The Fish Swims Alone

Posted on July 20 2002 by Mickey
    We regret to inform fans of the Fish that for the foreseeable future he will be unable to answer your e-mails. I was cleaning his cube just now when the little bass turd slid right out and into the sink dispos-all.
    No harm came to him, since of course the dispos-all was not running. But it made it quite difficult to retrieve him. I tried using a spoon and even went so far as to try tongs. Just so he wouldn’t suffocate from lack of water, I tried running a trickle into the sink; and I guess he used this slight stream of water to evade all attempts at rescue and to dive further into the plumbing. Perhaps he can survive, swimming about in our pipes; but I’m pretty sure he’ll be unable to access his e-mail account, unless of course he swims over to some Internet café or the like.
    We regret his untimely passing but wish him well on his travels.
The Fish, in two of the last photos taken of him, admires the SFG logo
Posted in Fish, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

JB Mention on LLS

Posted on July 17 2002 by Mickey
    I’m not sure if this is good or bad, but Jimmy has definitely become a new pop culture reference, mentioned on TV in dramas and joked about on talk shows. Here’s a sighting from last night. During a bump to commercial, on Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn, the announcer gave us this quiz:



When the show returned from the commercial, the announcer said that if you picked “A)”, you were wrong — since all these titles irritate him.
    Tee-hee.
Posted in Buffett, Music, TV | Leave a comment

It’s Official

Posted on July 17 2002 by Mickey
    I just switched over to multiple weblogs. Now the other elements of SFG World — Food, Music, Movies, TV, Gadgets — have been converted to weblogs too. This might mean nothing to you, but it will make it easier to update them. I can now post articles on-the-fly, without needing to manually rewrite the HTML. (Don’t tell my boss, but it also allows me to upload posts from any online computer.) It also allows you the ability to post comments on those pages as well as here.
    More content, more timely.
    Update: Yes, the Movies page looks like crap. I’m in the process of reorganizing the way it displays, and this process is taking longer than expected. My apologies for the inconvenience. I hope to have it soon.   [July 18, 9:00 PM]
    Second Update: The Movies page should be working fine now. It should be a lot easier to use and a lot easier to find reviews.   [July 19, 12:35 AM]
    Third Update: Forget the Movies page, it looks fine now. But the other PHP pages have been reverted back to HTML (and the above links changed) since all of them were slowing down my server.  Nice idea, though. [Sept. 7, 12:46 PM]
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I’m Legal

Posted on July 16 2002 by Mickey
    I just sprang for the Pro version of pMachine. Can you tell the difference? Actually, by the end of the week, you should be able to tell a difference, since I hope to be turning my Food and Music and TV and Gadgets pages into weblogs too.
    Vive le difference!’
Posted in Blog | 4 Comments

And so it starts…

Posted on July 16 2002 by Mickey
    A while back I read a troubling article at the ZD Net site, about how the next Windows OS, Palladium, will, in collusion with chip manufacturers, be “explicitly designed to handle rights management–meaning it’ll govern what software you are allowed to run and what you’re allowed to do with documents and content.”
    By coincidence, this is exactly what I do not want my computer to do. But it would seem easy to avoid inviting Big Brother into my den, by simply not buying this OS upgrade, right?
    Well, this was recently found in the End Users License Agreement of the latest Windows Media Player patch. “You agree that in order to protect the integrity of content and software protected by digital rights management (‘Secure Content’), Microsoft may provide security related updates to the OS Components that will be automatically downloaded onto your computer. These security related updates may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use other software on your computer.”
    So in order to fix WMP’s security holes, I have to allow Microsoft to police my hard drive. Gee thanks. And I should trust you because…?
Posted in News, Tech | Leave a comment

Talk to the Fish

Posted on July 16 2002 by Mickey
    My fish has become quite the celebrity, during his all too infrequent webcam appearances. If you would like to e-mail him, you can contact him at fish@troubledloner.com. “I’ll try to answer as many letters as I can,” he bubbles, “but eating, pooping, swimming in circles, and hiding behind my rock take up a major portion of my day.”
Posted in Fish, Personal | Leave a comment

Starting the Week

Posted on July 15 2002 by Mickey
   
  • A lot of viruses are starting to show up in my e-mail Inbox. If you don’t have antivirus software, now would be a good time to get some.
  • I hate spiders and that new Eight Legged Freaks movie is making things worse. Now I have to delicately page through the newspaper’s Movies section, just in case I might see that horrible ad.
  • Isn’t it fascinating how the children of Ted Williams are fighting over profiting from his lifeless body, at the same time greed could do some irreparable damage to our national pastime when baseball players go on strike in August?
  • I can’t believe some of the user reviews on NetFlix. Some people are giving A Beautiful Mind a bad review simply because they were sent the bonus disc instead of the feature. I’m not crazy about NetFlix’s policy of splitting up multi-disc sets into separate rentals either, but if you can’t tell the difference between clicking on A Beautiful Mind and clicking on A Beautiful Mind: Bonus Disc then that’s your own problem, not the movie’s.
        And then these people have the temerity to base their entire review on this, which only helps advertise their stupidity.
  • I can’t believe the number of cell phones I saw in use at the art fair yesterday. Seriously, are your conversations really that important you can’t put your phone away for a second?
Posted in Personal | Leave a comment

Fruity Loops

Posted on July 14 2002 by Mickey
    [Note: Even though this page [my original Music page] is mainly dedicated to live music, I figured I’d share a bit of music I wrote myself. And likewise even though this entry originally appeared on my homepage, I’m moving it to here (as of 7/17/02), where it’s more appropriate. [Only to get moved back to the homepage on 11/14/03!]
    Well, I did next to none of the work I had planned for the site. Instead, I got sidetracked into messing around with Fruity Loops, a program I’ve had for quite a while. By the end of the day I had an actual piece of music, a sprightly electronic jig the MP3 of which I would like to share with you now (1.9 MBs). I hope you like it.
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Mmm, Fried Food

Posted on July 9 2002 by Mickey
    The latest in haute cuisine: New Yorkers love the fried Twinkie. (At least my breaded gravy idea is still safe.)
Posted in Food, News | Leave a comment

…Getting there…

Posted on July 8 2002 by Mickey
    I’m starting to get the hang of this pMachine stuff now, I guess. I just added a couple things called “pBlocks”, where I can have more up-to-the-minute control of content. The most obvious one is the box titled “The Latest””, and the “Current Interests” box has been turned into a pBlock as well.
    I can randomize these pBlocks, but for now they’re set for “static”. But soon, maybe, I can start adding different images upon load-up or maybe even skinning the site with different colors. The sky and my fat-fingered limited skills’ the limit.
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