Monthly Archives: October 2007

Hamster balls…

Posted on 2007.10.08

…are cute? Well, hamsters at least, are cute, so I suppose this won’t fit into my doubleplusuncute bucket.

Hamster balls

I don’t know HOW you managed to capture your hamster’s ‘tocks so perfectly. I mean look at this specimen!

Should I tell them that those are not, in fact, “‘tocks”, but are rather testicles? It seems that other people saying as much in the comments are for the most part being ignored, so there’s really no point, I guess.

Besides, when I told them that one of their previous darlings likely had terrible birth defects they accused me of “Nuffing”. Do a browser find in the comments for ‘hydrocephaly’ and/or ’nuff’, if for some reason you are interested.

On the bright side, I guess any accidental hamster births (“But the pet store said they were both female!”) couldn’t happen to nicer people.

Ithacans have bad taste in pizza.

Posted on 2007.10.05

For the zillionth year running, Ithaca has once again voted local pizzeria Pizza Aroma as the best pizza place in town.

I don’t get it.

Pizza Aroma pizza is gritty, doughy, and boring. The cheese tastes more like milk than cheese. The tomato sauce is overpowering in its marinara-y blandness. After one and a half slices, you feel like you’re eating vomit.

New York style pizza, it isn’t.

Imagine my surprise when, after I complained to a co-worker about Pizza Aroma’s laudations in the face of execrable taste he disagreed. And when I offered up Gino’s (Ithaca’s only NY style pizzeria, ironically, as Ithaca is in NY) as my favorite local pizza place he went so far as to say the crap pizza in the mall’s food court was better. As he’s generally an okay sort of guy, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt, and even subjected happicow and Peter to a Pizza Aroma dinner taste test, in case all previous experiences with them (all two!) were flukes.

And we all came to the same conclusion: BLEAAARGH. Ithaca, what is wrong with you? Why must you continue to encourage the perpetuation of such terrible food?

Happicow calls it hippy pizza. Maybe it tastes good while stoned? Maybe the secret ingredient is hemp?

Anyway, I think the local bad taste is because we all hail from the only part of the U.S. that actually makes good pizza, and Ithaca is just far enough away from there to think that their bland pizza is good, and to disdain the flavorful stuff for it’s lack of bland (“The spices! They add flavors! They buuuuurrrrrrn!”) :)

I think I’m taking this all way too seriously, but stuff like this makes me wish I lived in a real city. Sure, all non-NY pizza is terrible, but at least in, say, Chicago, they have the decency to make distinctive terrible pizza; as opposed to pizza that is mostly terrible for it’s lack of distinctness. I can respect that. I don’t agree with it, but I don’t think people who prefer Chicago-style pizza are crazy- just wrong.

Ithacans on the other hand…

Intriguing discoveries and developments!

Posted on 2007.10.03

Today, there was a bit of forensic digging and a lot of fixing in regards to various neglected corners of the Internet that fall under my jurisdiction (for lack of any more willing suckers). I don’t think I learned anything useful, but things are possibly less terrible now than they were when I awoke and I certainly wasted tons of time, which ought to count for something (but almost certainly doesn’t).

One of the sites was a wordpress blog at work (one of the multitude) which I have not so much as seen before. I now know what happened, and when but still not how, or why. Someone using an IP address in the Netherlands logged into the admin panel of the blog and used the plugin editor to edit the spam_karma2 plugin to simply say echo 1ntr0;. They didn’t do much of anything else, so far as I can tell, but I haven’t looked into it deeply enough to know for certain.

The other site was my long neglected pet project, The Order of the Black Wind, which I’ve practically ignored since about 2004. I tried to give it away to various users of the site who would take better care of it several times, but no one else wanted it so I decided to simply keep paying the bill and see how long it lasted until something catastrophic happened; sort of a nihilistic quest for knowledge, really. Since the site was running an Invision Power Board, circa v1.3, which is notoriously lousy for security breaches, I’m surprised it’s gone this long without more than a few spam bots stinking up the place. Today some spam bot apparently found a vulnerability allowing it to masquerade as a user’s account (it chose mine, as it was the first user, I suppose). Though for some reason all it decided to do with its forum root privileges is make a single spam post. Peculiar. Anyway, as these days the Invision people actually want money (gasp!), I installed an instance of phpBB and converted all the data. We’ll see how long that goes in an unmaintained state, now.

In completely unrelated news, today I’ve learned that a human eyeball has approximately the same texture and taste as a hard-boiled egg, which has possibly ruined hard-boiled eggs for me forever. On the bright side, I’ve done my small part to spread the plague.

In more unrelated news, I got a haircut yesterday- sort of a mix between a pageboy and an a-line bob.

Haircut

I was going for something like this, but my hair curls too much.