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

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.

Whoops. Episode 1004 of South Park appears to have been censored. In “Cartoon Wars II”, Kyle races to make sure an episode of “Family Guy” that features Mohammed giving someone a football helmet will air. The scene where he’s (finally) supposed to appear is just black with the words, “Comedy Central has refused to broadcast an image of Mohammed on their network.”

Now, at first, I pretty much thought that this was a bit of self-propaganda; namely, South Park getting miffed over its “Trapped in the Closet” episode, plus the fact that the scene is followed by Bush, an unwed mother, and Jesus pooping on each other and the American flag (the idea being, look what we CAN show you, then look at what we CAN’T).

There’s one problem. Comedy Central has aired a South Park that showed Mohammed WELL BEFORE THIS. In “Super Best Friends”, Mohammed is right there, and nobody got held hostage at Comedy Central’s offices.

So what is this? Just a reflection of heightened concern due to the Danish problem? Or is this maybe a sneaky way of portraying themselves as martyrs again, although this time under false pretenses? I’m inclined to believe that Matt and Trey did want a short picture of Mohammed, and that it is the change in times now, but I’m one skeptical son of a bitch and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a publicity stunt, perhaps with Comedy Central complicit because of the whole Scientology debacle (“You take a heeet for us now, Comedy Central!”).

Anyway, it’s worth debating.

Well, just writing a quick note to let all you good folks note (all three of you) that you may have noticed kiplange.com was down for about four days, and my mail was also down for that period. The good folks at 3Media Web Solutions were performing a software upgrade, and it’s now finished, so I am pleased to say that I am back and blogging away again. Did you miss me? 🙂

Alright. I have to admit it. I like the new Doctor Who. Yes, yes, I know it’s kind of crappy, but I like it. They at least kept the spirit going much more than, say, the idiots who did Star Trek: Enterprise did with Star Trek (may that awful thing descend the bowels of the Earth and be seen no more).

Whew. That’s a weight off my shoulders.