Lance of Leisure

I promise I’ll stop after this one for a while…

Last year I stumbled across the stuff about Bigfoot being on Mars and Bird Flu in India and just now, one year and one day later, I see this post about Microsoft Songsmith.

On the bright side, it made me post an update here. On the down side, I think it may herrald the end of capitalism; I mean if this is what someone does with billions of dollars…well ok then.

A computer built in an aquariam submerged in mineral oil. Neat!

Sometimes, if you are keenly observant, you can detect subtle queues as to a player’s feeling about their hand.

In this example of a Low Confidence Tell see if you can pick out the person who might be uncomfortable.

A couple of weeks ago I got my new computer built and since it has 4gb of memory I figured why not go 64bit with Vista. It’s been working great and I’ve had zero problems – I had heard as long as drivers were available for all your hardware, it’d be like this so I’ve been quite happy with it.

I really sort of felt bad about installing the Rhapsody software for the Best Buy Digital Music Store on my nice new computer but I bit the bullet and tried – and failed. Apparently the genuises at Real who have been getting $14.99/month from me for a long time now can’t be bothered to support a 64bit OS. That was enough to make me just throw in the towel and cancel the membership. I guess I’ll be forced to get an IPod like everyone else – ITunes has a version for 64bit Vista…

 In trying to cancel my membership, I found no way to log on to my account from the 64bit OS – I had to power up the older PC, run the stupid music store app and manage my account from there. And then I couldn’t cancel online!!! I had to call during business hours of 9am – 9pm Pacific Time and speak to a nice man in India. Finally – cancelled. Bozos.

Bye bye Best Buy

It’s against the rules and someone will have to go back and fix what you’ve done. See http://killinghitler.notlong.com.

I just got home yesterday after 5 weeks of dealing with my dad’s estate stuff 1000 miles away. I spent a lot of that time with family members and I did enjoy the time with them but I am so happy to be home. Today it dawned on me that I may have invented the anti-vacation…

When you go on a regular vacation, you do something far superior to your awful life. Towards the end of the vacation you start to dread having to go back to your regular life and when you do go back, it sucks and you wish you were still on vacation.

With the anti-vacation, you do something you wouldn’t normally want to do for some significant period of time. Something like spend 5 weeks going through all your dead father’s stuff or whatever – anything you don’t want to do should work. Towards the end you start realizing “hey, I get to go back to my normal life soon!” When you get back to your normal life, it’s great and you’re happier than you were just prior to your anti-vacation.

Granted this feeling may not last but if it does, I may really be on to something here. I mean think about it – with a regular vacation every year, you get a few weeks of fun and relaxation and then the entire rest of the year you spend wanting to be on vacation again. If you take your valuable vacation time and use it for an anti-vacation working in the sewer or something, then you get the whole rest of the year to be happy you’re not working in the sewer (no offense to anyone who works in the sewer, is happy about it and has Internet access.)

What more can I say – damn interesting: http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=406