First day of classes.

It was okay - I managed not to get rained on, and I ordered the book (I'll probably just have to spend some time with an MP3 player and the book on reserve) I need for my last class, and tomorrow's an early class with a clean slate. Because today was kind of pissy right at the end - the rest was okay, and I should be able to get over the bad part with the good, but it's not that easy.

The bad was that I played 2dlife tonight at Literati, and lost by margins of 100, 150, and 180 respectively. Could not get anything to work at all, while he found bingo after bingo after bingo.

The worse was that I had a dentist's appointment today, and althoughI received an e-mail about it, and confirmed it because I didn't have class today until six, I managed to reprise my role as the Man Who Remembers Nothing Important and forgot about it until someone called and asked why I wasn't there. The frustration that I feel right about now is not properly expressable in words, but if I had to try, it would be a howl of incoherent rage followed by the smashing of everything around, breakable or not. This would continue in a frenzy until either the entire room had been pulled down around me or the only things left to break would break me instead. It's a Bruce Banner type of angry, and it doesn't help that annaonthemoon keeps getting needlessly frustrated at the imperfect workings of her Internet connection. We all need to chill out, I'm sure, and in the grand scheme of things, it's probably pointless, but it makes me feel so stupid to have forgotten something like that.

Moral of the story is, don't trust me with anything important. I'll forget it until after I needed it. If you remember, tell me to write it down and your odds improve a little bit that I might remember it. Still, I'm not the dependable person when it comes to remembering things. Just don't do it. Honestly. You'll save yourself aggravation later.

Old books time - How it works... the computer! Take a jaunt down memory lane to the days of big whirring tapes-spinning stuff.

For a decentralized, cell-based organization, according to this blogger's count, there's an awful lot of #2s of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Justification for keeping the terror alert on yellow permanently? Although, the constant fearfearfear atmosphere has led to creative talent remixing old war propaganda posters and bringing them in line with the current day.

Perhaps bringing us closer to a world where the BSOD is common even in military ventures, Microsoft makes a foray into robotics.

A warning that putting too much of oneself's real life online may not be safe - Google's Calendar used in conjunction with other things to identify a person. What I want to know is why the default options to all of these things seem to be set to "Sure! Share all of this with the whole world!" Although, I suppose, considering the trail I've blazed on the Internet for these many years, someone could probably find me as well, and I'm not actively trying to put my sensitive details out. (In my defence, I hope that much or most of my personal data has been placed out by others and I don't have access controls over it to delete it.) I'm just miffed that the default options are "share", rather than "not share".

Not very related to George Carlin, perhaps more to David Letterman than anything, the seven types of Web Searchers. Classifications for all!

Anyway, while still frustrated at myself, I have to go to bed, or class will eat me alive tomorrow. So g'night.

Eventful first week of classes.

Tomorrow, after a short stint at the office, err, Festifall, whoring out promoting the gaming organization, I'll be on the road with a car full of annaonthemoon's stuff. And her, too. Tomorrow, she goes home (although I find it rather problematic that nobody else could be arsed to get her and her materials. Ah, well.) and Friday will be spent in semi-idleness about Philadelphia. I'll get to be the clueless newbie wandering around the big city, and annaonthemoon will be able to tell me to hurry up. It'll be a ncie role reversal, I'm sure. Of course, I still have to actually make it to her house with the carload of stuff we packed and unpack that. It sounds bad to say that I'm basically hired muscle for this, but that's really the truth. Maybe when we get to her house, we can enlist another body or two to help with the unpacking and such. Or maybe not. We'll see how it turns out.

Good news from the Crysanthemum Throne - Princess Kiko has given birth to a boy child. The first boy in forty-one years, apparently. (See? It's not just the United States and England that keep a close eye on their celebrities...)

A superintendent did a charitable thing and posed for a calendar to make money. It's not said whether he was buff or not, and since it appeared to be a greenscreen shoot, it's likely not at all. In the finished product, anyway, the bits were blocked by a desk. Now, though, the super super is getting calls for his head after his philanthropic pose. The blurring between professional life and personal life is continuing, we see. It's not possible anymore, I guess, to be effective at your job and a little eccentric in your home life, or to do things for a good cause if someone is going to object to them. I can understand people wanting to know if the teachers are paedophiles and making advances at the kids, but a superintendent doing this as a riff on an earlier concept and for charitable work? We should be lucky to have creative people in charge of the schools. Goodness knows the students are being creative. Like the one that called in a hoax about six armed people in her school. Creative, but ultimately stupid.

In an attempt to do some dot-connecting, as well as talk about an elephant in the room (as they paint it), the Columbia Journal Review remarks that the mainstream media wasn't interested in torture before it became impossible to ignore it, and since then, has still not been covering everything. If that was the apathy of editors, then if the proposed legislation gutting the War Crimes Act should get no coverage at all. At least Mr. Bush has finally admitted that secret prisons exist.

A counterscript to read back at a telemearketer. Using the technique of the telemarketer against them may have some hilarious results.

However, I don't find the following very funny at all - it appears that a post appeared on craigslist, a personal ad, I would guess, where the authors posed as a submissive woman to collect responses. (One NSFW bit - a picture was included with the advert) They did - and some of the responders were not particularly smart about divulging personal information - there were also apparently a large amount of pictures. And the authors of this jake then posted the entirety of the responses, uncut - including personal data. Fine, sure, you had your laugh. Also, you've made people who might actually be seeking serious relationships or friends in either dominant or submissive even more wary about finding people to talk to. Nice going. I hope the laughs were worth it. So when you respond to someone else's false ad and have your data plastered across the Internet, I hope you have a good laugh at your own expense, too.

I took the funny bar graph thingy meme.

Neurotic: 88
Extraversion: 31
Openness: 86
Agreeableness: 84
Conscientiousness: 29

This makes me... a mad scientist. Sort of. Highly neurotic, very introverted, but able to experience things that are new and trying to be agreeable, and a significant slob. I'm the classic mad scientist archetype. So ph33r my d34th r4y 0f d00m! Maybe it's a good thing I'm becoming a librarian, then.

This is the stuff for tonight. As things are, I'm probably going to have to worry about making sure annaonthemoon doesn't soak any important maps or directions tomorrow - I expect that she'll be very sad to see Ann Arbor and me go.