TRANSLATION OF SELECTED PORTIONS OF THE BURNING MAN ‘I DID IT’ LETTER FROM HIPSTER TO ENGLISH

Short Version: “HAHAHAHA MY BURNING MAN ART PROJECT GOT WAY MORE PRESS THAN YOURS”

Slightly Longer Version: “I did this to point out that you’re all poseurs, lamers, and noobs who come here to fuck and do drugs and pretend to be hip before you go back to your mundane lives. But in doing so, I’m sort of being elitist for elitist sake, this watering down my point, and making everyone who was at this Burning Man ‘part of the club’ cause now all the lamers and noobs can say, ‘we were there at the arson!’, so all I’ve done is give the lamers the keys to the kingdom and invite said poseurs to imitate my shit. Also haha, my art project got way more press than yours, you rivethead wannabe douchebags.”

(Source)
and apologies to the translation of …. people who are far better at it than I.

Words not to use around me (an ongoing series)

“Bacn”

I reserve the right to cockpunch anyone who uses this term around me, in any kind of non-mocking manner.

Call for our rate sheet

In 2005, my girlfriend (now wife) and I decided to take a vacation to New Orleans. We all know how that turned out.

(Nothing happened in 2006, we camped a number of times but didn’t take a real vacation, cause we got married.)

In 2007, my wife and I decided to take a vacation to the “Mexican Riviera”, aka Riviera Maya, south of Cancun. Yeah, same thing.

So anyway if you’d like to not have your city, state, or region smashed to pieces by a Cat 5 hurricane, drop me a line and we won’t plan any vacations there. Our rates are affordable.

(In all seriousness, I think the worst might miss where we’d be going, and we weren’t going until November, anyway, so maybe we’ll luck out.)

How soon we forget

So I went to the doctor today. Everything’s fine, don’t fret. She was going over my chart and remarked, “I shouldn’t even recognize you”.

Oh? “You’ve lost some weight.”

Yeah. Just curious, though, how much did I weigh last time I was here?

“273.”

Oh. Um, wow. (I previously marked 257 as my high water mark; as of this doctor visit, I was 177 @ 14.5% body fat)

So, yeah.

In other news, she kicked some statistic that it takes on average 3 years to make a lifestyle change permanent. So only another couple years of forcing myself to go to the gym every day before it starts to become less effort. Hooray?

Places where Zend Platform shines

So I’m writing this “admin app” for another, customer-facing app, and I’m bored and angry because I have to run around trapping and responding too errors that occur in the front-end, so whomever is “on duty” can know the why-what-where-who-the-fuck of any issues.

And suddenly I’m aware of my time test-driving the Zend Platform, and its little real-time error trapping stuff, and how I could drastically simplify this by merely saying, “if error A occurs, do this; else look up the error event in the Zend back-end”.

Is the new Mac Mini a value?

Briefly:
a 2Ghz Mini vs a 2Ghz iMac, each w/ 2GB of RAM, are $1024 vs $1349, respectively. That’s $325 on the face of things, for a decent monitor (but a 20″ widescreen monitor can be had from Dell for a helluva lot less (the “Good” 20″ Widescreen is $269). And what else?

* A decent video card, for starters. The 950 supports OmniDazzle, for instance, and I assume the Dashboard water-droplet effect, but it’s not going to exactly light the room up with performance.
* 250GB Serial ATA vs a 160GB 5400 RPM laptop drive. Does anyone even ship a laptop with shitty 5400RPM drives?
* iMac is arguably expandable (at least a new HD and another stick of RAM, I think?)
* iMac comes with keyboard and mouse (about, what, $50?)

So when you diff it, the extras - a little bit better hard drive, a much better video card, some fit/finish, and a decent monitor - makes the iMac about the same value as the Mini.

Basically unless you already have a monitor that pwns, why bother with the Mini? (Conversely, get the iMac if you’re looking for a new monitor)

The new .Mac is awesome

Gateway Timeout

The following error occurred:
[code=GATEWAY_TIMEOUT] A gateway timeout occurred. The server is unreachable. Retry the request.

Please contact the administrator.

How is it a service can be simultaneously unpopular and crushed to dust by traffic?

Fasting is bad, except when it’s not

Probably the impossible problem of weight loss (and especially fat loss) is that, in the end, food is required. You know, for living. No food, and you die. But you knew that.

So, the goal of every weight loss program is to balance the need for food with the simple math of, “burn more calories than you intake”, right? Simple fasting - just eating less - is bad, because you might be depriving your body the appropriate energy needs (you might be deprived of protein, or some other thing).

So why do so many interesting things happen in a fasted state? (Via)

I guess the takeaway here is, “fuck it, I’m having another 18 glasses of Shiraz, I’ll see you on the floor.”

You say “software error”, I say “Apparently there is a God and he’s fucking with you RIGHT NOW”

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/ixarch/arch.php?my=2007-07#071707a

Chris Shull’s “Get Lyrical” script — v2.3 was posted yesterday — apparently only retrieves lyrics for “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson.

Draw your own conclusions about the nature of the Universe.