Fish Supper

Many different versions of Swami inhabited the Miles house over the years. From Applesaucer bassist through Rockridge's own Big Lebowski, maverick underground video producer, holder of the prestigious Ben & Nick's "Eleven Beers" award, and finally to Almost Respectable Family Man With Good Job, Probably. Swami is living proof that enough time spent in the east bay's most famous halfway house can indeed turn one's life round.

Unfortunately, respectability comes at a price, and Swami found it necessary to leave behind his friends, who must now navigate their own salvation. However, it's not quite clear how we're supposed to do that without the 4-hour late night bitch sessions hosted on the kitchen floor, and especially minus the sturdy spiritual sustenance represented by the Magic Auto Refilling Corona 12-Pack parked in the fridge.

Tragically, his friends weren't the only things he left behind. A good 3 days after the official move-out date, we were still carrying truckloads of assorted kibble out of the Miles house for handling by NBC-suited toxic waste disposal experts. I did say that we could blow them up in the garden ourselves, but the NBC guys said they'd not seen waste this toxic before and they wanted to call in their lab rats to sample it.

Some of the more entertaining things remaining after the Exodus though were Swami's impressive collection of Mutant Video Star Goldfish. These guys were bought as nippers to star in a long-forgotten Hieroglyphics video, and subsequently force-fed every day on Royal Jelly, with the effect that they achieved the size and weight of ocean-going liners.

And nice healthy crunchy late night snacks. Yummy.

Anti-Aircraft Bat

I did try to blame this summer's infestation of fruit flies on global warming, and I even conducted studies in other people's houses tracking the incidence of these annoying little fuckers. Almost the worst thing about them is their irritating tendency to cluster around, or frequently in, one's sublime and refreshing adult beverage. The more luscious and expensive the beverage, the more it drew in clouds of buzzing spectators. Of course, it's relatively easy to give them what they want and drown the little buggers in it, but there's precious little fun in that.

I sometimes wonder what it must be like to be a fly, and frequently ran around my kitchen (the old one, that is, the new one has barely enough room to turn round, never mind run anywhere) waggling my head around furiously in an attempt to empathise with the highly mobile insect's plight. Of course, I was holding bunches of straws up to my eyes for the complete fly A/V experience.

Somewhere along the line I realised that while these things were diving and swooping and whirling around various areas of the house, they were perfect prey for my vorpal anti-aircraft bat, +50 vs anything airborne, to include basically anything getting in the way.

Now, in this country, badminton is a sport which usually brings forth mirth from any native with which you discuss it. This is because Americans are crap at badminton. England is about #6 in the world, and the USA, despite having lots more people living in it, is in the 40s somewhere. This is due to the influence of the following elements -

- it's tough to make money out of badminton, compared to lame sports like basketball, baseball, American football, etc, where the thing being passed around rarely if ever breaks the sound barrier and most of the game is spent feeling up the other side's players in an event to make it more TV friendly.

- badminton clubs in successful (at badminton) countries usually operate on a very egalitarian peer to peer system where everyone plays with everyone and therefore everyone gets better. Kinda like the JFK "all the boats float" idea. Well, you know how well that approach goes down in Individuality Central. Hence.

Badminton is most emphatically not the beach game the USA thinks it is. It's the fastest racket sport, by a long way - a good smash will leave the shuttle breaking 200mph. That crack you hear is the racket head breaking the sound barrier. Yeah. No shit. Because of this, and the shuttle's heart-stopping deceleration causing long rallies, it's obviously much better a spectator sport than the ridiculous tennis or golf or indeed much of anything else. Try it.

You can see where this is going. With the racket head travelling at 500mph+ even in the hands of a rank expert like me, the little airborne alcoholics are going to receive a pasting. Check it out.

Guest Destroyer

Please welcome the first guest destroyer to Carnage Supreme. We don't know who he is, and he (presumably) doesn't know he's here, but that does nothing to diminish the magnitude of the event. I'd like to say that I hired a freelance destroyer to come in and do some destruction, partially in order to assuage my fear that Heisenberg was setting in and I was ruining things just to write about them, but the truth is that the universe noticed the unusually long no-breakages period and provided a Saviour.

Of course, we don't actually know that our mysterious destroyer exists, because only G actually saw him, and he's an unreliable witness at best. Liz (aka "her upstairs") claims to have seen an appropriately clad stranger scarpering from the scene, but upstairs is a known stoner hangout, so that could mean anything.

Adding further to the already murky waters, our destroyer only broke the window in the front door, which arguably needed a good kicking to convince Carol that our security was inadequate, and he only took the crappiest laptop in the house, which could only barely get it up anyway. G maintains that the destroyer took his phone, but G *returned* to the house, catching him in the act. Are we to believe that G left the house *without* his phone? In 2007, are we really going to buy that story?

So today, of all days, some time after the event (this is a(nother) backdated post) we can finally unmask the mysterious burglar destroyer dude. Some deliberation was necessary, but now the jury is in. The fact is that there was no such mysterious burglar.

Cast your mind back to June 6, approx 4.15pm. G returns home from his noncy stick-waving session and discovers that he can't open the front door, either because he's forgotten his key or because the Door Fairy has accidentally moved lock #3 into alignment with the planets and No Power On Earth can open the door from the outside. G tries various combinations of knocking on the door and calling people and all the rest of it, and eventually concludes that I am enjoying my post-trawl afternoon nap in my room with Vangelis's Voices playing at threshold of pain volume.

At this point G flies into a martial rage and drop-kicks the door into the middle of next week. However, the unexpectedly loud noise shocks a respectably dressed and impeccably behaved young black man who was randomly passing, and he takes off down the street, assuming quite rightly that he will be blamed for anything going wrong in this neighbourhood.

The noise also jolts G out of his destructo-trance, and seeing the black dude take off realises that he has a short amount of time to cover his tracks. He dumps the crappy Sony laptop under the love-seat (for later removal to some remote trash-can), hides his phone in his backpack (for later production upon "replacing it", which carries the nice possibility of profit via my renter's insurance), and then bursts into my room, yelling "are you stupid?" upon encountering my rather sedate countenance. He then takes off in his car to try and "track down" the offender. Of course, no progress is made with this task.

G managed a convincing performance during the resulting police visit, and no further questions were asked. Until now.

And if you're out there, good sir, and come to any distress or inconvenience from this performance, please accept my apologies.

Vista Meets a Sticky End

sorry it's been so long. the problem is one of heisenberg. am i destroying things just to write about them? in other words, is the red mist real?

happily, this time, the act is justified whether or not it's premeditated. the irony is of course that pieces of criminal insanity like Windows Vista are adept at breaking themselves without any outside intervention.

so why you have such a low regard for microsoft, jase?

ironically enough it's not so much about the product these days, utter crap that it is. it's not about the fact that windows presents its user interface approx 2 minutes before it will listen to mouse clicks, or that it usually won't reboot at the first or even fourth try, or that it installs updates without asking you (whose computer is this, bill?). it's more about this type of stuff -

- microsoft were really the first to introduce the concept of bugs as profit sources. they, or rather bill and steve, realised that a working product wasn't going to make any money for anyone. rather like the drug industry, microsoft built their business on lifetime treatments instead of cures. and once the market leader settles on this kind of strategy, competitors are a little screwed - either you spend the money on QA and impact your bottom line, or you ship a flawed product and then admit you're no better than the worst best player in the game. it's this situation, that to my mind has brought about the current woeful state of software quality. when the web arrived, with its free and broken software model, it wasn't greeted with the "fuck this, it's broken, let's use something else" reaction that it should have been. instead it has been accepted with the postmodern "no worse than the worst thing" LCD attitude.

- microsoft have traditionally cared almost nothing for any aspect of their product apart than those that directly translated into profit. i remember thinking ages ago why i preferred mac. i deciding that for apple, it wasn't just about the money. it was about making this wonderful thing called computing actually nice to use, and fun. whereas, if you gave microsoft all the money on the planet, they would immediately investigate how to make money on another planet.

- microsoft have traditionally defeated competition by very scabby tactics. they would embrace and extend an accepted standard, thereby diluting it so that it was useless. or they would pre-announce a competing product in order to kill demand for a new arrival from another mfr, only of course to never actually produce it, never mind release it. and in some cases they would consider licensing a product, only to release a competitor to that product based on code stolen from the evaluation copy provided. would you buy used software from these guys?

- microsoft also did some downright nasty things in software. engineering is about making things that work - enabling, creating, building, growing, permitting, co-operating, all that hippie stuff. it's not about writing code that deliberately breaks or defeats things, but that too is a microsoft hallmark. consider that IE would recognise an attempt to download netscape, then slug and corrupt it along the way. also, IIS used to put requests from netscape to the back of the queue, so that netscape would seem slower than IE. IMHO, all this stuff should be legally actionable.

the core issue is that microsoft pervert the whole idea of what computers and software are supposed to be about. it's as though republicans ran a software business.

and windows is shit, too.

Thanks, Virgin

As many will know, I have a hell of a time finding shades which don't make me look like Rivers Cuomo or Henry Kissinger. There's a fine line between Henry and Peter Sellers, but I always seem to land on the wrong side of it. I don't know whether it's my alien face-shape or something, but to me, the mirror seems to indicate that most candidate shades are convex instead of wrapped appropriately. I look weird enough and don't need this, trust me.

The last pair of shades I liked was lost on a hike in Yosemite, winter 1997. Serengetis. So not exactly cheap, either. Of course, the firm immediately realised the mistake they made (making a pair of shades I liked) and immediately discontinued that entire line.

This is rather like aircraft seat manufacturers immediately killing any design in which anyone manages to fall asleep.

My driving glasses are Serengentis too, as the optics are excellent - but those are major league nerdy. I drive fast mainly so that people don't notice them.

Anyway so recently I finally found a pair I could deal with, in the shop in the lobby of the hotel in which we were staying in Hurghada, Egypt. The logo said "Ray Ban", but my suspicions, together with the rather cheap asking price (even pre-haggle), suggested that the otherwise cool and friendly proprietor (he taught me how to write my name in Arabic, and drew a cartouche for me) was painting on the said logo prior to sale.

These worked fine, and there was much rejoicing. There are even some pictures of me wearing them and smiling. I thought I had at last triumphed in my quest and the Holy Grail was mine.

When I got back to Oakland, this is how I found them in my luggage.

Bike Light Lens Terminated

As fellow destroyer Mr Joel "Dirkmog Derethin Nallyr Datashade Hinterlands DreamWithin" Stevenson will confirm, Cateye bike lights really are the pits. After some serious industrial espionage and a daring raid on Cateye's HQ, I liberated the production plan for these bags of shit and hereby present it below.

1. New shipment of bike lights received from factory voted Worst Sweatshop in Indo-China, 1987-2006.
2. All bike lights found to pass basic functionality testing returned to China.
3. QA Phase 1: battery holders yanked and rattled until they become loose and cannot reliably hold a battery in place for more than 30 seconds while attached to a moving bike.
4. QA Phase 2: battery holders yanked and rattled until they become loose and cannot reliably hold a battery in place for more than 30 seconds while stationary.
5. Cost Saving Phase 1: mounting bracket reduced in size, a side benefit being that they do not mount securely on any bike manufactured after 1902.
6. Cost Saving Phase 2: lens design re-engineered to ensure awkward re-assembly after battery insertion.
7. Cost Saving Phase 3: clamshell screw mount re-engineered to ensure shearing off under least possible screw torque.
8. Cost Saving Phase 4: retainer bracket on slide mount removed, ensuring the light slips out during bike operation.
9. Realise that QA and Cost Saving cost money: double SRP.
10. Any "nonfunctional" units (or cheekily so marked) received from stockists immediately sent to same stockist.

I couldn't get the red lens back on the light body after replacing the battery, so i smashed it. It looks cooler now and works better, so.