bbot's blog

As of 02008/03/26, I am no longer employed at Union Square. My contract ran out, and management elected to not renew it.

THAT WHICH IS updated. Now with more explosions!

Just kidding. You can't add any more explosions this without flagging the TWO AWESOME setpoint.

Seriously, you guys. So awesome.

So make recently featured these neat interlocking cardboard boxes called "Bloxes". The price?

Only $60 for twenty!

Hah!

So I reverse engineered the pattern from one of their promo photos using QCAD. PNG file here and DXF file here. Have fun!

I'm sorry to sound a million fucking years old here, but anyone who feels the need to sit at the very back of an otherwise empty bus needs to be shot. It's the spot of choice for noisy wannabe gangsters. I don't have anything against wannabe gangstas, who are otherwise a fine, upstanding group of fifteen year old white males, but I do have a problem with wannabe gangstas who won't shut the fuck up at one o clock in the fucking morning.

So I'm going through the new items in my rss reader, when I see a project wonderful ad with cleavage. Being male, I, of course, click on it. And what should befell my eyes but this

Now, I'm not a prude, but the thing is, fanservice is very limited in scope. It attracts males, but it cannot take the place of actual content. Loading your terrible furry webcomic down with fanservice won't make it any less terrible, but it will make it crappy, overly talky softcore pornography. No matter how explicit you make it, (and my lowlife associates assure me that it can get pretty explicit) it still won't be actual porn, because of the inherent limitations of the medium. Fanservice is great, but it has to be used sparingly.

But it's not until this that I truly began to plumb the depths of madness that is SFA. Stupidly wide image. Terrible, terrible art. Rapping furries who can't bring themselves to say "ass", despite the damn near full-frontal nudity in the previous page. A page that describes the comic as "hilarious". Oh boy, I can't wait until the comic actually starts!

And after a mere nine pages of filler, we are treated to... a terrible small penis joke and some terrible unretouched scans of terrible pencil drawings. The next page doesn't disappoint, either. Or the next. Yeah! You show that strawman who's the boss!

You get the point. I was going to write a full out rant on the manifold crimes of Single Female Alien, but A, I can't bring myself to endure the complete archives (all 30 pages), and B, as far as I can tell it never actually starts. Every page is a "bonus strip", or random filler. The "bonus strip" nomenclature made me suspect that perhaps this was the vile front to a hidden abyss of horror and poorly drawn basketball tits; but subjecting myself to his shitty deviantart page turned up nothing but horror and a link to...

Oh.

Apparently Chidi Okonkwo was so enamored of his talents that he decided to sell SFA for actual cash money, much like the stuff you use to buy objects of actual value. But hey, at least it's FREE FOR COLLEGE NEWSPAPERS, right?

So, my blackberry comes with a neat little utility called "memos", which, oddly enough, allows you to write memos. I've been using it to write bits and pieces of various things, and it finally came time that I had enough that I wanted to actually export them in a usable format. How is this done, you ask? Easy!

1. You back up the device using RIM's terrible backup utility. This takes an oddly long time, seeing as how it's only backing up text, and over a USB2 connection at that.
2. This produces an .ipd file, which is some wacky proprietary binary format, and cannot be read by any linux utility.
3. Find a program which claims to be able to read .ipd files; which is of course shareware, since it targets a tiny user base of people with too much money.
4. Download the free version, to discover that only lets you export ten memos at a time, because the cocksucker who wrote it wants twenty bucks.
5. Produce four .txt files of ten memos each, by hand, taking an inordinate amount of time.
6. Copy this over samba to the linux computer.
7. Use cat to mash the files together, then manually, again, paste each one into Tomboy

EASY

index.html updated with link to the blog, and a link to the cleaned up folder with all the crap I've written over the years.
writings/ updated to hold aforementioned crap.

Lately I've been checking for leaks. How does one do this, you ask? Easy!

Check system pressure at the EP box, where each floor taps compressed air from the central air line. 19 times out of 20, pressure will be nominal, maybe a pound below central pressure.

One time out of twenty, though, system pressure will be outside of tolerances, and you have to proceed to the actual leak checking phase of the operation.

Now, at two union, the system air is piped to a loop that circles the floor, with taps where perimeter fans and thermostats draw air from it. Everything is operated by air, of course, because two union was built in 83, before the invention of electricity.

To test for leaks, you cut the loop right by where central air is connected to the loop, but before it is tapped to power a thermostat/perimeter box, since this would isolate it from the loop, and thus render it nonfunctional. This isn't bad, in the sense that this is done all after-hours, and thus with nobody to complain about the heating suddenly not working, but bad in the sense that you can't test a box for leaks if it's not connected to the loop.

Anyway, once you cut the loop, you go halfway around the floor and connect a gauge to the line. You then squeeze shut the line directly after the gauge, and if system pressure goes up, you know that the leak is somewhere after farther down the loop. If it doesn't go up, then the leak is farther up the loop. By doing this over and over, you can narrow down the location of the leak enough that you can just trace the line by popping up ceiling tiles, which would otherwise take far too much time.

This is idealized scenario, of course. What actually happens is that when you plumb in the gauge halfway around the floor it will read one PSI, stubbornly refuse to budge from that reading no matter where you clamp the line, and then strongly insinuate unkind notions regarding your mother's reputation.

Dejected, you will wander the floor at random, immediately stumble upon the leak, (a contractor cut a branch but was too lazy to plug it) fix it, and hurry to your blog to tell the world about how awesome you are.