Yekrats.com: Scotto’s Seafud Shanty

Way back in 1991, in my college acting class, we were assigned a lip-synch project. (Thanks Rich Rand!) We were to pick any song to lip-synch, and then perform it ON STAGE for the rest of the class. I chose Michael Jackson’s “Black or White”.

I dove into the assignment full tilt, too - no parody. I really tried to get into the mind of Michael. This was theatre class after all. I watched Michael’s video over and over again, and practiced my choreography and imitated his style. I tried my best to dress like him despite my own nerdy white-boy limitations. I couldn’t moonwalk, but I faked it OK for a couple of steps.

I remember I was last to perform during that class period. There were a lot of good performances that day. I was nervous, but the lights came on and the music started. It was great! (At least in my mind’s eye.) I was dancing all over the place. Somehow, I had tapped into the Michael Jackson groove!

Do you remember the end of the video where Michael did a primal scream - AAAAAAAARGH! - and ripped his shirt in two? Did it! You betcha. After my scream, which was not technically part of the song, the class went wild! For a moment, I had a ephemeral feeling of what it was like to be a pop star.

Got an A+ on that assignment.

In spite of all his weirdness, I really liked his music, especially his earlier stuff. So, I raise a glass to you, Michael. Mama-se, mama-sa, mama-ku-sa, yow!

GenCon registration almost snuck by me this year.

Carl and I are running four StoryCards events, which are pretty close to full.

In addition, I’m keeping it light this year, signing up for only two events. The first is the must-see musical comedy sing-a-long Hickman’s Killer Breakfast (which I had a lot of fun at last year). Also I signed up for a live-action RPG set at a Hogwarts band camp for Slytherin. (The same group did a Harry Potter LARP last year that was really quite fun.)

For my English-speaking readers, I thought I’d bring to you a little debate raging on in the Esperanto community right now. It’s a debate about what to call some countries. That’s a big deal to some people. (continue reading…)

It’s the girls’ birthday this week, and like a bad parent, I did not order one of their gifts until early Monday morning. Aha, but like a smart parent, I ordered from Amazon, paying a little extra for their 3-5 day shipping option. That way, I could get the gift in time for their birthday party. I figured they might be able to process it that day, and I might receive it by Thursday, Friday, or Saturday at the latest.

But Saturday is here, and no package. In fact, the USPS site claims the package did not leave their facility until yesterday afternoon. Checking the Amazon site, it tells me to expect it on Tuesday, 8 days after my order, or 7 not counting the order date. So, what gives?

I called up Amazon (receiving surprisingly very prompt service there) but they explained how they count “3-5 days.” First, I can’t count Monday, because that is a fraction of a day. (Fair enough.) Also I can’t count weekends (despite the postal service running on weekends). I also can’t count the day it arrives, because — according to the Amazon rep — that’s another fraction of a day. So they count Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Monday … (hand waving) … TA-DA! You’ll have it on Tuesday! (Note, they said if I don’t get it by Tuesday, I get my extra $5 back.)

I’m still trying to figure out exactly what I paid the extra $5 for, to upgrade from “free” 5-10 service to more expensive 3-5 service. Maybe they should name it something different, like “regular” service and “gold” service, and not promise a specific number of days. Then I wouldn’t have the expectation of receiving a package within a certain number of days. If I pay extra for something within 5 days, I expect it!

Moral of the story: Caveat emptor.

If you haven’t seen it already, my good pal Fuzzy has an interesting rant. About his elevator at work.

Probably more interesting if you’re a programmer or like computer interface design.

I’m currently at the “Landa Kongreso” (National Congress) of Esperanto-USA in Saint Louis. It’s a pretty amazing experience - using a language so much that you think in it. In fact, writing this right now, I must concentrate on which part of the brain to use: Esperanto or English. Even more baffling: We are Esperantists, chatting in the hallway or at an excursion among English-speakers… and then an English-speaker talks to me, and I must consciously think whether to say Dankon or Thank you. I never really had that feeling when I spoke French in Quebec, because I don’t think I was ever sufficiently capable to think in French. You might be surprised (not) but we have had more than our fair share of strange looks.

There’s about 100 people here supposedly, all mixing and chatting in Esperanto. This is my first real experience speaking the language (vocally). I’ve become pretty good over the last 10 years of typing and reading it, but since I don’t have a local club, this is my crash course in hearing it and speaking it.

There’s people here from all skill levels, and the veterans are very understanding when I explain my situation. And I try to be very accommodating to the fresh newbies who decided to come.

Last night we went to the Memorial Arch (”Memoriga Arkego”), which was more crowded than I remember in the past (in 1984, I think). Today we have a full slate of Esperanto meetings and presentations.

I recently discovered that the International Brotherhood of Magicians (”IBM”) has a local “ring”  here in Lafayette. Further, I found out they meet about 5 miles from my house! So, last night was the first meeting I was able to attend.

It’s a small, casual, fun group. They asked me to perform something, so I managed to do a couple of rubber band effects (one of which they seemed to have not seen before). They do a round where everyone gets to show a trick or two to the rest of the group, and get pointers and such. (Although none of them seemed to need any pointers.) The group has a couple of professional magicians who regularly attend.

Since I have a lot going on right now, I’m not sure how much I can do with them. But it’s fun to know that such a resource is so local to me!

I found the following video about the Inform programming language, and it made me want to get back into programming IF again. The “natural language” thing I could probably do without (and I can imaging things getting needlessly complicated by making the interface “natural”) but the IDE seemed to be brilliant. I wish TADS had debugging tools like the transcript control and Skein!

Inform 7 screencast

Yesterday, I had to alter my normal lunchtime walking route, because I didn’t want to wade through a few dozen people on the pedestrian bridge. They were having a “tea party” event, dumping tea bags into the Wabash river to protest high taxes and Barack Obama.

(continue reading…)

This past week I helped a friend get rid of a nasty trojan/virus on her computer that I thought I’d warn you about. It’s called “Antivirus 360″.

The beast is a nasty, nasty thing. If you click on a bad weblink (”Your computer is infected… do you want to remove the infection?” or somesuch.) the nasty bugger will dig its claws into your Windows system and never let go. Here’s some of the things it does.

• It redirects all web traffic away from sites that might be used to eradicate it. So if you find a handy Google reference, you will not be able to access it. It will forward you to its own advertising site.
• You won’t be able to install tools downloaded from the aforementioned sites (downloaded from another computer, that is) that could help cure your computer.
• It removes the tabs from the top of the Task Manager, so you can’t look at the processes, so you can cancel it. (I was never able to find it.)
• It stops Windows System Restore from working, making it so you can’t roll your computer back to before the infection happened.
• After I *reinstalled* Windows (albeit with a “Quick format”) Windows told me it couldn’t install to that partition because it had errors. A deletion of the partition and full format cured it, though.
• None of the virus scanners I use seemed to notice that anything was wrong. :-/
• And the kicker: It pops up “alerts” every 30 seconds telling you your computer is infected and advertises that you need to lay down $30 to get this special scanner to disinfect it. (ie: Criminal extortion.)

I had to format the stupid computer (twice) to kill it. Bleh.

An ounce of prevention for this thing would be to use a beefed-up HOSTS file. I’ve been using one for a couple of years, and it seems to help a lot. (It also has the side benefit of making annoying ads come up blank.) I found this site which gives aHOSTS file I use, and the latest version blocks this Antivirus 360 thing. You simply copy an ordinary text file into C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC\ changing the name HOSTS.txt to just HOSTS (without the file extension).

However, one downside to a beefy HOSTS file is, it *really* blocks advertisers, even if you happen to be interested in something. For example, occasionally there’s a text-ad in Google that I’d really like to see. Well, you can’t really get there by clicking on the ad. If you really want some kind of ad, you can delete its listing in the HOSTS file, or you can copy the URL from the link and cut out the parts going to the advertiser, leaving the parts going to the advertisee.

So, do yourself a favor, if you run Windows: get yourself a HOSTS file.