October/2003

I wrote a chatbot for FirstClass (a BBS system) a few years back. The bot was dubbed ‘slackjaw', since for some reason his phraseset that our users filled it up with always sounded like a dumb yokel to me. There was a mailing list setup for ‘him', which meant of course within a few days, slackjaw was receiving spam by the truckload.

There is something I find really, really funny about spammers trying to sell a bot merchandise of a sexual nature. Here are a few recent subjects that slackjaw has received over the last week where they've customized the subject just for him.

• Slackjaw, Keep it hard all night long
• These pills make you shoot it like a p0rn star, slackjaw!
• Slackjaw, Make a girl/boy l.o.v.e you pass.ionately
• Hi slackjaw honey, i hope my webcam makes you HOT

I'll have to doublecheck with him, but I think Slack might have ordered the pills.

So, here's a crazy saga. I bought a motorcycle very nearly 2 years ago now. It's over 20 years old, and has sat dormant for about 15 years of that. It's in great shape for it's age, it's only real problem being that is has been untouched for so long. So I got a shop to clean the bike up immediately after buying it, and took it out for some crusin'. Rode around for about 2 weeks or so, and noticed some increasingly random problems accelerating. It got to the point where I was scared to ride it, since I couldn't accelerate when I might have really needed to. Took it back into the shop with the problem. I was told it was probably gunk in a carb, and that they'd make sure it was all cleaned.

During this time, I was in the process of moving. I had to take the bike from the shop before they were done, and move it with me to where I am now. It went back into a different local shop once the move was complete. Then began a crazy ping pong match of me getting the bike back in a declared ‘fixed!' state, only to find out the problem was still there, and having to take it back. This went over the course of an entire summer, when I decided to take it away and store it for winter.

This summer, I took it back out of storage, and back into the shop it went. My specific request: "I don't want it back until it runs properly, and is verified." Simple enough for a repair shop, I'd think. 4 MONTHS later, I realize I might never get it back, and so I go to find out what is taking so long. They have no paperwork on me or the bike, even though this is the 2nd summer they've had it. They can't tell me what has been worked on. They can't tell me who was working on it. They can't tell me any useful information whatsoever. The only silver lining out of this was that they couldn't charge me, either. What a colossal waste of time.

Thoroughly pissed off now, I take it home, and start tinkering. Please bear in mind that I have nothing that even vaguely resembles automotive intelligence. This was tinkering out of desperation. I take the gas tank off, drain it, put a bunch of nuts and bolts in there, and start shaking like mad. I end up removing over 2 pounds of rust from that tank. Went out to buy some chemical cleaning agents for it, and went to work. It actually looks like metal inside the tank now. Amazing. Gave it a good chemical bath and coating, and am probably going to put it all back together and test it out tonight... just in time for winter, again. Sigh.

If this works... I probably will learn how to take care of the thing myself, since I can't trust 2 separate repair shops to check for rust in the tank before taking apart and cleaning an engine. Is it just me, or does that seem just like common sense?

Next step is to get the tank painted. I guess it's a good thing I didn't give a rat's ass about the paint job - I wasn't very careful with the chemical bath, and I ended up utterly destroying the paint as it exists now.

Oh well. I just want functional right now... I'll worry about pretty later. Maybe after owning a bike for 2 years, I'll actually get to ride it soon without fearing for my life.

This was what I woke up to this morning.

See how she stretches out?
Q: Where the heck do I sleep?
A: Crushed up against the wall, squeezed over there by my own kid.

Yeah, she knows who the boss is.

I turned 27 yesterday, and in the tradition of getting older, I'm going to take this opportunity to complain about how things are ‘nowadays'. The subject matter: toys.

First off, GIJoe. These are ancient action figures (1960's), and they used to be really large. They made a huge comeback when I was little, probably due to the fact that they had the sense to size them much smaller (so boys didn't feel like they were playing with dolls), moved away from the straight up army stuff, and made some interesting characters with wacky and unique abilities. Zartan was a glow in the dark master of disguise, Snake Eyes was mysterious, and Destro was just a bad ass with an unexplained metal noggin. They produced new characters that coincided with the plotline of the cartoon, and the women characters had strong roles. All in all, good stuff. On my last visit to a toy store, they had a selection of original, large GIJoe characters. These were recreations of the originals, their purpose completely escaping me. Collectors don't care, since new stuff isn't worth squat - and kids don't care, because by today's standards, these toys are seriously, seriously lame. Boys don't want to play with dayglo orange vest wearing Ken dolls.

Item 2: Transformers. These used to be beefy metal, almost all of them transforming uniquely from each other. They seem to be mass producing 5 different types now - when they want to sell another character, they change the plastic color and give it a different name. They are brain dead easy to transform, and are lacking in nearly every way possible when compared to their 20 year old counterparts. The worst thing ever: They gave a new transformer the name ‘GrimLock', some shit ass bulldozer or something. Grimlock was originally the t-rex of the dinobots. How dare they crap upon my childhood like this?

Item 3: Masters of the Universe. I'm not even going to go into this right now.

Even more of a bummer is thinking about things to come... there are entire generations of kids that grew up on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, and Pokemon. They will eventually grow old enough to make movies. You think the Hulk was bad? Just wait.

Flipping around the TV during dinner, landed on Extreme Makeover. They need a warning or something before showing that kind of nauseating realism on prime time. It's strange how movies like Dead Alive (weird, not seeing it on IMDB) don't bother me one bit, but witnessing a hoover shlorping out someone's yellow, sticky, and abundant fat makes me want to lose it. And of course, the moral of every show is "I realized it doesn't matter what I look like, it's who I am on the inside!"

Yeah, right. Why does this show exist, again?

Update: There it is.

Since I now work for LiveJournal, I feel a good amount of pressure to maintain a journal of my own. Damn the peer pressure!

With that said, I guess I'll make a good faith effort to keep this thing updated. I had my own little miscellaneous blog at martini that was originally created to calm down my Mom from asking me to email her my life story every day - I of course promptly forgot about it.

So. This space for rent. Expect loads of nonsense ramblings.