Avram's journal

Aaaaauuugh! I managed to totally forget that there was a Sketchcrawl on Sunday! And the weather was nice, too! At least there’s another one coming up on December 11th; I’ve set my Backpack account to email me a reminder a few days in advance.

Look, if I disobey the command to “Don’t read this”, what makes you think I’m gonna obey the orders hidden behind the cut?

Hey, did Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Moses, any of that crowd, any of them bother to mention that boxer shorts fit funny when you put ’em on backwards? Hanh?

Can anyone explain this to me?

N:\fake\path\here>dir *bur*
 Volume in drive N is fakevolumename
 Volume Serial Number is 12345678

 Directory of [path deleted]

05/18/2004  02:08p              30,666 TX030_BUR.jpg
04/14/2004  12:44p              36,537 SO129_ECR.jpg
05/18/2004  02:08p              28,059 TX032_BUR.jpg
05/07/2004  02:02p              25,932 FT098_BUR.jpg
05/18/2004  02:08p              28,587 TX031_BUR.jpg
05/13/2004  12:20p              30,084 FT097_BUR.jpg
05/07/2004  02:02p              25,584 FT099_BUR.jpg
               7 File(s)        205,449 bytes
               0 Dir(s)  36,263,952,384 bytes free

Trying to make up a character for a Big Eyes, Small Mouth game has reminded me of the annoying things about a system that I generally like.

( RPG neeping here )

Another annoying thing that has nothing to do with the system is that I want to make up a necromancer, but the character who shows up when I start typing is a rakshasa.

Grrrr. I picked up my new PDA at Circuit City last night, a Sony Clié TJ37. Sony ships a CD that contains a special-for-Cliés version of the Palm Desktop, but it’s only a Windows app. I figured this only mattered for things like accessing the MP3 player. Nope. From hunting around on the web, I’ve finally discovered that any Clié with an MP3 player won’t sync at all with the ordinary Palm Desktop on a Mac.

There’s a solution — The Missing Sync, a piece of third-party software, which gives Mac users full access to the Clié. I eventually bought the download version (after waiting an hour because their store site’s server was down). I got my confirmation email, which was supposed to contain a download URL, but didn’t. I wrote to customer service, who’ll eventually get around to me by the next business day. Fuckers.

Update: Actually, they emailed me with an URL about seven hours after I sent the complaint. Still not as good as it could have been, but better than the next day.

Every so often I’ll see a story in the news on a topic I know about. Every single time this happens, the story is a pile of rubbish. Here’s the latest, from The Guardian:

Just 48 hours before Lord Hutton delivers his verdict on the controversy surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly, the BBC has begun an advertising experiment that involves buying up all internet search terms relating to the inquiry.

Despite being one of the main players in the drama, anyone searching for "Hutton inquiry" or "Hutton report" on the UK's most popular search engine Google is automatically directed to a paid-for link to BBC Online's own news coverage of the inquiry.

Well, that sounds pretty creepy. But wait — “automatically directed to”? What does that mean? When I do a Google search, I get a list of links, and I can click on the one I want, I’m not automatically directed anywhere. And since when does Google sell link rankings? Ah, further in the story, we find out what’s actually going on:

Through Google's Ad Words service advertisers can bid to buy up search terms that relate to their business. The more they bid, the higher up their link is shown on the right-hand side of the page next to Google's normal results sorted by relevancy.

Oh, that’s all? The BBC bought an ad on Google? What’s the big deal? Lots of people do that. That bears no resemblance at all to what The Guardian claimed in the opening paragraphs.

To top it all off, when I actually Google for hutton inquiry, I don’t see any ads at all. The top link goes to the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk (I don’t know who owns that, and don’t care enough to do a whois). And in a fine display of self-referentiality, the top news link goes to that Guardian story.

So, is all mainstream news reporting this bad, and I just don’t realize it most of the time?

One thing Jersey City’s teaching me is how good the transit was in NYC. Not just the transit itself, but the support services. Specifically: the maps.

There doesn’t seem to be a bus map for Jersey City. Each borough in NYC has a map showing all of the bus routes, overlaid on a street map of the borough, so you can find your start and finish points and then see what routes go by and where the intersection are. No such thing here. We’ve just got route maps for each route, so you’ve got to already know what route goes where, and gods forbid you need to transfer, ’cause then your decision tree starts branching out into mystery space.

It looks like there’s one bus route that goes past where tomorrow’s interview is, and it doesn’t intersect with any other bus route. It looks like there are two routes that go near me. Do either of them go within a few blocks of that first bus? I don’t know, and there’s no easy way to find out. NJ Transit’s website is supposed to be able to advise me, but when I use that form, it claims there are no routes near my origin.

As far as I can tell, from consulting an actual map of Hudson County and guesstimating where the light rail stops are (’cause they’re not marked, though the PATH stations are), it looks like my options are (1) walk three-quarters of a mile or so east to the light rail, take a two-and-a-half mile train trip to a spot three-quarters of a mile or so northwest of my destination, and then walk from there, or (2) just walk two miles south. In the snow, all uphill both ways, no doubt.

Other stuff from yesterday:

I’m down to one last lead in the pack of ten non-photo-blue 0.5mm mechanical pencil leads I bought in September. (That’s not including the current one and replacement sitting in my mechanical pencil.) I’ve been going through ’em pretty quick recently. I stopped off at Kinokuniya Books to stock up, and they only had one pack left! Aiieeee! I’m sure they’re ordering more, but will they get in by the time I need them (which should be, um, March or April) They had another kind, but they were 0.7mm.

bugsybanana and I had to walk about eight blocks out of our way to get around the huge cordoned-off area north of Times Square. We could have walked through if we’d been willing to wait on line and show ID. I had no intention of starting off my new year by acting like a citizen of the Soviet Union and showing fucking identification papers to the cops just to walk the public streets of my own city. Sorry, I’m just one of those cranky old guys who remembers living in a free country.

Turns out that you can open a stuck jar of gesso by prying under the lid with a screwdriver. Works real well. Lid comes off all at once, real quick-like. If your goal involves covering your shirt, hands, arms, and several floor tiles with gesso, I cannot recommend this technique highly enough.

But that’s not all! Since the first question 90% of my friends ask when I talk about gesso is “What is gesso?”, I figured I’d provide a web link. I typed what is gesso into Google, and it came back with a definition link.