“Defecating on the Map will not change the Territory, regardless of how many laxatives you took.”
— Ian's Law of Territorial InvulnerabilitySo, two days after my LASIK surgery, my friend Dave and I headed off to Vegas for stress reduction and general amusement. Many people questioned the wisdom of mixing eye surgery with a seven-hour drive to a desert town filled with bright lights and cigarette smoke, but it wasn’t a problem. Eye drops and good sunglasses proved sufficient to the task (with occasional help from Aleve).
Dave will probably write a more detailed trip report than I will, but here’s the quick, relatively short form.
Yesterday, a man sliced open my eyeballs, fried them with a laser, and took $3,700 out of my wallet.
And I am immensely grateful.
Courtesy of CustomVue LASIK and the Friedman Eye Center, my vision is the best it’s ever been, and it’s supposed to get even better over the next few weeks. I’m temporarily a bit farsighted, and I’ve got a touch of spherical aberration that makes it look like I’m viewing the world through an old portrait lens, but it’s still pretty darn amazing.
Twenty-two years of glasses, fixed with five minutes of surgery.
Four complete and total morons in Los Angeles (redundant, I know) are suing computer manufacturers for reporting hard disk capacity using international standard prefixes. Even better, they are not suing the companies who actually make and label the disks with these capacities.
“Your Honor, I’d like to submit as evidence this disk drive, taken from a Dell computer. Note the name M-a-x-t-o-r on the label, right above the advertised capacity in gigabytes.”
“Right. Bailiff, take these four clowns out back and sterilize them for the good of humanity.”
I think this guy has demonstrated his lack of fitness for membership in the gene pool; he just failed the IQ test. His girlfriend should be put on probation for five years as well.
Under other circumstances, I might be willing to believe that a sixteen-year-old is mature enough to be dating a much older man. Our laws on the subject are pretty arbitrary, after all, using date of birth as a convenient proxy for physical and emotional maturity. Many sixteen-year-olds are adults, and should be treated as such. Many people over eighteen, on the other hand, shouldn’t be trusted with wet matches.
These two? Not a chance. “Hey, sweetheart, now that we’ve been dating for a while, let’s take a road trip from Illinois to Alaska, and I’ll hide you in the trunk of the car to keep the Canadian border guards from getting suspicious.” “Gosh, Michael, what a swell idea. You’re sure the rest of the youth group won’t miss us?”
Still, nothing can top the bass player from Phish coaxing the 9-year-old daughter of a Hell’s Angel out to a deserted boathouse at 1am for “art photos”. Now that’s stupid.
The Democrats of the “selected, not elected” crowd were extremely unhappy about the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore. Democrat Gray Davis has just been saved (temporarily) from those nasty election-stealing Republicans (not to mention the rest of us) by the 9th Circuit Court, who cited Bush v. Gore as precedent.
Apparently, the best way to protect voters from the heartbreak of hanging chads is to stop them from voting at all…
“Only Democrats and Dictators are afraid of elections.” — James D. Hudnall
Okay, most of them are lame, and many will grate on the nerves of anyone who has two brain cells to rub together, but this one was worth it.
New PowerBooks are out. Must wet pants with joy. They all look good, but I’m leaning slightly toward a 15” model with an 80GB disk and 1GB of RAM; not sure I’m ready for a 17” boat anchor.
Yesterday, on the other hand, was definitely not a good day. For some time now, I’ve been installing Panther betas on my iBook with the Archive & Install option, which preserves almost all of my applications and customizations while completely replacing the OS. I’ve always backed up my home directory first, but haven’t bothered with an extra full backup. Cuts the total upgrade time down to about an hour, most of which is spent watching the disks spin.
On another day, I’d consider including a comparison to my last Windows upgrade horror story. Unfortunately, things went terribly wrong this time. Twelve hours later, my iBook is almost back to normal.
A while back, the folks at Making Light recoiled in horror when I casually commented that I thought Bush had been legitimately elected. Several of them hijacked the discussion to focus on what was, to me, much smaller than the issue being discussed. Because they seemed to be otherwise reasonable people, I promised to give a fair hearing to any comprehensive references they were willing to point me to on the subject.
It was like pulling teeth to get those references, and the ones I got needed to be filtered for obvious bias, but heat eventually gave way to light. Sadly, I suspect that when they hear I have not embraced their position 100%, they will conclude that I never took their arguments seriously, and write me off as some sort of Bush-loving “freeper”, “looter”, or “theocrat”. I guess they’d rather be righteous and wrong than accept that someone can be a reasonable human being without passionately despising the President.
What do I think now about the 2000 elections, particularly in Florida?