An hour to spare between my NET103 tute and my haircut had the potential to be extremely boring, so I spiced it up with a little blood donation. Quietly chuckling over Fiona’s frustrations at her inability to give blood (she has herpes… wait, no. She was ”a very sick baby”) I stepped up to the mobile blood clinic and began filling out the forms. Been to England any time during Mad Cow season? Nope. Had any man-on-man action lately? Nope. Been “accidentally” stabbed with a bloodied needle any time lately? Nope.
“How wonderfully charitable I am”, I thought while sitting and draining blood into a bag. “How lucky the recipient of this A-Grade O-Positive blood shall be.” Upon arriving home I received an email from the Red Cross informing me that after testing; my blood was certainly not A-Grade, and that I appear to have contracted syphilis. This, of course, is not true at all; the email was from the Curtin psychology department requesting my participation in an experiment. Apparently it’ll only take 50 minutes and I get $5.00 for my participation. Wow, five bucks! That’s even better value than all that candy and juice I got to eat in the blood van. “Sure, why not?”, I thought, and replied to make an appointment.
All this volunteer work had better be putting me level on the cosmic-karma-counter scales, or I’m going to be extremely pissed.
Posted by Chris Clark on March 25, 2003 at 3:55 PM
Ah, Movable Type. There probably isn’t a better web publishing system on offer, nor is there a more ridiculously complex one (at least for people who aren’t familiar with it… which up until recently was me). Screwing with MT for several hours in conjunction with Apache’s mod_rewrite module has finally given me what I have wanted since starting this site: pretty URLs for MT’s machine-generated archive files. You’ll notice that the titles of each post on the main page now provide permalinks to that post… a default MT feature for sure, but when you’ve stripped the MT templates back to their bare flesh you sometimes remove such features inadvertently.
Now anyone can browse decaffeinated.org’s archives at their leisure; even GoogleBot, who I’m sure was feeling neglected with no archive pages to spider. Pretty, aren’t they? Thanks, I do try.
Posted by Chris Clark on March 25, 2003 at 7:20 PM
Mike Pinkerton has caved to pressure and removed Camino’s sidebar bookmark/history manager in the latest nightly builds. This makes me cry, especially since it’s a step in the direction of Safari.
*Sniff*
Admittedly, a lot of programs misuse the Cocoa sidebar but I’ve always felt that Camino wasn’t one of them. Farewell, sidebar. Some of us will miss you. Clearly, Pink isn’t one of them.
Posted by Chris Clark on March 25, 2003 at 7:41 PM
I was contemplating the rash of “Rate my [whatever the fuck]” sites that exploded onto the web a few years ago. Am I This or Not, Rate my Poo, Am I Bear or Not, Rate my Boobies, and the piece that started it all: Am I Hot or Not? Many of these are in poor taste, and unsurprisingly many of them are sponsored by Rotten; but I think the web is in need of some really poor-taste sites right now. So I present to you: Am I Shot or Not?
Photos of gun wounds (lifted from Rotten’s archives, obviously) are racked up and rotated for viewing and rating by the millions of weirdos the internet has to offer. How about Do I Clot or Not? Where people guess which of the old geezers on show has had a stroke, or Am I Bot or Not? — the cyborg rating site?
If only I’d thought of these at the height of the hot-or-not madness. www.shotornot.com isn’t even registered for chrissakes.
Posted by Chris Clark on March 25, 2003 at 11:32 PM