dotlizard

meet dotfrog, my mother's day present (red-eyed green tree frog)

2009-05-12T05:57:15Z

meet dotfrog, my mother's day present (red-eyed green tree frog)
Originally uploaded by dotlizard (insanely overworking)

isn't she beautiful?

whatever

2008-09-25T09:21:03Z

tonight i will go to sleep (well eventually) with dreams already live & in technicolor in my periphery, delightful unreality into which i propel my self willfully into whatever this is, & whatever it will or will not be, in spite of what it was meant to &/or should have been.

i have faced the past and found it mostly forgotten, those bits retained turned out to be less than i'd hoped they'd be anyway so fuck the past. fuck it. seriously.

i am more alone now than i have maybe ever been but you know? i forget stuff. so forget that, i am most likely wrong about the memories of aloneness, probably they were worse than this, as if that matters? because, you know, no. it doesn't. matter, that is. my point is, that this now, which may or may not be the most, is still ... now, & therefore this is it.

it is. it *so* is.

the for real twilight zone

2008-08-28T03:23:09Z

yesterday, my daughter called me to ask if her (and my) friend from (her) childhood could come crash at my house for a couple days. well, i forgot all about this, but today she called, and began to talk about a long conversation we apparently had yesterday. now, this was a specific conversation, in which the friend talked to someone who said that she'd have to ask her boyfriend, and that the dog couldn't come, and mentioned something about picking up kurtwood and meeting chris for dinner -- although we cannot be entirely sure exact names were mentioned, we are relatively sure that toads were. also some sort of 'grandma' person was mentioned in the context of a place to stay, and we know for sure that wouldn't have been me, my grandparents are long, long gone.

so she was wondering why i never called her back.

it's because i never talked to her. seriously. her sister was sitting right next to her while she had this conversation, so the conversation happened. i was fairly certain that i hadn't completely lost my mind between then & now, i very clearly remember leaving work, having a conversation about the toads with chris on the way home, and coming home and spending the next hour doing nothing but setting up the new TMobile @home phone. these are nice, crisp, sharp memories.

but everyone involved was exceedingly curious. so we pulled up my call logs online, which are not subject to being lost by my phone crashing, or erased, i mean these are the phone records that homeland security would use to track my communication, if i ever turned out to be a terrorist. and the call, the call most definitely did not involve me, not with my phone, not with any phone on our family plan.

but the conversation happened.

she even called the other number she had for me, which had never been mine but it was in her phone book as mine, and the nice boy on the other end (who must have been having one of the weirder phone conversations of his life) was quite patient, listened to our weird-ass story, and assured us that phone was in a locker at the time of the mystery conversation, while he was at practice.

we still haven't figured this out. but we're mighty weirded out, believe you me.

apparently, i like death cab for cutie

2008-08-19T02:34:12Z

& also apparently this intends to be the second in what may or may not be a series of blog posts about my wide-and-dewy-eyed appreciation for the technology i have at my fingertips these days. here goes:

there are certain chord progressions which, if you put them in your song, i will like your song, even if the genre of your music is not exactly what i consider my cup of tea. today on my way home i heard just such chords, but had no idea the name of the song, or even the band. not even the foggiest of clues, really.

so as i scooped all my stuff up out of the car on my way up home, i committed to what i loosely refer to as my memory, a snippet of said song lyrics. not as easy as it sounds, i have a notoriously lousy short-term memory & am semi-brain dead from sleep loss. so anyway. fired up the 'puter, impatiently typing in the query as the browser was loading "if the silence takes you i hope it takes me too lyrics". a click later i made the somewhat unexpected discovery: i like death cab for cutie! who knew? "oh no! i like death cab for cutie", i exclaimed, and everyone looked at me funny. which was fine, i was already at amazon and less than a minute later the song was on my hard drive.

listening to it, i ctrl+t'd a browser tab and logged in to the lyricbase, where i added the lyrics & the cover art. ctrl+t again for youtube, grabbed the embedding code and clicked save, resulting in this, which represents another one of those crazy technological leaps i would have never believed had some future dude came & foretold them to me back in the day, when i would have had to hear the song who knows how many times on the radio before catching the name & artist, then would have had to get to a record store & buy it & listen to it a hundred times to catch all the lyrics (i love lyrics, but can't make them out so well, which is why i have a lyricbase in the first place). but i digress.

if i had a point which i may or may not, it would be to repeat my absolute delight at the awesome array of technology we have today. & if i couldn't imagine what this now would hold back then, sure as hell there's no way today i can imagine what this future does. i don't even care about the flying cars anymore, you know? the music will do it for me.

and just for fun, and because i can, here's a just-turned-six year old kid playing "soul meets body".

several species of small furry animals gathered together in a cave & grooving with a pict

2008-08-08T04:22:03Z

a little more than ten years ago, i had my first cell phone, when digital phones finally came out & prices allowed ordinary folk like myself to possess these mythical devices that previously only rich doctors and coke dealers carried. the coolest thing i did with it was to put my home phone on call forwarding and take calls at the beach. man, that was teh awesomeness.

a little more than ten years ago, i'd heard of the internet, but it wasn't until 1999 that i got my actual hands on an internet-connected 486 with a screamin' 33.6 modem & right after that i rented my very own shiny 486 from Rent-A-Center because this internet thing was the best thing i'd ever had my actual hands on, & within 6 months i had a job with the title of webmaster but that's another story entirely, actually.

anyway. if, back then, some future dude had come up to me & said, "hey i'm a future dude, & i've totally been sent here to tell you that ten years from now, you'll be sitting in a funky beachside cantina eating a juicy ahi burger with one hand and playing on a thing called plurk on teh mobile internets on your qwerty-keyboarded telephone with the other, while you uploaded a very decent sized photograph you took with said telephone to a place called brightkite while you were listening to your music collection from a memory card the size of your pinky fingernail that held two ... get this ... two gigabytes yes giga, not mega, bytes of said music on a pair of stereo headphones that weren't even plugged into anything but the little controller thingy that you used to you know, control things like that" ... well i'd have thrown my fancy-ass CD walkman at future-dude's head and told him he was batshit insane, even though the term batshit hadn't even been invented yet. and then i'd probably have slapped him. in the face. with an ahi, had i had one handy.

seriously.

anyway. on the way home from the funky beachside cantina, walking up the stairs to my tiny beachy apartment, a particularly amazing song came on the bluetooth headphones. i set my beer down on the stairs, unclipped the receiver and attached it to my son (who was newly born when all that future dude stuff would have happened, if it had), and slipped the headphones in his ears.

hilarity ensued.

10 years of genius-hours invested in tech R&D: $gazillions
BlackBerry Curve with Bluetooth headset & huge/tiny microSD card: $200-ish
watching an 11 year old boy experience 'Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict' for the first time: priceless

a review: flipside.fm for the blackberry

2008-08-07T06:25:46Z

i just wanted what any girl wants, to be able to scrobble to last.fm from my shiny BlackBerry Curve. i heard all those iPhone kids were doing it, and i wanted to be just like them. and yes, if they were jumping off bridges, i'd probably want to do that too. or not.

but anyway. i did a little quick googling about scrobbling from a BB Curve, and found flipside.fm, a music player that works on BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices. flipside.fm "plays mp3s from your memory card, displays full-color album art, finds missing album art, creates playlists with ease, and tells you more about your music", which is fine. it also scrobbles (uploads your current playing track to your list of played tracks on last.fm), and scrobbling was what i wanted to do most of all. kind of a long-held fantasy of mine.

another one of the promotional blurbs for flipside.fm says that it lets you explore your music collection with your little trackball, something meant to appeal to the BlackBerry user, and on the surface this sounds like a lot of fun -- if you have a bunch of time on your hands to sit around playing with your telephone, which i don't. my BlackBerry is my portable music device, my bPod if you will; i have a big-ass microSD card in there and i keep a good playlist, i listen through my Altec-Lansing T515 headphones (my highest recommendation on those, btw) when i am out & about. so i have my basic needs with my mobile music experience, among which is the ability to use the play/pause, forward/back controls with my headphones, which flipside.fm did not support. neither did it support the usual shortcut keys on the BlackBerry (n for next, p for previous, but who cares about that, i want to use handy buttons on my little bluetooth doohickey, not fumble around with my telephone, no matter how legal that is to do on the freeway as long as i'm not holding it against my face).

so that was the deal-breaker right there. i didn't test it to see if it would work with my corded stereo headphones, because i'm not even sure where they are. however if the shortcut keys on the phone don't even work, why would the headphone controls?

so after three exciting days of scrobbling to last.fm from anywhere i felt like it, my trial expired, and that is that. there is no way i'd fork over $19.95 for software that takes away my preferred set of controls, and forces me to explore my phone's music collection with my slick little trackball. i just don't have that kind of time on my hands.

new plurk-related blog!

2008-08-01T07:47:40Z

tonight i have set up "Plurking Our Butts Off", at pobo.lizard.tv, a collaborative effort in which many plurkers (hopefully) will gather to support each other as we endeavor to alter our current weight levels. i am particularly encouraged by the whole Plurk vibe that spawned this, since it is by far the most collaborative, cooperative, close-knit (get it? knit?) community i've ever been privileged to be a part of.

Plurking Our Butts off is accepting registration, so go sign up!

oh and i am by no means a WP expert but i can promise you by tomorrow evening that little blog site will be nice and shiny and pretty. any feedback/suggestions are very welcome, of course.

***
oh and if you're reading this and you're not a Plurker, and thinking, oh my, i would love to join this strangely-named place, then may i ask you to please use this link? and thank you.

what is MobileMe and why is it in my control panel?

2008-07-31T15:27:03Z

i do not remember installing, nor granting permission, nor being asked permission to have installed, anything called MobileMe. on further exploration, it appears that MobileMe is Apple's successor to .Mac, and that it purports to connect my Mac and/or my PC to my iPhone. i'm fairly sure i don't have an iPhone, but i hate to be wrong about this sort of thing, so let me check.

nope. it's still a BlackBerry. ok, so if i don't have much if any use for this (and even people who do have a use for it are having a really rough time of it), why do i have it? why did Apple feel that my consenting to thier software update service, that i was in effect consenting to find random shit in my control panel? i like Apple, i've got a couple of their computers which are quite nice, but sometimes they are just some presumptuous bastards, aren't they?

the tmomail.net / spam assassin mystery

2008-07-30T05:05:29Z

the situation: four bizarre bounced emails received on a T-Mobile phone, at the phone's @tmomail.net email address, as SMS messages because they of course don't fit as text. two from SpamArrest, one from Yahoo, and one from "Midwest Computer" which seems to use the same "whitelist" approach as SpamAssassin.

all received within hours of each other.

indicating an unpleasant trend. i hate it when bad people soil the good email addresses of good people.
]]>
any help in figuring out exactly what the fuck is going on here (and how to stop it and/or the people doing it) would be much appreciated. there's no terrible urgency as all our tmo phones have unlimited txt, so it's not like we'll go broke from this. however it might be entirely inconvenient for us and for all @tmomail.net customers in general, if our phones' email addresses became horribly blacklisted everywhere.

FROM: Jennifer Nolan TO: Kim SUBJECT: herrera (SpamArrest)
kim.txt

TO: dhemberger (Midwest Computer)
dhemberger.txt

spam: it's the new mystery meat

FROM: Marion Huddleston TO: davechristianson SUBJECT: davechristianson (yahoo)
crussell.txt

FROM: Gale Abel TO: crussell (SpamAssassin)
dave.txt

sun java + yahoo toolbar = bite me

2008-07-24T17:10:21Z

dear sun,

i do enjoy your Java platform and i appreciate the things (Star Office) that you would give to me for free if i wanted them, but with all due respect, y'all are deeply fucked up for sneaking that Yahoo toolbar in your installation like that. seriously, i would love to come to your offices and go on a slapping spree. not kidding. not even a little bit.

now, i knew it was there, or i suspected at least. i even (briefly) poked around in the options looking for it, but when i didn't see an obviously checked box to uncheck, i thought hey! maybe they saw the light and stopped inflicting that obnoxious piece of shit toolbar with its aggressive 'i want to change your homepage and your default search provider' nonsense. so you can imagine my rage when it finished up and said 'thank you for installing Java with Yahoo™ Toolbar". or maybe you can't. trust me, i was pissed.

well i uninstalled that unwelcome, un-asked for, annoying, ugly, worthless, wretched excuse for a toolbar, and now i'm going to spend the next several hours periodically cursing your name under my breath. oh, and i'm going to join many others on the internet, blogging about what a fucked up thing it is you do. maybe you'll get the message, maybe you won't, but whatever.

bite me,

lizard

freecycle!

2008-07-22T06:15:02Z

on my way home from work this evening, i made an 18 mile detour and came home with a terrarium (reptile habitat, with screened top) as big as the whole hatchback area of my kia. the price of such a luxurious piece of lizard real estate, if purchased retail, would be roughly $100. the cost to me, was about $3 worth of gas.

Freecycle was founded in 2003 as a local group in Phoenix, and has grown into a force to be reckoned with:

The Freecycle concept has since spread to over 75 countries, where there are thousands of local groups representing millions of of members -- people helping people and "changing the world one gift at a time." As a result, we are currently keeping over 300 tons a day out of landfills! This amounts to four times the height of Mt. Everest in the past year alone, when stacked in garbage trucks!

to participate, you simply sign up with a Yahoo e-group which asks that you follow a set of basic rules (see my local group's "Freecycle Etiquette") for posting, but leaves the rest up to the individual members. why should you Freecycle rather than give to a charity? certainly giving to a charity is less effort, especially if the charity picks up donations from your home. but to me, there is tremendous appeal to the idea of participating in a community where we help each other (especially in these tight financial times) by sharing things we don't need, with others who do. i even think that if we made more of an effort to support each other as a community, there would be less need for charity. that sounds awfully pretentious though, doesn't it? let's just say that i enjoy free stuff almost as much as i love giving away free stuff to nice people, and leave it at that.

so if you think that Freecycling sounds like an awesome idea, i have some helpful tips, based on my experience using the local Freecycling network.
]]> i see a lot of messages posted on Freecycle that are vague and uninformative, as if the poster couldn't be bothered to give a detailed description, and i think this defeats at least some of the purpose of Freecycling. the point is, to prevent things from going into landfills, while helping other members of the community. if you don't make the effort to clearly describe what you are offering, the people who respond are doing so without enough information to determine if they really want this item or not. this means that the recipient must spend the gas and time to go pick up this item, only to discover it won't be helpful to them after all; also, it's possible that people who respond to posts which offer very little information, are doing so because they don't intend the item for themselves, but for their next garage sale -- this does happen.

so what i recommend is that if you are going to post an item, make sure you give a very detailed description. i frequently post gadget accessories (bluetooth dongles, memory cards that i've outgrown), and with items like that you have people who think they want them just because they're cool toys, yet might not have any use for them at all. for instance, with the bluetooth dongles, i gave very detailed technical information, and specified IN CAPITAL LETTERS that they ONLY worked on WINDOWS XP or 2000. i furthermore went on to say IF YOU HAVE A MAC, THESE WILL NOT WORK FOR YOU. the first email i got was a nice gentleman who thought this would be ideal for his wife to be able to transfer files from her cell phone to ... you guessed it, her Mac.

Mr. Mac-Wife probably didn't even read through the description -- he was the first response. i sometimes suspect that people who just fire off a response right away might not even be interested in the item personally, they just want to get free stuff to sell at a garage sale or on Craig's List. many Freecyclers will just give to the first responder, but every time i've done it, i've regretted it later. since my purpose in giving on Freecycle is that the item does someone some good, i prefer to wait a few hours until i've got a good pool of respondents, and i choose the one that gives me the best sense that they have a need for the item. when i gave away a smaller MicroSD card, i had many responses, but chose the one who needed it because her daughter had just saved up to buy a camera, but hadn't gotten a memory card yet. i was rewarded by a nice thank you email from the girl, who was thrilled to be able to take more pictures than her camera could hold by itself.

RECEIVING:
when responding to items i would like to have, i do try to be as prompt as possible but i always take the time to express my reasons for needing the item, and to politely thank the Freecycler for their consideration. in addition, i always state clearly when i can pick up the item, and sign with my name, email, and phone number. by taking the time to compose a thorough and thoughtful response, i might miss out on the folks who automatically choose the first response, but overall i find it gives me a better chance of being chosen. our adorable leopared gecko, Humpfree, came from Freecycle, and the lady who gave him to us told me that there were 50 responses and mine wasn't even in the first 30 - but she thought i'd be the best new home for her lizard (indeed, i was).

one last bit of advice, is about the email. if you are in an active Freecycle group, you will get at least several dozen (or more) emails per day. choosing the individual email option is the only way to keep on top of offers, since even the best response doesn't do much good if you wait until the daily email digest to respond. what i recommend is that you set up a folder under your inbox, and set up an email rule to filter all messages with the name of the group (in my case, [VenturaFreecycle]) into that folder. i've heard of people giving up on Freecycle because of the email volume, but with a little bit of organization, it's easy to deal with, and more than worth the effort.

so, to sum it up: Freecycle rocks. i have found good homes for items that had outlived their usefulness for me, and i have received many cool things, including most recently that spacious 50 gallon terrarium for my growing bearded dragon, Puff. things are tight, financially, and most of us can use all the help we can get -- and if we can accomplish this as a community while keeping things out of landfills, so much the better.

to find your local Freecycle group, go here. happy Freecycling!

guest blogging #2

2008-07-21T17:56:36Z

live today @ Techipedia, entitled Quantum Entanglements: the Social Media Scandals

and thank you, Tamar, for helping get the word out.

guest blogging #1

2008-07-21T06:51:56Z

my guest post, which i entitled 'the accidental racist', is now live at Mean Girls Need Not Apply!

and that's not all, there's more guesting coming really soon.

Antivirus 2009

2008-07-20T05:31:30Z

this evening my son said to me "antivirus says i have a virus!" and i knew we were in for a long night. i've battled infections of Antivirus 2008 and i know it to be a very insidious enemy. well, Antivirus 2009 is new and improved with extra insidiousness!

Antivirus2008 / Antivirus2009 attacks when you visit infected websites, and has a very aggressive installer, once it's popped up it is virtually impossible to click or do anything that doesn't grant the installer permission. It uses a logo/icon with the shape of the Windows Security icon, and the Windows logo colors; it is very carefully designed to look like a legitimate piece of software. once installed it pops up a bogus virus scan window with a list of viruses, none of which are on the computer. i will repeat: it does not find viruses! there may indeed be infections somewhere on the computer, but this software does not find them. it is a scam. it then tells you to buy a license in order to remove the non-existent threats. it will continue to pop up dire virus warnings every few minutes or so, and it can't be shut down. it is not possible to uninstall this software through the normal methods - either its own "uninstaller" or through Windows Program Manager.

the difference between 2008 and 2009 versions, is that the 2009 version is capable of disabling existing anti-virus software - in my case, AVG free. after AVG dies (and this is the seriously insidious part), Windows Security Center then pops up and informs you you have no virus protection because Antivirus 2009 is not activated, and offers you a button to purchase a license from Antivirus 2009. further, the Windows Security Center alert logo appears in the taskbar, with a message that Antivirus 2009 is not activated, and says to click this balloon to fix the problem. they have managed to exploit the way Windows Security Center monitors the computer's protective software, in order to compel the user to purchase a license, and the user can initiate this process by clicking a button within the Windows operating system itself.

seriously, get a Mac.

haha, just kidding. i have Macs and PCs and i like them both, you're not going to get any of that OS-bashing here.

a friend recommended Simply Super Trojan Remover, but i installed Windows Live OneCare first to see if that would do it. i've used AVG, Avast, ClamWin, Norton, and Macafee, but i'm most happy with Live OneCare, it is effective and (unlike most of the freeware anti-virus programs listed) it is not a system resource hog.

before Live OneCare was even finished with setup, it had found and dealt with Antivirus 2009. i'd expected to do a lot more work to get rid of the insidious pest, but it was actually quite an easy fix.i am very impressed (and surprised) by OneCare's ability to deal with a very nasty infection.

i guess it's not going to be such a long night after all.

note: according to Miguel Campos, it might require more effort, but for now, i'm going to relax and be happy that the computer is suffering no further symptoms.

we're off to see the lizard

2008-07-16T19:27:49Z

before all the scandal began, i was about to semi-officially re-launch my old lyrics site. i built it from scratch out of PHP, MySQL, caffeine, and obsession. i am not as proud of it as i once was, it was my first ever attempt at a database driven website, so not only is it so web 1.0, it's also got n00b written allll over it.

it does have a live flash chat thingy, that's sort of cool i guess.

offtoseethelizard.com

the reason i built the site was because i love lyrics but hate those spammy lyrics sites with the obnoxious ads and the occasional outright attack-spyware, and i wanted a peaceful place to keep my own little collection of my favorites. it is also open to lyrics submissions (here!).

i have considered the thought of implementing user accounts so my friends could use the lyricbase and be able to collect their own favorite lyrics and whatnot, but i'm not convinced that would ... you know, matter. after all, the interwebs are full of lyrics sites that have vast, vast libraries of lyrics they've content scraped from other lyrics sites, why would anyone but me want to bother? but anyway.

also? life feels much better if you are not all bunched up in a wad.