DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I spent Friday morning at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. This was about my 5th time there. I think this was one of the lowest-energy shows I’ve seen.

I’d seen the press lamenting that Apple had no grand announcements, but that wasn’t the problem. I think this Expo was smaller than previous years: the corners seemed empty, and there were a lot of places to sit and chill out. The ends of the halls were curtained off. And several large vendors were not present.

For example, I was surprised DigiDesign was not there. I had specifically hoped to see them (to complain that their lame software isn’t compatible with OS9). But the “Digital Audio” area of the Expo had only a few forgettable booths and a lot of empty carpet.

The best thing about this year’s Expo is that I didn’t catch a horrible disease. I worked in a booth at the 1996 show, and after four days of exposure to imported germs and tainted business cards I felt like I wouldn’t survive the day. I spent the next 48 hours on my back with a 102° fever and vowed never to work another trade show.

I was only a tourist at this year’s show, but still I was cautious… piles of colorful schwag could be teeming with the Expo Flu, or, what the hell, Ebola, for all I knew. I washed my hands seven times in three hours.

Earthlink was giving away orange “gel” pens. I picked one up as a curiosity; I assumed there had to be more to it than what I could see, which was a ballpoint pen attached to a squat tube filled with some sort of gunk, on a lanyard. But, no, that’s all it was: pen, gunk, neck strap. When I got home, I unscrewed the end to divine if maybe there was something more there, something I missed with some sort of geek appeal, and this piece of trash dumped goo all over my desk. I curse Earthlink’s marketing department.

There was a great article on schwag in Wired recently.

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..!”