Boston has a innernets
Found among some papers tonight. No, this isn’t irony or anything. This is THE IN-TER-NET, coming to Massachusetts. Doot-de-doodly-doo!
Actually, I’d been on THE IN-TER-NET for almost a decade when I signed onto this service, but this really was a breakthrough for price and ubiquity of coverage. I think this was the mid-Nineties. The Usenet days. The Web existed, but it was still excruciatingly lame and boring and non-interactive.
The deal with Usenet, you could post under any name you liked, but your IP address was always in the header for everybody to see. That’s what made AOL such a popular trollhaven when it hit the ‘net: no matter who you were or where you posted from in the world, the IP address just resolved to plain old AOL.com. All AOL users looked alike. They could trash talk anonymously.
These people, this USAinternet thing, had dialup numbers in cities all over the country. When I posted from work (yeah…I had a dedicated outside phone line for data transfer…sweet), I dialled a local number and my IP resolved to something like powernet.boston.ma.com. And from home it was powernet.providence.ri.com.
Well, lots of ISPs used these same phone lines, I noticed. So, for the modest price of a long-distance phone call, I could make strange troll-y messages look, to anyone who paid attention, like they came from…whoever on Usenet happened to be irritating me at the moment.
Yeah. Hm. They don’t call me “weasel” for my silky fur and jaunty whiskers.
December 5, 2007 — 7:38 pm
Comments: 9
A cat person in a dog people family
“How did you turn out to be a cat person, anyhow?” my dad asked last week.
A good question, in a way. The whole famn damily is dog people. My siblings, my cousins, my natural mother, my unnatural stepmother, my vile Texas grandma and my sweet little bluehaired down Eastern grandm’ma. We found a jaunty poem about a dead cat in Grandmother’s personal papers. Shit you not.
On another level, it was an incredibly fucking stupid question to ask someone bleeding from a fresh dog bite.
Yeah. Stoathund here had a few practice snaps before moving in for some delicious stoatburger.
“See, if she decides something is hers, you’d better not mess with it,” my father explained patiently, like it was real stupid of me not to know that. Problem is, she decides something is hers VERY FAST. Like, in the blink of an eye. Like, the entire contents of the dishwasher. Which is a bitch if you’re loading it and aren’t really paying attention. Yeah, you load the dishwasher then, you smart-alecky old coot.
I should have been on guard. I’d seen her pull silverware out of the dishwasher and parade around waving it in the air like, “g’wan, weaselbreath — dare you to touch my spoon!” Ugh. I probably ate grapefruit with it next morning.
Do you know what they do when she gets hold of something like that? To get the whatever-it-is away from her? They give her a treat.
That’s right. When the dog acts like a shitbag, they reward her. Now, I am but an humble cat person, but even I know when you reward a dog for being a shitbag, you might as well rename her Ol’ Shitbag, because you’re going to get a LOT of shitbaggery out of that animal.
Whereas cats are shitbags out of sheer joy and professionalism.
December 4, 2007 — 6:28 pm
Comments: 57
Spaminated. Enspamnified. All spambled up.
Heh. Check out the #1 blog in the TTLB ecosystem: Grandfather Clocks Blog. “Whoa!” thinks Weasel, “with 58,541 hits to Michelle Malkin’s paltry 6,139, that site has to be a real hotbed of hot beds.”
It is, in fact, a boring site selling grandfather clocks. How they gamed the incoming links, I do not know.
I have a hate/hate relationship with TTLB. The rating system broke days after I started up this site, so I was a Jaunty Plague Bacillus or an Irregularly-Shaped Mole on your Ass or whatever it was for two months. And now it arbitrarily adds and removes links from me in a random way, irrespective of, you know, people linking to me and stuff.
I know, I know: all the cool kids pretend they don’t care about traffic. But it’s like that goddamned bear is messing with me or something.
December 3, 2007 — 5:44 pm
Comments: 24