DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Near the top left corner of this image, from Terraserver, is a picture of the house I grew up in. I am just dying to know who wrote the ‘X’ on there.

I had to laugh at this job posting. I think this company needs more help than they realize.

The ad boasts that Kanisa transforms a company’s e-service web site from a source of customer frustration to a source of customer satisfaction! And yet Kanisa’s own e-service website is apparently so poorly executed that in the same message, the hiring manager goes on to warn candidates: do not send resumes through the www.kanisa.com web site - they will get lost!

I played briefly with the Zend Optimizer, which promises to speed up PHP scripts (such as those that create this journal) by 40%-100%. In practice I found that when the Optimizer was enabled, single-script execution speed actually slowed by a few thousands of a second.

The statistics are not significant, but I sure didn’t see any improvement in performance.

I tested various levels of optimization with similar results. I wonder if the Alternative PHP Cache would yield better results? (But I don’t wonder about it enough to warrant actually testing it… this site is, regrettably, a long way from “heavily loaded.”)

I stumbled across an ancient cassette tape today — a rough mixdown of a recording session from about 1993. Apparently we’d left the microphones hot and recorded a few minutes of conversation inadvertently. Listening to this, a randomly captured exchange from over 7 years ago, feels oddly voyeuristic, even though I am one of the two people on the tape. I guess this is because we had no idea, at the time, that we were being recorded.

Anyway, I was amused to hear a spontaneous joke created by my companion. To enjoy this you would need to know that we were rehearsing and recording in a building in which several of the tenants financed their music ventures by selling crack — so, to prevent felonies from occurring within one’s own room, everybody (at least, everybody not selling crack) kept their doors locked. Most often, the shared bathroom was locked as well.

And so my friend says, mostly to himself as he was searching around the studio, “I’m looking for my keys, so I can pee.” And then, a second later: “I don’t know if your dick takes keys..!”

I finally got a chance to see Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai this weekend. For anyone not familiar with this film, it’s about a samurai/ninja/gangsta living and assassinating people in New York City. Here’s a plot summary:

Forest Whitaker blathers some psuedo-philosophical drivel in voiceover.
Forest Whitaker steals a car.
Forest Whitaker shoots some people.
Forest Whitaker fondles a pigeon.
Forest Whitaker eats an ice cream.

Repeat.

It wouldn’t be accurate to say I didn’t enjoy the film, but I sure don’t understand the critical acclaim that’s been heaped on it.