October 2004 Archives

HUZZAH! Time for ghosts and goblins and other assorted creepy candy-eating zombies! Looks like I'm dishing out treats to the little monsters this Halloween, since I now have a house that's an obvious egging target (still have to ditch those hearts on the shutters). I've done all I can to spookify the place, including carving this neato pumpkin.

Got this idea from a couple of real propaganda posters. The idea was to use existing images, preferably something from a vacation (or a plow match, perhaps?). Certainly, I can't compete with actual propaganda posters, but here's my attempt.

First the original... Pretty threatening, no?

Now mine.

Got this one at my own home account. Sounds a little like an absinthe hallucination-induced Harlequin romance novel.

Some of this stuff is really beautiful. You may have read this previous post of Spam poetry but I got this new one today, submitted into our support queue. Frankly, I'm amazed at the depth and the soul of these generated emails (perhaps I should publish a book on this):

He called her Harriett (or was it Harriett?).
Fetishists remain mitochondrial. But they need
to remember how wisely demon toward insurance agent hides.
When insurance agent beyond ribbon is magnificent,
mortician about figure out bartender defined by.

Remember that all Spam Poetry submitted becomes the property of Zuckervati.com. Heh.

Was up until 6 am working on an issue in a customer's maintenance window. My whole day's been messed up as a result. These guys are the biggest bunch of amateurs I've seen; after repeatedly giving them my cell phone number, none of them called me when their server started acting up. A handful of customers saw an unusual dialogue box, and started calling in. So these guys call the president of my company and start freaking on him.

Me, I heard none of this, despite still sitting in front of my computer, with my cell phone and pager on my desk in front of me. By the time I got into work at 9am, everything's going crazy and they ended up unsetting a single option which they had earlier told me to set. Bunch of fucking amateurs.

Been playing with PhotoShop again. Trying to take some vacation photos and turn them into those Art-Deco propaganda posters, like those ones of Che Guevara or Lenin, or Ronald Regan .... Here's some recent ones.

Work has been a bit of a light load recently. I've been doing a little more than my fair share of surfing surfing the day, as can be seen by the number of articles on the MissingLinks page. Did a bit of an update to the icons on that page as well. Found out how easy and fast it is to do. I may make a habit of changing the icons every couple of months. That ought to keep it fresh.

Hoping the job will get a little busier than it is now. Got some updates to do next week (at 3am), and some training up in Ottawa sometime -- so I probably shouldn't be complaining.

For those who never look around my site -- not that there's anything wrong with that (I barely scratch the surface, myself) -- I got those SpamRock pics up. Also did some fixes to make the site more up-to-date. Stuff like getting most of the pages to at least have the updated stylesheets and theme colours (!!!). I've been looking for a more efficient way of doing this for the static pages, but haven't had much luck. Going to revamp the art pages -- maybe with some real artwork -- so they're offline right now.

Got paid today. Yeah. Finally getting some money back into the account after the new house, new furniture, new appliances, Australia boondoggle, etc. Been acting pretty frugally this past month, not doing too many things that would cost money (Montreal trip and parties aside). I'm hoping that this trend will continue, and no unexpected expenses will show up. One possible exception is the body work on my car. Got a quote about fixing the scratches and broken taillight on my car yesterday and it wasn't too bad.

I'd like to do something interesting tonight, like get hammered and hit the Starlight (I know ... I'm such a classy guy). Orange Monkey guy is DJ'ing and he'll probably be playing more disco tunes. Ah, we'll see what's going down after werk.

Been trying to get samba up and working for this machine. My 2.8 server was a breeze compared to this. Everything looks to be configured properly, but I get different errors every time I change my smb.conf file. I'll bash away at it for a little while longer, but I'd really like to be able to access this machine from Windows. Most of my web HTML work is done from Windows, and I don't like the idea of having to SCP everything over every time something needs updating.

Spent the weekend in Montreal (only a 7 hour drive!) and hung out with some friends there. Got to play my new Trivial Pursuit: Pop Culture Edition. Yah, I know -- go all the way to La Belle Province, and play Trivial Pursuit. We hit the town a little later, and got to see many a spectacular restaurant, and got to butcher the French language in a way fitting of all Canadian anglophones.

Not too bad really, if anyone started giving me problems, I'd just yell out: "I'm an American, dammit! You can't treat me this way!" Either that, or "Hey Buddy, how ya get to Yonge St.?"

We did all the usual stuff: Drove around the Big "O", ate poutine (I opted out), ate ribs at the Bar-B Barbeque (I had a salad), bought bagels, checked out the Forum, and walked up and down Rue Ste-Denis and Rue Ste-Catherine, hitting all the coffee and head shops.

Ok, blog is back online now, and barring some minor stylesheet issues, and static pages which need to be redone, the thing's back in working order. So for those of you keeping articles around for the MissingLinks page, you should be able to login now and get back to work!