My job is painfully boring most of the time. I’m not supposed to browse websites unless I’m looking for material to update the company homepage, I can’t install any games on the machines there, and there’s nothing to watch a movie or listen to music on. So, after several weeks of wondering what to do with my time there, the obvious answer finally hit me: I can write at work.

So, today, for the first time in about a year and a half, I wrote something political and posted it to my website. The column is here, the related forum thread is here. Tomorrow, I shall quest to finish the first of the Lupinia stories, something I’m running amazingly behind schedule on, even after changing my deadline. So, the low-content Lupinia site should soon have some updates

I also re-did the existing columns, adding links on each page to the related discussion thread on the Lupinia forum, and links to each column in PDF format for download, since the white-on-dark text isn’t very printer-friendly. And, in preparation for a site reorganization, I rearranged the threads in the forum, created some new sections, and consolidated some existing ones. Stay tuned for more!

If anyone sends you a link via AIM that says “hey check out this!” and points to http://gallery1.t35.com/gallery/, do NOT click the link, it is a virus that is too new to be picked up by antivirus software.

The virus is a DOS executable that is downloaded and installed by the PHP script. Filename proto.com.

I’ve filed an abuse report with t35.com, and I submitted my findings to Symantec and McAfee, so we should get some definitions soon.

EDIT: I’ve just been informed that this is a variant of a previous AIM virus. More information here.

After a year of my recruiting efforts, I’ve finally brought a new fur to the Shenandoah Valley area! Please give a warm welcome to fox_cub, who will be joining us in a couple months

Normally, I ignore emails from trolls. But, this particular sequence of messages bugged me because it’s from someone I know, and seems to be unprovoked.

This person is on one of the mailing lists I subscribe to, and he has a very annoying method of quoting previous posts. Observe an example of one of his messages (I shall call him GXB):
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Last night, after watching the second half of the Battlestar Galactica pilot with some friends (which ROCKS), I was feeling kinda strange, so instead of turning off Rt. 42 North onto my street, I kept going. And going. I talked to a certain special person while driving, which helped significantly, but I wasn’t tired or anything, and I had nothing better to do, so I kept going past Broadway and ended up in Timberville. For those who’ve never been there, Timberville is a cute little town in the northern part of Rockingham County. The last time I was there was about 14 years ago when my dad was refinishing a house my grandma had just inherited, and I “helped” (not a whole lot a 5-year-old can do at a construction site), and I haven’t been back since, despite having a good many family members there (half the residents are related to me in some way). I have no clue where that house was (except that it’s in T’ville), and only a vague mental image of what it looked like, but the curious puppy side of me took hold and I decided to wander the residential areas and try to find it.
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Apparently, I’m the only person on my side of the internet who isn’t going ga-ga over Sin City. Naturally, this really piqued my curiousity. Did I somehow miss the point of the movie? Was I so wrapped up in the gory-ness that I simply overlooked what it was about?

Well, by the time I was a half-hour into it, I was going over every scene with a fine-tooth comb, searching for some shread of redemption in it. I admit, the camera work was pretty, and much more artsy than what one would normally see in a mass-marketed film. But even that got really old after awhile, having seen far too much of it in my high school film class.

After my last entry, I got a dozen responses from people who thought that it was some amazing cinema masterpiece and that I was way off. Then there were three (two private, one public) responses from people who basically said “I thought it was ok, but definitely not your type of film”. Now, there aren’t many movies that I dislike (aside from anything Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings), especially not entire “types” of movies. So, I thought about it more and started inquiring about why I was getting that particular reaction. Basically, those people were the ones who apparently know me very well, perhaps better than I know myself, and they pretty much said that random overblown violence wasn’t my thing and they wouldn’t have recommended this movie to me.

So, don’t let my review sway your opinion, listen to what your friends think about it and whether they think you’ll like it

Yesterday, after taking one of my liberal activist friends off-roading, he invited me to come see Sin City with him and some friends. He had seen it twice already, and absolutely loved it, and he usually has good taste in movies, so I figured “Sure, why not?”

Oh. My. God. I thought I’d seen some bad movies over the years, but damn. Sin City has got to be the most crap-tastic movie ever made in years. It made middle-school student films look like Oscar-material. There was more blood, violence, and gore than every movie from the last ten years COMBINED, and since almost none of it was in colour, they got away with showing more. Decapitation, mutilation, castration, severe torture, cannibalism, suicide, everything. Little sex, moderate bad language, just piles of gore. Oh, and just in case the ungodly high body count wasn’t enough to feed the bloodlust of Americans, this heap of wasted film was pretty much plot-free, just to make sure you don’t miss the bloodbath from thinking about stuff. There was no charater development, no plot, and the storylines were fairly unique but shoddily executed. Even the all-star cast of actors couldn’t pull this thing off very well, it was the worst acting I’d seen from Bruce Willis ever since his guest appearance on Friends.

So, if you want to see two hours of plot-free bloody mayhem, go for it. Otherwise, avoid this steaming pile of movie industry shit at all costs.

FINAL GRADE: This isn’t worthy of an F, I give it a Z

I got to experience the joy of taking a “defensive driving” class yesterday, as mandated by the VA DMV (if you’re under 20 and get a ticket, you’re required to take this stupid class no matter how many times you’ve taken it before). It was probably the most boring thing I’ve done all year (though I did learn that wild hemp plants grow naturally here), complete with videos that made cheesy soap operas look like quality acting. I’ve seen better actors in middle school plays. And I had to endure eight hours of this! Gah! This ought to be considered cruel and unusual punishment.

The stuff they taught was a mixture of common sense (don’t pass on double-yellow, don’t use small children as target practice), safe-but-silly (wait five seconds before accelerating from a traffic light, maintain 3-second following distance when passing), and just plain dumb (drive 5mph BELOW the speed limit in heavy traffic because it’s “safer”, keep several car-lengths following distance in the same traffic). They also kept hammering in things like “driving is a privilege given as a courtesy of the court”, “driving a car is the most dangerous thing you’ll do in any given day”, and “43,000 people die every year in car wrecks because they weren’t driving defensively”. The thing that really made me twitch is that the instructor kept saying that it was safer to stick to the speed limit on roads than to drive the same speed as the surrounding traffic. Now, perhaps that’s safer for YOU, but to everyone else on the road, that turns your car into a hazard that needs to be avoided, forcing people into lane changes and passes that they normally wouldn’t have to make. It also adds to the stress/anger level of drivers who are probably already fairly annoyed. I’d learned from previous classes not to question this goober, but I have a hard time believing that this guy actually thinks that granny in her giant sedan driving well under the limit on a busy 4+ lane highway is a safer driver than the other people travelling around her.

In other news, I’m hitting the trails again tomorrow, so if any of you with 4WD vehicles want to join me (I already have several passengers and don’t have abundant room for more), let me know.

And, I figured out that the reason I’ve been getting so tired so early in the evening is that my mental clock must be off, since I’ve consistantly been going to bed around 8 this week and getting back up at 4. So, all of you who I talk to on IM, don’t let me go to bed before midnight anymore. I do have a cold or something, yes, but it appears to be unrelated to my early-evening-sleepiness.

People keep asking me what happened with the ISP I worked for, and other work-related stuff. Basically, two of the company owners relenquished control of the company, leaving my former boss, and one of the original investors from North Carolina. They’ve decided to try to sell it to another local ISP, and they called me last week and asked me to come back to manage the shop temporarily to keep the customers from disappearing.

In the meantime, I’ve been unemployed, searching for jobs in all sorts of places. The opportunity I posted about last time (police officer at JMU) fell through, leaving me wondering what I really want to do with my life. Do I want to stick with tech support? Do I want to be a cop? Do I want to try to get into graphics design? Or truck driving? Or be an electrician? So many different possibilities. I may pick up an ASE mechanic certification and work on cars, too. My future is rather uncertain at the moment, and it didn’t used to be.

In other news, I feel like shit, I think I may have caught a cold or something. Bleh. I’ve been in bed since 8:00 this evening, feeling rather achy but fairly well-rested. I have to be out & about in a couple hours to take one of those stupid Defensive Driving classes from a speeding ticket (required in Virginia if you’re under 21 and get a point violation, otherwise they suspend your license). My boss won’t be happy about that, I didn’t realize until the last minute that it was today, so I won’t be working today. Not that I have an option, if I don’t go to the class I lose my license for 6 months and won’t be able to come to work anyway. He never got back to me about whether he’d willingly let me have the day off (which I sent early yesterday morning), so he can just deal.

Yesterday afternoon, being bored out of my mind and stuff, I decided to take the Rover off-roading for the first time since I’ve gotten it, now that the transfer case lever works like it’s supposed to.
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