Where Dustbunnies Go To Die

hico is picking me up around noon to head off to Montreal for Con*Cept for the weekend, so I really should be packing. Not to mention doing laundry. But I got home around 10:30 and had to return a phone call, then make dinner. Normally I might have tried to get home earlier, but I was trying to finish up something at work and so didn't leave the office until about 9 - I almost got all seven reports finished, but I'm having a bit of trouble tweaking the SQL for the last one and so I left it for Monday.

It's funny how things work out - I hadn't booked a room in the con hotel because, like with everything else, I left it until the last minute and the hotel ran out of rooms. (There's a Canadiens game Saturday night, plus a lot of people are coming for Anticipation meetings who wouldn't normally attend Con*Cept.) The phone call I had to return was from someone with whom I often share rooms at out-of-town cons, who had called this evening to ask if I'd like to share this weekend. So that's a bit of luck. :)

I didn't go for lunch until about 3:30 today, and on the way back decided to stop off at the store where Zak and I were working during the summer. Roman had said that I could have a router that he no longer needed, so I finally got around to picking it up and getting the instructions on how to set it up from Brian, who is the service department there (not just the service manager, he's the entire department). Once I get that set up, I'll be able to surf the Web from the comfort of my couch. :) (Well, I also need to get something to allow me to plug the three-pronged plug of my laptop into the two-pronged outlet in the wall behind the couch. Details, details.)

Of course, this also means that the plans Eric and I have made to watch the upcoming season of BSG together while chatting in IM will actually work. :) (Though I have to finish watching the rest of the series first... I'm currently on 1x12, "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Pt. 1". I still have a couple of months to get caught up, though. )

I'm sure everyone has already seen the new photos from the Trek movie. For the few of you who haven't:

( Make with the clicky-clicky... )

I just don't know. The bridge looks completely different from what I was expecting or hoped for, and the uniforms look more like soccer jerseys. Karl Urban seems to have De Kelley's body language down to a "T", though.

There are more pictures online, here, here and here. (There are duplications between the sites, but some of them might be in higher resolution.)

And bovil posted this the other day, which I thought I would share. Toronto people, note the name of the artist. :)



(For non-Toronto people, Lar deSouza is a regular at Polaris, and this year did a two-hour workshop on digital art. He also participates every year in our origami workshop.)

So, let's see, at this rate I should be starting to pack for the weekend around, what, 2 o'clock? :)

I just have to share this...

The answer to the question in the subject of this post: they're all being sued by Jonathan Riches... along with about a few hundred other people, in Philadelphia's U.S. District Court. There are 57 pages, listing everyone he's named in his prisoner's civil rights lawsuit (that's right, he's currently in jail for identity theft and credit card fraud). He seems to have named everyone and everything from those I named in the subject of this post to Skittles Candy, Don King, Paris Hilton, the Congolese Army, the YMCA, ninja samurai fighters, the Virgin Mary, the Doobie Brothers, George Orwell, Malcolm X, Teri Hatcher, the Holy Quran, the Fort McHenry Tunnel, Che Guevara, a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, Jack Kevorkian, Ted Kaczynski, Hannibal Lecter, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Colossus of Rhodes, Gene Hackman, the Holy Grail, the Great Wall of China, Betty Crocker, the Magna Carta, Hegellian Principle, the 48th Grammy Awards, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the British Round Table... it just goes on and on. (I'm not sure how one can sue many of these... they're inanimate objects, fictional characters or philosophical beliefs.)

(Edit: I was just continuing to scroll through the list, and it gets better. He's named the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Ming Dynasty as defendants, too.)

The article at Philadelphia's citypaper.net
The list of defendants - I know I've already named quite a few of them, but do have a look if you have a few minutes. It's mind-boggling.

He's also suing Michael Vick, the Atlanta Falcons' quarterback recently charged with organizing a dogfighting ring, for allegedly stealing two of his dogs along with his credit cards, which he then allegedly used at Petsmart to buy dog food. The suit goes on to claim that Vick pledged allegiance to al Qaeda, subjected Riches to microwave testing, and used drugs in school zones, and that after using the two dogs in his dogfighting operations, sold them on eBay in order to buy missiles from Iran. That one is particularly amusing, because it's handwritten.

And here are some of his other lawsuits.

The stupid, it burns. And yet it's simultaneously rather hilarious.

It's rather disconcerting to turn on CBC and have the first thing one hears be that Paul Martin has been penalized for hooking in Ottawa. Of course, it was this Paul Martin, who plays defense for the New Jersey Devils, not the Paul Martin who is the former Prime Minister of Canada. Whew, dodged a bullet there...

Even more amusing is LolTrek, a site which combines the latest craze of lolcats with Star Trek - specifically "The Trouble With Tribbles". Thanks to bovil for the link.

This was posted at TrekBBS, and I thought I'd pass it along for all of you Monty Python fans out there:

Estimating The Airspeed Velocity Of An Unladen Swallow

I must say, the author went to a lot of trouble to work this out. Do read right to the bottom of the page - and I mean right to the bottom of the page.

... on a Samsung ad on the wall at St. George station, on the eastbound platform:

"Go Borg. Resistance is futile."

Class tonight wasn't that exciting - we spent most of it writing a Javascript program to build a web page whose background colour changes when you run the mouse over portions of the text. The rest was spent talking about loops, which have the exact same syntax in Javascript as in C#.

Speaking of which, the C# midterm is tomorrow night. I suppose I should probably read through the lecture notes as well as my own notes a few more times...

I just came across this posted at TrekBBS, and it cracked me up, so I had to share. If you don't get it, don't worry about it.

---

Q: What do you get when you cross a mosquito and a mountain climber?

( Read more... )

---

There are two kinds of people in this world:
[1]: People who start arrays with "1"
[1]: People who start arrays with "0".

As if it weren't strange enough that there's a World Rock/Paper/Scissors Championship, here's an updated version of the game, with 25 different gestures that can be made:

• gun


• dynamite


• nuke


• lightning


• devil


• dragon


• alien


• water


• bowl


• air


• moon


• paper


• sponge


• wolf


• cockroach


• tree


• man


• woman


• monkey


• snake


• axe


• scissors


• fire


• sun


• rock

And here is a table with all of the outcomes expressed verbally.

I can see it now...

"Tree!"
"Monkey!"
"Wolf!"
"Alien!"

"Okay... um... monkey lives in tree, enrages wolf and infuriates alien, tree shelters wolf and ensnares the alien's ship, wolf chases alien... um... so who won that round?"

"Hang on a sec, let me get the chart."

But if the tree shelters the wolf, and the monkey lives in the tree, isn't the tree also sheltering the monkey?

It seems I made my last post while Space was airing the Enterprise episode "Chosen Realm"... and now they're airing it again. They must be strapped for money these days - they're airing "The Hilarious House Of Frightenstein" three times per day. Oy. (That being said, I was amused by tonight's two Stargate SG-1 episodes: "Holiday" and "The Ties That Bind".) I did manage to catch tonight's episode of "Alias", though... the one with Gina Torres. Not bad at all, even if the show's premise is a little "out there", even for SF.

Bowling started up again tonight for the new season. Walking tomorrow will be a chore, I think. :(

I didn't do that well - I had meant to get a practice session or two in during the summer, but somehow chairing a con, co-chairing another, and attending two more requiring travel got in the way. My first game was okay - 159 - but then I bowled 114 and 136. Ick. In that second game, breaking 100 was looking shaky - I only had one mark in the first seven frames, a spare in the fourth. Fortunately I managed a strike and a spare late in the game.

The evening started off with a shock - the Friday VP was making announcements, and apparently our league treasurer, Jacques, passed away suddenly in June. He was a young guy - possibly even younger than me, though I'm not sure. Apparently he was at a tournament when he noticed a lump on his side. The next day it had moved up to his neck. When he returned to Toronto he went to a doctor, and it was found to be cancer. Two weeks later, he was dead - they hadn't even had a chance to start chemotherapy yet.

He wasn't a close friend by any stretch, but he was someone I knew and liked.

The rest of my day was good, though. I met up with redeem147 at a Tim Horton's near the bank where she works to deliver her autographed Mickey Rooney photo. We must have sat there talking about various stuff for two hours - IIRC, it was after 4 when I got home, and we'd met up just before 2.

It was also nice to see h8torun and Mario again after not having seen them all summer - Randy, of course, I had lunch with yesterday. Our fifth team member from last year had declined to make the move from Wednesdays to Fridays with us, but the person the league assigned to our team wasn't there tonight. We had someone fill in, but I don't know if she's just temporary (she said she would be bowling with us again next week) or if she's supposed to be permanently replacing the other person.

I have to say that I was a little disappointed with the lack of eye candy in the Friday session of the league. There was one guy, bowling about ten lanes away, whom I thought was kind of cute. h8torun agreed that he was kind of cute, albeit in that geeky way that I like. She and Randy tried to get me to go over and introduce myself, but I thought that would be a little out of the blue. I can wait until my team bowls against (or near) his, though this time I won't wait until the last night of the season like I did last year with John MacEachern, only to find out that he'd started seeing someone before I got up the nerve to ask him out.

There are also some people who were there tonight who also bowl on Wednesdays, so it's not as though there was nobody there I knew apart from my teammates. Nobody whom I'm particularly close to, though.

Oh, I did have one funny thing happen tonight - a woman whom I know slightly because she used to bowl on Wednesdays as well came over and asked if I did TV commercials. Apparently she had thought that the PC guy in the Mac-versus-PC commercials was me. She didn't believe me when I said that it wasn't. I'm not sure how to take that... I think I'm thinner and have more hair. (There's also the whole thing that he has brown hair, and I've been dying my hair blond for three years - and yet she kept insisting...)

And finally, from the SMOFS list earlier today: the California legislature introduced a bill a couple of weeks ago deploring the demotion of Pluto to dwarf planet status. Here's the bill itself. I particularly liked the clauses that stated that downgrading Pluto would cause psychological harm to Californians questioning their place in the universe (see line 3) and that it would reduce the number of planets available for legislative leaders to hide redistricting
legislation and other inconvenient political reform measures (line 17).