Xydexx

iPhone, uPhone, weallPhone For... Ponies...

Mon, 12 May 2008 21:58:21 GMT

Buzzsolomoto (5:45:31 PM): I bet you've always wanted an iPhone squeakypony! Well you can get one for free. It takes no time at all. Click Here and you'll get your own for free right away!
squeakypony (5:46:21 PM): Oh boy! An iPhone! Does it come with a free pony?
squeakypony (5:46:59 PM): And does the pony come with a free pony inside another free pony with a pony on top?
squeakypony (5:47:15 PM): Because ponies are stackable, you know.
Buzzsolomoto signed off at 5:47:50 PM.

But... what about my free pony?

Because The World Needs More Cowboy Dinosaurs

Mon, 12 May 2008 20:48:08 GMT

I blame normanrafferty for this. He mentioned "Brainy Yak" and I Googled to find out what he was on about. That's how I stumbled across this, which as far as I can tell doesn't have anything to do with Brainy Yak, but instead somehow involved a Yosimite Sam-like dinosaur...

63 M. To B.

Sun, 11 May 2008 20:24:48 GMT

Bowling, 05-06-08: After a dinner of bratwurst and pommes and boozahol at Hamburg Döner, I went bowling with rigelkitty and kody_wolf. 116/196/128! A new record for me!

Weekend Adventures: Rigel and I went to Wisp Mountain and Adventure Land USA parks last weekend for various ACE events, and then this weekend checked out Crystal Grottoes Caverns near Boonsboro, MD and explored the Historic National Pike (US Route 40). Unfortunately I took the new US Route 40 on the return trip, so I missed out on a lot of cool stuff. (Historic National Pike has cool stuff like milestones along it, and I saw a few of them, one of which had "63 M. to B." engraved in it. Neat!)

In Honor Of Drama Free Thursday, Be Excellent To Each Other

Fri, 02 May 2008 00:40:37 GMT

The always-awesome popfiend has a weekly event over in his journal called Drama Free Thursday, the theme of which this week is leaving things better than you found them. It's a philosophy that he lives by (or at least tries to). His challenge for today is to leave LJ better than you found it. Take compassion and turn it into action. Be the sun rather than the storm. Or, as a wise man once said, be excellent to each other.

So in the spirit of DFT, I make the following offer of general reset and amnesty, which I admit I'm shamelessly stealing from cargoweasel because I was so impressed with how he said it that I don't think I could improve on it:

I love y'all.

I ain't mad at anyone. If we had a recent exchange of words I forgive you. If I was a dick to you here or wherever else I apologize unreservedly. If I was a dick to someone else and it hurt you indirectly I also apologize. Shit gets out of hand here, I know it does and you know it does, and I don't want to cause any lasting pain. I can't promise I'll never post anything I regret, in future, because that's kind of how this lj works, but nothing personal towards anyone is ever intended.

So this is an offer of general reset and amnesty. I ask for the same thing in return. You are all cool people.

(If anyone's wondering, no, this wasn't inspired by any recent problems in my LJ... it's merely done in the spirit of DFT and just being my usual benevolent squeaky pony self...)

I guess I'll end with passing on Popfiend's challenge of making your corner of the intertubes a nicer, shinier place. Go forth and do awesome. -:)

In other news, here's a catchy tune/video I found recently by the same folks who did "Geeks In Love." Very TMBG-ish. I like it.

"Word Disassociation" — Lemon Demon

So Begins The Madness

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:36:42 GMT

Well, I've got my office ready for conbook production. I just need to log whatever last-minute submissions come in before tonight's deadline. The blue painter's tape on the walls is covered with strips of double-sided poster tape which hopefully won't stick to paper as much as the industrial-grade stuff I bought at Home Despot the other day. The compact fluorescent really brightens up the room (probably also helped by the fact that it's 100 watt, but hey).

My office, ready for imminent conbook production time

Honestly and truly I am not a werewolf. -=)

Fun link of the day: LOLgrues.

I love deadlines... I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by...

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 18:50:35 GMT

Hi all!

Just a quick reminder that the deadline for Anthrocon conbook and advertising submissions is rapidly approaching—in fact it's less than two weeks away!

Do you have artwork or stories you'd like to submit to the conbook? Do you have a Dealer's table at Anthrocon and want some extra visibility for your products? We need to hear from you no later than April 30, 2008! See the links below for complete information on both.

Conbook Submissions: http://www.anthrocon.org/conbook
Advertising Information: http://www.anthrocon.org/advertising

Looking forward to seeing everyone at Anthrocon 2008! -:)

Update 04/28/08: The last-minute rush to get submissions in is underway, and I've been getting reports that some people are having trouble sending large files to me via the usual conbook e-mail address. If you have difficulty you can try sending submissions via this alternate address: ac2008conbook@gmail.com. Apologies for the inconvenience!

Because The World Is Awesome

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:53:35 GMT

Share and enjoy!

Ever Notice How The People Who Call Me Crazy Usually Have More Issues Than I Do?

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:04:51 GMT

At least I can take consolation in the fact that I'm the silly kind of crazy, not the batshit kind of crazy. -:)

Time Management with Randy Pausch

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:13:06 GMT

Below is Randy Pausch's "Time Management" lecture, given at the University of Virginia in November 2007. Randy Pausch is a virtual reality pioneer, human-computer interaction researcher, co-founder of CMU's Entertainment Technology Center, and creator of the Alice software project.

I saw a similar version of this lecture via popfiend's journal a while back. It's definitely worth a watch if you've got an hour or so to spare.

Edit: If you don't have that much time (this is about time management after all), here's his ultra-condensed 10-minute talk on "Achieving Your Childhood Dreams":

Yaaarrr, I Am Full Of Flying Horse.

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 01:52:28 GMT

I was successful in my battle against the tent caterpillars and surely saved our decorative tree from being devoured by them.

During our third visit to Home Despot today, little girl asked if rigelkitty and I were twins. We get that a lot, but doubly so because we dressed exactly alike.

We tried a new Indian restaurant in Leesburg called Angeethi (17 Catoctin Circle, Leesburg, VA 20175) which was yummy and good and they had Flying Horse Lager, yarrr. I also had murry purry curry... I mean pineapple murg curry.

STOP. Hammer time.

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 02:24:12 GMT

Back from biking. Details and more pictures at milepost38.

It's An ANSI-Standard Beautiful Day

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:55:49 GMT

72 degrees and sunny. I'm going biking. Possibly to Brunswick, MD. Seeya later!

Edit: I'm back! I has a flavor. It's the flavor of sweat and bugs and road grunge. Mmmm.

Regional Dialect Meme

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 05:57:37 GMT

Where did you grow up: Westchester County, NY

WHAT DO YOU CALL:

1. A body of water, smaller than a river, contained within relatively narrow banks.
Stream.

2. What the thing you push around the grocery store is called.
Shopping cart.

3. A metal container to carry a meal in.
Lunchbox.

4. The thing that you cook bacon and eggs in.
Frying pan.

5. The piece of furniture that seats three people.
Sofa.

6. The device on the outside of the house that carries rain off the roof.
Gutter.

7. The covered area outside a house where people sit in the evening.
Porch.

8. Carbonated, sweetened, non-alcoholic beverages.
Soda.

9. A flat, round breakfast food served with syrup.
Pancake.

10. A long sandwich designed to be a whole meal in itself.
Wedge.

11. The piece of clothing worn by men at the beach.
Bathing suit.

12. Shoes worn for sports.
Sneakers.

13. Putting a room in order.
Cleaning up.

14. A flying insect that glows in the dark.
Lightning bug.

15. The little insect that curls up into a ball.
Basketball bug or (more commonly) potato bug.

16. The children's playground equipment where one kid sits on one side and goes up while the other sits on the other side and goes down.
~~Catapult~~ See-saw.

17. How do you eat your pizza?
By putting it in my mouth, chewing, and swallowing. What a stupid question.

18. What's it called when private citizens put up signs and sell their used stuff?
Garage sale.

19. What's the evening meal?
Dinner.

20. The thing under a house where the furnace and perhaps a rec room are?
Basement.

21. What do you call the thing that you can get water out of to drink in public places?
Water fountain.

Ruingasm!

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 03:00:39 GMT

It's on my To Do List.

But if I really wanted to go nuts, I'd head to Massachusetts...

...because that state is just full of creepy old abandoned insane asylums.

And Now, Here It Is, Your Moment Of Zen...

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 01:29:14 GMT

Inspired by a post by chasingtides that patgund got via metaquotes (original here):

President Bush No Longer Opposed To Human-Animal Hybrids

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:37:06 GMT

[image stolen from jcurious:]

See? See? Everyone loves furries eventually. IT'S THE LAW.

This Moment Of Zen brought to you by Xydexx, the Pony of Infinite Squeakiness. Do not be alarmed, this is my way of sparing you from the horrible, horrible pun that I thought up while downstairs at Rigel's computer a few minutes ago. No, really. It was awful terrible. It was so incredibly bad I may have to draw it and unleash it on you unexpectedly. It'll be a... surprise. I hope it's not too obscure. Nobody gets my sense of humor sometimes.

Needs To Be Said

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 06:01:29 GMT

Seen several places elsejournal: A Boy the Bullies Love to Beat Up, Repeatedly

It's truly mind-boggling that whenever bullying comes up these days, the responsibility is always on the victim to "toughen up" or "ignore it"—but never on the one doing the bullying to be held accountable or act civilized.

Same goes for the recreational harassment that happens online and the reprehensible individuals who think that sort of behavior is "funny."

QotD / "Get Drunk On History"

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 23:53:41 GMT

A year with Crazy Mary taught me more than any other class I took in the public school system. I began to realize that she was teaching us to learn, and to extrapolate rather than sticking strictly to facts and learning by rote. Her test questions were more often about thoughts, feelings and deductions about historical people and events. At times, she would present questions such as "If you hade been there to advise him, what would you have suggested" as extra credit questions. I would never fail to answer everything, including the extra credit questions that few others dared to come near. They feared her, but by the end of the first year I came to realize that I admired and looked up to her. Being "crazy" wasn't necessarily wrong. I worked things out so I could have her for European History my senior year.

She signed my yearbook when I graduated, and eluding to a comment she made frequently in class, she wrote "Remember to get drunk on history." It was her mantra, and her lesson. Getting drunk on history means to put yourself into history, to become alive with it. If you simply comb through dates, names and events you'll put yourself to bed early every night. If you instead dig deeper, to read what caused these events, what made these people who they were... Why? How? If? Then the whole picture starts to come alive. You are standing in the middle of history right now. Just because someone else was standing in the middle of it centuries ago doesn't make them that much different than you.

There are lessons to be learned, about who we are and where we have been. How did we get this far? There is also substantial humor and entertainment. Everything connects. Everything leads to another chapter. You keep reading and following the "links" from one person's story to another's, from where one was to where the other found his niche... it is like painting a picture. A picture of you. A picture of us. And if you do it right, you will indeed feel intoxicated. A Samuel Adams or Scotch and V8 might not hurt either.

—TheDeadGuy, Everything²

Treasure Hunting

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 23:42:22 GMT

I was doing my chores and finally putting away several boxes of books I had brought down from Hawthorne back when Mom moved, and happened to glance through Wonderous Westchester: Its History, Landmarks, and Special Events by Anita Inman Comstock. It has a small section on milestones along the Albany Post Road, including the precise locations of the ones I remember telling Rob Yasinsac about last year.

I was delighted to notice that Rob has since updated his milestones page and he had found one of the ones I'd pointed out, as well as quite a few others I'd never known about. As y'all know, once I start digging into history I am nigh unstoppable. I did a little research, and learned that most of the milestones were noted on an old 1789 atlas, A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America, by Christopher Colles. Lo and behold, there happened to be a copy of it available online at David Rumsey's Historical Map Collection. (Wow... David Rumsey also has a presence in Second Life—how cool is that?)

Currently I'm busying myself with comparing the old 1789 route of Albany Post Road with the current maps and seeing what interesting things I can find. And even with a cursory glance at it, I'm finding a lot. Fascinating stuff. Perhaps I'll make use of my Wall before conbook time to organize this.

A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America, by Christopher Colles, 1789

Decluttering

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:17:22 GMT

I've been spending the past few days decluttering our storage room (and making good use of the paper shredder). It feels like I've gotten rid of a lot of stuff, but I know there's a lot more that I need to trim down. There's no reason I need to save my old timesheets from 1992, or paystubs from 1994, or checking account statements from 1995, and so on.

A lot of the stuff I sorted through was from back in my old mail art/zine publishing days. I was a lot more selective in culling this than I'd previously been, only saving the really interesting stuff. Man, those where the days. I used to get a near-constant stream of weirdness in my mailbox, much to the amusement of the folks at the post office.

I keep thinking I should get back into that, but there's so much else to do.

QotD/Rules Of The Internet

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 19:16:44 GMT

"It's one thing to try to solicit constructive criticism to improve things, but if your first reaction to feedback you don't like is to say 'stop taking things so seriously', then you shouldn't act surprised when people stop taking you seriously. Watch what you wish for, and all that."

20/20 Hindsight

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 02:40:45 GMT

*grumble* Should've sold off my LMT stock back in December when I had the chance. *grumble*

Why Flaming People Online Is Boring

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 17:43:18 GMT

Back when I was in high school (these were the days when 300 baud modems were all the rage... I suspect I've been online since before many of you were even born) *waves cane* we used to have these things called BBSs. This was in the days before this newfangled internet thing became popular.

Now, being the sort of huge geeks who ran or called BBSs in the first place, one could say we weren't exactly the most popular kids in high school. And a lot of these local BBSs had war boards dedicated to flaming other users for no good reason at all. So after school we'd log on and trade insults with other geeks as a way of making ourselves feel better. (This is kinda why I think the whole trading insults with other geeks online thing is so twenty years ago... I've been there, seen that, yawn and sigh.)

I don't remember what prompted it, but eventually some of us geeks got the idea that there must be more to this online stuff that just flaming each other all the time. So we started to meet each other offline (those of us who lived reasonably close, anyway). And we had fun. A lot more fun than sitting behind our computers flaming each other, certainly.

So that led to more of us getting together offline. And more of us having fun. Geeks who lived further away joined our merry band, and our group continued to grow. Eventually, there were parties. Soon we had a band of about 40-something geeks spanning two counties showing up (40 may not seem like much, but remember, this was before the AOLization of the online world... modems were still very much a geek toy). After making plans online, we descended on local arcades or movie theaters or had picnics in the park and whatever else we could think of. Hiking. Exploring abandoned places. Seeing how many highway cones we could acquire in one evening (and then wondering where we'd like to redirect traffic with them afterward). Our New Year's Eve party lasted three days.

We were geeks, yeah, but we were social. (Demented and sad, but social.)

And what happened to the geeks who still wanted to hang around in front of their computers trading insults? I don't know. They missed out on most of this, I'm afraid, and we were too busy off having fun to notice their absence.

Like all good things, this had to come to an end eventually. In 1988, many of us headed off to college and our merry band was for the most part scattered to the four winds. Some of us still keep in touch here and there.

I guess the point of this story is that it doesn't really matter if you're a gamer geek or an anime geek or a furry geek. We're all geeks, and geeks today have a choice: They can either sit around behind their computer screens flaming other geeks to make themselves feel better, or they can get out and meet their fellow geeks and find out what they, and the real world, has to offer.

Lord Rancer preparing to throw a watermelon off Kensico Dam, circa 1987.

QotD

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 03:17:30 GMT

"The brain is the most responsive organ of the body. Actually it is the organ that is most susceptible to change and regeneration of all the organs in the body. I have a friend named Gerald Edelman who was a great scholar of brain studies and says that the analogy of the brain to a computer is pathetic. The brain is actually more like an overgrown garden that is constantly growing and throwing off seeds, regenerating and so on. And he believes that the brain is susceptible, in a way that we are not fully conscious of, to almost every experience of our life and every encounter we have. I was fascinated by a story in a newspaper a few years ago about the search for perfect pitch. A group of scientists decided that they were going to find out why certain people have perfect pitch. You know certain people hear a note precisely and are able to replicate it at exactly the right pitch. Some people have relative pitch; perfect pitch is rare even among musicians. The scientists discovered – I don’t know how - that among people with perfect pitch the brain was different. Certain lobes of the brain had undergone some change or deformation that was always present with those who had perfect pitch. This was interesting enough in itself. But then they discovered something even more fascinating. If you took a bunch of kids and taught them to play the violin at the age of 4 or 5 after a couple of years some of them developed perfect pitch, and in all of those cases their brain structure had changed. Well what could that mean for the rest of us? We tend to believe that the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind, although we do not generally believe that everything we do affects the brain. I am convinced that if someone was to yell at me from across the street my brain could be affected and my life might changed. That is why your mother always said, ‘Don’t hang out with those bad kids.’ Mama was right. Thought changes our life and our behaviour. I also believe that drawing works in the same way. I am a great advocate of drawing, not in order to become an illustrator, but because I believe drawing changes the brain in the same way as the search to create the right note changes the brain of a violinist. Drawing also makes you attentive. It makes you pay attention to what you are looking at, which is not so easy."

—Milton Glaser, AIGA Voice Conference

"We could not understand the location you."

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 00:34:29 GMT

With regard to other items of curiosity, I found a huge directory of summer resorts from 1900. Wondering how many of them still exist.