Just bought tix to see Dino Jr play Bug in its entirety. Woo Hoo! Freak Scene!

And Henry Rollins is going to do a pre-show interview with them, on stage.

Now all I need is a $6.00 case of Golden Anniversary and a room full of textbooks and dirty laundry, and it will be just like college.

According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research by Kurt A. Carlson, assistant professor at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business, and Jacqueline M. Conard, assistant professor at Belmont University's Massey Graduate School of Business, the farther back in the alphabet the first letter of your surname falls, the quicker you're likely to chase some enticing new consumer offer. This response is rooted in childhood trauma.

Not having a last name, I am not subject to this tyranny. But I find it interesting to see what normal people go through.

The Adventures Of Brown Recluse Spider Man

The NAS RAID server where I keep our music, pictures, semi-weekly backups and Quicken data, is dead. Three weeks ago, I replaced the four drives in it - because they were starting to flake out - with three brand new drives. Right now, it's looking like at least two of those new drives died at the same time. FUWD. Luckily, I have a full backup from a few weeks ago. Unluckily, I have nowhere to put it.

The site here is still exceeding my ISP's usage limits, and I'm completely stumped on how to fix the problem. I'm starting to suspect that this really is a WordPress issue, since the date of my last WP upgrade happens to perfectly coincide with the day the problem started. FUWP.

My managers are about to chop my head off over a piece of software that is taking longer to finish than they told me it would (they reduced the initial four month window to four weeks and then didn't tell me about the change for a week). This is compounded by the fact that this software has to be tested and certified by a government agency, and that testing and certification takes two weeks per round. And, the agency does not answer my emails. And they give me conflicting answers. And the documentation is skimpy, ambiguous and disorganized.

Days like this, I just want to get in my car and drive. Except it's 100 fucking degrees out.

Engage!

The Scotch Pronunciation Guide

... if this blog disappears in the near future.

Whatever was banging on it last week is still banging on it today, and none of my WordPress caching or robots.txt or hot-link-breaking tricks seem to have any effect. Something is hitting this site enough that it's pissing-off my ISP. And I'm apparently powerless to stop it. It's a low level, but constant, banging. It doesn't look like a big DOS attack or anything (and really, why would anyone bother?). It's just enough extra hits (which turns into memory usage and CPU time) to push my usage stats too high for my hosting plan.

I'm guessing that the problem is web spider bots, but they don't seem to respect the "GO THE FUCK AWAY" sign I posted on the front door.

So, if this goes down again, I'll be shopping for a new host. I guess.

The Jedi A-Holes Strike Back