scenes from a waiting room

For those of you who wonder how anyone could ever mispronounce my name, let me just say that during my last visit to the doctor, the nurse retrieved me from the waiting room under the sadly uncommon "ush-kaya" ('ush' as in 'slush').

In other little-to-do-at-home fronts, there's been a lot of interesting news recently, esp. for bittorrent users, as partially chronicalled in my list of interesting news stories. For the most part, MPAA is not only suing sites but launching electronic attacks on them as well. All of this while p2p networks from the napster-era try to market themselves to content providers as the new, legal, distribution channel.

Also, I've been playing about with ObjectDock in an attempt to get over my OSX envy (final conclusion: bit buggy and sucks up power on laptops, but certainly very very cool).



On a more cultural note, I've recently become a big fan of Ann Telnaes's political cartoons. Check her stuff out if you're bored and cynical.

web celeb

I was going to make a facetious comment about me being a "web celeb" due to yatta, but when I went to go link the Google results page, I discovered my site is no longer the number one hit. In fact, it doesn't actually appear in the results at all anymore. A quick check to my counter showed that starting Dec. 9th, the site daily hits halved in number (600 to 300)... a moderate Google effect, I guess.

Anyways, the unindexing of the site is probably a good thing; now when you Google for the family name, dancing japanese men in their underwear are no longer hit #5. On the downside, my actual website, wings that work seems to have been unindexed as well....

ass in ascii

it's been inquired if the title of this blog is meant to signify an ass in ascii. no.

it's a statement about confined expression. i like the aesthetics of an exclamation in parens just to begin with... it's also is a mild allusion to a Piet Hein grook:



AN ODE TO MODESTY

Talking of successful rackets
modesty deserves a mention.
Exclamation marks in brackets
never fail to draw attention.

I seem to have a bad habit of creating titles requiring explanation -- the hallmark of a bad writer, but now you know.