Web was young. Small world.
Urged to enter password, readers replied with a variety of quips, conundra, log in-jokes, oblique references to Tolkein and Marx and Infocom, and suchlike (I have the best readers). If any of these is actually your password, we urge you to change it at once.
Friend
Muscle Beach, CA
eight8
[link]
Ludden
Password:
ir1s chac0n
************
password
SV01
Tx!
Tnx!
KafkaKnew
"digital theft device"
swordfish
Password:
Joshua
crummy.volkswagon
AzhCruft12roolz-Nut
You can't see how to enter an abstraction.
swordfish
If the blind link fails to work, you can try this one. It's to an L. A. Times story that has for some reason vanished from the L. A. Times website. Whether or not the story is really "made up" (hey look, that "This Modern World" guy has a weblog!), or not, the general subject of the legal basis for the executive branch's locking up of citizens without judicial review is worth pondering.
Haven't you received endless instances of spam proffering Eau d'General Competence? You should pay more attention...or PIN number. Do not divulge your password or PIN number to anyone. Should someone request a password and or PIN number, be aware that it is likely an attempt at fraud.
Never give out your password or credit card number in an instant message conversation.
Pay more attention to spam?
One of the more common scams (as opposed to spams) for password stealing on Neopets (which hasn't been entirely displaced from my affections by GNE) is to post on one of the bulletin boards "hey, did you know that if you type your password on a bulletin board it gets changed to all stars? Here's mine: ******".
And when people read that...
Hm, this looks to be a somewhat visual evening in the Log.
First, various readers (mostly using that old Microsoft "IE" browser) wrote to say that they couldn't see the exciting Swing Applet that I posted yesterday, so here's a screen shot:
The real thing is even more exciting, as you can scroll the little scroll bar, and watch more and more and more lines saying "Here is line number 674" appear at the bottom.
Amazing, eh?
I hafta say it's pretty neat. I wrote a reasonably complex system over the weekend, with communication between different processes and different systems, and configuration files, and little GUIs, and all sortsa stuff. I wrote and debugged it under Windows 2000, and when I copied the binaries (okay, the .class files) over to the iBook running OS X, it all just plain worked, without changing a thing.
(And in fact it looked better on the iBook; the OS X Swing makes apps look more like the native operating system than whatever Windows Swing library I'm using; so on the iBook it looked like normal Aqua rather than hokey not quite there Windows.)
Warning: some reader of this log almost certainly has a Klez infection; three qves-related addresses that I used in the log the other day (and which were in fact slightly munged from the real fake ones, and so have never appeared anywhere but that log entry) were used as the forged "from" addresses in some Klez mail to me yesterday. The real sender was perhaps someone who uses McLeod USA as their ISP, and their computer seems to contain some data of which Robert Bork might not approve.
The attachments were (1) a jpeg depicting a young lady apparently attempting to retrieve something misplaced in an unusual location on her person, (2) a short but impressive mpeg featuring human ectopic intercourse (first time I remember Klez sending me a movie!), and (3) a jpeg of some young persons on snowboards. So if you are a reader of this log, and you recognize this young lady and these snowboarders:
you should definitely get your computer checked for modern viruses with a modern anti-virus program. Right away!
Speaking of ectopic intercourse, one of the things that makes bad porn (including this little mpeg) so bad is the lighting. Someone needs to tell the guys who light porn flicks that things like shadows, and dimness, and flickering lights, have important roles to play; not every surface has to be illuminated at all times! Of course maybe I'm not their primary target audience, more's the pity.
Speaking of porn in general, here are some more reasons to love Asia Carrera; "the nerd of porn" indeed.
And speaking of crushes, when I read in a recent NTK that Google had jiggered their ranking algorithms recently, and felt compelled to make sure that the Log is still high in the rankings for "brazil triplets nude" and "david duchovnu" and so on, I stumbled (for the obvious reasons) across this account of someone else's childhood memories of watching Iris Chacon on channel 47, and being mesmerized. Sweet nostalgia...
Spam Subject Line o' The Day:
~WORLD'S GREATEST COLON CLEANSER_SEE PROOF~
Ewwwwwww.
So I finished "The Woman and the Puppet" (did I mention I got a copy on EBay, thanks to a kind reader pointing it out there?). It was pretty good, decently written and well conceived. The ending was quite different from "That Obscure Object of Desire"; not only in that the scenery didn't suddenly explode, but we get a rather different take on Conchita's character and motivation. So now I have "The Devil is a Woman" (also inspired by the same novel) on videotape, and plan to watch it someday.
Contents of the latest Amazon order: The Devil Is a Woman (see above), Design Patterns (about time I got around to reading this; pity the examples are mostly in C++ and therefore hard to read; but whaddya expect of a language that has punctuation in its name?) Feersum Endjinn (I'm pleased to see how much Banks there still is that I haven't read), and The Wasp Factory (similarly). I'm still waiting for Thinkpad: A Different Shade of Blue (not my usual sort of thing; I got carried away).
While looking for (and eventually finding) a version of Doom for OS X, I came across this, which I thought you might get a kick out of. Should I spend two hundred bucks to be able to have little talking heads on my web pages? Probably not right now.
Still loving the iBook (although it has hard-crashed once now, apparently caused by some hiccup in Mozilla). Favorite recent discovery is the speech-synthesis support; a dozen different variations on the usual "Sven" voice, each with its own little speech that it recites when you make it the default. F'rinstance
Spring has sprung,
Fall has fell,
Winter's here,
And it's colder than usual.
which had me figuratively rolling around on the floor laughing for quite awhile. The speech recognition stuff is pretty cool, too, and the little boy thought it was incredibly neat to be able to say "computer, tell me a joke", and have the computer tell a knock-knock. Trying to play chess by voice was less successful; the first time it hears you wrong and moves the wrong piece, you acquire a certain scepticism about the whole idea.
Amazon the other day suggested that I might want to buy OS X 10.2. I asked it why it thought that, and it said it was because I'd bought "A New Kind of Science", and a particular camera case. Still some kinks in that system. (Although I suppose in some sense it was right, wasn't it?)
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Spam Subject Line o' the Day: "did your husband knew?"
Apparently other people have had that same "infinitesimal Mozilla windows" problem that I exorcised with my skillz the other day. Glad to be of service; all in a day's work.
Another nice little image from Klez spam (see Monday):
I call it "Medical Encyclopedia".
So if I'm somewhat (more) incoherent (than usual) today, it's because I woke up at 2:30 in the morning this morning (last night), and thought about the Wrong Things. I particular, I thought about a little frob that I might add to a program at work, and then I thought "hm, I could use a similar frob over there also", and then I thought "hm, that could probably be made pretty general", and then I thought "oh my gosh!", and then I had to get out of bed and write down the cascade of thoughts that flowed from that, and I even had to crack open the JavaDoc and learn enough Swing to be dangerous, because one small component of the idea involved a Java GUI, and I've always meant to learn Swing, and what better time than a 2:30am when you're wide awake anyway?
Here's an appletized version of my first Swing app. It may not run in your browser; Swing isn't always supported.
Amazing what we high-powered Computer Scientist types can come up with, eh?
So anyway I got not much sleep altogether last night, and now I'm really sleepy, and while the Idea didn't seem quite as grand and all-encompassing in the sober light of day, it still seems like a good idea, and I'm also gratified to have learned both vi and Swing in the same few days.
There's life in the old brain yet.
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