Saturday 25th January 2003
Yup: no What's New yesterday. I had to blank the laptop and start over.
Spam of the Day
More Later....
I've had to do that for a couple of weeks, actually. I made the critical mistake of installing Opera7, which Microsuck inferred to be a FirstStrike manoeuvre; and, in its own defence, it shut down all things Java.
Not just in websites. Throughout Windoze. Hitting Start-F resulted in a folder window with no way to enter any text to search for. And that kinda sucks when you've got sixty gigabytes of random junk on a laptop.
So I haven't got sixty gigabytes of random junk on the laptop anymore. I think I've got about fifteen.
Including, on a whim, AsUType.
I'm not sure quite why I installed this thing. It just sounded kinda neat. Although it would be a lot neater if A) it didn't think 'kinda' meant 'Linda', and B) it didn't think I was a bloody yank. So I'm teaching it wot's wot--primarily that very few words actually have zeds in the them.
And, of course, that I didn't actually mean that very few words actually have seeds in them. You'd think the programme would already have known that.
It is too programme. Dumb ducking thing....
Ugh.
Anyway....
On the bright side, along with teaching this thing that the compound of deinos and sauros is deinosaur, I can teach it a few other neat tricks. Like AutoCorrecting god to deity, since people keep citing the arcane Assyrian creature whose name was plagiarised to give christians a monosyllabic way to indicate Yhvh as the type species of this unlikely race. Not that software alone will fix that societal problem; it's a hardware issue: morons with temporal lobe epilepsy. Which is somewhat worse than the old Pentium math problem of the nineties. Somewhat.
Anyway: about news....
Greenback managed to get to a computer today. It was a military computer, on a pay-per-minute basis, so he couldn't actually reach gremlin.net [another neat example of governmental interference], or 'any site containing words with more than three letters'; but he was able to use YahooMessenger to talk to people. Which didn't help much, since most of the time he had to use a computer at all was used up trying to convince YahooMessenger that both his and my usernames actually existed before we could connect. But that's probably not news to anyone who's ever been online.
I tried to explain Deadache to him. That, it turns out, takes more than a couple of minutes to do. I think, in the end, we worked out that it wasn't actually some advanced form of migraine [most of the google.com returns on 'deadache' show typos of 'headache'--alarmingly in various WebMD clones, most of the time]. He should be online on a PowerBook [blanked and reset to use Linux] in a week or two. He might even be able to reach gremlin.net that way. Presuming Linux haven't banned it as well....
Also, since a few people are wondering about this, he'll be able to do some photoshopping once he's got his laptop online. Which is good, since that's not really my field. So a few projects relying on image manipulation will become easier and faster around the beginning of February.
On which note: I should probably reinstal Photoshop7 tonight....
Huh. I forgot to save my cache of Spams of the Day. Lemee see what I've got so far since I fixed this thing....
Oh good. Being about six five and a hundred and thirty-five pounds, I was hoping someone would spam me with the ability to lose ten to twelve pounds in one day. And why do I doubt that they have a high traffic site? Aside from it not showing up in google.com, I mean. And what in the hell is all that shit at the bottom of the EMail? I can't think of a reason to have gremlin@gremlin.net##randomgremlin in this thing. Perhaps the ten to twelve pounds these morons lost were from the neck up.
--Gremlin