Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Give it back
August 04, 2004

You probably haven’t noticed, but I’m trying to change. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few weeks (months?) working on public projects. Significant amounts of my time have gone into making WordPress better, not just with the hacks I’ve written, but with a couple of core code changes. I have also been beta-testing some software from MicroOLAP hoping to make it better before it’s released. And there’s always the Blog Breakdown chart, which possibly started me on this whole new direction.

Molotov abandoned car
August 03, 2004

Realize that I did not take driver’s ed. in school because I wasn’t as inclined to be driving as all of my older classmates. Nonetheless, I took my driver’s test, passing both the written and driving tests on my first try. Nowhere in my memory did the driving manual say anything about hanging a rag out of the driver’s side window when abandoning my car.

I’ve seen a few cars lately that have done this. They were left in odd places, too. I suppose that there must be some reason for leaving a t-shirt or a towel, usually white, rolled up in the driver’s side window, otherwise not so many people would do it.

Oil and the end of civilization
August 03, 2004

Some mornings under the window in my bedroom, nightmares of nuclear holocaust would awaken me to staring blinded at the new sun in the window. I would know that I was awake, but the dreams were so fresh that the contrast in light from closed eyes to morning sun would convince me that the bombing had begun and I was just a microsecond from being crisply well-done.

Those heartbeats of fear before realization are nothing like the doom that lingers over me these days of war over oil.

Ugh, Windows.
August 02, 2004

Well, it’s been an interesting morning. I’ve been lamenting the speed of my work computer for some time now, and have secretly wondered if there was perhaps a virus on it. I’ve been running antivirus software and updating virus patterns regularly since 2000, and haven’t found anything - until this morning.

I’m not even sure what the virus was. It was detected and quarantined and I didn’t really care, as long as the scanner picked it up. See, the real issue is that the version of antivirus that I was using was purchased in 2000, and I recently got a popup during startup saying that future pattern files would not be compatible with my old antivirus version, and that I should upgrade. Ok, fine, so I did.