Spam poetry

A new idea has been born.

A friend was showing me some hillarious spam he received today and pointed out the poetic quality of much of it.

I had a go at writing some, and here it is. It makes no sense whatsoever, but the process was so stimulating and fun I'm going to share it with everyone whether they like it or not :) I don't know what it is, but the process of writing this stuff is so damned hillarious; and refreshing, like you've given your mind a good exfoliating back stratch. I think something like this should be instituted in schools at the start of every day, after singing the national anthem every morning and reading prayer books.

Here it is in all its craziness.

Crushing cans to fritter night into frightened google daisies. Rushed into space to be hurled backwards for the fight fist.

We touch dancing listlessly. She kicks along, my cat fur hat plops flat to frisk round embellishments and I will commit it. Deep earth rumbles; the red alcoholic strips cake from nosed giants. Integrating the root mean square shops happily for pantyhose ruin.

Push dial welter in the solarium crust. Mortar bosses like nicotine chastity. Smash vibe to wrestle weightless smacked porn. Rip roadtrip because she always does. He punches tree ferns and jumbles hard knuckled cement calls. Darling one, love to see you with purple seashells and slapping waveforms.

Neon son with guns to Iraq. Bushed president calls gladwrap to orbit. It happens sometimes to slip knee first in bangles. 1800 562 102 24 hours.

Now the cool part. I'm going to write a program to generate this stuff, and post some of the results here. Give me a couple of days at the most. Work is boring at the moment anyway.

I'd almost forgotten about

the little browser that couldn't.

I was reading an article this morning and found myself wrinkling my nose and dumbly mouthing What the...? Having used Firefox pretty much exclusively on PC since it's release and Safari on my mac (when it was still alive and kicking) I've gone and forgotten about security vulnerabilities in browsers for the most part. Apparently this flaw also affects IE 7 Beta 2 preview aswell. Looks like they've really solved their security problems at Microsoft.

In other news, Microsoft has delayed it's consumer version of Vista again (anyone who can recite all Vista versions in less than 10 seconds deserves a medal). Apparently we can all look forward to further security enhancements as a result. Whoopee.

Well, that being said I'm off to close all the firefox browser windows I have open. 99% CPU usage for a bunch of tabbed windows just doesn't make much sense to me either. Bah, Humbug!

A morning about her

Teacher types sit in traffic and exercise latent horn blowing tendencies. I see kids scuffing knees in playgrounds and my ears are cringing like devils. Hands furrow into my pockets and I realise with alarm that they aren't mine. So I crease my body forward in annoyance and imagine exploding car shells blowing debris into treetops while unprotected arses speed over bitumen. Feet below me wade into the weight of today and I see that I am only here and now, and it doesn't really matter anymore. I'll follow rules and learn about history so as to marvel like every other sentient bastard, how we never learn a thing from our past. It's our social contract, and considering arguments for erasing those who dissent I whoosh back to a trudging monotonous meditation on Bourke St. The whole dark grey line of it is being lit with my memories as I wash past and lacquer and plaster experiences over street lights and cafe shopfronts. Brett Whiteley is journeying out for his morning paper in paint splattered overalls 100 metres in front of me. People heavily riffled with life are sitting in languorous loungerooms having breakfast and staying sane with trivial rituals. The whole of Surry Hills is awakening as I realise we're just a slash of babble and noise on rich layers of filth and life. So very many layers. I imagine breaking free and surfacing outside of all this and gazing at an azure firmament mixed with streaks of magenta. My legs are kicking to keep me afloat and I implicitly understand that there would be no going back, so I submerge back into a world of translucent broad leafed trees and joyous seed pods wiggling to greet the rising sun. I force my lips and cheeks to mould a smile and ignore the pressure in my chest. It hurts so much, and I shouldn't think of art or music, so I scrape the stylus across the record playing in my head, and snap the cantilever with my fingers. I should bury her soon or by god the stink of it all will drive me crazy.

Intro to madness

I can't scream, and I shut my mouth with a fastener looped around the gap in my front teeth. My foot long arms want to flap like nailed wings to prove they can move, but I'm sitting in front of these two, arms rigid beside me and I slip into something like a black sea, a chilling core of panic. He moves to watch me, eyes kindling interest with a wryness about his mouth, and his face containing a likeness of chilled slate. The other man is absorbed with the birth of our creativity, our strewn childbirthing on the white-washed board, and he draws his fingers through it like it was detritus - a rubble of hip bones and bloody fingernails. Like an apocethary he mixes our labours and degusts them, paying attention to the nick of sinew catching between his teeth and the ear wax which runs from his ear down his neck. He is a connoisseur for the mad. The other man laughs with glee and points his body at the mess of finger and bone. The light of his mania plays like a darkened cinema, like a schizophrenia of light. The scene spins. Slowly at first, then with a dizzying and blinding brightness. The coruscations move me, and I fit. I spit out my tongue and writhe to the rhythm of his kaleidoscope. Outside of me I hear myself singing of loneliness and heartache, and I hear forlorn voices joining me. We hang in a discordant etherworld of music and we hurt and we cry. And I am alone.

I'm a life hacker..

and proud of it. Now hold my hand.

A guy at work has been changing his work practices, indeed his life practices by reading and religiously applying life hacker principles. I hid my bemused expression everytime he mentioned his colour coded email inbox, or his theory of surrounding himself with people who disagree with him. He even fervently encouraged me to to play devils advocate with him in a meeting when I was sitting there about to dose off, chewing my cud in solitude.

But the thing that takes the cake, the act that exceeds all gayness has to be the people who attend Life Hacker parties - and photograph them - AND put them on flickr.com. God damn it. Chris, I thought I knew you. How could you betray your legion of loyal fans like this?

Relativism would make me question my sanity here. One friend decides to seriously considers the merits of a "fixed earth" and the others become "life hackers". So-fucking-help-me-Jesus. Amen.

Magic realism

Finished reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel García Márquez a couple of days ago. What an amazing story. Wow. When I finished reading it I think I must have sat there with the closed book in my hand staring at it with a ridiculous beatific grin on my face for at least 30 minutes remembering all the characters I'd met and the beautiful way I'd been whisked through their world. It was the most content I think I've felt since I last ingested mescaline :)

Some favourite quotes:

"She went out into the street on one occasion, when she was very old, with shoes the colour of old silver and a hat made of tiny flowers, during the time that the Wandering Jew passed through town and brought on a heat wave that was so intense that birds broke through window screens to come to die in the bedrooms."

"The letters looked like clothes hung out to dry on a line and they looked more like musical notation than writing."

"A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors."

Solitude is obviously a central theme, and I'm not going to launch into a review of the book because I wouldn't do it justice in my current hung-over state, but it's a beautiful theme. Very "human". The whole story is incredibly moving and enchanting. One of the best books I've ever read.

Bright Satanic Offices

Stumbled across an almost interesting article today, Cubicles: The great mistake. Apparently the original creator of the "cubicle" denounced them as subversions of his original design. What a suprise. Apparently the original design even had desks of differing heights, accommodating working whilst standing :)

Businesses who require employees to file into a concrete box in the sky every day, wear bibs around their necks while sitting in little pens in front of beeping machines alt-tabbing and performing the glorified menial exercise of telling them what to do have it all wrong. How backwards have we got it?

From the horse's mouth

The guy who hacked a mac in the first 20 minutes of the rm-my-mac comp isn't impressed with Mac OS X security.

Gwerdna concluded that OS X contains "easy pickings" when it comes to vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to break into Apple's operating system.

"Mac OS X is easy pickings for bug finders. That said, it doesn't have the market share to really interest most serious bug finders," added gwerdna.

I wonder if this will be a new trend for all those mac-ians who barely know how to open an xterm yet are adamant they have the most secure operating system in the world? :)

OS X still kicks arse though :)

Battery Programmers

Rows of restless balding programmers sit in tiny environmentally controlled pens stretching RSI'ed hands, laying beautiful little Perl modules, C++ headers and ancient Java-like objects.

We're moving to another floor in my office building soon, and I'm sad to say that the company I work for obviously thinks that putting people into smaller cubicles is going to emancipate a deluge of creativity. Watch "engagement scores" (simulate knife stabbing) shoot through the roof you silly, fat, over-paid twats.

I'm quite outraged, and as a sign of protest I am, from here on in, going to program standing up. Donald Knuth does it and so did Einstein. Viva la Rebellion I say. Screw The Man with their expansive "harbour view" desks who insists on a 9 to 5 working day and placing their "creative geniuses" in claustrophobic cubicles (and David, you're not a creative genius - you write movie scripts and average ones at that). Oh, and I'll play Kittie at an ear-bleeding level and simulate screaming metal chicks thrashing long black hair whilst playing air guitar. What can they do? Sack me?

Who's going to register www.programmer-lib.org.au first?