DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

This week has been a drag. I think I need a cheer transplant; mine seems to have atrophied.

I’m most of the way through a series of workstation upgrades. I can’t justify a new dual-processor G5, but I feel pretty good about installing a CPU upgrade, faster video card, and additional RAM. Total cost of the upgrades is under $500, whereas the G5 would cost about $2500. So I’ll be getting about 1/10 the performance of a new system for, umm, 1/5 the price.

No, it makes no sense. My financial decisions rarely do. (Hey, wanna buy some Syquest stock?)

The CPU upgrade went too smoothly. I mean, I just plugged it in, and it worked. What’s up with that? I’m supposed to have near-death experiences when I do hardware maintenance. I’m supposed to make desperate phone calls to experts, late-night runs to the electronics store, and offer prayers to the gods of Sts. Torvalds and Jobs.

Fortunately my first attempt at an LCD upgrade was a dismal failure. I’ve had a mismatched pair of LCDs for a few years, and decided to buy a second unit of the bigger one so I’d have a matched set. But then I bought the wrong screen.

Here, see if you can do better than me. See if you can tell these model numbers apart:

• 1900
• 1801

The difference is subtle, but if you look closely you’ll see it.

The replacement’s replacement just arrived. I’ll set it up shortly. I want to publish this first in case that workstation implosion I’m overdue for finally catches up with me. There’s nothing quite as cathartic as having something really disastrous happen to justify having felt bad where there was no obvious reason for it.

Oh, wait — this is election season. Scratch the line about not having a reason to feel unwell and depressed.

[T]he state of Illinois whipped out a lawsuit against the Dave Matthews Band and its tour bus driver Stefan Wohl, accusing them of violating state water pollution and public nuisance laws for allegedly dumping human waste from a bus into the Chicago River onto the upper deck of a boat filled with tourists.

More than 100 people on tour boat were splattered with the foul waste dumped from the bridge. Some of the passengers suffered nausea and vomiting, and five entered a local hospital for tests.

Befouled victims were somewhat appeased when the Matthews Band invited them to enjoy private booths at an upcoming concert.

The #2 link in a google search for “Hummer H2” is FUH2 — 1167 user-submitted photos of people giving the official “Hummer H2 salute” to neighborhood passenger-tanks.

The #9 link is the Sierra Club’s satirical HummerDinger site, the best bit of which is this Onion-inspired headline:

Hummer 2 wins “Worst Idea Ever” award
Narrowly beats out acid-wash jeans and Vanilla Ice to gain coveted prize

Wordplay from the Wikipedia: bacronyms, retronyms, fake etymologies.

(Obligatory link to the quintessential source of linguistic fun for culture hackers: the jargon file.)

We already knew that the patent system is fucked, but this is just sad.

Clear Channel … announced that it had acquired a U.S. patent covering a system of creating digital recordings of live performances. Essentially, the patent’s “Event Recording System” is a convoluted and fairly vague description of off-the-shelf stuff you could pick up at any Guitar Center…
Clear Channel has interpreted this patent to infer that it now owns the exclusive rights to all live performance recordings sold at any venue on the day of show, thus creating a virtual monopoly on the process.

Here’s the patent: U.S. Patent #6,614,729: System and method of creating digital recordings of live performances

(Hearty thanks to Chuck for keeping us in mind as he’s killing company time reading Mix Magazine)