All Your Base Are Belong To Us — The Kip Lange Homepage

Good God. Okay. I watch The Daily Show. It’s liberal, but it’s not that bad. But tonight was awful. They trot out Ted Kennedy (who you don’t get to see walk out like other guests, most likely so you can’t really see how ENORMOUSLY fat he is), and Jon Stewart falls all over himself fawning over Kennedy. No witty repartee, no jokes, no nothing, just about ten minutes of pure Kennedy ass-kissing. Like Stewart has any clue what it’s like to be a) middle class, b) live in Massachussetts, or c) be middle-class living in Massachussetts with Kennedy as your Senator.

The only conservative Stewart (and the rest of the libs) fawn over like that is John McCain, and McCain still thinks he can bank on the press loving him to get him into the White House. He’ll be in for a bit of a shock once he actually starts running — the press will finally realize he’s pretty much a conservative and start crapping all over him.

But man — I tried to listen to Kennedy talk for two minutes, and my heart-rate went up so fast I had to fast-forward so I didn’t destroy the TV in a fit of rage.

I bet he has a myspace.com account.

Yeah, you heard me. I fucking hate that site. If you can actually call it a site — rather, more a collection of the largest number of freaks who seem to be PERVERSELY INSISTENT ON MAKING THE WORST AND MOST SENSUALLY (IN THE SENSE-SENSE) OFFENSIVE WEBSITES POSSIBLE.

I have a lurker account on there, where I go to see how many people I used to know are getting sucked into the myspace black hole of stupidity.

Some uppity whore was on “The Showbiz Show”, a Tila Tequila, who is apparently the myspace.com user with the most friends (no I won’t actually link to myspace, dammit, the post would actually smell from wherever you read it)…this gets her a spot on a TV show? And, true to form, she was a bubbling idiot. “Myspace is, like, um, high school!” she quipped.

Yes. And high school is stupid. Yes, I partied all the time in high school, took huge bong hits, drank more beer than conceivable, mixed it with whiskey, still pulled good grades, got laid, and into a good school, but high school is OVER you 30-ish people on myspace! Over, I said! Over! Get the hell off that site!

I can understand a geeky 16 year old who wants friends logging on there. I cannot tolerate the people I know, in or near their 30s, who are still…apparently looking for friends who think we’re all still in high school. Or attention. Or something else that involves bondage. Hey, try this — START A DAMN BLOG! And one that has text you can READ on it that isn’t covered by pictures of “Morrisey” or some shit like that. And no, I don’t give a rat’s ass if I misspelled his name.

God, I hate that site.

After a bit of battling and changing their data source, 3Media has finally put me back online. Praise be to Xenu, etc.

My hostee, 3Media Web Solutions, just upgraded to new servers. Now, if you know anything about servers, you know that this is a process which a) seems really easy and b) is actually the ninth circle of hell. The CEO, my contact over there, has been up for about four nights straight trying to resolve umpteen problems with the server — all the while keeping his clients’ websites up and running. Which, amazingly enough, he has done. The sites haven’t gone down while he’s tried desperately to restore needed backups which won’t restore and implement workarounds and…okay, look, if you’re an IT guy or gal, you know about this nightmare. He and his crew are doing a bang-up professional job of it, though. But if you have some extra good vibes, send them over there, where there are a few guys taking five minute catnaps on keyboards covered with drool. They do a great job and they deserve a little rest and I’m not just saying this because they pay me (but that doesn’t hurt, you know).

Peace out.

Okay. My webalizer is down for a little while, but before it went, I was noting that the top search phrase that hit this site was “wisdom tooth rotting” — as I have a wisdom tooth that has a chip that has fallen out of it and haven’t done anything about it, and wrote that I feared it would rot.

So let me say this: IF YOUR WISDOM TEETH ARE ROTTING OUT FROM UNDER YOU, GO TO A FUCKING DENTIST. This should be simple. It’s more complex with me because I have EXTREMELY sparse dental coverage — I *think* extractions are covered but I’m not sure — and so a mere visit to the kindly dentist would set me back several hundreds of dollars. So far the tooth has not fallen apart, but no doubt it will fall apart at some point and I’ll be wishing I had spent the money earlier as I scream in agony.

To repeat, then: wisdom tooth rotting = go to the damn dentist (if you can). If you have problems, like me, I understand, but also remember my teeth are NOT “rotting”. Rotting implies steady decay and a nasty smell. I just lost a chip off mine.

We clear on this?

Okay. I’m known to watch MythBusters. Yes, yes, I plead geekdom. I can’t help but think how wonderful it would be to make my living…well, okay they’re not ALWAYS blowing things up…but basically by blowing things up. I mean, usually something gets blown up. And that’s cool. Right, Beavis?

I also have to confess an uber-crush on the Kari Byron, the enormously attractive redhead on the show (who never seems to wear a shirt that reaches all the way past her stomach). Having gone to school at U.C. Berkeley (and somehow remained a conservative lounge lizard), I can safely say that she’s an amalgam of every cute and perky San Francisco chick I ever chased after. It helps that I dated like four redheads out there. And I don’t even prefer redheads! I like brunettes, mostly, and then blondes, and blondes over brunettes if they…oh what the hell am I talking about, Angelina Jolie wins the pillowfights I have in my head with Marilyn Monroe. But a lot of times Kari Byron is standing around looking perky in a nightie.

No, I do not have screen captures, yes, I could get them, no, I won’t, I’m not that far gone into fantasy (yet). Byron, I think, would prefer to be known for her art rather than her stint on MythBusters, so I’ll just post a link to said art right here and no there are no pictures of her there either (just get off your ass and google her if you want to see her).

Worship mode off.

It seems like lately every time I go to publish my blog, something goes wrong and I have to remove all my files and republish everything from scratch. This isn’t so much difficult as it is extremely annoying.

If I figure out what the hell is going wrong I’ll share it with you. 🙂

Ahh. Earlier on, I was pondering why Comedy Central would air a depiction of Mohammed in a South Park episode called “Super Best Friends”, when they wouldn’t air a depiction of him in last week’s episode (“Cartoon Wars II”).

The answer is simple, blatantly obvious, hypocritical, and I missed it.

“Super Best Friends” aired before the 9/11 attacks.

Let’s all revel in the hypocrisy of it.

It’s struck me recently how people have problems using verbs with their DVRs. Even me. I’ll say, “I’m taping…no sorry, I’m DVRing…no, I mean, recording…oh what the hell…”

Now, what a LOT of people say is, “I’m TiVoing that show tonight.” Even if they don’t have TiVos. I bet if you go out there and compare the number of people who say they’re “TiVoing” something, only a very few actually have TiVo.

Now, I find it fascinating that TiVo, which is by no means the dominant DVR system at the moment (mostly due to proprietary DVRs that cable and satellite companies use), is the active verb a lot of people use when referring to digitally recording something.

I know this is silly, but in that way, TiVo has triumphed. They get their name repeated over and over again by people who have never even seen a TiVo (and yes, folks, TiVos are different than other DVRs, mostly because of the “push” technology they use to recommend shows to you — much the same way as Amazon.com uses “push” technology to recommend books to you).

So it’s an idle thought. So I think too much. But it’s kind of interesting. 🙂

Ah, fresh from the Trojan war front. A couple of days ago, my computer started acting up — mostly Internet Explorer. I would load say, one page — the front page of Wikipedia, for example — and then try to look something up and I’d get blank white pages with the correct URL.

I ran NAV. I ran several spyware programs I have. They cleaned up over 397 files, but they didn’t do squat about this. I began to think I’d need to reinstall Explorer all over again (what a bitch). I finally used a secure system manager thing on a freeware basis — I can’t remember the name, just look up “secure system manager” or something, or use a non-secure one and locate the file I’m about to tell you about — and it told me that a “directpt.dll” file was using up a lot of resources and taking priority.

I did a quick search on “directpt.dll”. Apparently it’s part of a Trojan backdoor/haxdoor rootkit (for those who don’t speak jive, that’s “nasty virus-like thing that lets people control your computer from afar”). So I quarantined the bastard, deleted it, and behold, everything is back to normal…except all my icons now look generic.

To fix *this*, I just opened up display properties and resized the icons from small to large and then back again. This forces Windows to rebuild the desktop. This hung after a while, so I tried a hard boot to see if it was working at all and — it completely fixed the problem.

Anyway…maybe this will help someone down the line.