I will be the first to admit, this is a little strange, as this post is directed towards a specific person, with no real value to anyone but that person, which is just weird, but its *my* blog, so there! :-)

When it comes to giving someone flowers, there really are only two reasons for it. There is a distant third, with events such as weddings and funerals, where it is more of tradition than anything else. By and large, a flower delivery, especially at someone’s work means either a) you fucked up pretty bad or b) you are really pushing for getting some action later on that evening.

Since I have little hope of “getting any” anytime soon, you guessed it, yeah, I fucked up. I think in part why the I fucked up flowers means so much to so many, especially when delivered to someone’s work, is that it shows everyone else around what a retard I was, which plays nicely to the whole situation.

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Tonight is one of those nights where I am at home, alone, with very little to do. It has been years since I was interested in “partying” or even social drinking. My girlfriend, on the other hand, has taken a few less trips around the sun, and is still very much into getting her social fix on weekends. Generally, she does not “pull all nighters” like tonight, but seeing as how it is a friends birthday, it is at least, a justifiable excuse. It has the added bonus of her being far from driving a car while just a few too many over what I personally call safe. So what the hell, I get bored, and she gets to let off a little steam, all in the name of safety… w00t!

She is pretty good about it, I get routine calls throughout the night to let me know she has not fallen victim of a smooth talking bar predator, and it was one of these calls that got me thinking. I just got one of these new fangled Apple Cinema Displays, the 23″ model. I have had two others, the ones in the plastic case, it was just time for a upgrade, I know the value of my old model is getting less and less, so it just makes sense to get into a new model. The IRS thanks me for these things anyway.

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This is new to Mac OS X Tiger, and I am not liking it. I am lazy, I enter in urls in the form of just the name, so no .com, as I assume it will default to the .com. Enter “macupdate” or “macfixit” and you end up at domain registration pages. It seems to end up at http://macupdate and http://macfixit. I have no idea what is going on, tcpdump kind of shows me what Safari is up to, but why this behavior changed, I have no idea. I have seen it do other odd things as well, where I get a message that “there is no website configured at this address”, either way, it is new behavior, is not intuitive, and needs a fix.

Over the weekend I updated to OS X 10.4 Tiger. It went pretty smooth. There are a few things that are just going to take some time to get used to, but most have been covered in detail on other blogs. I do have one issue that is driving me bonkers. The drop shadow under the main Finder title bar is darker on the left than on the right. I have looked at it on three computers so far, this is new to Tiger, and seems to happen on all machines I update to Tiger.

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I am not entirely sure how far to take this one, one idea is to start at the beginning and explain what torrents are, how they work, and why they are cool, the other is to jump right in and explain why I think it is time for “TivoTorrents” and what exactly they are. I tend to be verbose, looks like I am going to take the long winded road, feel free to skip past the “Introduction to Bit Torrent” if you already know what it is and how it works.

By now, it is safe to say that everyone knows about peer to peer networks, or at the very least, you know it is a place where folks swap files and other stuff with one another, usually illegally. The problem with these p2p networks as they are called, is that they are not particularly fast, you are pulling a single file from a single other user out there. At least, thats how it was when I was a kid :-) It has gotten a little smarter and files that are identical are pulled from more than one source, but in the end, your simply downloading a file. On the plus side of this is that there is very little that can be done to stop all this. When you perform a search for a file, you are searching an index off most of the known computers within that p2p network, there is no single source to take out, much to the RIAA’s and MPAA’s chagrin.

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In this day of cell phones and internet connections, I have this sneaking suspicion that many kids out there have no idea what a rotary phone is. As time goes on, less and less are going to know what in the heck a “pager” is. I remember how cool I thought I was to be one of the first in high school to have a pager. Generally, I would put it in “stealth” mode, aka: vibrate, so others did not know I even had one. Imagine one of them vibrating on a table, apply that to a child who was born of a parent who had a drug problem, and you get “pager babies”. It’s all fun and games to laugh about stuff like this, but when it hits a little closer to home, it does make you think twice.

I was about seventeen years old or so, my good friend at the time had a girlfriend whom I have maintained friendship with over the years. She is generally a pretty good person. She happens to be one of those people that no matter how bad they fuck up, something allows me to just keep continuing to be friends with her.

So today, we are going to talk about Nina, a friend whom I have known for ages. Nina is one of those flakey people, but once you have her attention, you generally get her full attention. I suppose that’s in part what I like about her, the introvert in me just does not deal well with competitive social surroundings, Nina has no problem keeping it one on one. The hard part is getting her in that one on one. The times I have sat around waiting on her ass to show up are countless. So yeah, she has a tendency to be a little on the late side, but I have grown used to it and simply don’t wait around for her, or at least, I don’t alter my schedule in any way in the hopes that she will actually show up.

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