Weird things happened to me in GTAIV last night.

First, the suicidal taxi. I was finishing up a job at Brucies, and for some reason didn’t feel like stealing a car (that road can get sparse sometimes anyway and cops love it too). So, I called Roman for a taxi. I waited and waited, but the blue dot never got to me. I looked at the big map, and saw that the blue dot was at the end of the docks, about a block away. I walked to the end of the dock and saw the taxi waiting for me, parked behind a container next to the warehouse. I got in, and the drive went into his hating-on-me spiel, as the AI tried comically to back out from the spot to get onto the street. Unfortunately, it poorly navigated the end of the dock, at a point where there’s a short car-length waterway between two piers. The taxi backed up, straddling the edge, then when its rear tire caught on the next pier, the taxi tried to pull forward. By that time it was too late, the front tire caught, and the car slowly tilted off the dock. I bailed from the car, but both me and the car ended up in the drink. The driver was still inside, and still whinging at me, until, I presume, he drowned. I got myself back onto land and walked.

At the end of Russian Revolution, where you have to escape past the cops, I managed to basically just steal a cop car, just as a cop was getting out of it. I’m surprised it wasn’t an auto-arrest at that point. I guess I caught the mechanics at a point where my entering the car and his exiting the car didn’t interact. So, weird, but a good weird.

Getting away from the warehouse, the road curves, which makes it really hard to get out of the wanted circle. So, I drove the police car up the side of the grass hill. Well, I didn’t quite make it, and it slid back in such a way that it ended up tightly wedged between a tree and a container or something. So I had to bail (with Jacob in tow through all this of course) and we hopped on a passing bike. (I didn’t even know you could ride a bike with an NPC; it was a crap shoot, but it works. Nice touch, though Jacob got thrown once.)

After dropping off Jacob, I was going to finish up for the night and head home, so I drove the bike back. As I was coming up a hill, a mack truck came out of nowhere and SMACKed directly into me, throwing me literally like 60 feet. I landed on some grass with barely a thread of health left.

Well crap, I don’t want to get back on that bike if I can help it, and I need to grab some food asap. I went up to a passing taxi and jacked it. Taxis are nice and sturdy and fast, so I figured it was the best option. But then I hear gunshots. I’m like, who is shooting? Wtf? And I hear “I teach you to steal my cab” or something like that. I realize that the damn cab driver I just jacked is packing, and shooting at me! I try bail up a side street but he nails me. That’s the first gun-toting cabbie I’ve encountered in the game.

Every time I sync my Zune — every time — it pushes another copy of The Last Poets - “Mean Machine” onto the device. It’s like my Zune is trying to warn me about the Man, which considering its origin, is pretty ironic.

I have 33 copies of the song on there right now as a result. This means that “Mean Machine” comes up inordinately often in shuffle mode. Sure, Zune software has pushed other dupes, but this one is really egregious.

This ordeal is only punctuated by the fact that the very first sounds in the the track are the words “Driving me NUTS!” And, fittingly, the title of the album this track appeared on was This Is Madness.

Maybe my Zune is trying to be a mean machine. Again, irony abounds.

Stealing your time, smooth and slick
with the latest trick to get rich quick
from nonsense at your mind’s expense
as your mind digs the scene
from the Mean Machine
designed to drive your brain insane

Who the fuck are these people?

Tay Zonday is K-Os meets Busdriver meets Mark Leyner.

All of which are good things, btw.

A few months ago we added a G3 350 iMac to our home network. Ever since then, we started seeing network blips, where our WRT54G would occasionally reset itself. It didn’t happen often enough to see a correlation. Over time it got worse, but not debilitatingly so, but we’d managed to suspect the Mac was at fault. Since the WRT54G had a real bad habit of “losing” its static WAN IP setting whenever it blipped, we went out and replaced it with a new WRT54GS. Things seemed to get somewhat better though not completely; there was still periodic problems when the Mac was being used.

Well, the user of the iMac went away for a week, came back, rebooted — which kicked in an update to MacOS 10.4.10 — and the network started having fits, the WRT54GS resetting itself every three minutes to the point that nothing of any practical value could be done on the network as connections kept getting hosed. The short-term solution was to pull the Mac from the network (though the problem was pronounced most when the Mac was surfing).

Over the next day or two I wracked my brain trying to think up options. I didn’t want to get a new router. I considered hubbing the network between the modem and the router, hooking the Mac straight into the hub (we have a spare IP from our ISP). But I couldn’t find my hub. I did find our old BEFSR41. And I thought, just for fun, why not see if the BEFSR41 hooked into the network will at least isolate the Mac’s damage to a second subnet.

So I wired the BEFSR41 straight into a free port on the WRT54GS, set it up as 192.168.2.* (instead of 1.*), and plugged the Mac into that.

It all works great now. I don’t know why. And I don’t dare update the FW on the second router.

The model names are all Linksys home routers. WRT54G is a 4-port wired/wireless device, as is WRT54GS; the latter claims to have some sort of enhanced speed. BEFSR41 is a wired-only 4-port device.

While it may be reasonable that there are those who believe that war is sometimes necessary, and perhaps forgiveable and repentable to believe that war is ultimately a good thing, it seems entirely deranged for there to be those who believe that war is the best thing that can happen to humankind. At dispensational millennialist (i.e. Left Behinders) blogs such as Rapture Ready, exactly this sort of people are currently creaming themselves (hey, you read them how you want) over the war breaking out between Israel and Jordan Lebanon. It’s bad enough that this is a direct analogue of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, and portends that other countries will follow the pre-emptive example of the Bush administration. It’s a whole other thing to eagerly and excitedly look forward to war. Some samples, courtesy of Harper’s:

“Praise God! We are chosen to be in these times and also watch and spread the word. Something inside me is exploding to get out, and I don’t know what it is.” (K: Now do you see where I got that metaphor from?)

“This is the busiest I’ve ever seen this website in a few years! I have been having rapture dreams and I can’t believe that this is really it! ”

“Tunnel ceiling collapsed on a car and killed a woman of faith, and we had the most terrifying storms I have ever seen here!! But, yes, oh happy day, like in your screen name , it is most indeed a time to be happy and excited, right there with ya!!”

And the most cultish, disturbing, Heaven’s Gate-like comment:

“I am excited beyond words that the struggle of this life may be over soon and I can finally be FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!”

Screw the Kool-Aid. Don’t drink the wine, either.

K and R survived the evening “lock-in” at the Seattle Museum of the Mysteries. The esteemed Museum hosts exhibits on every paranormally linked person, place, or thing in Washington, including but not limited to such topics as D. B. Cooper, Bigfoot, Georgetown Castle, even Mel’s Hole. Unfortunately, nothing on our favorite Seattle mystery, which to date has had no paranormal associations; although there is a corridor dedicated to former Seattleite Bruce Lee, who reportedly fought with and lost to a ghost.

Can’t say much about the museum’s in-house ghost tour, which takes you out back to a forgotten alley, the women’s rest room, and a utility closet, all of which may or may not be haunted by ghosts. In addition to their back hallways, the museum also believes that Pike Place Market, the Harvard Exit Theater, and even the Kalakala ferry boat, among other places, are haunted.

“It’s All In Your Head FM“, the live sound collage performance by Negativland and based on their Over The Edge radio show (and which R and I saw in Seattle in March) is available on CD.

The show, “It’s All In Your Head FM”, is a two-hour-long stereophonic look at monotheism in all its fundamental forms worldwide, and the all-important role played by the human brain in believing them. Dr. Oslo Norway is the founder of an all-new radio network, and his provocatively-reasoned position of God-less objectivity can actually start arguments. Is monotheism now doing more harm than good? Christianity and Islam are this year’s featured religions as Negativland asks you to contemplate some rather complex ideas about our brains’ beliefs in “documentary collage” form.

In Japan, in 1992, someone had a great idea…

What would be the best way for easily bored Japanese to learn stodgy old English?

Let’s teach people English by having slender young girls do weird calisthenics to bad pronunciations of the lesson’s phrases!

See them move on YouTube.