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Why is it that so few of my friends put even a single photo of themselves on their homepage? Are they all -that- shy? Phoey on them!

I’ve been working on Colossus the last few evenings. I’ve been grinding metal to prepare it for welding and to protect people from cutting themselves on the installation. In the image, I’m grinding the center pole down so the gussets can be firmly welded on.

In the last few days I’ve met a guy that participated in SimNuke, some of the Burning Man Thunderdome guys, a group building a giant nose-picking machine powered by a human-sized hampster wheel, some folks building a statue of Ganesh, art-car builders… phew!

Much of the time, as projects were discussed, they’d point to a far-off corner of the studio and say something like, “Those are the giant fans we used to push all the gasoline in the air before we lit it.”

Oh yeah.

There was supposed to be a Music and BBQ event just 2 blocks away from me but it got moved to 2 miles away. I was too tired from grinding all night anyway so I just got a sandwich from the shop ON MY CORNER. :-)

I’m off to a pinball party right now at Lucky Juju Pinball.

Wee!

Last night I had a great meal with an old new friend Barry and his wife. in February I had sent out an email request, asking for people to help me consider if I should move to San Francisco. He responded but I never ended up having time to meet him. Well now I did! The both of them are pretty great. And the meal was wonderful as well!

When we were at dinner I asked, as I do most of the time if the bartender has any drinks that have umbrellas of them. In all the time that I had lived in New Jersey, not a single bar or restaurant had umbrellas. Well, the very first time that I asked for one in San Francisco, I got one! I’m in the right place.

I told you that I wasn’t going to be welding because I didn’t have enough experience. Corbett just gave me a call and I’m going to be doing some only slightly less glamorous grinding of metal tonight and tomorrow at NIMBY.

The job is going well.

Things are going well!

update 1:33pm The company is springing for a snazzy laptop for me. They love me. They really love me.

I’m sure the joy will wear off when I go somewhere on vacation and then get/have to log in and do some work in the evening. But no matter, I’m giddy with happiness. I’ve never had a good laptop.

update 11pm Grinding went very well. Great space. Great project. Great people. I’m learning too. I saw and met some good people… I’m just terrible with names… there’s the guy who happily bought me a beer from the sodabeer machine, Daniel, a couple other guys, the 2 folks building a 20′ Ganesh, Zack and Corbett and some nice guy named Larry.. we talked for a while…

Coldforged in rare form:

Coldforged on Grand Theft Auto’s sex scene.

What was little Suzie doing with a Mature labeled game anyway? This isn’t like buying Spongebob Squarepants’ Underwater Adventure and unlocking a secret “SPONGEBOB SLIPPERY SLIDING SODOMY” minigame. The GTA series is all about beating and killing cops and pedestrians, banging hookers and killing them afterward and doing essentially as many virtual illegal things as you can fit in a day. But, someone figures out there’s sex in the game and people lose their skulls.

And more…

Finally, someone is launching an investigation into that patently obscene millisecond shot of Janet Jackson’s mostly-obscured nipple during the Super Bowl. I’m so glad that someone is thinking of the irreparable harm that this brief pseudo-nudity caused.

Oh! Did anyone catch that CSI episode where the dog carries home a decapitated human head, and the dog got sick because it ate part of the head?! That was awesome!

Yeah! I saw that episode too! I remember, the killer drugged and then buried some poor sot up to his neck and tortured him all night before killing him! Frickin’ awsome!

I’ve always loved this story. (local version).

I first read it a while back but I wanted to share it with you.

It’s the story of how a 13 year old hacker knocked Steve Gibson’s website off the internet and how he tracked the kid down. The story goes into very fine technical detail but Steve writes it all with such clarity that anyone can read and understand it.

I had only gone a few times during my Boston years but places such as this are important cultural and personal institutions. I certainly hope that there is follow through to the promise on their website

ManRay will be reopening shortly, at a new location. Check the website for update.

I haven’t followed the Boston scene in a while but when I last left our galant heros, they were slowly losing the battle to Puritanical forces.

[Insert image of Mel Gibson tied down on his back in front of a throng of onlookers]
“FREETRADE!”

Friday the 22nd - Wait most of the day for and then receive the bulk of my stuff via UPS directly to my storage space.

Saturday and Sunday the 23rd and 24th - take a welding class at The Crucible (the class ended up being not as educational as I had hoped)

Tuesday the 26th - Start contracting for Wavexpress.

Thursday the 28th - Help a friend of Vixen’s build an Art Car for Burning Man.

Friday the 29th - Meet Bean’s friend Cate. Help her sign-up for the San Francisco Marathon on Sunday. have a great lunch with her overlooking the ferry (all excepting the part where she nearly choked to death… quite a memorable start to our friendship!). Argue with a housemate who firmly believes that newspaper, paper bags, and white paper goes in the compost bin. walk to the Red Poppy Art House just a few blocks away and hear a Spanish guitar duet.

Saturday the 30th - Fill out the forms to get health insurance in California: it is going to cost 70% less than in New Jersey. I could have paid a mere 50% less and gotten almost exactly the same health plan as in New Jersey. See The Incredibles with Vixen and have an all-around very good evening.

Sunday the 31st - Maybe I will go see the San Francisco Marathon, or maybe The 2nd Annual Burning Man pARTiciPARADE. Oh my, I see that the marathon and the pARTiciPARADE are separated by only 3 blocks. I certainly hope that some planning has gone into this!

I certainly am keeping busy!

Russian spammer murdered
John Leyden, The Register 2005-07-26

Notorious Russian spammer Vardan Kushnir was found bludgeoned to death in his Moscow apartment on Sunday. He was killed by repeated blows to the head, Russian news agency Interfax reports…

Cordless phones are a huge disposable industry. How many cordless phones have you owned in the past 10 years? A good phone that is made to last is hard to find.

For corded phones, you lose a lot of credibility with me if you don’t have at least one corded phone in your house… they are reliable as anything. I’ve had the same 2 corded phones for 10 years+ I’ve lost track; they don’t break.

First, more megahertz doesn’t equal better phone. That is a STUPID idea that people apparently willingly buy into. That’s like saying you’ll get better reception on a radio station at 107.9 than a similar station at 88.1. To use another analogy, it’s like saying that a Miata will get you across town faster than Cadillac during rush hour. Additionally, every 5.8 Ghz phone I’ve seen so far isn’t really a 5.8 Ghz phone; it’s 5.8 Ghz from the base to the handset and either 2.4 Ghz or 900 Mhz from the handset back to the base. This means you get the worst of both worlds; each of these technologies has certain problems with reception… maybe it’s trouble going through concrete walls or bouncing off a refrigerator. By using both technologies in one phone, you’re guaranteed to have more trouble.

Excellent phone: Uniden Digital Spread Spectrum 900Mhz phone with answering machine model exs9800. This phone was a new model in about 1999. Excellent and adjustable handset speaker sound quality, people tell me they hear me perfectly, good heft to the handset (I like very much that it feels like a “real” phone in my hands, I’ll save the ity bity phone for when I want to put it in my pocket on the road), digital spread spectrum keeps radio snoops out as well as the best encryption, excellent sounding answering machine, easy to use answering machine (big, simple buttons et all), excellent range in a concrete and steel high-rise building.

Crap phone (that masquerades as an excellent phone): Olympia / Wave Industries OL2400 2.4 Ghz phone Pluses: stylish looking, good interface to a lot of features. Minuses: hard to hold with your shoulder, hard to hold handset speaker to your ear (the speaker only pushes sound out of a tiny opening so you must place it precisely or not hear your party, only moderate speaker sound quality, only moderate microphone, the case creaks loudly directly into your ear as you hold it up to your ear and move about (this drove me INSANE), received some interference in the form of lower sound quality and occasional pops when within 10′ of my 2.4 Ghz wireless network router.

Good phone: I only used this phone for a few weeks before moving away from it but it might qualify as an “excellent phone” Radio Shack 43-3570 2.4 Ghz Expandable Cordless Telephone System. First, it was less expensive than many of the $200 double handset phones I’ve found. $200 for a phone?!?!?! Good interface, excellent sound quality, expandable to 4 phones in $40 handset increments, useful “voicemail waiting” blinky light, though when I hold the Radio Shack phone closer than 6 feet to my laptop running wifi (IE, sitting at the computer while on the phone), the wifi bandwidth suffers a bit and the phone crackles a bit for about 15 seconds (I assume the phone is switching channels or something). It’s kind of annoying. It would take getting a 900MHz phone to fix that issue since wifi is 2.4 GHz. I tried switching wifi channels to no avail. It has enough heft to hold it comfortably. And it has this nifty feature where the phones can work as walkie talkies without the base being nearby. I haven’t given it a real-world test but it sounds neat enough.

I have so far purchased (and returned) 2 CRAP double handset 5.8 Ghz phones. The most amazingly stupid problem I had with it was that you could only have 1 handset off the hook at a time. I’ve spoken about this before.

Ok, enough ranting about phones.

Students for an Orwellian Society