Category: Plugs

I promise I’ll do the hard part

July 10, 2007 /

Finally got around to following Leonard’s links to Rachel Chalmers’s blog, and now regret not doing so in 2004. Her blog is the blog other blogs want to be when they grow up. Blog up. Wait, no.

I’m reading backwards through her archives, so most of the content so far has been about her daughters Claire (who appears, from this perspective, to be carefully paring down her vocabulary) and Julia (who has disappeared, then had her name retconned to Zoë, as if in a bad thriller movie). I know blogging is the new selective memory, but they sound like amazing kids. I want kids now, dammit! SOMEBODY HAVE SOME KIDS WITH ME.

May 31, 2007 /

I haven’t been keeping track: where’s the pendulum these days on whether it’s permissibly hip to link to anything Onion-related? Regardless, the video stuff they’re doing now has been surprisingly good, for two reasons: the production values aren’t awful, and the headline-scroll supplies as many gags as you get all week in the print version. Yesterday’s Al Qaeda Also Fed Up With Ground Zero Construction Delays is a low-key classic.

A DRM Story

May 2, 2007 /

“How is that a number?” asks Val, squinting at it. “There are letters in the middle of it.”

“Huh?”

“The fourth digit is an F, tenth one is a D, thirteenth is an E…”

“I don’t know, must be a computer… something.” Glick shrugs. “Look, it starts with an oh-nine… then another nine after the F. And before the D. Hey, maybe it’s like that thing from Lost?“

“The Lost numbers didn’t have an 11. Or an 02.” Val turns the monitor toward him. “See, the third and fourth pairs.”

“Maybe some of that Nine Inch Nails stuff, then. Gimme a pencil. 74, a 3 after the E… 5B…”

“I’ll read them off, you write. D8, forty-one, fifty-six. C5. Isn’t that like a kind of bomb?”

“I bet it’s a substitution code!” says Glick excitedly. “Like, next, 63 would be… uh, FC…”

Val scrunches his nose. “But then what about the C0 at the end? There’s no zeroth letter.”

“No, and the part before would have been EFHH anyway.” Glick looks glum. “I was never any good at these things.”

Val chuckles. “Leave it to the kids, man.”

“Yeah,” sighs Glick, “they left us behind a long time ago.”