Friday, December 31, 2004

resolutions (draft)

More exercise. More writing. More music.

sex in the mountains

Sex in the City is stylish. We watched 4 and 1/2 episodes while stuck in traffic on i-80 in Sierra mountains. They showed the Prada store I visited while in New York. The rows of mannequins. A connection.

The trip took around 14 hours, not counting some light shoveling time. The house has wireless internet access; and a washing machine, darling. That's a new feature.

Monday, December 27, 2004

"non-standard and extreme technologies"

I am struggling how to translate "mulki" into English. "Widgets" doesn't cut it.

Anyway, my friend started a community about interesting technological thingies, from modern clones of Victorian bicycles to extracting Uranium from seawater. And with everything in between.

The community is in Russian. Most of the linked pages are in English.

Tuesday, December 21, 2004

pathetic

About a month ago, I bought a used car. A Porsche. (This becomes important later on.) The Porsche, among other features, has an alarm that was mostly disabled - except for an annoying beep when the car door is opened.

Today I left my Porsche with the lights on. Tow truck guy thought that was funny. Tow truck guy also jumpstarted the car, and soon I was on my way to the meeting with a friend at a bar.

My friend and I drank almost no alcohol. Really.

After opening the car door, I start hearing intermittent beeping of the alarm. The beeping doesn't go away but increases in frequency, ultimately escalating to full alarm horn sounds.

Investigation leads to the following discoveries:
  • If left alone, the alarm turns itself off after a minute. Any activity causes the alarm to restart signaling.
  • Even if driving with a horn blasting were an option, the alarm is capable of shutting down the engine.
  • Pressing random digits on alarm's keypad has no effect.
To recap: the alarm was reset by the jumpstart. I don't know the code. The alarm was designed to prevent all obvious ways to work around it.

It's midnight, I am standing in a parking lot of a bar, waiting for a $80 taxi ride home, away from the fully functional but unfriendly Porsche. And I am completely sober.

Saturday, December 11, 2004

for the articles

Russian Playboy predicts that by 2015, Sergey Brin will lead the Forbes' list of the richest people in the world. "In the beginnig of the 10s, he started to work on global technologies of structurung information." Sounds like fun.

2 months free!

The passwords that come on AOL disks are the 21st century fortune cookies. Today I got CAVIAR-GULPS. Time to open that can in the fridge...

Wednesday, December 01, 2004

geek humor

Dear valued user,

You have reached the error page for the error page...
You win!!

Love, The [product code] Team