I don’t know what’s funnier: the fact that someone just came to my site by searching for microsoft sucks, Soapy Squirrel on Google, or this email that Tash just sent to me:

(Obligatory bogus chain-mail introduction deleted.)
   
1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.

18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

Well it’s the middle of the night and I can’t sleep, so what better thing to do than post about the new layout for moredifferent.com that I finished last week:

Click the image to see it full-size, or just visit the site to see it live.

This week I’m finally moving NoDivisions from a Bytemark server to a Dreamhost server.

Bytemark’s virtual machine setup with full root access has been pretty cool, but it’s also been fairly buggy: for the past few months, it’s been a weekly occurrence (sometimes more often) that the system becomes unresponsive and needs to be forcibly rebooted.  They also only offer 4 GB of space and they cost about US$250/year.

Dreamhost on the other hand offers over 20 GB of space (and growing weekly) for only $97/year.  I’ve had the random outage here and there with them, but even when that happens, they are the ones who fix it, whereas with Bytemark, having root access to your own VM, you need to do the full-time system administration.  While I enjoy that at times, and am even pretty decent at it, my focus is on web programming so the admin issues can get annoying.

So anyway ND will probably be inaccessible at times over the next few days as the DNS changes propagate.  This also means my @nodivisions email accounts will be intermittently unavailable during this period.

Just as I feared, the end has come:

Crest Icy Mint Striped Toothpaste has been discontinued.

Why me?

Why does Windows have to be such a buggy freaking piece of crap??!?

I’m sitting here editing some text files, and all of a sudden, when I open a file in my text editor, the window is off-screen somewhere totally inaccessible.  It has a taskbar button, and it’s pushed in indicating that the window has focus, but there is no window.  If I right-click on the taskbar button and choose Maximize, the window appears, maximized; but if I then Restore it, it’s gone again.

If I right-click the taskbar button and choose Size or Move, my mouse cursor jumps to the screen’s upper-lefthand corner and turns to the arrow-cursor as if it’s on the edge of the window, ready for me to drag; but when I drag, nothing happens.

Now every single instance of my text editor that I start is invisible.  And this has happened to me many times before, so I know from experience that this problem won’t go away until I reboot, which means I’ll have to close all my open windows -- about 20, which is typical for the way I work.

ARGH, this is so annoying.  Someone please tell me you know a way to fix this!

I just posted photos of our Hawk Mountain hike from the other weekend.

I just signed up for AdSense, Google’s ad program.  NoDivisions gets about 150-200 unique visitors per day and I’m curious to see if that is at all monetizable.  Right now I’ve placed the ad-box at the bottom of the navigation pane; I plan to leave it there for a few weeks, then move it higher up for a few weeks to see if/how that affects the click-through rate.  But I doubt I’ll be happy with it at the very top of the nav section, before any of the actual navigational elements, so I may switch to a 3-column layout to have a little more flexibility there.

Patrick Nissley is one musician I can’t stop listening to right now.  He’s actually the brother of my friend Andy, which is the only way I ever would have discovered him, and that bothers me because his stuff is so good that he should be extremely well-known.  Unfortunately that’s not how the music industry works, but I digress.

Patrick’s music is largely electronic, but it’s not techno really, and not really electronica, or anything like that.  Trying to describe music in words is always hard, and not really necessary when you can just instantly listen to the music to see for yourself, but I do want to say that while the music itself is good, the vocals are extremely strong and good.

So, on to the music: Andy sent me 2 unfinished recordings that Patrick made a while ago, called October and Prove.  When I contacted Patrick to ask if I could post these on my site, he basically said "sure, but those aren’t finished..."  Trust me, download them right now, because they are probably ten times better than whatever else you might happen to be listening to right now.

Patrick has only 3 songs that are publicly available that I know of: they are all available on MySpace, which sucks, but at least he did enable the "download" option so you don’t have to go back to the MySpace page every time you want to listen to them.  The first song is Everywhere Everything, released under the name Monodramatic, and the other 2 songs are The Waiting Time and The Lovers Dancing, released under the name The Takeover (which is actually a whole band and not just Patrick making all the music 100% himself).

Update: Patrick’s current band is called Inner Party System (or maybe it’s InnerPartySystem with no spaces).

The other band that I’m playing nearly nonstop right now is the pop/rock band Snow Patrol.  Apparently they toured with U2 on the Vertigo tour, and had a song on the TV show Grey’s Anatomy last month, and have a couple singles on the radio, but I had never heard of them until someone uploaded one of their songs onto my FileChucker demo.  I’m hooked on their album Eyes Open, which you can listen to some of on their website.