July 9, 1997, Wednesday

An interesting game that I would recommend to my readers is to see if you can fake the tone of the other taste-challenged signers while slipping in subtle subversive (perhaps sardonic or ironic) messages.

F


orgive me, but I'm in the mood to be outrageous. I'm thinking of a possible way to counter all the me-too vibes issuing forth like gravity from the many helpful "missing children links" on the web. How about "appearing children links" or even an "appearing children ring," perhaps used to draw attention to the fact that an increasing fraction of the world's carbon is being tied up in human protoplasm. Just a thought.

While I'm in this mood, let me address another issue. It seems that the Guestbook of the Ladies of the Heart is periodically purged of all comments that don't gush about how wonderful the site is. An interesting game that I would recommend to my readers is to see if you can fake the tone of the other taste-challenged signers while slipping in subtle subversive (perhaps sardonic or ironic) messages. If you're good, the message stays and works its understated magic. If you're too blatant, the message gets yanked. It's a good excercise in literary control. I've done one, and it's still in there somewhere! I'll check the guestbook periodically to read the entries, and if I find a priceless one, I'll post a copy here!

By the way, thanks are in order to "Clifford Natas" whose correspondence inspired this idea.
*******

T


he day was spent on another mission to find a modem. Wouldn't you know, the last $70 external 33.6 Kilobaud modem sold to a guy who beat me by a minute. The guy looked and sounded like he'd endured a whole lifetime's worth of humiliation back in middle school, so I guess I can't begrudge him. Instead I bought a $250 hard disk drive. 2.6 Gigabytes on an IDE. Now we're talking. I read somewhere once that the average human takes in about 4 Gigabytes of sensory input during the course of an entire lifetime!

I don't know how true that is, since listening to a single CD while blindfolded in a sensory-deprivation tank would gobble up about an eighth of that alotment; I suppose the 4 Gigabyte figure is some sort of post-processing information quantity.

The task of installing this drive in my 486 was only slightly hairy. In order to copy the operating system over I had to guess the pin jumpers on my Western Digital 40 Meg drive so I could get it to play slave to the new Master. IDE drives are not straightforward like Macintosh SCSI. But I succeeded! Success is not always guaranteed with Master/slave combinations, you know.

I have not caved in to the Microsoft/PC - clone juggernaut.

So now I'm looking at an unprecedented blank digital canvas waiting to take on my creations. In total, now, I have about 5 gigabytes worth of storage on my various machines. By the way, to all you Macintosh purists out there: I have not caved in to the Microsoft/PC - clone juggernaut. These machines fell into my lap for free and I can always make them run Unix and/or use them as Macintosh file servers. Yes, I have ethernet cards.

*******

In the evening, no one was at the house except for Deya and me. We sat around drinking cold Schlitzes, smoking clove cigarettes (on the front porch) and listening to her copy of REM's Murmur on vinyl. I hadn't heard the whole thing since 1988. It's an exceptionally good album. I suppose that's why REM has gone on to completely conquer pop music (with a little help from an assortment of others).

Before I took my pre-work nap, I did a little hardware work: an old 16 MHz 386SX inherited the 40 megabyte hard drive from the 486DL. I need names for all these nice vintage computers that I keep having to step over to get to my CDs.

now for something completely different

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