Blessed by the Potato

Things have been pretty busy lately for everyone I know, so it’s been tough to organize get-togethers (even fireworks weren’t enough to get most people out and about this weekend). Perhaps worst off at the moment is Wayfare: her job’s riding her pretty hard trying to get a new website and database rolled out, in addition to the stuff they actually hired her for. Her other job, which was supposed to be a steady 2.5 days a week has taken off since everyone there took their vacation in the same month, and she just can’t say no.

Things have been so busy that June has come around and we haven’t even started work on our Halloween costumes yet! For normal people that might not be an area of concern, but for us it is. We’re Halloween nuts — it’s hands down the most important (or at least the most fun) holiday of the year; as we look for a new place here in London, one of our criteria is “how will this place look decorated for Halloween?” (thus, places with good banisters, porches, windows, and friendly, good-humoured, but mischevious goblins rate rather well). Yet this year we haven’t even thought about what we’re going to be.

I’m open to suggestions: since I should have more time towards the end of the summer, I’m up for attempting something more ambitious this year. I’ve always wanted to do a Mimbari, and my brown cloak would work fairly well for a Ranger. There is the concern that I’ve waited too long and nobody will remember what a Mimbari is now (and that I’ve thrown out too much of the spare styrofoam here). It’s also an extremely difficult costume for an amateur like me (prosthetic head bone, etc.). Another suggestion was to do an undead pirate. It would work both for WoW and for Pirates of the Carribbean.

I know a lot of my readers also check out Nebug & Hayley’s blog. Unfortunately, it appears as though Blacksun has deleted their database. Netbug is still waiting on specifics, but it looks like for now at least their sites will be down for a while. If anyone has either of those sites still in their cache, particularly Netbug’s Australia diary, the static bodybuilding pages, or anything of Hayley’s, please try to save as much as you can and forward it to me or him, just in case Blacksun doesn’t pull a backup out of their butts (they should, but who knows…).

I guess it falls to me then to entertain you all in the meantime. Pity, since I haven’t felt very creative for the last little while. You see, after my thesis was done I was hoping to catch up on a lot of stuff I had been putting off: vacuuming, fixing my bike, eating anything with a vitamin in it, and of course, writing. Netbug’s been wanting a short story and/or screenplay to use as a basis for his movie, and I also wanted to start entering some short story competitions… but I just haven’t had anything come out. It’s not the same sort of writer’s block I was facing before, probably because there isn’t as much stress involved as with my thesis, so I’m not feeling the huge amounts of frustration. It is, however, not very good and especially dull for you, loyal readers.

Having nothing substantial to say, I might as well backup my files. DVD-Rs are on sale at Futureshop for the purpose too (32 cents each before tax). It’s finally cheaper to backup to one DVD than to go through a bunch of CDs!

I got my thesis back from the printers!

It’s so weird how unreal it seems — I was able to grasp that the masters was finally done up until I picked up the actual printed proof, and now it all seems so unreal again. I would have thought holding the book in my hands would have the opposite effect.

I’m not very impressed by the super-expensive “thesis paper” they printed it on — it’s thinner than my resume cotton bond paper that was cheaper to get from Staples. Of course, that didn’t have the weird water mark on it. Plus, all the pages stick together along the bottom edge, so I have to be really careful about turning them. Now, I have to find a free spot on my shelf to keep it, because sitting here on the floor probably isn’t going to work for me in the long run.

I just got a call from a credit card company. Miraculously, I have been pre-selected for a mastercard… the exact same one I already have (from the same bank).

It got me thinking to just how ridiculous some spam is these days. To get past spam filters, many spam messages are complete gibberish, many beyond even the extent of leetspeak. Just randomly generated garbage and an URL. Does that actually work? I would have figured the diminishing returns of spamming, despite how cheap it is, would have long ago made it unprofitable… and that’s for messages that actually make sense. Who follows a link in a piece of random gibberish that’s obviously spam and then actually buys something off that website? Sometimes I wonder if there are some slow companies around “investing” in “direct, online marketing” and not realizing that it’s just spam that won’t do a damned thing for them. Then the contracted spammers just need to show that they sent so many millions of emails, without caring about what’s in the message at all, just that it was delivered (since they probably know that their scam has turned 180 degrees now…).

Recently, Netbug has been having a lot of trouble with spammers hitting the comments section of his blog (I’m glad they didn’t follow his links here!). I read on Boing Boing today about even more baffling forms of spam — random, meaningless automated comments that don’t even have a link to a site selling something. There’s some interesting theories out there about why these spam for the sake of spam messages are going out: perhaps they’re trying to build goodwill for an alias or IP in the filters by posting seemingly legit messages before starting the real spam campaign; perhaps it’s a spy network leaving coded messages for each other; but the most interesting one was that perhaps there’s a computer network out there, somewhere, that’s just on the verge of consciousness. A nascent AI. And maybe it’s trying to communicate with us, maybe learning the language slowly, naturally by trial-and-error. And of course, since spam is the most prevalent type of communication it sees crossing the ether, that’s what it tries to mimic first. A new intelligence, trying to communicate with us the best way it knows how: through random, trashy, spam.

Hmm.

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value—you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you — daft as a brush, but very, very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: a non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have ‘lost’. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.”

Today is International Towel Day. There’s been some controversy over when the date should be, since May 25th doesn’t have a whole lot of significance on its own (it’s a Thursday this year, but isn’t usually; it’s not related to 42 in any way, nor is it the actual date of DNA’s birth or death). However, I think that an essentially random date is perhaps just as fitting.

I never could get the hang of Thursdays.