This creepy-ass little robot crossed with an Aibo would just about weird the shit out of anybody.

Pro tip: If you really want to feel your skin crawl, watch that video with Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” playing in the background.

Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:

Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.

[From FOXNews.com - Democrats Close to Vote on Jobs Package Without Bill in Hand]

And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.

When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock’s “I’m just a Bill”. It was simple, really, you’re just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.

I’m trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying “Hey, dudes, we’re still here and we’re like in Congress and we’re gonna vote on stuff”, which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It’s just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There’s some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.

It’s all about hookers and blow with these people.

You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn’t changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.

Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom’s attic.

Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in ‘01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.

The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name’s cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one’s self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it’s time to clean some house and shorten some lists.

Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.

So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I’m setting an iCal alarm as we speak.

Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It’s a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can’t get here in my preferred time slots, as I’m pretty sure they don’t cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.

So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.

Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?

One thing I don’t get, though: I’ve been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?

Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I’ve had a fetish for printers. There’s nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.

The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.

Which is why I have to giggle at this page.

How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor’s wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he’ll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.

In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era’s issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.

The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn’t much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.

The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.

But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they’re “good enough”. And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.

Document image cribbed from here.

The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don’t really care. That’s one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs’s scrotum that I have on my nightstand.

There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn’t it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn’t have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don’t have Flash; iPods don’t have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).

What I’m still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There’s no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I’ve seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it’s just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.

So, you’re going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.

Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?

• what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple’s other stuff, like AirTunes?
• and Home Sharing?
• Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
• Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
• Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?

I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can’t wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I’ll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she’s trying to buy the last one. This ain’t for you, you old bag, this is a man’s ‘Pad.

But didn’t Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he’s in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c’mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I’ll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that’s AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.

I can’t wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.

Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.

This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.

Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...

I’m gearing up for the UK driver’s exam, and I just came across this nugget:

Pedestrian Crossings

The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:

• at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
• give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
• give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings

I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?

I’ve been here now for two years, and I got my Learner’s Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.

What are provisional licence conditions?

As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.

Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.

Rube’s just got a lot going on right now, you know? Work’s taking all my time, and then there’s the family things a man’s gotta do.

But we been together long time; me and you, we got history. So maybe we should try and work this out. Together. So what do you say, You Bitch!

Hey, where you going?

A snide comment on a company mailing list gave me a pause today, in a thread discussing Opera’s “Facial Gestures” April Fools’ jape. In question was the following paragraph:

Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.

It was stated in our mailing list that, pursuant to the reactionary, fascist PATRIOT Act which our current Fearless Leader immediately struck down in righteous anger upon taking oath, beards were nowadays illegal owing to certain talibani connotations. My first hastily-typed reaction was, oh yeah? Followed by, I don’t think the founding fathers had a problem with beards!

Luckily, I can’t remember how to actually send off a mail with mutt once it’s written, otherwise I would have been humiliated once again by my own ignorance. Check out this picture of our Founding Fathers, as captured in situ during the Continental Congress:

Now, I’m not exactly a scholar of 18th century men’s fashions, but there are 30 men in this picture and the only beard I see is Martha Washington (zing!). Was there some sort of anti-beard phase during the revolutionary period? I always imagined that whiskers were mandatory for all men of age until 1920. These mama’s boys don’t even have sideburns to speak of.