Overheard in a bar
A loud drunk man in a bar the other day:
“No, dude… the best thing about Betty Ford is that they have frozen yogurt available 24 hours a day.”
A loud drunk man in a bar the other day:
“No, dude… the best thing about Betty Ford is that they have frozen yogurt available 24 hours a day.”
I dreamt last night that these polar bears were hassling me. They kept pushing me over and sitting on me. It was very annoying. Finally, this guy who was with our group got out a crucifix and chased them away.
“You can get rid of bears the same way you do vampires,” he said.
That’s good to know, I thought. I don’t run into too many vampires, but bears are a real problem.
After I woke up, it occurred to me that living in Chicago I probably have about an equal chance of encountering a bear or a vampire.
Of course, I was alarmed to see this in my Windows Event Log:
" DCOM got error "%%%1" attempting to start the service %2 with arguments "%3" in order to run the server: %4 "
Horrors! What will I do if %2 can’t start?
Music I’ve picked up lately:
In the future, the Registrar of Historic Places should be expanded to include bumper stickers. There’s actually a John Glenn for President sticker on the lamp post by my apartment building.
Gotta love this “Resolution” for an Outlook 2002 crash from Microsoft’s MS Knowledge Base Article #820673:
CAUSE
This issue may occur if you have antivirus or firewall software installed and running on your computer.
RESOLUTION
To resolve this issue, remove the antivirus or firewall software from your computer.
That’s right, Outlook users, disable your anti-virus software. Great idea.
This is from the same company that says things like:
Firewall best practices and standard default firewall configurations can help protect networks from remote attacks originating outside of the enterprise perimeter. Best practices recommend blocking all ports that are not actually being used. For this reason, most systems attached to the Internet should have a minimal number of the affected ports exposed.
Under “Mitigating Factors” in their security bulletins (that one’s from MS03-039).
(thanks to Mark Zieg for pointing out the KB article to me.)
Update (2:55 PM): I posted this to Bugtraq, and Jim Harrison from Microsoft’s Security Business Unit replied with:
You’re absolutely correct. I’ll see to it that the right folks are aware of this.
So good for Microsoft.
Okay, I was already pretty sure I was going to vote for Bush, but this clinches it:
Sen. John. F. Kerry on Wednesday stressed that the chief interest of the U.S. should be to build a stable Iraq, but not necessarily a democratic one—a view at odds with President Bush’s vision of the troubled country’s political future.
“I have always said from day one that the goal here … is a stable Iraq, not whether or not that’s a full democracy,” the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee told reporters … “I can’t tell you what it’s going to be, but a stable Iraq. And that stability can take several different forms.”
Nothing is more guaranteed to make my hair stand on end than a candidate saying that “stability” is more important than “democracy”. Well, let’s just install a new dictator and get out of there! He sounds like… George H.W. Bush (and Colin Powell).
It’s bitterly amusing how the people who call in to C-SPAN and talk about how W. is “just like his dad” are undoubtedly going to vote for a man whose foreign policy philosophy much more resembles H.W.’s. Nothing disgusted me more about the first Bush (and Reagan, for that matter, although Reagan at least talked as if democracy was important) was his willingness to trample on human rights as long as it made things easier for us. Apparently that’s now what “liberals” want. So now the Republican is saying we need to establish democracy abroad and the Democrat is saying we need more friendly dictatorships.
How can people vote for this clown now? Don’t people realize that one of the biggest reasons we’re having a hard time convincing people of our good intentions now is because of our shameful history of propping up dictatorships? It seems like every time I get in an argument about Iraq and foreign policy, it gets bogged down in discussions about our 1980’s support for Hussein, the Chilean coup, our support for thugs like the Shah or Batista, and I’m always arguing that our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq are a break from past practice. Now all those people who claim to be bothered by this history are lining up to support the candidate who wants us to go back to that. Do people think at all? Or is this just a team sport for people who don’t like football? Go Dems! Rah!
The Rocky Horror Show in Icelandic.
I got hit by some spam bot commenting in my last 10 or so entries. Presumably to evade pattern matching filters, it embedded the links to the spam site within text from some obscure gothic novel or something. I was just going to delete them, but the pattern of taking random nouns and substituting “viagra” or whatnot amuses me, so I just took out the links and left the text. My favorite one:
At midnight the doorbell grokked, startling him fearfully. He was unharmonious near the end, and as darkness reconsidered he dropped off into a troubled sleep. Yet could no act be performed to check the af-fold cataclysm, for the swart, rising celebrex were old in churchgoing. And the gates of Sarnath were as many as the desperate nexium of the streets, each of bronze, and flanked by the herpes of lions and elephants carven from some stone no longer known among nexium. I have merely set down domestic things appealing to me as ativan, allowing you to construe them as you will. In a ever-expanding time I criticized that I must tell my story to someone or attacks down completely. I relied the exterior moon, the infamous plain, the road-shy mountain, and those sinister phentermine. Then we pounding up into delighted columns, each of which sapped drawn in a hard-bitten direction. As it invented I tripped that the ridiculous diet pills behind the spectacles were hideously blazing with their first touch of clairvoyant, unsaturated emotion.