Well, after the great spamming of ’06 I thought things had settled down and I could live with the 30-50 comment spam attempts that Spam Karma 2 handles for me every day. I mean, I still have to quickly scan a long list of these blocked spam every now and then to make sure that good posts aren’t being blocked,… Read more →
Author: Mr. McLaren
The biggest downside of midsummer…
Most of the time I’m a peaceful man, but all the earwigs in the world could die right now and I would be OK with that. Damn you Mom, for telling me when I was very young that earwigs crawl into your ears and can’t turn around, so they have to eat through your brain. Damn you Night Gallery. Read more →
My job is getting me down.
Blogging is suffering due to overwork. My day today felt exactly like this. Of course, even when my job is painfully tedious, there are some levels even I won’t sink to to provide myself with distraction. Read more →
Sleep is awesome
My wonderful wife and child let me sleep in until 11:15 this morning. (Note for non-Canadians: today is the observed holiday of Canada Day, July 1, and is thus a non-work day for me–hence I had an excuse to stay up last night fiddling with wireless card firmware, etc.) While 11:15 would have been “early” for getting up on a… Read more →
I have a wireless Linux box
I am writing this post in a Firefox window on my newly installed Ubuntu Linux machine. I had a relatively old IBM Thinkpad A21m sitting around, more-or-less unused, so I decided to test the rumours I’ve been hearing that Ubuntu is now at the “easy one step install and it just works” stage. Bear in mind that the last time… Read more →
I have too many fillings.
You know, I’ve always expected to see a couple of things in my lifetime: a cure for baldness and a way to scientifically regrow teeth. For both of those, I expected the solution to be some kind of biological one–we would trick the body into regrowing these things the same way it had grown them in the first place. Well,… Read more →
Go SCOTUS
This post made possible by the New Medievalism research team. I was pretty surprised today at the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Hamadan–I honestly didn’t expect this court to deny Bush anything, much less make a decent ruling. Here’s a snippet from the AP story: Supreme Court blocks Bush, Gitmo war trials WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that… Read more →
Dreamland by Edgar Allan Poe
…because I’m just in the sort of mood where I spend several hours thinking about a poem, and writing a ridiculously long post about it. I’m even feeling contrary enough to leave the whole damn thing without a “more” break in it. Dreamland By a route obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where an EidolonAn eidolon (from Greek… Read more →
I still like most of Appetite For Destruction. I admit it.
BBC NEWS:Rocker Rose arrested in Stockholm Guns N’ Roses singer Axl Rose has been arrested in Sweden for alleged violent conduct and damage to a hotel room. Rose is alleged to have bitten a security guard in the leg outside the Berns Hotel, in Stockholm. Two thoughts on reading this story: 1) Axl is not aging well. And I think… Read more →
Hanging Around The House 8: The Upstairs Halls
Continuing the series of posts that try to capture the various pieces of art I have hanging around the house. Remember that these posts are made up of quick snapshots–these are hardly professional images, and the upstairs images are worse than the downstairs ones since the angles I could use to take the snapshots are much more highly constrained. The… Read more →
Links to a cornucopia of images
Keith Loh‘s Flickr photoset of images from the World Peace Forum‘s Peace March. Keith’s captions are a lot more useful than on most Flickr photosets. A gallery of cool science-fiction landscapes conjured from TerraGen. (The site’s main page is in German. Here’s another.) If you think hookers look like this, then you’re in for a rude awakening. Another photoset, just… Read more →
Butter Sculpture as Novel Inspiration?
For many years now I’ve been polishing my story about driving across America to take a friend’s car to San Francisco. The story has everything: Monet in Chicago, parties at the Renn Fest outside Minneapolis and a day at the Minnesota State Fair, the Shetterly tour of Weird America (Corn Palace, Wall Drug, Crazy Horse Mountain, Carhenge, etc.), a spooky… Read more →
B’n’E Cleaner
Look what happens when English majors go unemployed in the age of desktop video… (Speedbag is a member of the HGPA. He doesn’t know that I know his door code. However, I certainly didn’t put his dishes away–hell, it’s a constant battle in my own house to get me to put away the dishes.) Read more →
Hanging Around The House 7: Family Room
Continuing the series of posts that try to capture the various pieces of art I have hanging around the house. Remember that these posts are made up of quick snapshots–these are hardly professional images, and the upstairs images are worse than the downstairs ones since the angles I could use to take the snapshots are much more highly constrained. The… Read more →
Father’s Day
Well, my second Father’s Day was pretty great. Sarah was, obviously, much more interactive this year; she actually said “Happy Father’s Day” to me. It was so cute it nearly broke my heart. And then she gave me a present: Space Frogs in the hizouse! Yes, that is a giant bibb. One reading of this gift would be that Sarah… Read more →
