jumpy jumpy vitamins

New DSL stuff is en route; until it gets here, though, I’m relegated to dial-up. d’oh!

Saw Fahrenheit 9/11 Friday night with R* and his friend S*. I think I’ll be kidnapping certain friends and relations and dragging them to see said film — while it isn’t perfect, it is excellent, and it is quite damning of the Fuckchop Administration on several fronts (to the extent that people in my theater were cheering and applauding the film, in freakin’ Creve Coeur).

Got to see Joe Kang on Monday. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to meet his wife or daughter — kid was apparently all tuckered out — but it’s always nice to run across Mr. Kang, at least.

Work? Heh. I’ve been pulling early mornings for the past 3 weeks or so, trying to get a backup stabilized, and I think I’ve got it. There are a few things I’ll miss about getting here at 06:00 (the lack of traffic at 05:30, the Arch at sunrise, fresh coffee, no obnoxious phone calls for a couple hours, going home at 3), but DAMMIT I’ve missed those extra couple hours of sleep.

Also, people at work are stupid. Honestly, what is so difficult about keeping your password secret? Why should I have to remind people to turn their systems off when they go home? And where is the insurmountable challenge in actually reading the text of the message delivery failure?

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And now, the bullet-point section, because I know you’ve missed it.

• Yesterday’s “This Modern World” is BRILLIANT.
• I’m eager to see the direct confrontation between the vice-presidential candidates — or, as Salon puts it, the smile vs. the scowl. Seriously: it’s young/charming/self-made vs. old/creepy/crony-driven. Who would YOU want one lack-of-a-heartbeat from the White House?
• Since there have been comments on how handsome John Edwards is, Wonkette (everybody’s fave foulmouthed Beltway-gossip blog) has re-posted links to a truly funny primary-season Photoshop mockup.
• Am still tinkering with a way to output specific Wikipedia pages to RSS; the “Special:Export” does a nice job of pushing stuff to XML, but reformatting the wikified text to something more standard is a real bitch. I’ll post here and there if I figure anything out.
• In the meantime, though, RSS-heads can rejoice: I’ve fixed my issues with atom.xml. It should work again. Sorry.
• Ooh, and while I’m thinking of Wikipedia, the English version (the one I keep on linking to) just hit 300,000 articles. I’m guessing they’ll hit half a million articles on or around October 22, 2005… there’s no scientific rationale behind that guess, I just wanted to mention my birthday to the wikipediholics.
• Nigel‘s license plates expired at the end of June, so I had to get him a few new things (brakes, tires, windshield) and pay my personal property tax in order to get the renewal stickers. Only cost me ~$900 total, ouch. At least his brakes were under warranty.
• Atomic Books, the world’s greatest store, now has a blog. w00t!
• Tim Fish, please publish some more YBIL already!
• The Washington Blade reports that there could be a whole lot of forced outings down on Capitol Hill if the Federal Discrimination Marriage Amendment ever comes to a vote. I’m not sure how I feel about shoving people out of the closet like that; on the one hand, they should come out on their own, but OTOH the hypocrisy is wrong on so many levels. However you feel on the issue, though, we’re likely to hear more about it real soon.