Freeday 10 December 1999

Pic of the day: Ladies and girls, we interrupt to show you live from the Chaos Node the latest in manly pajamas! Yes, it is true! After all the heartfelt pleas by my adoring fans (ahem) I went off in continued search for a new pajamas. This one isn't all bad. It is nice and soft and comfy. Its one downside is that it is strikingly similar to one of the few I already have, the famous blue-striped one. (Or even unforgettable, somewhat depending on who you are.) When seen side-by-side they are actually not the same, but at a glance one would be excused to think so. More details later, perhaps.

Why, yes, it was payday today. I paid bills too, including last month's charge on my credit card. So don't worry.

You are not going to believe this. Well, perhaps, but I'm not sure that is a good thing. Oh well. Off we go.

It was late yesterday evening here and I was chatting on IRC with the regulars. And they used some strange American expression, and I chided them when they would not explain it to me (why use it in the first place if it ain't decent enough to talk about?) and I told them that I might need to know American. And then I called Amanda at work. (Just very briefly, in case her employers ever read this. I did not disturb her for long. It is true. I am known not to lie, at least as long as it's not about sex. All men are known to lie about sex. Not that I have any sex life to lie about.)

Anyway, here I dialled this insanely long number ...

"When the sweetest voice I ever heard, whispered to my soul..."
That's what Leonard Cohen says, but I've not particularly paid attention to voices before. It's just a way to communicate, just like typing or morse code for that matter. So I was taken totally aback when the sweetest voice I've ever heard, answered the phone. I already had a couple lines ready to say, and I guess I said them repeatedly for a while, as the scattered pieces of my brain frantically tried to reassemble but tripped over each other's legs. (I did not even know the pieces of my brain had legs, until this.)

She tried to make a conversation, I think. I made a complete ass of myself, as I sometimes do, and then hastily excused myself and hung up. I was sweating and freezing at the same time. Ack. And it cost me kr 3 (ca 38 cent).

Rereading this a bit later, I think I should point out that this is not what it looks like. At least I sure hope it isn't. I've met beautiful women before. Actually, some of my best friends are beautiful women. But I've always known that before I approached them in the first place. (Or more likely before they approached me, me being very shy and all.) Anyway, if you want to independently verify that it isn't all in my head (or somewhere such), I guess you will have to make an appointment with Amanda about that. A good start would be to familiarize yourself with her excellent online diary, "A is for ...".

Yes, I know I've "pimped" her site before, but that was last month. So for any new readers (and there probably are, since they will have found this entry while searching for Leonard Cohen stuff on the popular search engines), go there and you will understand. :)

In other extremely local news, I was informed by the never tiring Joe Shedlock that there was a new version of Gibson Research's Trouble In Paradise Zip disk diagnosis tool. Last time I looked (1-2 months ago) the TIP did not handle USB drives, such as my new one is. The current version does. I'm running it for the third time and the disk has over 100 soft errors but no hard ones. I wonder how this relates to the tendency to lock up. I had set the QuikSync to automagically backup my diary related stuff to this zip drive, but after a while it locks up and the process must be terminated. Also scandisk will occasionally lock up the drive and have to be killed by ctrl-alt-del. To the best of my knowledge Iomega has always made slightly shoddy products, but cool (high gadget factor). This seems to hold true yet again.

Speaking of Gibson Research, I used their testing service at work today and found that our Internet computer was wide open to intruders. Not that it holds a lot of company secrets or anything, but I still fixed it, using the easy and lucid instructions provided on the web page. You don't want some kid to delete your hard disk just for giggles.