K-Squared Ramblings

Deja Vu

I saw this and was absolutely certain CNET’s software had accidentally re-posted an old news article about Gnutella.

A day after developers at America Online’s Nullsoft unit
quietly release file-sharing software,
AOL pulls the link to the product from the subsidiary’s Web site.

As it turns out, Nullsoft did it again, with an encrypted collaboration program called Waste.

Anyone want to take bets on whether its brief posting will be enough for third-party developers to pick it up and run with it?

Beware!

Every once in a while, something that I see every day will just strike me differently. For instance, this bit from the sign printed on the window outside the lobby where I work:

NO SOLICITORS
In Case of Emergency Call…

Even interdimensional law firms need comp coverage

It’s the law: all employers in California have to provide work comp coverage for all their employees. Even Wolfram & Hart.

Normal law firms probably don’t have much of a premium. Evil law firms, however, might see a big increase. For this reason, I think they’re probably self-insured. That, and they can keep all medical treatment and administration entirely in-house (especially given that their “house” has locations on several worlds and lots of unofficial ties in this one), along with as much defense litigation as possible. I’d imagine they don’t incur many penalties either, since it’s likely they can turn back time to avoid late payments. And if an employee wants to argue that anything they’ve gotten is less than they deserve, I’d imagine the second phase of their employment isn’t long in starting.

Sample injured worker: Lindsey. Definitely injured on the job, so the injury is fully compensable. According to the California permanent disability rating guidelines, loss of the dominant hand between wrist and elbow, inclusive, where a prosthesis is possible, has a standard PD rating of 60%, meaning 60% of the jobs available wouldn’t hire you with that disability. When you adjust for age (assuming he’s just shy of 30) and occupation, both of which lower the rating, it ends up at 53%. This is, of course, not counting in psychiatric effects, which would probably raise the rating. So, if he settled his claim, which W&H would probably “encourage” him to do, he’d be entitled to at least $49,342.50 in compensation. And they’d have been in something of a bind later if he did settle, since he’d have ended up with minimal PD and they couldn’t legally recoup their money.

Way too much time on my (evil) hands.

Crimes against adulthood

I now have a Hermione toothbrush. I consider it revenge for all the times my mom wouldn’t get me theme merchandise when I was a kid.

Sometimes things are just perfect.

I got in to work Friday and was accosted by the back-up receptionist, who was, in a word, poinging. “Guesswhatguesswhatguesswhat?”

“What?”

Says the actual receptionist, from behind her desk: “I’m pregnant.”

Maybe this explains her diagnosis of me.

The perfect title for a Buffy spinoff

Unfortunately the name Slayers is already taken.

I can just see the Sunnydale news reports

(Spoilers for last night’s Buffy finale)

EARTHQUAKE DESTROYS CALIFORNIA TOWN

By Kelson Vibber, staff writer

A 5.9 earthquake struck the Central California town of Sunnydale Tuesday morning, rattling windows as far away as Los Angeles and San Francisco and triggering a massive sinkhole which appears to have buried the entire town. In an amazing twist of luck, however, the death toll may turn out to be zero.

Emergency workers dispatched from neighboring communities have reported the scene is one of eerie silence - largely because many of the town’s residents had left over the past few weeks.

A rising crime wave over the last several weeks may actually have saved thousands of lives. An atmosphere of hysteria had descended on the town, causing many residents to pack up and leave. “It was just getting crazy,” resident Joe Sweden told reporters. “Gangs were killing people at night, there was an honest-to-God riot at the high school… We’ve lived here for years, but it just got to the point where it wasn’t safe anymore. My wife and I took all our vacation time and took the kids to visit my brother in Cleveland. Let me tell you, I’m sure glad we left when we did!”

Mr. Sweden’s story was repeated over and over. Reporters covering the exodus, which caused traffic jams for three days the likes of which the city had never seen, found Sunnydale to be a virtual ghost town just a few days ago.

Search-and-rescue helicopter teams have begun combing the wreckage searching for survivors - or casualties. At present, it is not known how many residents were still in town at the time of the earthquake, although the scope of the destruction does not paint a promising picture for anyone who remained in the area.

Geologists at the California Institute of Technology, who measured the trembler at 5.9 on the Richter scale, are still trying to pinpoint the fault along which the quake occurred, as well as the cause of the sinkhole. Very little groundwater is used in Sunnydale, making it unlikely to be the result of over-pumping. The most popular theory at the moment is that a previously unknown cave system may have lain in wait below the city. If this cave structure were damaged in the quake, it could well have caused the city to collapse into the space below.

City employees have cut short their vacations in order to begin tracking down Sunnydale residents. The task could take months, as the city’s records were all kept locally - and many of those records that are recovered are unlikely to yield out-of-town contact information.

Representatives of the University of California were “stunned” by the unprecedented loss of one of their campuses. “We’re still in shock,” a spokesman for the University said. “We’ve been here since 1960, and suddenly the entire school is gone.

“What are we going to do with the students? Now that’s the million-dollar question. We literally haven’t had time to think about it. We lost everything: classrooms, offices, equipment. The best part is that we think everyone got out okay. The worst part is that we have to start from scratch. Do we open Merced early? Do we try to spread the students and faculty around to the other campuses? We just don’t know yet.” A new UC campus is already under construction in the San Joaquin Valley, and is scheduled to open in 2004. The “other UCSD” was best known for its nationally-recognized psychology program.

Sunnydale was founded in in 1899 by businessman Richard Wilkins. In fact, three generations of Wilkinses served as mayor of Sunnydale over the course of the century. The founder’s grandson, Richard Wilkins III, was killed in the 1999 gas explosion that destroyed Sunnydale High School during graduation ceremonies. Despite the presence of a military base (Camp Brendon, one of many bases closed in the late 1990s) and light industry, the city remained primarily suburban to the end.

Big finale….

How did we get to here?
How did this plot appear?
The show’s all done
It was really fun
But I just can’t raise that cheer
Tell me
How did we get to here?

(You better know the tune.)

Sound and Fury

I don’t like car alarms.

Mainly it’s a matter of “crying wolf.” They go off for the stupidest reasons and don’t signify an attempted theft, so everyone ignores them. I can imagine a lot of cars have been broken into or stolen despite the alarm because people heard it and assumed it was just the usual pointless squealing.

Last night was worse. At about 12:40 AM, we were woken up by a car alarm in the parking lot, echoing between our building and the next. Figuring the owner would get down there to turn it off, we waited it out. After 5-10 minutes I figured they’d had plenty of time to throw on a robe, walk outside and deal with it. This qualified as Disturbing the Peace.

I was ready to do something I had never done before: call the cops on my neighbors. (Not that I knew which neighbors it was, but I figured they could work it out from which space the blaring car was in.) The only reason I didn’t was that it took me so long to find the non-emergency number that they had finally turned the damn thing off by the time I was ready to pick up the phone.

Hey, I didn’t want to call 911 - that would’ve just added sirens to the mix.

To top it off, every few minutes from then until 1:30 I would hear the “bleep bleep” of someone turning an alarm on and off. Just enough to knock me out of half-sleep.

Shooting the Moon

Some idiot is out there taking flash pictures of the eclipse.

Stoked!

Drumroll, please.

As of 8:30 this morning, I am officially down to the weight on my California ID card. (180, if you care. I’m not shy.) I haven’t yet officially lost 10% of my starting weight, but I’m betting that by next week, I’ll have hit that goal. Not bad for 12 weeks.

And a very nice birthday present, too.

Stop flashing me

As one of the many working stiffs who can access the internet from work but has to share a connection, I would like to make a request of the corporate world at large:

STOP REQUIRING FLASH TO VIEW YOUR SITE!!!!!!

Everything I look at on the net while at work has to go through a server in northern CA, which doesn’t have Flash capability and probably never will, because it would be even slower if the 250 people using it were allowed to view bandwidth-hogging all-Flash sites. With the economy being what it is, bandwidth costs being what they are, and connection power needing to be split at most offices, I’m not sure any company should be upping the ante this far in the name of pretty pictures. And the defense that people can look at it at home isn’t too great, either, since DSL is out of reach of more working stiffs than web geeks want to admit, and Deity-of-Your-Choice only knows when it might creep into affordability.

So, please do what you used to do, and keep your non-Flash site online after the upgrade, instead of routing us to a page exhorting the wonders of Flash and attempting to bully us into downloading it. (Baaaa.) You’ll widen your audience with very little effort–and hey, aren’t non-Flash sites easier to maintain?

Eep

I just looked up and found out that I was so out of it yesterday, I left my iPod sitting out on my desk here at work all night…..

“Touched”: Getting into the Fray

The first thought I had when I saw the Weapon of Doom was, “A sundial?” Then I looked again and thought, “A gigantic jar opener?” Then Kelson said, “Hey, that’s Fray’s weapon!” and I noticed the blade. (Finally.)

So, if it’s there, and findable pretty fast (since I assume Caleb could shove, if not toss, those barrels aside pretty handily in a minute or less), why hasn’t Caleb gone down and gotten it? Why hasn’t he at least tried to wield it, even if the prophecy says he isn’t supposed to? One explanation: it has the power to hurt evil. (Yes, Great Axe of Hurt Evil (+15, +18). Moving on.) He can’t touch it without getting his First-endowed power weakened, and the First, far from being able to wield it, can’t even go near it without getting seriously damaged. More to the point, if this is the case, this thing can beat Caleb (to a bloody pulp–please!), and insofar as the First can be injured, the axe can do it. All that needs to be done is to disperse the First or break its projection mechanism.

Day 45. Would like to see Jasmine and Caleb on Celebrity Deathmatch. Apocalypse update: still coming along.

Still no Slayer army.

It’s a COLD, dammit

So I caught some kind of bug at the right time last week to have it really fully hit me on Saturday evening, while watching X2. I’d already been having the sinus pressure and sore throat, so I had my box of Kleenex with me, and I had fun timing my nose-blowing during explosion scenes. I slept 14 hours that night (getting up at 1:30 the next day) and lounged around doing nothing much yesterday, and decided I was well enough to come to work today. Well, in trying to rip off two packets of DayQuil, I ripped into the plastic of a third and had to take both pills. Normally, I only take one. Can we say “medicine head?” It’s supposed to have worn off by now, but I’m still a little spacey.

I was coming back from the bathroom and the receptionist asked, as I was punching in my door code, “How’re you feeling?” I don’t remember what I said, because her next line was:

“Is there any chance you could be pregnant?”

That about knocked me flat. I wanted to say, “WHAAAAAT???”, but settled for “Absolutely none,” and went in. I’m still trying to figure out how a stuffy head, sore throat, cough, body aches, and tendency to sneeze can be caused by pregnancy. Of course, the people in this office have tried to pin all sorts of my physical ailments on pregnancy. I don’t know what they find so cool about the idea, but I’m getting a little tired of it. Thing is, if I say so, they’ll just say, “You’re really irritable. Is there any chance you might be pregnant?”

Grrrrr.