Well, I'm not having any luck… I wanted to do an “Officer BME” takeoff on the logo, but it turned into “white trash karate guy” (and not even very good at that). Oh well. If any of the numerous more-talented-than-me artists want to take a go at a BME reward shirt, I'm totally open to submissions!
Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy takes out his phone and calls the emergency services.He gasps: "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator says: "Calm down, I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a gunshot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: "OK, now what?"
Apparently that's the world's funniest joke. What's more interesting though is the regional breakdown. According to the study, Germans find almost everything funny, most of the British Empire likes word-play jokes, Europe enjoys surreal academic humor, while Americans (and Canadians as well, although Canadians had the “toughest standards” for jokes in that they found the least funny, probably why Canadian comedians are so influential — they have to work so hard here!) like jokes that put people down. Want more? Buy the book I guess.
There were two top competing Canadian high-ranking jokes. I think I like the one on the right better.
| When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ballpoint pens would not work in zero gravity. To combat the problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion to develop a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to 300 Celsius.
The Russians used a pencil. |
Q: What do you call a woman who can balance four pints of beer on her head?
A: Beatrix. |
I found an old photo CD from 1995, and thought I'd share a few pix from it. Dunno if they're interesting to anyone but me, and maybe Saira, Ryan, and Ryan, but here we go:
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| This is my second tattoo, hand poked with a needle while in my bedroom… It's supposed to be a cat skull or something. It's since covered up with blackwork. | The proprietor of BMEshop, when we both worked at Stainless Studios! I have some shots of the other Ryan as well somewhere that I'll have to dig up. | Perhaps this is the earliest recorded screenshot of BME. Sorry it's so grainy. | Me in 1995, whith short dyed black hair. My other ear is just a 6ga in this photo I think. | Saira, and I think that's our friend Jen standing in front of her. | My first “professional” tattoo (also the artist's — a friend of mine — first tattoo). It's since been covered up by the aliens you see outlined in the photo. |
So I'm driving back from picking up DVD-R's from Ryan and I pass a cop going the other way. Big surprise, even thought I'm totally within the law, he does a u-turn, flips on his cherries, and I pull over. As you can tell, I'm having a bad day and I'm already angry. He comes up to the window, opens his mouth, but before he can say anything I loudly interrupt, “TELL ME WHY YOU PULLED ME OVER”. “You seemed to be going awefully fast.”
“I wasn't speeding. This is a $150,000 Porsche. It probably always looks fast to you.”
“You went around that corner really fast.”
“I went around that corner at 80. Again, it's a Porsche. I don't have to slow down for corners if I don't feel like it.”
“You really looked like you were going fast.”
“Look, I told you how fast I was going. Either show me the radar reading or let me leave.”
“I didn't get you on the radar… I was just saying you looked kind of fast…
Give me your license, ownership, and insurance.”
Now, I had the ownership, but my license is incomplete, and I have no insurance paperwork. The post office refused to deliver them, even though I had the complete and correct address information — they said “we need to know who's having an affair with who” or some other stupid excuse for what they did. Anyway, I handed him what I had and told him that if didn't like it, he could take it up with the post office which seemed more concerned with small-town gossip than they did with delivering the mail.
He complained that I hadn't signed something or other on my license. “That's a $110 ticket,” he said to me.
“Do what you have to do.”
So then, like always, he took my paperwork to his car and ran me through the computer. A few minutes later he returned — presumably after guessing at my financial status from the list of cars that show up under my name (keep in mind I look like some dirtbag that stole the Porsche — I wasn't even wearing shoes). Anyway, he apologized profusely and tried to make smalltalk. I asked him if we were done, and then tore off, making sure to keep the engine at high RPMs.
Fuck any cop that pulls me over because he thinks the car I'm in is too good for me.
(I'm referring to my bandwidth here, not site bandwidth.)
As you know, I'm on two-way satellite. That's my only option for reasonably priced ($180/month) highspeed access here. Which means that I get between 300 and 2000 kpbs downstream (which is fine), between 5 and 30 kbps upstream, and a second or so of latency (both of which are unacceptable). In addition, it regularly freezes for 5+ seconds, drops connections, and of course blacks out totally during heavy weather.
I called the various providers to see what it would cost me to just run in a dedicated line. Single ISDN costs $550 a month here, and a 256kbps line costs $2300 a month, and it ramps up from there depending on how much bandwidth you use. Getting this same speed connection in the city costs only about $50, or $500 if you want a 1mbps dedicated unmetered line.
I am unable to properly do development on my current connection. That's why the TOS software is lagging behind, and it's why I haven't fixed a couple of very obvious (and very easy to deal with) bugs. It's really driving me crazy. My work schedule is set up in a way that expects that all my peripheral tasks operate at maximum efficiency, so I'm putting in three hours of work to get half an hour of work done and am falling hopelessly behind.
This leaves me with four options as I see it:
I don't particularly like any of these options. I really don't want to move back at this point, but unless I'm overlooking something totally obvious, I don't see that I have much of a choice. So I think I'm going to take the next three or four years, work like a mercenary, and try and squirrel away as much as I can and take it from there. I have some commercial projects on the side that I can probably generate a few million off of if I play things right, and then I can just walk away (and by that point, IAM will be fully self sufficient so there'd be no fears there).
