Henry Earl has made the national media. w00t! I'm not-so-famous:
Local media outlets jumped on the wagon next. Now there is a Yahoo group dedicated to him; there are blogs boasting real-time jail stats and all 52 of his mugs (some of them animated), online forums where readers swap stories and recent sightings around town.
See what a day at home with the flu, some cold medicine and a little Perl will do? Success is the brew those ingredients concoct, I tell you! Pure success! I'm going to crack open a beer and drink to Henry right this very minute...
(BTW, the start of the second paragraph in that MSNBC article seems strangely familiar...)
My brother Shawn tipped me off to this company that makes a half-scale, working replica 1919A4 machine gun. It takes .22LR ammo (which runs about $12 for a box of 500), and comes in full or semi-auto models. That's just amazingly cool. You could shoot all day for like fifty bucks. And all night for a hundred! They even offer scaled-down ammo cans, and it feeds ammo via a reusable cloth belt so that you don't have to worry about half-scale links or whatever.
The only way to truly appreciate the thing is to see it in action.
That looks like about as much fun as you can have while still wearing pants. The only thing I'd want more than that is a .22LR M-134 Minigun. And I'd also need a backpack that held 10,000 rounds or so. And a spare battery. And a free weekend with a lot of watermelons.
This is just getting silly. God, as in the guy upstairs, the dude with the white beard, jahweh, etc., has an IMDb entry. God, among his/her/its many other talents, is apparently a writer, and works with Mel Gibson and Benedict Fitzgerald on movie screenplays based on his/her/its novelizations. And here I thought God didn't exist...
So if the movie gets an Oscar, Golden Globe, whatever nomination and God wins, who gives the acceptance speech? Where do they send the gift basket? Do they have to give statuettes to Jesus and the Holy Ghost as well? Will it lead to God's becoming a highly sought-after A-list Hollywood celebrity? And since he/she/it is supposedly omnipotent, how would anyone really know if God were to cheat and make the presenter say his/her/its name when they open the envelope to reveal the winner? Couldn't God just make his own Oscar anyway? Does he/she/it really need an award in the first place? Or even a writing credit? If he/she/it created everything, shouldn't God have a credit on every movie?
It took me 24 minutes to get home from work tonight. I consider that a relatively speedy journey. Way better than 100+ minutes, in any case.
Argh... SoCal...
It took me 103 minutes to drive home from work today. My odometer says that I work 11.2 miles from home. 11.2 miles in 103 minutes. It boggles the mind why I continue to live here.
The cause for my lengthy and blood-pressure raising trip? Some light rain and the average Californian's complete fucking inability to understand the phrase "Do not block intersection". Yuppie assholes.
Me and one of the roadway 'tards had a lengthy "discussion" on the way home tonight after he ran a red light (it'd been red for over a minute) and tried to get in front of me by squeezing in between two lanes full of cars. I swear if I had had a baseball bat there'd be one less white Honda CRV on the road tonight.
Oy, me achin' head.
I'm going to go find my calming place, and be in that space.
I've been catching up on the news. Seems Microsoft went open source. I'm at once amused and sad. Regardless of how I feel personally, the outcome likely won't be good. MS doesn't exactly have a shining record when it comes to security or releasing patches for holes. Now that the ne'er do-wells can see part of the source to windows (albeit an older version), you can bet that they will be pawing through it looking for exploits at maximum speed. I'm betting that we can expect a bunch of Windows security flaws announced in the coming weeks and months.
So it seems that a refresher on the nature of the computer virus is probably warranted. And given the size of the huge gaping hole that recently opened, there'll likely be more than one virus floating around. Which brings us to everyone's favorite topic: the plural form of the word 'virus'.
I came across a Straight Dope article about plurals for latin nouns, and it has some good information. More than I ever wanted to know, as a matter of fact. One part in particular applies here:
There is one more common English -us word borrowed from Latin that doesn't follow any of the rules above: virus. To the Romans a virus was a dangerous or disgusting substance, anything from snake venom to body odor. Ancient grammarians couldn't agree whether the word was a third-declension noun, a fourth-declension noun or in a class by itself, but the one thing they could agree on was that it didn't have a plural form. Ever. To the Romans, it was a mass noun, not a count noun. That hasn't stopped English writers from inventing pseudo-Latin plural forms to cover the modern countable senses of the word. Viri is formed on the false assumption that virus is a second-declension noun. (Viri in fact is the plural of Latin vir, "man".) Virii is an even worse mistake. Only Latin nouns that end in -ius form the plural with -ii. There are no really common English plurals in -ii other than radii. That hasn't stopped people from trying out such atrocious forms as virii and penii. Virii would be the plural of virius, if such a word existed in Latin. Other suggested plurals include virora, vira, virua, and vire. For more on the debate, see http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus.html. The one inescapable fact is that in classical Latin, there was no plural of the word. In English, the only correct plural is viruses.
And that, I think, is just about enough on the topic of viruses for the foreseeable future.
 .
Tired of being underappreciated and manipulated by powerful "others," you fight back. Though possesssing a cold, violent outside, you have a soft, scentimental inside. You love your partner, you cherish family heirlooms, and you want nothing more than to be geniunely happy -- but you don't mind having to kill a couple of nimrods who happen to clutter your path. Take the What Pulp Fiction Character Are You? quiz. |
Seems about right I guess. It was either him or maybe Jimmie.
I'm a member of Orkut now. Why? Not a clue. I was curious I guess. I pretty much have all the friends I need.
If you want to join, let me know and I'll send you an invite.
I put the shooting videos from this last Thanksgiving online. There are some good ones of Tess and Wy shooting Uncle John's BFG9000. Watch that milk crate fly!
Update: If you're trying to use any sort of streaming software with the above videos, you might need to right click (command-click, whatever) and pick "Save As...", save them, and then open them locally. You can also try open them directly -- by clicking one of the links. The clicking of a link on a page on theis site is the key here.
See, we've had a little problem with people linking directly to files here from within their own pages (typically on message boards and such), and that was using almost as much bandwidth as the legitimate site. So I had to get slightly restrictive. You should be able to watch them fine as long as you click one of the links on the videos page to open it. I just tried it and opened them with IE and Opera on Windows and Opera, Mozilla and Konqueror on Linux.
Here's why I need my own machine:
wee@storm:~$ uptime
10:44:58 up 10 min, 9 users, load average: 13.37, 11.54, 6.70
Tried to log this morning, couldn't. Finally got on, and ran the above command. Which took over 30 seconds to complete. Pine took two minutes to start.
The three numbers at the end are the load average. The higher those numbers are, the worse performance is. The numbers above, while not amazingly high, aren't good. There are a lot of people on that box:
wee@storm:~$ ls -l /home | wc -l
? ? ? 456
And one of them obviously started doing something that required a reboot, ruining the server for everyone. Keep in mind we're talking about a quad Xeon machine with 2GB of memory. And this has been happening all the time lately. How you could get it wedged like that so regularly is beyond me.
Luckily, a new machine is ready to go, waiting in the wings.
If anything deserves the "Random Stuff" category, it's this Henry Earl real-time stats page that I did this weekend.
Don't bother asking why. Some things just need doing.
Been popular, too: 4,121 visitors since Saturday morning. About what this site would get all month. As you can see, the traffic's near constant and in a predictable pattern for North America. The guys who do the first Henry Earl Site (and do it with considerable elan, I would add) linked back here, and that's probably what's doing it.
Heh heh... I just looked at the stats page to make sure that the link worked and I noticed that according to the automatically updated stats, Henry got busted today. Rock on, Henry.