Diskage:
DVD • Brotherhood of the Wolf
CD-ROM • Empty
CD Player
• Nine Inch Nails - Pretty Hate Machine
• Mindfunk -  Mindfunk
• System of a Down - Toxicity
• Faster Pussycat - Wake Me When It's Over
• Metallica - ...and Justice For All

Books Lying Open
• The Books of Blood, Volume Two, Clive Barker

Soul-Devouring Worry
• That's not jello!

When I Grow Up:
• The squeakers will know when it's time to be goddamn quiet.

Curse of the Day:
• May you forget to ground yourself first.

And no, you can't just use the switch on the back of the PC, or unplug it/turn off the power strip.  Those provide power to the tower, but you can't actually turn on the machine from them.

Of course the problem is that a new tower is fine, but you still have to take apart your existing tower, unhook all the wires, take out the cards and drives and motherboard, and then reassemble them all in the new tower.

I volunteered to do that, since the PC shop wanted $100 for the job and said it would be 2 or 3 days until they could get to it.  It's basically the same as building you a new PC, but worse, since they have to take the parts out of an existing one, rather than just cardboard boxes and molded Styrofoam packing material.  And with a new PC they'll give you break on installation since they're selling you $800 or more worth of hardware, rather than $40 worth of tower.

He'd been having lots of performance problems with his machine for months, and I suspected it was all infected, nay, infested with viruses.  I'd tried to install Norton on it and had no luck.  It would unzip and start to install, and then the program would just vanish.  McAfee would install (probably since it's such a PoS that no virus fears it) but as soon as you started to scan it would close instantly, and then the machine would lock up.

So, knowing I'd have his machine gutted, I took my HD out of my back up tower and took it over with me.

Much tedious unscrewing and maneuvering later, I had everything switched over and set up properly.  I tried to run Norton off of my HD as the slave, and it just would not work. It wouldn't start; click the exe and it would hourglass, and then after 5 seconds just go back to a pointer.

So I opened it up and took out the HDs and switched the pins so mine was the master and dad's was the slave, and it didn't work. Remembered you have to put the master in the middle of the ribbon cable or it won't see the slave, so switched that.  At last it works, but now my HD has to install about 500 drivers to work with his hardware, and it keeps not seeing the CD-ROM since the drive letter was changed with 2 HDs in the box.  Etc.

Anyway, eventually it would boot and worked okay, and the virus scan revealed... 296 infected files.  So yeah, "infested" would be an accurate term.  Norton was able to repair about 100 of them, and had to quarantine and then delete all the rest, but apparently all of them were just shit.  Mostly gobbledegook.exe type names sitting in program files and windows/temp.

That worked out okay, so I took my HD out and switched his back to master and eventually got everything else working properly.  Whole thing took like 5 hours, though that includes endless restarts and time for virus scanning, as well as eating dinner and watching the Lakers game.  It was almost as exciting to do it as to read about it.  If you can imagine.

I've been somewhat backsliding the last two days, and played some Diablo 2, rather than doing work.  Well, I did a bunch of work yesterday, but I had to get on Bnet and refresh my characters before they were all erased.  I nearly didn't, most of them had last been logged on August 23, and if they go 3 months without being logged on they get deleted.

I had to play just a little bit, to see if I still remembered how and wanted to.  Yes and no, as it turned out.  However today I was sitting around about 5am, no mood to write, sick of surfing, sick of reading job ap emails for the D2 site, but not tired enough to go to sleep.  So I got on and played a couple of games.  It wasn't bad.  Didn't really find anything glorious, but played my four top characters and muled a few nice mid-level items, and enjoyed it well enough.

I have now removed the CD and put it back in the jewel case and in the bottom drawer of the desk, where I can hopefully resist it's time-devouring siren song for another couple of months. He who has no money and no promising career options and is thir... twenty-eight needs to stick to working on the big novel, not screwing around with video games.  At least that's what I tell myself.

I have to work today, at this.  Should be some amusing crowd stories; there aren't that many fans at the event each year, but the ones that do show up are quite into things in a deeply-ethnic fashion.  The weather is a disaster though, since it's been raining since yesterday morning.  It's warm, probably 70 outside since the storm is from the south, but quite wet and gloomy. You drop a few thousand to fly your family across the country to San Diego to see your black university play football and have a parade, you damn well expect nice sunny weather.  Better luck next year.

Various site updates:

I trimmed back the kudzu-like growth of the nav bar, and now it's displaying just the last few articles and reviews and short stories, rather than all of them ever.  Hopefully people will see the link for the main page in each case, and not overlook the 90% of content that's not directly linked to.  If they do, I shall sob like a small child, lost at the zoo. Near the Polar Bears.  By that one cotton candy stand.  No, the other one, on the path to the reptile house.  Yeah, over there.

All four slang pages have been added to, but just a few bits here and there.  Two new terms for intercourse, two new full deckisms, a couple of more examples of hackerese, and a couple more disgusting sex acts.  I'd tell you which, but that would spoil all of your fun.  Now go read them before I publish them in a book and remove them from the website.

There's also an October mailbag, making a triumphant return after taking August and September off.  Confidentially, the mailbag was recovering from "exhaustion" at Betty Ford.  The mailbag would also like to report that Mrs. Houston snores like a '72 Pinto in need of a tune up, and Tim Allen bogarts the remote.

Various meaningless news items:

• I've been ignoring the Winona trial, but I had to post something about it a couple of days ago when word of her spending $3000 on a jacket and two tops came forth.  Today I happened to click through the slideshow, after reading news that someone has stolen a folder of her personal info, to sell to the tabloids, no doubt.  The photos of the trial are fascinating, and not just because Winona is such a cutie-pie.  Well mostly due to that, but her fashion faux pas and numerous other interesting photos called to me, so I've throw together one of my news photo pages.  This is the longest ever, oddly enough, and has 10 photos from the trial, most of them of Winona.

• Popular photo today on Yahoo.  It shows a platoon of Chinese special forces, all decked out in black kung fu style body armor, and armed with the wholly impractical weapon of... a really big broomstick. The fact that they're holding them like some sort of gay soldier porn just adds to the amusement factor.

• Suddenly every man on earth is interested in a German vacation.

Germany's top court has ordered the state of Bavaria to allow partner-swapping, dismissing complaints from residents in the conservative southern state by ruling that "swinger clubs" are not immoral.

• Guns 'n Roses died due to Axl being such a temperamental primadonna prick that everyone else just got sick of him and gave it up.  So he carried on with Guns 'n Roses pretty much alone, hiring various studio musicians and changing the sound about seven times before hiring a higher quality of musicians and working endlessly on Chinese Democracy, an album that still has no release date.  They're touring anyway, mostly on the strength of all the old GnR hits, and for the first date on their big tour... Axl doesn't show up and the fans riot.

Dozens of people threw rocks at police and security guards and smashed windows at the General Motors Place arena in downtown Vancouver late on Thursday, when promoters canceled the show at the last minute.

"Axl is going to pay," one man could be heard yelling at a television camera as a group of fans in the background were seen ramming a bicycle rack into the arena's doors, breaking the glass.

The promoters say he had problems getting there from California, but who knows if that's true or he was off on a coke bender in Detroit. In any event, the band was there, the equipment was there, the show was ready to go; how can the lead singer not make it?  It's only their first real show in about 10 years, no reason not to try and fly in at the last minute, Axl. 

• Rather disgusting story where a SF news station tested shopping carts and found all sorts of filth, human waste, and other junk on them. Consider that next time you put food into one.  The reason, obviously enough, is because homeless people are always stealing them, or they're being dumped into ditches and recovered later, and go back into service without being cleaned.

Biggest problem will probably be the extreme right wing judges that will be confirmed now; look for substantial erosion of civil liberties and constitutional rights in the years to come, especially if there are more terrorist hits on US territory.

I have long felt that conservatives are a smaller minority than the voting results confirm.  It seems to me that most right wingers are more likely to vote, since they feel themselves to be oppressed and under siege (see all the "liberal media" stuff they're always going on about, after 2 hours of loving Bush news coverage) and are working hard to keep their preferential treatment.  They want their tax cuts and gun rights and want to push their anti-abortion and god and church agenda upon others. That's sort of the history of religion world wide, after all.  So with 60% of the people voting, and 51% of those voting going republican, I figure that 90% of right wingers are voting, while maybe 70% of committed left wingers are voting, since they're more trying to vote to advance agendas, rather than hunkering down to preserve what they think society used to be, as the right wing is doing. 

Plus lots of the left wing voters are going for independent candidates, the green party, etc.  It's the uninvolved middle that has a very low turn out, as they are cynical, don't pay attention to who is running, don't think any of it matters in their lives, and can't be arsed to vote.  So a minority that's motivated to vote can command far more electoral weight than their actual numbers would indicate.

Of course a conservative would probably say the same thing, but in reverse, so grain of salt me if you must.

Molly Ivins had a good column about things today, where she talks about what idiots most everyone involved in this election is, and especially what a horrible job the Democrats have done the last couple of years.

How could they let themselves be buffaloed by Republicans on taxes, with all the facts and fairness on their side? One had only to say, "Every single nickel of tax relief in that package will stay in it, but instead of giving 50 percent of the cut to the richest one percent of Americans, we're going to put that tax relief into a payroll tax cut, it's going to the bottom 99 percent of the people." Payroll taxes stop at $84,900 a year -- anything you make over that is untaxed, a patently ridiculous system. If you cut payroll taxes, the money goes into the pockets of people who go right out and spend it, thus ginning up the economy, rather than to those who just put it in offshore tax shelters.

Further, any party so brain-dead it can't even make an issue out of Enron and corporate sleaze deserves to be out of office.

Given that the last few years of deregulation have created the uncontrolled greed business climate that allowed things like Enron and WorldCom and others to blow up, and that Republicans have this habit of giving their corporate donors absolutely everything they ask for, I don't have high hopes for a lessening of business scandals in the years to come.

Another interesting PoV on the election came from the Cal Pundit.  He often talks about elections and voting often, and how big a factor gerrymandering is.  The party in power gets to draw up the new district lines, and this can be done with quite a bit of leeway to cheat things for yourself.  The idea is to give your party a slim majority in as many districts as possible, while concentrating the supporters of the other party all in one or two districts.  So you could have a 10,000 person area with 5 districts, and if 6000 are for the other party and 4000 for you, but all of yours are spread around while all of theirs are in one small clump, you put them all into one district and spread the rest of the area into four districts.

Then when the other party is in power they of course try to undo this and redraw things so their power base is in every district, and so on.  It's a perpetual back and forth struggle, and what ends up happening is the lines get set in eventually, and you have hardly any competitive races.  Each district has a long time voting lean, and people get bored voting when their main local election goes the same way every time.  So they don't go out and vote on that, and therefore aren't around to vote on other larger issues that might be of more importance.

Lastly, I found this Tom Toles cartoon borderline brilliant.

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