|
|
|
I'm version 1.3
Tuesday, October 17 2000
Last night while my housemate John and I were walking back from the Café, I had one of those Eureka! moments, those events that forever change the course of science and medicine. I figured out a cure for schizophrenia.
The cure is easy and inexpensive. It requires a one-time purchase per patient and a little basic training, and from then on it is completely effective. My cure: distribute fake cell phones to schizophrenic patients and train the patients to hold these mock devices to their heads whenever they talk to themselves. While this isn't strictly-speaking a cure, it does correct most of the cosmetic ugliness of schizophrenia. I've seen Discovery Channel shows about parents who buy their Down Syndrome children plastic surgery, and my schizophrenia treatment is considerably cheaper than that. It's a good marriage of cutting-edge pop culture with an age-old psychiatric problem. This treatment would have been impossible 20 years ago, back before it was common for people to receive disembodied voices out of thin air. But now we take for granted that people, especially the rich and famous, routinely receive such messages. All we need now to culturally-legitimize the voices inside the heads of schizophrenics is to give them the necessary paraphernalia. And, under the inexorable force of Moore's Law, in a few years that paraphernalia may shrink away completely.
Since Kim is now officially dating (in other words, getting oral sex from) someone else, it's only fair that I kick up my love life a notch. I've been thinking about starting an unrequited internet love affair with Molly Zero. She sent me an email today in response to my positive comment of Sunday, and I was tempted not to read it just to keep things completely unrequited. The more unrequited the love, you see, the better the art. On my bike ride to work this morning through the alleys of Santa Monica, I was singing a song to myself, which went:
Molly Zero
I'm version 1.3
Let's save the world with our humility.
Molly Zero
It's the same with me
Let's tear the veil from our duplicity.
But wait, there's more. I thought this up while walking to the first floor company restroom this morning:
Molly Zero
Put down your gun
Sit back and relax and try to have fun.
Molly Zero
Clapping with one hand
Send your lovers away while diluting my brand.
I remember when Windows came with a CD player application that played CDs and that's all it did. That program worked. It was small, it launched quickly, didn't need a big window and never ever crashed. That was good. Give its developer some kind of award. Now I'm using Windows 2000 and that nice little CD player application is history. I'm forced to use Windows Media Player, the big ugly orange thing that wants to look like it was designed by someone working over at Apple. I'm forced to use it whenever I want to play a CD, sort of like being forced to run Microsoft Word to edit a PostIt Note. Whenever I change CDs, there is one thing I can count on: the MediaPlayer crashing. What I want to know is: who can I punch in the nose for this? Is it really true that all the gains from Moore's Law will be devoured by uninvited software bloat? While we're on the subject, yes WordPad, I actually do want to save this file as text-only and could care less if your idiotic formatting (none of which I've used!) goes away. Where, oh where, can I reconfigure you so you stop bothering me about this?
The other day I wrote about the opportunistic "post grass" growing in the perforated posts of urban Los Angeles (I've also seen it in San Diego). I told you I'd put some pictures up this weekend, but I only got to photographing it today. I found this particularly robust example of post grass growing in a parking sign post near the Café on Rochester Avenue.
This is the largest post grass tassel I've ever seen.
Here we see a closeup of the growing end of the post grass stalk, prepared to grow 20 feet higher if need be.
At work, the fallout from the re-org continues. The only discussions I have with colleagues these days seem to be about finding new jobs. I myself was deluged with recruiters after putting my semi-fictionalized resumé on Monsterboard.com. I'd claimed to have graduated from Oberlin and had proceeded to set my target salary at $100,000, but this didn't seem to be scaring anyone away.
This evening, while discussing the predicament of a SQL developer colleague whose new place in the organization is documenting front end applications, my housemate John said it sounded like a backhanded firing technique. Considering it for a moment, I realized he was right, and it totally creeped me out, more so than that post grass I'd photographed.
Here are some job-finding websites that people at my workplace have been visiting:
CareerMosaic.com
CareerWeb.com
Classifieds2000.com
ComputerJobsStore.com
Computerwork.com
Developers.net
Infoworks.com
Headhunter.net
HotJobs.com
MonsterBoard.com
Net-Temps.com
Did Al Gore kick some cocaine-sniffing rich kid rump tonight or what? That debate was the best thing that happened to me in the past week.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?001017 feedback
previous | next |
