GlitchNYC.com

Lex - Chapter 1

I've completed a re-write and edit of the beginning of the Lex vignettes series and bound it together as "chapter 1." Hopefully this is the start of a trend for me, as I have more than enough material for chapter 2 ready if I can just get my butt in the chair long enough to edit it together. I'm pretty happy with this re-write as I feel it gets many of the pieces of the plot which were obscure across much more clearly.

Once again, fair warning - depending on your definition, these may not be 'work safe.' Don't read if you or your boss is made squeamish by R->NC17 rated material. This story is going to be as gritty, vulgar, sexy, and real as I can make it.

My eyes opened to pure feedback.

Bright, stark, white.

It was that blinding type of white which washes out everything else. I brought my hand to my face, pure porcelain, as if the contrast on the world was up too high. I moved my slender fingers in front of my groggy eyes until I was able to make out the edges of my hand, slowly coming into focus before me.

Instinctively, I reached up to run my hands through my long black hair. The amplified sensation of my hand on my bare scalp woke me from the remaining haze of the quicksed which had put me out.

Read the rest here

11:59 pm | permalink | /fiction/lex | 0 writebacks |

Not to jump on the Friendster bashing bandwagon, but

This is just creepy

You have 29 1st degree friends, 666 2nd degree friends, and 22,553 3rd degree friends in your Personal Network.

Maybe Friendster IS really the work of satan afterall... Hmmmm.

Am I the only one that still thinks Friendster and YASNSes are neat? I'm getting back in touch with all sorts of people who I had lost the contact info for.

2:53 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

The Icon Experience: Final Fantasy

My Dad, of all people, is a Final Fantasy Nut.

Starting back with FF1 on the NES (anyone else remember the rainbow bridge off the first continent?), he's played most of the series, (and the Dragon Warrior Series before that,) but didn't really get addicted until FF7 came out.

He spent untold hours playing that game, and had the characters maxed out well before beating the end boss.

FF8 came out, and I barely played it, but he ate it up, spending almost a year playing through all of it's mini games and again maxing the characters out. 9 was a bit of a bust, with its drop back to the original settings and characters - it just didn't engage him as well, but 10... Ohhhh 10

Final Fantasy X has lead to several things: 1, I had to wrestle my PS2 back from my dad after loaning it to him "over spring break." 2, my Mom broke down and bought my dad his own PS2, and 3, my Dad has been playing Final Fantasy X-2 almost non-stop since christmas.

With that in mind, I give you the following picture set: Final Fantasy in Person!

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1:18 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

The 16 Weeks: 25% Done

Well, I've just completed 4 weeks of my 16-week running program. I don't really know when or how it happened, but my body has suddenly jumped enormously in the amount of physical exertion it can handle. I was scheduled to do my first 1 hour jog without walking yesterday, and really expected it to kick my butt - amazingly, rather than being dog-tired when I reached my door, I felt, for the first time, that running an actual marathon might be within my reach.

The scale is finally cooperating a bit as well; up until now, my increased appetite from the exertion has kept me either at the same weight or going up slightly. Now it seems that it may finally take a bit of a turn in the right direction. That would be nice after hitting the plateau of my current weight and being 'stuck' there for 1 1/2 years. I may finally meet my orig. WW goal of 165.

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12:05 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

The iCon Experience - Summary & First Thoughts

Well, I've got enough material to be blogging all week about this, but I wanted to jot down my first thoughts about ICON.

This was the first convention of any kind for me, so I was both excited and nervous about whether Sara and I would enjoy it, if it would be interesting, if people would be nice, etc...

3 Days later, I can safely say that we both had a blast, I've got a lot of great pictures and we're most certainly going back next year!

CAPTION: Joker & Rogue - both one of the first costumed couples we saw and also certainly one of the best. I pestered these two for pictures all weekend, and they were wonderful sports about it (they returned as Gambit & Rogue on sunday - Erik's Gambit was just as accurate as Lilith's Rogue) They were also, weirdly, in the hotel room right next to us. I felt really bad - they were locked out by a faulty door RIGHT before the masquerade ball, and it looked like they didn't get a chance to change into their Rogue & Gambit outfits for the actual contest. I'll talk more about the contest and the rest of the con in the coming posts this week.

2:03 am | permalink | /life | 1 writebacks |

Icon SF

Well, we're off to ICON

It's my first con, so I'm sure I'll have some unique experience. I don't know if I ever would have gotten the mojo to go on my own, so its cool that nepthys and mortalis are coming out for it. We get to see them AND do something fun and new.

I'll let you know how it all goes.

4:29 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

We Saw This Guy!

A few weeks ago, when visiting upstate, we saw a Mercedes driving around playing a video on FOUR SCREENS of his car while driving with no passengers.

I didn't see the video, but Sara was like "Was that what I think I just saw?" and my Dad just said "Yeah." Apparently, they booked him for doing it!

From CNN.com

A driver in Schenectady, New York, was arrested last month after rolling past police with a DVD titled "Chocolate Foam" playing on the passenger-side sun visor in his Mercedes-Benz, authorities said. The movie also was rolling on screens set into the car's headrests.

The driver was accused of breaking state laws prohibiting watching TV while driving, as well as another law making it illegal to exhibit sexually explicit material in a public place.

Umm... Yeah.

1:53 pm | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

The Gimp for Windows

The Gnu Image Manipulation Program for Windows 2.0 is stable and released today, (following the source code release a few days back) along with a fresh version of GTK+ 2. It's free and the installers are super-simple, so all of you still running on Microsoft OSes get downloading! You'll be glad you did!

If you're installing on Win95/98/ME, please uncheck the WIMP theme option in the Gimp installer options to save yourself some headaches. Also, be sure to install the version of GTK+ 2 that's on that page as well.

My little logo guy at the top right of glitchnyc.com was done on an early beta using paths and selection masks, which allow you to do some basic beizer curves and point-to-point selection. Very cool.

1:36 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Doggles? Hahahahha.... Eh... Whoo...I mean. Ahem.

What are these? I mean really, what purpose do they serve? I've never seen a dog squinting at the sun as we do - hell, they ride down the highway at 70mph with their eyes and mouth open and seem to love it. These just seem silly.

Ahh well, I couldn't resist the cute.

12:35 pm | permalink | /technology/gadgets | 0 writebacks |

What a Beautiful Night for a Run

Well, after suffering through a week of asthma inducing cold, tonight was a freaking gorgeous night to run. It must have been 45 degrees, no wind, and the streets were all but empty.

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3:02 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Why Adobe Should be Worried

The Gimp hit 2.0 today. I've been using the betas on both Win32 and Linux for months, and they're awesome. The main problem with The Gimp was its use of the archaic GTK tooklit, and Gimp2 finally makes the switch to GTK2.

The result is a cleaner, more consistent look and UI which finally ditches the "Lefty mouse cursor" that drove me nuts.

Gimp 2 is still lacking when put up next to Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro simply because vector layers are absent where they have been integrated into the professional products.

The slashdot discussion of this brought up the fact that if you need vector imaging, there's many Open Source options. Following one of the links, I discovered the popular sodipodi, and I think I'm in love.

This is what Corel Draw used to be for me - a simple, page oriented, vector design system. Node editing, beautiful text rendering, beizer curves.

As near as I can tell, Sodipodi is everything Illustrator SHOULD be without all the crap. Gimp is getting very close to rivalling photoshop, and is already better for certain applications.

They're both written on GTK 2 and are cross platform across Win32, Linux, and OSX, so are developing quite a fan-base of people who run one desktop at home and another at work.

All it would take is for an enterprising group of developers to sew together Gimp and Sodipodi (perhaps switching interfaces when working on raster or vector layers?) and we would have an open source tool that took the graphics design world by storm.

Mark my words, in 3 years Adobe will be screaming the same sort of "Foul Play" junk that SCO and Microsoft are now.

2:53 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 2 writebacks |

Hot Topic Unveils Awesome Harry Potter Merch

Okay, this is just geeky enough to be fun, just obscure enough to sell. Well done.

Harry Potter Sirius Black Prison Work Shirt

This charcoal work shirt features three Harry Potter inspired screens: "Sirius Black" on the left front, "Azkaban Prison" on the right front, and "Azkaban" on the back. 65% polyester. 35% cotton. Wash cold. Dry low. Imported.

$39.00

Here's the rest of the HP Merch at HotTopic

4:28 am | permalink | /life/freak/garb | 0 writebacks |

Urban Dictionary Rocks My Face

They didn't have scratchiti, but they will by tomorrow. I just submitted my definition to the site, and it should be approved within 24 hours.

While there, I weeded through a bunch of other crappy submissions, like people submitting eachothers names and then being like "mike drucker" AKA total fag.

Luckily, after submitting my definition for scratchiti, I got to mark about 100 of these for deletion and contribute to the beauty that is UD's user contributed, edited, and rated online reference. Ahh insomnia.

4:17 am | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

The Almost-Too-Obvious Scratchiti Zamboni

The word Scratchiti, which I mentioned previously in reference to the MTA just passing it off as a common phrase on it's most recent "rules and regulations" flyer, has roots farther back than I expected. Examples of Scratchiti date back to the 70's in "Urban Art" circles, although the practice is generally viewed with disdain even by aerosol artists. Repetitively scratching straight lines into a hard surface doesn't really leave much room for art. It's also unclear exactly when and where the phrase scratchiti describing scratchings on hard surfaces was coined

While tooling around the net looking for the word's origins, I found a novel solution, at least for glass surfaces. I wonder if the MTA is using this already.

The Scratchiti Zamboni

3:36 am | permalink | /life/nyc | 0 writebacks |

Game Review: SSX3 for PS2

As I don't often play games, these reccomendations have been a bit sparse, but I can't go without throwing in my hat for SSX3 from "EA Sports Big". Fitting that 20 years ago EA released the first sports game I ever played on computer, "Dr J. vs Larry Bird," beginning my long history of excelling at athletics in the virtual world, while sucking at them in meatspace.

We played the hell out of the original SSX back in 2000-2001, but you can only play the same 7 tracks so many times before you're just sick of them.

See more ...

1:36 am | permalink | /technology/games | 0 writebacks |

The 16 Weeks: 3 Down

Whelp, I was almost flawless in my running schedule, but at least I'm not that far off track.

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12:52 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Teenage Regression

Well, the lack of updates here was due to a few things, including a trip upstate to do nothing but drink tons of diet pepsi, play video games, recite old one-liners and in-jokes, and make new ones:

RYE: "do you have the tickets?"

VIN: "Yeah, you're going to want to pull a u-turn"

RYE: "Ha ha, very funny. Sorry, I just had to be 'that guy.'"

::uncomfortable silence::

VIN: "No... really, you're going to want to turn around"

I'd almost forgotten how much fun it was just to hang out and do nothin' with the guys. Had an awesome time, and normal blogging will now resume.

Ironically, Remy also dropped off the face of the net this week for nearly the same reason.

12:41 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

New Virus Exploits MHTML Dumbness

We've just encountered a new virus that I can't seem to find anything about. It exploits one of the weaknesses of Mail-HTML, namely using a link to run an executable.

For Example, this mail body reads:

Received message is available at:

www.cg.org/inbox/nprotected/read.php?sessionid-3140

But the link goes to:

mhtml:mid://00005642/!cid:031401Mfdab4$3f3dL780$73387018@57W81fa70Re

displayed in source as

When you click on it, it runs the attachment, even on my fully patched install of outlook.

Thank god the server doesn't let through executable attachments, but I have a feeling home users are in for a doozy.

Most techs I know only advise users not to click on attachments; links, until this point, have been fair-game. If this virus propogates as quickly as I think it might, we won't have time to warn the users.

After a wonderfully successful install of Mozilla Thunderbird at my parents house, I don't see any reason to keep home users on Outlook Express while it's being targeted so heavily.

4:12 pm | permalink | /technology/microsoft | 0 writebacks |

The World Still Still Says No to War

Peace Rally Numero Tres. They're really getting their use out of that graphic!

At some point, they're going to get slapped for sticking these all over the place - this was on the 42nd Street sign.

11:59 am | permalink | /life/nyc | 0 writebacks |

Found Art - Spring + Broadway

11:54 am | permalink | /life/nyc | 0 writebacks |

NYC MTA Coins New Word: Scratchiti

The fine purveyors of subterranian transit here in New York have decided to ban the practice of scratching letters and words into the metal and glass of their subway cars.

This is nothing new or exciting. The weirdness is that they seem to have coined a new word to deal with the problem, rather than just lump the practice in with Graffiti and other vandalisim. At first, this poster was seemingly alone at the 28th Street stop. Now, it's showing up everywhere.

It's fun how the word defines itself simply by the context it is used in. Someone in communications and marketing at the MTA is having a good time with this, I suspect. Nothing like coining your own word, and then forcing it into the lexicon by posting it legally everywhere.

11:48 am | permalink | /life/nyc | 1 writebacks |

What the F#@$ is Wrong With The Post?!?!?!

Okay, I'll put it in the best way I can think to put it, since I know I tend to get ranty with this subject.

If there was some scandalous sex act in the news, no self respecting (or FCC fearing) publication, TV show, or presidential campaign ad would run footage or photos of the act itself.

Yet, when something so shocking, so soul-shattering as someone throwing themselves to their death happens, they run images of it happening with no concern for the outcome, the feelings of those involved, or the collateral damage.

Inside your pages, maybe. On historical footage, ok. ON YOUR GODDAMN FRONT PAGE? I don't want to see it. I know I don't want to see it, so I won't buy your filthy rag, yet you keep pushing this garbage in our face.

That was a real girl. She's really dead. I didn't want to see her mid-air, you scumbags. Neither did the little girl sitting next to me on the subway while 5 people read the paper across from us, holding the paper up at her like so many posters.

The Post now officially joins the list of my boycotted media, along with Fox news for running footage of the WTC jumpers in a commercial for their "Year after" special during American Idol (read: kids watching.) I'd avoided seeing that footage through the whole ordeal, another year and a half later, it's still burned on my retina.

I'm all for freedom of choice. Anyone else can watch anything they want - but in both cases, most watchers didn't know what was coming until they saw it and had no choice.

UPDATE: I'm not alone.

Arrg. I'm also venting at Gothamist where I actually saw the thing. Not big fans of theirs for running the photo on their front page as well. The comment thread (no picture) is here

3:34 am | permalink | /life/politics | 0 writebacks |

Old Favories: Lunch Money 2

I just stumbled on something from a few years ago in the photos section that made me laugh!

Back in HS, we used to play this game called Lunch Money by Atlas Games. It was pretty fun, and we had some really good times sitting around the "freak" table in the little cafeteria bashing eachothers brains out playing the game.

I'd always thought I should take pictures of all of us and put them on our own deck, but never got around to it / didn't know how to do it.

Of course, by the time I was a senior in college, i had a bit more time on my hands and a lot more skills, so I put together my own deck. It's turning out to be the funniest photo album I have. It should be fun looking back at these in 20 years.

4:58 pm | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Great Independent Artists - Edie Carey

Over the course of the past few years, I have managed to find a couple great independent artits, and I'm going to start profiling them a bit here to share them with others and hopefully promote good, non-RIAA art.

I stumbled opon Edie Carey on CDbaby.com while buying another indie CD, and really liked her stuff. Little did I know that Sara had also found Edie on MP3.com years ago when she burned me a custom "indie artists" cd for christmas.

I listened to her free sample playlist, really liked it, and got the full cd. Turns out, it's even better than the little snippits CDbaby gives you listen to. Very nice stuff.

See more ...

4:51 pm | permalink | /life/music | 1 writebacks |

No More Stingy RSS!

I've just made a minor hack to the "Seemore" plugin I'm running to allow RSS feeds to be the full text of the article, rather than resorting to the "see more" link that the rest of my site uses.

"See more" is useful for keeping the index clean and letting casual browsers see the headlines, but for those reading via aggregators, having to click for the full text sorta defeats the purpose.

Let me know if my rambles are too long for your aggregators and/or friends pages, and I'll consider turning the seemore links back on.

2:19 pm | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 0 writebacks |

Since When Does LJ Syndicate?

Awesome - you can now add me as an LiveJournal friend:

Add glitchnyc.com to your friends list on LiveJournal.

Looks like they picked up my RSS feed somehow. Cool. Thanks to whomever did the grunt work!

3:53 am | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 3 writebacks |

Invader Zim Goodies of DOOM!

Ok - I swear this is the last link for tonight. While looking for the Zim quote in the last article (deja vu?), I found this awesome site, which has this neato mini-comic by Jhonen himself, and announces that the Invader Zim DVD is out on May 11th. Whoo!!!

I love the moose on the first page, with the arrow pointing to it that just says "FLOATIN'!!".

3:29 am | permalink | /technology/tv | 0 writebacks |

Temporal Anomalies in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey

As seems to be the pattern lately, I've stumbled upon one of the diamonds in the rough of the net while searching for something completely different. All I wanted was the correct quote for my last article, and ended at a site which, apparently, takes apart every sci-fi movie dealing with time travel and discusses the temporal implications of it's characters.

The fact that it tackles Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey is simply awesome. This is one of the movies that's so far out of whack that it's obviously meant to be tongue in cheek, but I certainly spent many an adolescent night giving myself headaches thinking about the infinite time loop represented by Rufus coming back to make sure they succeed in the first movie.

Gir, from Invader Zim wraps it up pretty nicely:

"Wait, if you destroyed Dib in the past, then he won't ever be your enemy, then you won't have to send a robot back to destroy him, and then he will be your enemy so you will have to send a robot back-" *GIR's head explodes*

2:06 am | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

The 16 Weeks: One Down.

If there's one thing most people can agree upon, it's the general perception that time speeds up as you grow older. When you're 15 and have 2 years left of high school, that feels like an eternity; like something insurmountable. 8 years later, you're out of college, settled into your job, and it feels like the blink of an eye.

Aside from finding this accelerating spiral of time terrifying due to my irrationally intense fear of being old and out of touch, I have, occasionally, found the time-acceleration trick very useful. It's like that final scene in "Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey," where they don't yet know how to play guitar. I'll explain.

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1:29 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Creepy Picture, or Foreshadowing of Headlines to Come?

Gothamist has a crazy, "what the hell is this?" captioning contest going on for this oddball snapshot of the the dueling baby michelles. Some of the write-ins are pretty hillarious.

Link to picture + captions


Gothamist.com

1:00 am | permalink | /technology/tv | 0 writebacks |

Admitting Where it Sucks

Like anything, in order for Linux to improve, especially on the desktop, I think we need to look at the areas where it NEEDS to grow in order to be better, not just everything random that's "wrong" with it.

On the desktop, Firefox is well on it's way to rivaling and even beating IE. This is especially true on windows. On Linux, it's flagging for two main reasons.

1) Fonts

I know this has been beaten to death, and you can control the font size within mozilla, but for the life of me, I can't understand why you can't change the "proportional" font. It's The main, default font that firefox uses, and all you can select is "Serif" (aka times) or "Sans-Serif" (aka arial).

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12:45 am | permalink | /technology/linux | 1 writebacks |

One Step Further

Well, both viruses in cyber and meat- space have gone one step further than I would have liked.

The Bagle virus has just gotten really nasty, spoofing mail to our users to make it look like it came from "administrator" and also signing it "The $domainname Team" where $domainname is the current suffix on your email addresses - in my case, commonground.org.

Meanwhile, it seems the real-world-need-to-go-to-a-doctor type of virus or infection that has me may have shrugged off the 10 doses of levaquin I just dutifully took. The last one is still in my system, and I'm already waking up with green-sleepy eyes and may yet have a sinus infection.

In both cases, I'm rebelling against extreme measures - in cyberspace, I have yet to filter and block all mail from the outside with our domain name in the from, for fear of screwing up all internal email. In meatspace, I refuse to go and demand a "bigger gun" like cipro until I know I really still have this cold and can't kick it myself.

Come on Immune System! Do your thing.

3:17 am | permalink | /technology/microsoft | 0 writebacks |

EBay Auction for Personal Stalker

Remy is auctioning off 2 years of "hate mail" and/or other forms of creepy stalking via whatever methods you give him.

Seems to be a case of "if you're good at something, run with it." The guy seriously needs a job.

It'll be interesting to see who bids on this. Has he discovered a hidden market for the attentionally deprived?

4:38 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

What's My Mug Doing on a Website? A British Website No Less?

So a while back, we had some people from BBC taping a bit about Common Ground to background our replication efforts there with CRISIS. They were doing an interview with Rosanne, and needed someone to play piano in a pinch.

I ended up with the gig, thinking I would just do some background music and maybe a quick filler shot. It was a far cry from my normal day to day as a web admin!

Turns out, I ended up opening the video, and now I'm smack dab on the front of the Crisis Urban Village Project page.

The funny thing is, in the video, they make it sound as if I'm either a rehabilitated homeless person, or a Broadway musician. I don't know if I should be insulted or flattered in either case... Not a bad scam for the company Web Geek!

3:25 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 1 writebacks |

Off to a Running Start

Sorry, I couldn't resist the pun. Well I finally got myself some sneakers. It was weird to buy them, as I haven't had to deal with anyplace like foot locker for ages.

Retail in NYC in general is a horrible place to work, and I forget that sometimes as I usually only shop in independent stores and little niche markets. It's one of the perks of being a freak. Even the kids in Hot Topic tend to have a sense of ownership and pride in the store they work in.

Having to endure a store that was crowded full of overpriced, overbranded products, pushy shoppers, and workers macking on any lady that came in because they hate their job made for a... ahem... enjoyable experience.

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2:27 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

New Virus Is a Kick in the Head for Admins

There was a new virus out yesterday, and it's nothing that scary - just another NetSky variant. Everyone's virus server is handling it just fine, spitting out emails to users saying things like "you had a virus in your inbox, but i've quarantined it."

Unfortunately, all users (and pointy haired bosses) ever read is AHHH VIRUS, MUST CALL EYE TEE! STAT!

Of particular note about NetSky-D is that is appears to have a new mail forging algorithm. Instead of just faking the from address, it attempts to fake it specifically from someone you know. This little nasty is harvesting addresses from both address books and any file on your C: through Z: drives.

The reason this sucks so much is that ALL of the email addresses at Common Ground appear to have been harvested, possibly from infections on certain home user's pcs. The code in NetSky-D seems to be realizing that it has multiple addresses in the same domain and is using them together to make it look like internal mail. This isn't helped by the fact that Exchange translates email address, forged or not, to the complete name of the sender when they match.

Although these messages are being caught by the virus scanner, they look like legit mail which was inappropriately blocked. For example, I get errors saying that a message from John Doe to Tom Cruise was blocked due to an unscannable message body. In reality, a forged mail to tcruise@cg.org had jdoe@cg.org in the from, confusing the hell out of my server.

What a mess.

1:10 pm | permalink | /technology/microsoft | 0 writebacks |