Assorted Rantful Goodness

Pre-Movie Entertainment
John and I recently (read: about 2 weeks ago) saw Princess Mononoke at the Googleplex. Why? We were bored. At first it was going to be The Green Mile but when checking showtimes on the web we came across Princess Mononoke’s entry in the drop down box.

Me: Hey, didn’t Hemos post
a review of
this on Slashdot a while back?
John: Yeah, I think your right. click Well I’m intrigued.

For some reason (and I’m not too clear on this point) we didn’t leave right then but ended up at JWZ’s website. (Recall for all you non-geeks out there that JWZ was one of the lead developers on XEmacs (then “Lucid Emacs”), employee #20 at Netscape, the guy behind UNIX’s Netscape Mail, and until recently, the guy driving the Mozilla Project.) We admired his latest “Industirial Martha Stewart” undertaking. Checked for some more recent rants, and then ended up admiring his CD collection. That’s when we noticed that Princess Mononoke was on his Media Page. Another recomendation. We were further intrigued. So we actually got off our ass and saw the movie.

That’s when we were “entertained”.

After showing a few previews (Mission to Mars reeks of a 2001 knock off. Damn Brian De Palma. Damn him to Hell.) The screen said “2:00 until the feature presentation. Until then, enjoy some premovie “entertainment”.”

2 minutes of ads. Discover Card. Coke. Hell I forgot the rest. Needless to say I was pissed. I really do hate that shit. I do. If any of you are planning some Y2k shennaegans may I suggest NCN?

Living Furniture
I now own a fish. It’s a Betta (aka “Japanese Fighting Fish”) I have to take it home over Christmas, so if you’re going to be in Chambana you’ll get to see it.

A woman (well she’s approximatly my age, so use whatever word you think is appropriate) used to have a fish sitting on her desk. Then last week she dropped by and asked where Boss Bill was, because she had something for him. Later that day I saw that Boss Bill had a fish on his desk.

Me: You’ve got a fish.
Boss Bill: Yeah it’s Lynn’s.
She gave it to me. Something about having to change the water.

Needless to say this called for a chastising of Lynn. The
next day when I come to work I have a fish sitting on my desk as well.

The Plant Gestapo
The plant Gestapo came by Friday. on every other cube down ever aisle in every building they stuck a plant box. It’s like a damn jungle in here. Bob (he’s older than me) and I looked at them and shuddered. We decided that it would be much cooler if we would take down the boxes and replace them with interesting stuff such as fishtanks (3 gallons) and ant farms. We planned out our hanging fishtank, but I don’t know how likely it will be for one of us to actually go through and build it. It would make a nice home for my fish though.

Yet another sign of The Corporate Man. (Sorry no link here. Searches turned up nothing cool, and well randomly typing in URLs gave me gay porn.)

Slowaris, Ever Popular ITS, and The Borg
ITS moved me to Solaris, so my window manager, “utilities” and .files have to be recompiled/ported. Sucks.

ITS finally endowed my doorstop with life and turned it into something useable. Of course it’s cursed with the Mark of Redmond. My boss knew I wouldn’t like switching over to NT, so he asked me if I wanted to keep my piece of shit NCD xterm. I said “no” because I wanted local storage, local processing, and a real video card. (Let me tell you something. If anyone tries to tell you thin clients are the future or network computers are hip punch them in the face because they’re either stupid or a damn liar. Trust me, I used one.) My boss tried to tell me that running Exceed would make it just like running UNIX. Trust me, I know the difference. The login. The lack of cool screensavers. The title bar across the top. That damn logo at the bottom staring at me laughing. Good Lord! You know it’s there. It’s right there under the surface. When I start Exceed I feel like I’ve just spraypainted over a rust bucket. Maybe I should liberate it.

Self-Loathing
So begins another year of being a slave for The Man 465 days remaining.