Another Dream...

Last night I dreamed I was a muffler.

Current Mood: exhausted

Global Cooling

Yesterday I was relaxing in a lawn chair in my back yard drinking lemonade and enjoying the warm sunlight when I felt a droplet of sweat roll down my cheek. As I lifted my arm to wipe it away I felt a chilling wind and realized that the warm sunlight was actually a dull haze and that the droplet was not sweat but rather rain. After going back into the house and verifying that it was in fact May 24th, I decided that I should no longer be concerned about global warming.

Today is Kate's birthday. She seemed excited that I sent her a gift, but she said she didn't know exactly what she was going to do with 60 cans of CFC-containing hair spray. I miss her so much that I've started constructing a mannequin to look like her which I can then cover with her shampoo and hand lotion so it will smell like her too. At first I thought it was a slightly nutty idea, but the voices in my head assured me that people do things like this all the time.

My car survived about two-thirds of the drive home from school, and if you're reading this after May 27th, 'my' isn't even the correct possessive pronoun. No sane person (and only the most wasteful insane person) would pay for major surgery on an economy car that is over ten years old, so it's going to get junked. However, I'm still going to drive down to the garage where it is currently being held, take some of my things out, maybe take some pictures, and then spray it with 15 coats of environmentally-unfriendly paint before I sign the title over.

Current Mood: relieved

The quarter winds down...

My last class of spring quarter for the 2004-2005 academic year was no less painful than it has been for the last ten weeks of my life. The course title is quite deceptive and, in my opinion, should be changed from "Professional Communications" to "Professional Coma-Inducing Lectures" or maybe "Freehand Drawing". The only thing that keeps me entertained is my observation that the professor's mind seems to exist in an entirely different universe from the one where his actions take place and his words are spoken. He mentioned that he was very pleased with the excitement and the enthusiasm of the class on Tuesday while we were working in groups on xyz assignment. I thought that was odd, because all I can remember of Tuesday was trying with all my might to keep my eyes open while the teams beside and in front of mine gave each other dumb looks and discussed the fact that they had no idea what we were supposed to be working on. Maybe the excitement and enthusiasm the professor was referring to was coming from the kid in my group who was playing crappy Flash games on his laptop.

In other news, I had a phone interview with someone from Harris Corporation this morning. It went very well except that my voice is all screwed up because of the virus that is currently ravaging my body on a cellular level. I was expecting to hear him say that they couldn't hire me because it is against company policy to employ frog-men, but he didn't. Maybe they don't discriminate against amphibians, although I'm not sure they should be trusting frog-men to embed software into chips that go into missile-guidance systems.

I helped Kate move some of her stuff out of her room this morning, which served as yet another reminder that the end of the academic year is approaching...no...stalking...no...hunting - that's it - hunting me down while I try as hard as I can to flee in terror. I really wish I had gotten to know Kate earlier in the year, because it's going to be difficult to spend an entire summer without her. Oh yeah. That reminds me. It's 2:00 and I'm supposed to meet her in the foreign language lab. I guess that means the end of this post.

Current Mood: ecstatic

Healthy activity outside the gym is strictly prohibited.

Today me and my friends made the mistake of trying to be healthy and get some exercise in a nation where there is an exploding epidemic of obesity. We got kicked off the soccer field by some corpulent campus safety officer for playing soccer despite the fact that no one else had to use the field, unless my school has some sort of invisible sports team that I don't know about. Oh well. I guess RIT would rather we all go back to our rooms, play computer games, and eat potato chips until it's time to get drunk, because I've never seen them send campus safety after someone for being lazy.

Current Mood: lazy

Zero. That's either my euid or my IQ.

Tonight we were at the NRH computer labs. The Macs there have not yet been patched against a certain known vulnerability which I am familiar with. I sat down at one, logged in, carefully set up some environment variables and, using my own craftily-written PowerPC shellcode, rooted it. This means I had gained superuser access and the ability to act as a God in the system. Having cleverly used the computer's own complexity against it, I had tricked it and was now able to do anything to it that my heart desired.


...but I couldn't find where the 'Trash' icon was and had to ask Kate for help.

Current Mood: amused

Believe everything you read.

Once again I find myself, like so many other Americans, staring at one of the countless many flickering boxes we use to connect ourselves to the landfill of misinformation known as the internet. I feel that, as a member of the internet community, it is my civic duty to confuse you and contribute to your misunderstanding of the world around you by adding my share of worthless data to the garbage heap. So sit back and enjoy the mind-rape while I shove my opinions down your throat, presenting them as though they were both factual and undeniably correct.

The U.S. has seen a steep rise in the usage of both internet communication and cell phones in the past several years. The average American today sends between 1 and 90,000,000,000 instant messages a day, compared with an average of 0 in 1871 (1). I read an article today from CNN that claimed constant interruptions from email, phone calls, and text messages cause office workers to suffer a greater loss of IQ than they would suffer from smoking marijuana. If we ignore for a moment the fact that the amount of marijuana in this comparison has not been specified, and could be anywhere from a picogram to a truckload, this article points out an interesting truth: We are becoming obsessed with quick forms of communication.

At the same time, the actual content that we communicate to each other is becoming more and more useless. The internet allows anyone to act as though they are an authority on any subject, and there are plenty of zero-cost ways to spread whatever moronic information you desire all throughout cyberspace. The danger here is that most audiences will assume that the speaker is more credible than they actually are. In fact, a recent study conducted at Harvard showed that 93.5% of the general population will believe what they read on a website without even considering the credibility of the author (2).

The lesson here is simple: Stop letting technology make you stupid.


Sources:
(1) My ass.
(2) http://deathjestr.blogspot.com/2005/05/believe-everything-you-read.html

Current Mood: confused