Several wifi technical issues and a naked transsexual porn star
It’s Mayday. The communists are communicating, the socialists are socializing.
Nope. No idea what that means. I woke up with it running through my head, thinking, “I say, Weasel! How droll!”
Today was neither as unpleasant as yesterday nor as productive as I hoped. I’m still +1 on the rodent offsets, but the night is young. I got my re-imaged machine back but, as I remembered, that external Linksys USB wifi dealie is the shits. It couldn’t get a decent signal in the stairwell looking out the window at the building next door. (When I used it at home, it couldn’t consistently hold a signal when placed directly on top of the router).
There was, however, a tantalizingly strong signal coming from right inside the building. Wide open. I emailed around to see if anybody knew what it was. Finally, I plucked up the courage and connected to it. Up came the company logo and login. Also a scary “business purposes only” warning. Huh. So they’re providing us with wifi now.
So! I’ve got a PCMCIA card I can try in the business laptop. Or I can give it another go with my ThinkPad (which I have this evening rescued from the clammy embrace of Linus Torvalds. I like Linux, but I’ve never gotten the damn thing working right). Problem with both of those options is…where does the antenna go? No smartassery from you in the back. Finally, I can try to jack into the provided wifi signal using some kind of tunneling software so they can’t see what I’m up to.
My technical problems are boring. But then, so is not being able to surf the internet.
Meanwhile, this here feller is Buck Angel, the Man with a Pussy, currently the world’s only (incomplete) female-to-male transsexual pornstar. No, I don’t remember how I got here, but it’s dark and I’m all by myself and I’m cold and scared. Can somebody come pick me up? I want to go home now.
Sometimes the internet makes me feel like crying.
May 1, 2007 — 5:05 pm
Comments: 11
Ack! I’ve brokened it!
Messing with my sidebars last night apparently pissed Explorer off. My content is all shoved down below the right sidebar, and I didn’t realize it because I don’t fire up IE at home unless I have to. I can’t fix it from work, because something in the firewall times me out when I try to access my bloghost control panel. Not something I’m inclined to complain to the Helpdesk about, know’m mean?
So, we’ll have to crouch down here below the fold today. C’mon. It’ll be fun. We can build forts out of blankets and couch cushions and eat grilled cheese sammiches and watch cartoons.
Update: Fixed! But the sammiches and cartoons are still on!
April 25, 2007 — 7:53 am
Comments: 8
Confluence
I know some of Drudge‘s juxtapositions are deliberate, like setting global warming stories alongside record cold snap stories. But even he doesn’t control the dials and levers of fate.
Anybody else amused to see the headline about Imus losing his MSNBC gig for using the expression “nappy headed ho’s” is dominated by a picture of this woman, an actual NHH? >>>>
No, me neither. Because some day, I dream of working for MSNBC.
Oh, like you don’t.
April 12, 2007 — 6:59 am
Comments: 4
An embarrassment of riches
Meh. Kind of got jammed up today. But I’ll never let you down — you, my imaginary friends who live in the computer. When I’m in a hurry and I need a dose of teh crazy in a hurry, I always turn to Pravda.
Yes, that Pravda.
Well, sort of that Pravda. The original house organ of the Soviet Union was shuttered by Boris Yeltsin in 1991. A few weeks later, the people who had written for the original registered a brand new paper, also called Pravda. Several years after that, there was a schism, and the majority of the original writers left the paper to start an online version, Pravda.ru. The paper and website currently have little to do with each other.
The website — which, glory be, has an English version — is a smorgasbord of crank and sleaze. Batboy would be embarrassed to appear in its pages. It is virulently anti-American and pro-UFO. Today, for example, I could choose between the following delectible morsels of cheez:
Huge oceans underneath Earth’s surface caused global flood in times of Noah… Soviet Union witnessed invasion of US-made UFOs in 1980s… George W. Bush may not live up to his mandate end due to Tecumseh’s curse… Man splashes sulfuric acid in his lover’s face, begging her to marry him… Virtual sex in Russia advances from silly chat rooms to USB vibrators… Two brothers get too drunk on their father’s funeral and forget to bury his body… Man dismembers his friend and sends his body parts to different regions… Five-year-old girl perversely murdered by elusive Siberian maniac… BBC: British Bullshit Corporation… Okay, I’m kind of persuaded by that last one.
The Opinion Page is so consumed with America hating, it’s actually running these two pieces consecutively: Is the USA a bully? followed by Is America a Bully? Seems to me there might be some editorial overlap.
Let’s go with Mysterious dwarfish alien brutally murdered in Russia’s remote village. It’s from their science page. There’s a flurry of stories on this one; I’ll see if I can piece it back together in chronological order.
An old lady named Tamara Prosvirina found a dwarf in the woods near the village of Kaolinovy. She named him Alioshenka. Her daughter in law saw this creature and described it thusly:
“I used to visit my mother-in-law twice a week. She was living on her own. On that day I brought her foodstuffs just like I did before. I was about to leave when she told me: ‘We’d better give some food to the baby too.’ Then she showed me to the bed. I took a closer look at it and saw him. He was on top the bed, squeaking some funny sounds. I could see his mouth shaped like a small pipe. His tiny scarlet tongue was moving. I also spotted two teeth inside. In a way, he looked like a little baby. His head was brown, and his body looked gray. I didn’t see any eyelids. He didn’t have any genitals either. His head looked like an onion. And the pupils of his eyes were widening and narrowing just like the cat’s eyes do when you turn on the light and turn it off again several times in a row. The fingers on his hands and feet were pretty long. I only bothered to ask my mother-in-law where on earth she’d got the monster from. She told me she’d found him in the forest. She kept calling him ‘Alioshenka.’ She gave him a candy and he started sucking on it. I thought it was some kind of animal.
[…]
“He was giving off that smell, you know, one of a kind. You can’t take it for any other smell. Actually, the smell was pretty agreeable yet somewhat nauseous at the same time. And he didn’t pass any liquid or solid waste matter. He was sweating, and that was all. I saw the mother-in-law wipe the sweat off his face with a rag,” Tamara added.
The old lady told her neighbors about Alioshenka, and they called an ambulence. Seems she had a history of teh crazy. The guys in white coats described her guest as a cat in a bundle of rags. They left it behind.
While she was in the nuthatch, her family leased her home to a Vladimir Nurtdinov. He found the alien, now dead, and thought it looked cool. Like an alien. So he put it on the roof of the garage to dry out. As you do.
Later he was picked up on suspicion of stealing wire, so he blurted out that he had a dessicated alien on top of his garage. As you do.
The authorities assumed what they had was just another a self-induced, late-term abortion and turned it over to a pathologist. At autopsy, he concluded that it had died violently from a blow to the head, and it was Not Of This World. Its skull had four plates and a human’s has eight. Plus, DNA confirmed it was some kind of weird shit.
Men describing themselves as ufologists introduced themselves to the authorities at this point and confiscated Slim Jim. Turns out they were…well, nobody knows, but they vanished with Alioshka and all that’s left is police videotape and a little piece of alien jerky that somehow fell into the hands of a Japanese film crew.
The old lady was due to tell her story under hypnosis when she was fatally run down crossing the street in a town that sees maybe one car a day. Her relatives are sure it was murder. Two men who investigated the scene have also fallen ill or died mysteriously. More here.
See also Russian fishermen catch squeaking alien and eat it. And Did George Bush bully squeaking alien and then eat it?
Yeah. I made the last one up.
April 11, 2007 — 6:39 pm
Comments: 5
We’d be in a world of hurt
If spammers weren’t such utter retards. I just picked this one out of the spam filter:
Oh, nice idea and works good! but i had read it and i have swift trucking
tepee
pnuemonia
Best regards
Yeah, I hate when I get swift trucking tepee pneumonia. It lingers on for weeks.
March 27, 2007 — 6:28 am
Comments: 6
Hiccup in the luncheon meat market
According to the story, the SEC has suspended 35 of the companies mentioned in those irritating “set to explode!” spams.
The tactic does work, it says. One company saw its shares quadruple briefly after a flurry of spam went out. But it also says it’s unclear whether the companies themselves did the spamming.
It seems obvious that the companies did do the spamming, but I wonder if that’s true. Or will be true from now on. If these are boiler room operations set to snatch a quick profit in the brief period of time a stock is inflated, it doesn’t matter whose company they pump, right? And if they pick someone else’s company, what do they care if it gets a trading suspension after they’re done?
Most of the spam I get isn’t spam, it’s bounce messages from mailer daemons because some asshole spammer used a domain of mine as a return address. They don’t care who they snarl up on their way to a buck (or a yuan or a ruple or a quatloo).
I’m all for killing spam, but this strikes me as a dandy thing to do to a complete stranger. Or a competitor.
March 9, 2007 — 8:56 am
Comments: none
Wherein Weasel makes a fancy party hat
Sarah D. to the rescue. She teleported me out of the naughty scary place and into a community college for Second Life newbies. Here you can click on various kiosks and posters to download notecards explaining how to do stuff. There are live classes. Nobody is wearing exogenitals. It’s cool.
Then she took me to the closest sandbox. A sandbox is an area in which you may create and manipulate objects. She reached into her inventory, flung a ballpark frank on the ground, scaled it to the size of a sofa and sat demurely on the edge of it, typing explanations at me with hairy paws.
I should mention, communication is by ascii text (for now). When you hit the chat button and type, you hear clickity-clickity sounds and your avatar hands rise up and play air-keyboard. You look like the silly boo-boo you truly are. It’s hysterical.
Then my hour was up and I had to go.
Next afternoon, I went directly to the sandbox. Right click on the ground and choose “Create” to get the modeling menu. This resembles, not surprisingly, a cut-down version of an application like 3D Studio Max. You got your shape primitives (“prims” in SL-speak) — spheres, cubes, toruses, whatever — that you stick together and carve 
away from and apply textures to in order to build stuff. There are many textures already in your library for free, or you can upload new ones of your own (for a $L fee). There are also particle systems and atmospherics (fire, water, smoke) and behaviors (scripts), but basics first!
First, I jammed a red sphere onto a marble cone and made a pretty party hat. Whee! I’m a beautiful fairy princess!
When I model something in Max, I typically see four windows simultaneously: my object from the front, the top, the side, and the camera’s point of view. Here, you have to pan your camera around continually to get the same 360º understanding. Working from the front, my hat appeared to be jammed firmly on my head, but the overhead view revealed that it was flying fifteen feet out in front of me. Mmm. Rookie mistake.
Next, I applied one of the textures I found in my inventory. 
It was called moss-something. It was a mostly alpha (i.e. transparent) rendering of some hanging Spanish-mossy stuff and, applied to my compound object, the red stayed red, the green stayed green and transparent transparent.
Neat. This was a jaunty, plumey effect. I look like Koo Koo the Bird Girl! Thus, delighted with myself, ended day 3.
Wednesday is, apparently, Retarded Day on Second Life. They do system overhauls on Wednesdays, after which nothing works for shit. Or so I gather from reading the angry comments on their blog. Never mind. My task today was a simple one: build a hat better suited to my dignity and station in life.
See you soon! Why? Because we like you!
March 8, 2007 — 2:14 pm
Comments: 9
On the grid, off the grid
I’m only allowing myself an hour a day on Second Life. I know my obsessiveness too well. Let’s not wake up that monster.
After I got dressed, I was whisked away to a place called Orientation Island. Unfortunate name; I wondered if I was being sent to take gay lessons. But no, it’s a series of twelve basic skill tutorials. You get a star for completing each one, after which, the instructions say, you are given a passport and allowed to wander freely around the world.
I got eleven stars, but it wouldn’t give me the twelfth. Flying. Yes, you can fly…very cool. But I flew through that stupid tutorial six times and it wouldn’t give me my goddamn star. “Stuck,” I thought. These programs do get stuck. Maybe if I asked it to teleport me home — wherever that is — and back again, it would reset itself.
Uh-oh. When I got home (where is that, anyway?), I did a search for “Orientation Island” to teleport back. It returned, like, a hundred of them. And I was refused permission to enter every one I tried. Did I have to find the particular Orientation Island I started on?
Just for shits, I tried going someplace totally different, at random, and it let me. I found myself standing in some kind of public square, empty but for me and a person with breasts and an enormous set of male genitalia worn on the outside of its pants. Golly, Toto. I don’t think we’re in the tutorial any more.
I’m free!
But I don’t have a passport.
Swell. I’m an undocumented avatar.
— 8:08 am
Comments: 1
Life sucks. May I have seconds?
I was a fool to think I could resist Second Life forever. I’m not made of stone.
I can’t remember when I first heard of Second Life. It bobbled to the surface most recently last month when John Edwards’ virtual campaign headquarters was vandalized by some merry anarchists (Their statement: “We simply did it for the lulz… The fact you were so bent out of shape to make a blog post on the OFFICIAL JOHN EDWARDS BLOG about how some people placed a bunch of shittingdicknipples on your lawn is mighty telling.”)
I’ve played MMORPG‘s before. In fact, I played them before they were massive. Electronic Arts had a very primitive online game platform in the early eighties — I forget what it was called — which included crude modular, build-yourself-yourself avatars.
The current crop are beautiful to look at, but the gameplay tends toward repetitive and boring. Especially if, like me, you don’t particularly want to interact with other people that much. I spent a lot of my Anarchy Online time running across the desert watching the sun rise over fantasy alien landscapes. Cool, but finitely interesting.
SL isn’t that sort of game. Aside from the ground under foot and the basic body shapes, every object there was created by its users. Clothes, buildings, furniture. These can be made, copied (or copy-protected), bought and sold in the local currency, and the local currency can be exchanged in both directions for US greenbacks (though how it goes from Linden dollars to realworld dollars, I have no idea via whatever credit/debit/PayPal you set up with them. Current exchange rate $L1,000 = $US4.04). And Linden Labs has wisely declared that all things created in-world are copyrighted by their creators.
There’s a basic built-in 3D modeler included, and a simple scripting language that goes with. So you can build physical objects and give them behaviors. Yeah, that’s what I’m after. A second life that’s identical to my first. Come home from a long day 3D modeling and Photoshopping and coding to an evening of the same.
I’m not being sarcastic. That sounds really fun.
Basic account is free (you have to pay money if you want to own land apparently, non-paying members can own land, but not on the mainland), so…here we go. Avatar creation first. 
Initial appearances are grouped in broad classes such as goths or nightclubbers, M and F. My first thought, naturally, was a furry…but then I thought, ugh. Furries. (I have since learned there are many on SL who wear animal costumes that aren’t furverts).
Physical appearances can be changed at any time, so it doesn’t really matter. It’s just fun to play with the buttons and knobs. I decided to start out as a small Japanese woman with no hair. I’m going for a “leave me the hell alone” look. In addition to broad body types and clothing, SL breaks physical features into a number of fine sub-categories that you can play with, too. Arch of the eyebrows, tip of the nose, length of the chin. I wanted something that says “I’m as sexless as the angels” (I really, really don’t like grownup games), so I twiddled the knobs until I realized I was the spitting image of a shaved Michael Jackson. That freaked me out, so I shifted male and bulged my jaw and forehead. Hootie-hoo, Monkeyface! Oh, well. I’ll fix it later.
So, behold! Monkeyface McShavedaperson! Looks like a gray, no? I’m pretty sure that tattoo on my arm says, “I’m a giant dweeb for getting mixed up in this.” Either that, or, “ow! Holy shit! Compound fracture of both arms!”
And thanks very much to Sarah D. for the hotdog ‘n’ stuff.
March 7, 2007 — 9:58 am
Comments: 7