LifeBox

These are the rules of Code Club:

1. You do not mix code and content.
2. You do not mix code and content.
3. You will use templates for content.
4. You will use CVS.
5. You will log messages when you check your code into CVS.
6. You will put any function that you use more than once into a library.
7. You will declare and initialize application wide variables and constants all in one place.
8. You will document your code.
9. You will use consistent naming conventions.
10. You will write build scripts.
11. You will use the bug tracking system.
12. You will use the right tool for the right job.
13. You are not your code.

I just caught a clip from the MTV music video awards show. I try not to pay too close attention to these things, but holy crap, I never realized what talentless b-movie stripper extras Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera were. It takes a special kind of suck to make Madonna look that good in comparison. Not that I have any specia kind ofl love for Madonna or anything, but I’d wager that when I’m 53, she’ll be doing some depraved grandma dildo act at the 40th anniversary awards show, and the other two will be pretty much exactly where Tiffany and Debbie Gibson are today. Wherever that is.

Okay, it’s become clear that whoever is Joe Jobbing me isn’t just in it for the lack of consequences, they actually hate me. (For those of you playing at home, this means that someone is using reply-to addresses from my domain on their spam, so I get all their bounces, and people who don’t know better think it comes from me, and there’s nothing you can do about it.) Recently, I’ve been getting some bounces that advertise quite clearly the availability of hard core pedography, featuring oral, anal, and so on, ages 4-16. Pretty unsavory, and quite illegal. Furthermore, there’s no contact information on the spam except my email address - no phone number, no fax, no shady website - so, the only way for someone to get their hands on this vile stuff is to contact me directly, supposedly. If it were me sending it. If it even existed. So, what we have here is obviously someone who just plain old hates me, and is trying to get me busted for pretty much the worst crime available to your average American.

If anyone reading here ever gets a spam that looks like it’s from majcher.com, please send me the full email, with all the headers, and any other information you have, server logs, whatever. I’m very interested in meeting these scumbags.

Last week was The Wrench’s birthday, but tonight was her birthday dinner at Habana. She only expecte a dozen or so people to show up, so when thirty or forty rollergirls came out… well, we’re just lucky we had such an awesome waitress. Fried starchy stuff, mango margaritas, lots of spiced meat, the best tres leches cake in Austin, and a restaurant full of rollergirls and friends. That was fun.

Then I came home and worked. The stuff I’m doing now isn’t very challenging, but I think now that if I ever met that guy from the Sprint commercials, I’d have to stab him in the fucking face. I’m sure he’s probably a nice guy in real life, but right now, I hate him like Kat hates squiddy sentinels.

In between the hating, I’ve been reading reviews from Ebert’s book of terrible movies. Some of these, I really feel like I need to see now.

In addition to the other craziness, we’re having someone put in new wall tile in the bathroom, because I’m either too lazy or too smart to try to do what we were thinking of doing. It looks pretty good now, but damn if every contractor that we’ve hired hasn’t left damnation and destruction in their wake. This guy seemed nice enough, and did a great job with the tile, but managed somehow to get some sort of white crap all over everything out front where he was cutting tile, and took out half the plants in front of the porch when he was cleaning up. Bernie was pretty pissed. I don’t blame her. I think I’m just getting used to the intermittent slapass.

A few days ago, I got this quick-lighter chimney thing in the mail - it was a present via amazon from my dad. I thought, “Cool! Now I have an excuse to get out and buy that grill, and begin to make with the grilling and so forth!” This time, my laziness has paid off, for today in the mail came the second part of that shipment - a charcoal-powered Weber grill. I just finished putting it together, and if we weren’t on our way out to Habana for The Wrench’s birthday thinger, I’d be cooking some goodies up on it right now. Grill! Woo!

In other news, I am finding working in Flash today to be a very similar experience to swimming through cement. I’m not sure what my problem is, but I’m getting that Spock’s Brain feeling, where none of the little wires are hooking up right, and every time I change some minor thing, the entire application explodes, and I have green brain juice all over myself, and I can’t take a shower to wash it all off because there’s a guy in the bathroom attaching new bathroom wall tiles to the wall, in a diagonal pattern, with a band of black bathroom wall tiles near the top. Well, at least the bathroom looks pretty cool now. Grill! Woo!

That’s a lot of kittens.

And bunnies.

And puppies!

I, uh, acquired a copy of Bugsy Malone today. I probably saw that movie a hundred times when I was a kid, back when HBO only had half a dozen movies, and just showed them over and over again. At one time, before we had a VCR, I would put a tape recorder next to the speaker of the television and record movies like that - Willy Wonka was one of them, this was another. Invariably, at some point in the movie, you could hear the eight or nine year old me yelling at someone, “Quiet! I’m trying to record off the television!” I think I lost all those tapes, but I’m not sure. Anyway. Man, what a movie. Seriously, who thought that was a good idea?

Also, this working all day thing is strictly for the birds. I talked to my evil accountant today about getting that incorporation thing done, and he pointed me to an evil lawyer that might be able to help me out there. I’m still not sure exactly why I should do this, but I still feel compelled to do it.

I’m cleaning off my desk, getting stuff organized in preparation for actually doing some real work, and I’m finding all sorts of cryptic notes to myself, like “furious cane”, “flash dice evolution”, and “monotremes don’t dream”. I have no idea what any of this means, but I’m writing it all down again, just in case it ever comes back to me.

Man, I got a lot of new books.

Today, I woke up late as planned, got myself together, then went to lunch (breakfast?) at the County Line Barbecue. It was pretty disappointing - people, including kin, have been telling me that this place has some good food. Well, it’s not bad, but there’s plenty of places nearby that have barbecue as good, and much better. It’s about on the level of RJ’s, on South Congress, only RJ’s has a much better atmosphere. RJ’s is a cheap little place in what used to be a bad neighborhood, and you get what you pay for; County Line looks like someone thought that TGIFriday’s had a real hot ticket going with their use of “flair” in interior decorating, and ran with that. Plus, it’s full of scumbag yuppies from North Austin and Westlake, and their screaming yup-spawn. Plus, their mediocre food is priced for said yuppies. Plus, they make you pay for bread! What’s up with that? It’s like some yankee who’s never been to another restaurant in Texas came down and created their own twisted little idea of what a BBQ place should be like. On the plus side, it’s got a nice little view of some little tributary coming off the river, and I’m pretty sure that all the waitresses had nose jobs. Next time, we’ll just go to the Salt Lick. To hell with this “trying somewhere new” crap.

Not too long after we got home, Bernie crashed out on the couch, and I headed off to the roller derby. It was a lot of fun - the announcing crew has been working on their presentation, and they totally have their act together, and it makes all the difference. The skaters were in top form, too, and put on an awesome show - fast skating, good teamwork, a bunch of good brawls, and more than a couple girls landing in the audience’s lap. We also got to use the in-house projection system at the rink to display the scoreboard, instead of a projector on a cart, which meant that Dave had to work his Flash thinger on the laptop in the office up front with the A/V hookup, and I had to get the scores from the referees and call them in to him on a walkie-talkie. That was kind of fun, and worked okay, but it’s hard to hear with the crowd and the hollering and the crazy rock’n'roll music. Plus, it wasn’t so much fun for Dave, who was about as far as one could be from the action without actually being outside. The upside is that using the radio makes you look like you’re actually doing something important. Ha! Suckers! Then I came home, and found that Bernie had made me a fudge pudding-type cake. I ate some with some ice cream. It was pretty darn tasty.

In addition to the usual socializing, I learned some nasty, nasty gossip about the evil derby and the nasty and stupid things that they’ve done recently, which I’m not at liberty to repeat here. Also, it looks like there’s some photos of the (good) derby girls in the current (October, I think) issue of Playboy, in the Dave Attell article. So, I went to Book People after the bout to get a copy, and told the cashier that one of my friends was in it. I wonder how many months I can use that excuse and get away with it. There may also be pictures circulating of me, at the derby, in a very small shirt from Tabu Lingerie, one of the derby’s sponsors. I assure you that these photos have been doctored, to besmirch my flawless public image. Also, Vin Diesel is a huge Dungeons and Dragons nerd! Who would have guessed?

Hey, I think I start working tomorrow. Like, for money. Crazy.

I crushed the Republic for my birthday. Done!

I went out for a walk to Book People this afternoon, but I was intercepted halfway there by the lady, so I just sat and read for a while, then had chicken chile relleno and cookies for dinner. I’m pretty sleepy now. We’ve got derby in the evening, and I think that something else might be afoot. My plan is just to sleep late, and see what my goodies are, and then drink some beer at Playland and watch the girls go ’round.

Scott is kicking ass with the actionscript these days. #noisier has been helping him learn some over the last while or so, and I was just realizing that most of the problems he’s had lately have been typos and stuff, and that he’s got the coding part pretty much down. It’s really cool to watch, and he’s already a damn fine artist, so I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of damage he’ll do in the near future.

Sometimes I wish I wrote more. Then I read stuff that some people who write a lot write, and realize that the people who would like what I wrote would be people I don’t want liking me. Or something.

I’ve been feeling pretty cranky for the last couple of days. Not sure why. Also, I think I skipped a whole week and a bit of class again. Lazy.