log (2005/08/19 to 2005/08/25)

(Note that this will probably be the last entry here for a week or so. In which case, see you in September!)

Spam Subject Line o' the Day:

Re: Are live no paris chigger

(We got a better selection of Spam Subject Lines o' the Day back when the spam filters didn't work so well. That's not a complaint, exactly...)

The mainframe blog! A weblog about mainframes! I used to use mainframes.

A reader suggests this, which is in fact quite funny.

From the referer log, our URL o' the Day: yoga moment catalog plastic bamboo tree iris chacon nude. Another one of those mysterious vacuous-links sites. This one, oddly, seems to live embedded inside a more legitimate-looking site. Very odd.

I've been wearing my reading glasses up on top of my head alot today (when I have my normal glasses on), and now sitting here typing this I keep feeling like I still have them up there (even though they're actually in their case over there on the table), and I unconsciously feel for them now and then and my subconscious sends up an interrupt saying "our reading glasses are gone!".

Silly subconscious.

I feel like if I'm maybe going to be quiet for a week I should leave y'all with something profound, but I don't feel especially profound at the moment (not bad or anything, just not especially profound). So instead I'll leave you with a Sims picture. *8)

Here are the Danverses, all six of them:

Six Danverses

Aren't they cute? Left to right, that's Georgia (formerly Bendett; Jane's partner), Jane, Joan (Jane's sister), Justin (sitting; Georgia and Jane's adopted son), John (Jane's father) and Jean (the noted Mad Scientist, and Jane's mom). Heh, I need to get khakis for Joan and Justin, don't I?

(Turns out that running a Sims household with six people in it is alot of work, and I haven't visited the Danverses much lately. Kaylynn and Benjamin and the twins are alot of work too, although both of the twins are now potty-trained and can walk and talk, so I haven't been neglecting them entirely. I'm also about halfway through building a house for Gina to move into now that she's back in the neighborhood; in the meantime she's cooling her newly-adult heels in the Sim Bin, poor thing.)

So anyway! *8) Behave yourselves, or not, until I post again, which may be after a significantly longer interval than usual, or not. Depending.


I got a hot-water bottle,
  but nothing I got'll
  take the place of you
  holding me tight!

(No idea why that's stuck in my head.)

So I have to admit to having cheated yesterday; I had these two pictures that I wanted to post, but when I looked at just the first one sitting there by itself as yesterday's entry it looked so nice that I didn't want to break up the design by putting in the other one. So then the Tempter whispered in my ear "well, you could put up the other one as a pretend Monday entry, nyeh-heh-heh", and I succame.

Aren't they fun pictures, though?

I put them up on flickr also. Turns out that posting pictures of fortunes from cookies isn't an entirely original idea (omg rotfl).

From somewhere in there, we find this fortune cookie image generator (Your actions will have consequences).

And whilst on flickr, we find the very logworthy Fragments - a photoset on flickr.

Geek funnies:

While SIP typically is used over UDP or TCP, it could, without technical changes, be run over IPX, or carrier pigeons, frame relay, ATM AAL5 or X.25, in rough order of desireability.

(Note how the author cleverly doesn't say if it's increasing or decreasing order; funny either way, though.)

TCP Based Discard Service
One discard service is defined as a connection based application on TCP. A server listens for TCP connections on TCP port 9. Once a connection is established any data received is thrown away. No response is sent. This continues until the calling user terminates the connection.

UDP Based Discard Service
Another discard service is defined as a datagram based application on UDP. A server listens for UDP datagrams on UDP port 9. When a datagram is received, it is thrown away. No response is sent.

The Net was so simple then. (Note that this isn't an intentionally funny RFC, it just made me smile. Note also that the text quoted above is somewhat more than half the total text of RFC863; brevity is good.)

On the Usual Subject, readers write:

No Sims pictures? The horror! Please retrofix immediatamente!!!

And relatedly:

Re: eyes glazed entirely over

No, not entirely...
It's your party and you can serve up the Sims on toast points if you wish but "fat soft udon noodles swimming in broth" transports this reader to places no Sim limo could ever take her.

Miss Raptor, on the computer

So as to avoid horrifying our dear readers while still transporting them, we'll endeavor to do both the udon noodles (and wolmanization) and the Sims pictures. A bunch of the latter are now available on Hullabaloo, in the form of Gina's College Years. Lots and lots of pictures of them! *8)

Our fine readers once again creatively interpret our log prompt: Type Here:

I care.

Skin and lips and fingertips, and lips and lungs and eyes and tongues, and paper and ink and stamps and tongues.

unsigned short

O Positive

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! [link]

So you're a fan of brown-haired women, eh?

Regendering bring more hot girl-on-girl action!

When will Queer Eye do a Sims household makeover?

Note the various types of "type" (and thanks for caring). I'm not sure that I'm a fan of brown-haired women any more than of any other sort of women (in the Sims 2 I've created one brown-haired woman (Jean Danvers) and one redhead (Sally Raptor); in real life my Mom was a redhead and I'm married to a woman with very black hair; so fwiw...).

I'd love to see a Queer Eye for the Straight Sim! *8) The other day I was running a cable through the basement so the little daughter could watch anime in her room at night, and when I turned on her TV to test it there was this show Trailer Fabulous, which was incredibly tacky and very funny; an obvious Queer Eye spoof, in a completely tasteless sort of way.

I only watched it for about ten minutes, but once again I felt vaguely that I ought to look at TV again sometime and see if there are good ("good") things that I'm missing. The feeling passed pretty quickly, though...


Wolmanized!


Depend on them to guide you.


Utterly lovely dinner tonight, fat soft udon noodles swimming in broth, with amazing delicate tempura vegetables on the side. Worth the quite a number of pennies that it cost; the stuff average places call 'tempura' is a whole nother, and inferior, category of thing

(This was the same place we went on Fathers' Day, but this time we sat at the nice quiet private tables rather than the big hibachi stoves. Marvelous food in either place.)

Love shack plan for World Cup:

The portable cabins, inspired by the success of the drive-in-brothel projects in cities such as Cologne, will be set up in areas where the football matches will take place.

After a lunchtime discussion of the Monty Hall Paradox, Ian who used to have a weblog dug up these links on Wikipedia: Monty Hall Problem, and the related Principle of Restricted Choice (which at the moment redirects to Principle of Restricted Choice (bridge) because I fixed it so it would; love Wikipedia).

Monty shows you three doors; there's something boring behind two of them, and something good behind the third. "Door Number Two", you say. Monty then opens Door Number Three, showing that there's something boring behind it. He then offers you the chance to change your choice to Door Number One. Should you? Almost everyone's intuition says that it doesn't matter, but in fact it's a very good idea to switch (at least under a natural set of assumptions about the details glossed over above).

Today instead of endless Sims pictures, we have links to endless Sims pictures. This may have the desirable effect of allowing any log readers who enjoy the Sims stuff to read it, while allowing the rest to easily not. Or something. (The main disadvantage is that they're on Someone Else's Computer; I really ought to mirror them here as well Just In Case. Let me know if you want to read them and for some reason can't; the site requires registration to post, but not I think just to read.)

Living with the Raptors has some introductory stories and pictures about the Raptors, and the detailed story of one busy afternoon; readers who haven't been skipping over the Sims stuff will be familiar with the general idea here.

Kaylynn's Story (the Beginning) is basically the story that I posted to the Maxis site the other week, in a less JavaScripty package and with bigger pictures.

And Unsticking Jennifer is the first story featuring Randy, Gina's teenage crush who is now also at Sim State U. This is New Material. (Gina and Randy are both doing well in school; Gina is a Senior, and Randy is I think about to finish his Sophomore year.)

Miss Raptor

See also a couple of pictures of Gina and Randy being in the Secret Society, and this thread about favorite pictures to which I contributed this classic shot of Gina looking at the camera, and this thread on some other topic entirely into which I eventually inserted a couple of pictures related to Garden Gnome Theft when the topic drifted in that direction, and etc etc etc ad infinitum.

I showed the little daughter enough of The Sims 2 Body Shop and Photoshop Elements that she can now both play the game and make new clothes for the characters. This has further cut down my playing time, as she has twice the reasons to be on that computer. Probably healthy all around.

You may eventually get some pictures of the adorable custom clothes that she and I make. Hers are so far more presentable than mine; she's been playing it more or less straight, whereas I've been pushing the envelope a bit and doing silly and scurrilous things. (With one rather shameful exception that you can find via dedicated perusal of some of the links above, I don't have any pictures of my modified clothes online; maybe sometime I'll get some Sim to wear the Sim-version of the davidchess dot com T-shirt, and take a picture of that for your edification.)

A Sims-related site that I noted down for future reference: Parsimonous dot org. An impressively huge amount of custom content, some of it very useful-looking.

Any of you reader-types out there playing this game also? Or are everyone's eyes entirely glazed over? *8)