i finally finished neal stephenson's quicksilver last night. it's hard to really discuss coherently a book that it's taken me three months to read, but i'll try, i guess. the first time i read cryptonomicon, i actually found myself skipping ahead from some slow parts. i actually enjoyed that one considerably more the second time through. i didn't skip ahead through any parts of quicksilver, though. you can draw one of two conclusions from that. either that i liked it better, or that it was composed entirely of slow parts. the latter is closer to the truth. but that's not to say that's a bad thing. i enjoyed it, actually, quite a lot. i liken it to a double quarter pounder at mcdonald's to some extent. it's tasty and satisfying but in the end just way the hell too much. at least the first time around. but in general, it is kind of an interesting perspective on the events in question, and it's damned amusing at times. sometimes it's too clever for its own good, and it does indeed take a while to get off the ground, but in general, it's enjoyable. i do plan on reading it again before passing final judgment. but not for a while. after all, there's another one coming in april... in the meantime, though, i need to read some pulpy trash...

number one, bush supports fucking with the constitution. this shouldn't come as any kind of surprise, obviously, since we know now that george w. bush is a reactionary dinosaur. this isn't what he sold the country on in 2000, with the whole 'uniter not a divider' horseshit, but there's not much we can do about that until november. what enrages me, is that he wants to enshrine, in the holiest document this country knows, the most repugnant kind of discriminatory nonsense that can still be spoken aloud in our evolved, but clearly still-evolving society. let's explain it real simply for the benefit of those who might agree with dubya.
fact: gays and lesbians are people
fact: since the 1860s, and moreso in the 1950s, too, we pretty much all agreed that discrimination is uncool.
fact: saying some people may do something and others may not is discrimination.
conclusion? dubya wants to encourage discrimination. seems pretty fucking simple to me. the reasons not to do this are legion. there is one reason to do this, and one reason alone, and that is 'because $religious_text says so.' and i'll spare you another diatribe on separation of church and state, but suffice it to say, it's proven to be a Good Thing. we've got ten months to prevent them from fucking it up.

number two. then, fucking arnold. arnold thinks that we should let people born in foreign countries become president. not for him, i'm sure, he's asking about it for a friend, right? regardless of the awkwardness of his saying this, is it or isn't it a good idea? well, goodness knows having intermixed royal families and cross-pollinated governments worked great for europe, didn't it? oh, wait, um, never mind. there's any number of reasons that it could be a disaster, and really nothing lost by prohibiting it. schwarzenegger's desire to be reagan threatens to be as pathological as michael dell's desire to be steve jobs.

finally, ralphie. ralph nader desides to run again. hey, well, so be it. don't worry boys and girls, ralph isn't going to hurt anyone besides himself this time. are we really worried that people burnt by bush in 2000 are going to risk voting for nader again? that 3% he got in 2000 is going to be .03% this time. he will have no support whatsoever, because there's just too much at stake, and everybody knows it. so, let him run. i voted for him in 2000, and i may vote for him again (after all, who among us fears edwards/kerry losing massachusetts?). seriously. if it's going to be close enough for nader to tilt it to bush again, there are but a few explanations: a. the country's dumber than we thought, b. bin laden turns up sometime in october, or c. they get a picture of edwards/kerry riding around in a tank.

oh and who the fuck said 24 was allowed to make us wait a month until the next episode???? gah!

if you are both a simpsons fan and a console owner, you owe it to yourself to check out the simpsons: hit and run. it's more heavily laden with running and inside jokes than jay & silent bob strike back. from the ship in the harbor marked 'globex' to the broken-down monorail, to the fact that you can purchase a muumuu for homer to wear, it's full of references to all of the best episodes, and even some lousy ones, too. and it's even fun, too! who knew?

a matter of some clarification, just for my own personal gratification.
the word radius, believe it or not, is the cause of serious confusion in my line of work. not on my part, mind you, but in the people i talk to.

today, i spoke to a gentleman who said he "wanted to radii the corners of his part." now this, this is emblematic of more than one problem with my telephone friends' favorite goofy little word. let's address the problems one by one. first, radii is not a singular term. ever (neither is axes, children.). number two. radius is not a fucking verb. you cannot radius something, try as you might. third, radiused is not a word. it's neither an adjective nor a past tense verb. consequently, you shouldn't say that "an edge is radiused," because that makes no fucking sense. and finally, believe it or not, i've heard it used as an adverb, pretty much. as in, "the tool moves radiused down to point five..." it could be worse--they could've said 'radiusly'. but it's still wrong. wrong wrong wrong.

to sum up, not everything that is round or circular can be described with some derivation of the word radius. that's why we have other words like round, circle, diameter, curve, arc, bend, et cetera.

thank you for your time.

those fucks went and did it. and you know, as soon as you read that it might happen, you knew, you knew that it was going to happen. so, let this be an object lesson to all those small market teams (yeah, i'm talking about you, oakland) who, in the course of their (generally justifiable) whining, conflate the payroll of the yanks with that of the red sox. classify the red sox with the mariners and giants and mets instead; this conclusively proves that there's a whole 'nother league.
while the sox were attempting a deal wherein they saved the greedy rangers some money and got them out of a foolhardy contract, while still not crippling themselves, they were thwarted. because they just couldn't pay any more. whereas mr. steinbrenner's club not only acquired a $25m salary, they swapped a guy who makes, what, two, three? soriano got a lot of headlines the past couple of years, but this past season he was exposed for the strikeout machine that he is. but still, the rangers fans must be ecstatic. a-rod's jersey should have had 'albatross' written above the number 3 on his back. i mean, this is just ridiculous; it is a deal not a single other team could possibly do, seeing as how no other team has a $200m payroll.
but all that said, it ain't the end of the world. nah, it just gets the blood boiling for the season, just about at the right time. and it's a good thing in a few ways. first, it takes the pressure off the sox--before this, they were favorites. now, it's just like last year, and last year, they were the better team, and should have won, but we won't get into that because it still leaves me sobbing in bed clutching my stuffed llama. and let's not forget that the rest of the yankee line up is old. OLD! two days ago, it was okay to make fun of lofton and sheffield and williams (and giambi?) for being old and decrepit. that hasn't changed. and hell, now they're dumb enough to keep jeter at short and move their new gold glover to third? i'm sure their pitchers appreciate that.
this doesn't tilt the scales; if anything, it evens them. and it makes me glad i did bother purchasing those standing-room seats for an extra game against the fuckers. and hell, the al east will be the most entertaining baseball seen in years, the way it looks, with the jays and orioles restocked and dangerous, and the devil rays less crappy, and always annoyingly decent, believe it or not.

remember, boys and girls, 'yankees suck' is not intended to be a commentary on their record, and it's this kind of shit that makes it ever so clear. game on...

addendum: bostondirtdogs.com has a typically amusing take on the whole thing, including a nice rant from that guy who was in phantoms and ever-insightful commentary from curt schilling.

since i have every intention of quitting my job later this year, a coworker of mine pointed out that it would be good to take the opportunity to make a portfolio of my cad work. since the recent attrition has meant more time on phones and more talk time in general, i've spent a lot more time fucking around in pro/e lately, and today i finally finished my latest project. you see, a while ago, i took my lego star wars battledroid figure, and built him in an afternoon of sporadic attention. and he's put up on proecentral (scroll down 1/4 of the way), and has been downloaded nearly 2,000 times. anyway, this is is his big brother, in more ways than one.

it's the #8012 super battle droid set, all 381 pieces. family tables up the wazoo, relations driving the gears, piping, flexible parts, component interfaces, you name it. the bom takes up the height of an entire C-size sheet. bwahahaha. it's really kinda funny. i have a hard time emailing or im-ing when i'm talking to some slug on the phone, but pro? hell, i can drive pro in my damn sleep. and some weeks i do. more pictures will follow in the pro/e gallery another day.

i am not smart. at least when it comes to using microsoft windows, i'm really not. today i frantically emailed some people asking them not to trust instant messages sent from me, because a piece of, uh, something, took over my im client. so i get an im from a colleague with a random link to click on. this is something that happens probably 5-10 times a day depending on how much work one or all of us are doing. so, it goes to this page, and it has what looks to be some stupid flash game regarding osama and saddam. real subtle. 'course, there's a click-through security dialog asking if you want to install the stupid game, mentioning the security certification. not terribly unusual. except the stupid game is a trojan horse to bring in this stupid program from buddy links dot com (i'm not helping those fuckers' pagerank, dammit). which quits and restarts AIM, also something that happens on a pretty frequent basis by itself, due to connectivity issues. by the time that happens, i'm messaging the person that sent it to me, who points out that she wasn't the one who sent it, and then someone says 'oh no, you didn't click on it, did you?'. yeah, i did. windows presents you with so many error messages in the course of the day is it any surprise that none of them have any meaning? even relatively informative ones get lost in the shuffle. so many things quit working requiring a kick to start up again, so many things behave inconsistently that when something really should grab your attention, it's already too late. and hell, even when you do do something about it, it doesn't work. the add-remove programs wizard crashed upon trying to remove it, and had to be taken down, which in turn broke several other control panels, and aim quit and restarted several times in the course of the day. i have no idea if it tried this crap on someone else again. sorry if it did. so, really, this can't be atypical, right? you can argue that it's my fault, and it is, you'd be right. but at the same time, with its preponderance of meaningless error messages that conceal the real thing, its inscrutable litany of security dialogs, the alacrity with which it allows a malicious program to betray and subvert others, and the failure of the cleanup routines, windows sure didn't lift a finger to save itself.

so why does the world still insist upon it as the standard for desktop computing?
oh, right. solitaire.

to get an idea of exactly how many people the whole gay marriage issue is bringing out of the woodwork, and exactly what their thought processes are, one need only look at the op-ed page of the newspaper. take for instance some lovely letters to the editor of the globe this week.

they range from civil, but misguided, to hopelessly beholden to stereotypes. when it first happened, they went even further towards the uncivilized end of the spectrum, but alas, the search results for older ones are less than useful. but anyway, the peanut gallery's reaction is one thing, but what's more of a concern is the reaction of people who actually have some clout in the matter. take for instance this little gem of a slippery-slope argument. polygamy's next, and then bestiality, some would have you believe. the dumbshits who went and protested on the common this weekend were even worse, holding up signs with pithy saying such as 'homos need not apply'. seriously, it boggles the mind that people suddenly feel like it's okay and acceptable to behave that way toward their fellow man. there are any number of words that you could have substituted on that sign that have been, to all our shame, essentially true in the past, and now, now it's suddenly okay to advocate it? because that what romney seems to want to do. in acting contrary to the court's opinion that 'separate is seldom, if ever, equal', by enforcing that very concept into law, that's what he's doing. 'separate but equal' was reprehensible and every year in january and february we justly commemorate those who led to its demise. and now we're ready to write it back into law, against a new and different minority. and to 'protect' what? a particular religious interpretation of an everyday concept, and that's all. it's disingenuous in the extreme to say that this imperils traditional marriage. what the fuck are people going to do, not get married, all of a sudden? maybe they'll come up with a new term for it or something. something involving elvis, i'd hope. but seriously, as many have said, this is not the threat that proponents of wedlock should be worried about; it's divorce and domestic violence that you really ought to be concerned with. but no, no our fucking idiot president (as well as this state's governor who's trying his damnedest to be an idiot) thinks that with all the other shit going on, he's got to protect traditional marriage. why it's the second most important thing to steroids in professional sports! fuck that. one of the benefits of having a girlfriend in law school is that i've gained an appreciation for the fact that courts don't decide right and wrong, they decide whether or not something is or isn't consistent with the law, something that's sometimes too easy to forget. but in this case, the two cross purposes dovetail nicely. and the worst part of this is the timing. this is just the issue that the religious right needs to mobilize themselves and really shift the national conversation back to the right. just in time to put their monkey back in the oval office. sorry boys and girls, but this has me pissed off, 'cause basically what it amounts to is too high a percentage of our country thinking it's suddenly okay again to think some people should be legally different from others. seriously, read the letters to the editor next time this is front-page news, and get pissed off, because there's surely got to be enough people in this country to respond to this with the requisite 'what the fuck?'

what the fuck?

despite the fact that i love the winter and all the attendant wonderful shitty weather, the promise of spring is not without its niceties. chief among them is baseball. yeah, it seems like i just managed to shut up about it the other day, but i spent much of today in pursuit of tickets (only marginally successfully), and apart from some catcalls when they accidentally flashed grady little's face on a promo video on the jumbotron screen, and some grousing about the limits upon purchases, it was a splendid day at the ballpark. mind you, having picked up a wristband at 8:30, i received a number that wouldn't be called until 16:00 or so. i don't know for sure, 'cause i wasn't there; i left and fired up my web browsers and telephone at 10... but i did get to see fenway park covered in snow:




and wally the green monster even came out, and didn't see his shadow. that means this is the year, right?

i wasn't going to waste time writing about the brouhaha regarding the halftime 'show' at sunday's super bowl game. but now this has got me started all over again. one minute, the fcc, the nfl, cbs, and mtv are falling all over each other to be more aghast than the next. a veritable race to get the sincerest mea culpa. the debate resurfaces as to why american society is so very prudish, but then, it's not really a debate, is it? if advertisers and viewers speak their minds so vociferously, then that's what causes this, right? no, i don't believe i've yet read about any advertisers pulling their ads (particularly considering, as jon stewart noted, that so many were for, uh 'male enhancement' anyway, thereby making it a rather hypocritical prospect). no, this is a case of protesting too much. don't you think the nfl loves having people talking about the super bowl at the water cooler two days after the season ended. for the wrong reasons or the right reasons, don't you think they're going to watch halftime more attentively next year? and then there's cbs saying 'oh, golly gee, i hope nothing untoward like that regrettable display happens at the grammy awards on february 8th at 8pm on cbs.' as if nothing like this has ever happened there in the past (hint: it has). they doth protest too much. even the staunchest helen lovejoy-type is going to be more tempted to watch the terrible filth they so deplore. like ignatius j. reilly in a confederacy of dunces, the american public keeps wringing its hands about how terrible every aspect of their entertainment is, yet the more repulsed they profess to be, the more it compels them to watch. it'd be nice if the people who are purportedly so offended by this kind of stuff just turned off their fucking tvs, and stopped listening to the radio, and let the rest of us embrace our well-earned degeneracy. but that'll never happen.