Pardon Meow

You know how sometimes, you'll be walking along, and see somebody coming the other way, so you move to one side to get around them. But they move to that side as well, so you move to the other side, but they move at the same time, and it takes you a few attempts to finally get around each other?

I just did that with my cat.

Yeah, thanks for getting flooded, asshole!

What remains of Lonesome Road in Old Forge, after the Lackawanna River made a snack of it during the June 2006 floods.

From the "Why Retail Workers Should be Armed" Dept.

So the Scranton Times-Tribune has an article today about the struggles of the Dollar General store on Lonesome Road in Old Forge, which can be seen in the background of the above photo. Not struggles against rising water, or the road being out, mind you. We're talking struggles by store employees against angry customers. Let's review their plight, shall we?

1. One week ago, the Lackawanna River surged, flooding the store under several feet of water. Much of the merchandise was, obviously, destroyed, and the store needed a major cleanup as a result.
2. In addition, the road in front of the store was washed away by the river current, leaving the store inaccessible for almost a week since.
3. When PennDOT finally built a temporary road around the washed-out portion, it was too narrow for the company's large trucks to navigate, leaving the store unable to replenish its stock, most of which is now waterlogged and unsellable, even if it is a dollar store.

Yet despite all this, there are still pieces of human garbage out there that actually have the gall to complain that the store is closed! From the article:

“Great. Now I have to go all the way out of my way. Thanks a lot,” one man yelled out of his car window before speeding out of the parking lot.

What the fuck do these people expect? "Yeah! Thanks a lot for not miraculously parting the Lackawanna like Moses so I can buy all my dollar store crap right this instant!"

It was much nicer back in the old days, when problem "customers" like that were shown the door and told never to come back, lest they be charged with trespassing. Now, all the retail business is done by large chains that hire managers who are too chicken to tell the terminally ignorant to get the hell out. This, in turn, makes it worse for the rest of us to shop, since we're always trying to get around idiots who:

• Block entire aisles and refuse to move
• Hold up the register for hours on end haggling the cashier over various expensive items that she swears were all marked 3/99¢ on the shelf
• Take the motorized carts simply because they are too fat and lazy to walk a few damn feet to the potato chips, leaving none for those who are genuinely handicapped and need them
• When an employee is assisting you, walk up screaming, demanding that the employee help them instead, despite the fact that you were there first (bonus points if they just need to know the location of an item they just walked by on their way to throw a tantrum)
• Take items out of other people's carts
• Allow their filthy, grossly overweight, lice-ridden children to run around the store completely unattended, tripping people, running into shopping carts, blocking aisles, and generally making enough retarded screaming noises to rival the taping of your average MTV show.
• Are filthy, grossly overweight, and lice-ridden themselves
• And so on, and so on...

I propose that we find the "man" (note the use of quotes) mentioned in this article. When the land along Lonesome Road is rebuilt, have a cheap, one-story house built alongside the river, and force this guy to move into it. Next time the river floods, we all get together and beat him with bricks for every hour that he is not finished cleaning up and rebuilding said house. Afterwards, we all take turns yelling, "Thanks a lot, jerkwad!", and speeding off his lawn.

It'll be the best national holiday ever!

Impatient for Independence

So it's only July 1st right now, and yet despite this, most of my neighbors are already setting off enough rocketpower to launch a small satellite into geostationary orbit. The air outside reeks of smoke and beer, explosions can be heard from all directions, and I swear I just saw Iraqi security forces patrolling the neighborhood.

Needless to say, I've put the fire department on speed dial.

A Quick Comparison of Operating Systems

From the "This Made Me Late for My Show" Department:

*I plug an ethernet cable into the computer:*

---

Linux:

Computer: Ah! An ethernet cable! *Prints a message in a log somewhere*

Me: *Fires up a shell and executes a command to start the ethernet interface.*

Computer: Roight-O! *Starts up ethernet adapter and connects to the network as configured, falling back on DHCP if there's no configuration*

---

Mac:

Computer: Ah! Ethernet cable! *Sets up connection the same way the Linux box does, but without requiring any user input whatsoever.*

---

Windows:

Computer: Dum de dum...

Me: Uhh... could you connect to the network I just plugged in? Please?

Computer: Hwuh? Wha? Oh, that. Well, you don't have the ethernet cable plugged in.

Me: What the hell are you talking about? I just plugged it in! Hell, your light's even blinking on the switch! Don't tell me there's no cable plugged in!

Computer: Nope. No cable. *Goes back to thrashing the hard drive*

Me: AAAAARRRRRGH! *I go through the entire Windows control panel, looking for any way possible to get this thing to recognize that yes, I did indeed plug in a network cable. When this fails, I fall back on the old Windows standby of rebooting the entire machine and hoping that knocks some sense into it.* Now can you connect to the network?

Computer: Huh? Oh, I've disabled that network interface.

Me: What? How the hell did the interface get disabled?

Computer: Well, you didn't have a cable plugged in the last time, so...

Me: AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGH! *I once again go through every single network configuration option on the system, all the while cursing Bill Gates and wishing that I had sprung for the Powerbook instead.*

After about 25 minutes of this, I finally got it to recognize that yes, there is indeed a network there, and I managed to get my files transferred by 3:55. That left me a grand total of five minutes to pack my stuff into the car and make the seven-mile drive to the station.

Note that this was after I had already spent a half hour trying to get Windows to connect to the wireless network for longer than thirty seconds at a time. Also note that I end up having problems like this every single time I'm in a hurry and have to deal with Windows. And people wonder why I always seem so stressed out.

Blowing Rasperries at your Heaven

So XScreenSaver (an excellent collection of screensavers for UNIX-ish systems, including Mac OS X) has this saver called "FuzzyFlakes", created by Barry Dmytro, which features multicolored flakes wafting around your screen. Originally, these were pink flakes on a green background, to match the end credits of Azumanga Daioh, which were the inspiration for the screen saver. A few versions later, the ability to specify different or random color schemes was added. However, the new color selection scheme made it impossible to get the original Azumanga-inspired colors anymore. So about a year ago, I posted a patch at the end of this post that would re-enable these colors.



Anyway, the patch no longer works with the recently released XScreenSaver 5.00, so I've made a new patch to go along with it. I've also included a universal binary for Mac OS X, for those of you who are into that sort of thing. For the patch, you'll need the source code for version 5.07 of XScreenSaver, which is available here. Mac users need to have Mac OS 10.4 or higher. Windows users can go suck Mr. Tadakichi's tail.

• Source code patch
• Mac OS X binary