Monday update

Well, let's see. Gave twenty bucks to phone company, which will keep them occupied until next cycle (when they will want it all).

Has anyone heard of a new tabletop game called "Derivation"? It seems a bit like My Word and Says You!. I have one, if someone wants to play. Sadly I have not seen the packet of Cheapass Games I had in some time. I suppose I will have to re-buy them with Extra Cash (in Copious Spare Time).

I watched the Stevenote over a crappy Quicktime stream at home last night, and am still reading the commentary on various sites (macslash, osnews, etc).

Further incremental work on the file server setup at the house. Plug for pornview, a handy little image and movie viewer available in most distros.

I started in on the Adams books. I've read H2G2, Milliways, LUE, and am working my way through the romantic one. It's almost enough to make me want to go outside and meet people.... oh wait, no. Upon further consideration I was surprised to discover that I'd finished that one and started Mostly Harmless before this post.

The truck is out of the shop, and one of the idiot lights is staying on, so it'll have to go back.

Two crappy Supreme Court decisions this week, and those were covered by NPR. I cringe at the thought of what horrors they haven't mentioned yet have come out. And to top it off, the Chief Justice is stepping down, leaving a vacancy for the administration to fill.

I've started the wx Python Tutorial, and have been pleasantly surprised so far. Usually in a programming tutorial for new programmers or a new language, I get lost a bit, and more annoyingly, the examples don't work when I labouriously key them in. So far with wxPy, two sample programs down (both trivial) and the only mistakes were typos, which were easily corrected in pycrust. I'd have to say that for usability, wxPy is indeed spanking Tkinter and Java thusfar. See the site for more info on this crossplatform GUI toolkit.

Kill your TV

Well, it's pretty obvious that the lifting of the ban on television and radio advertisement of prescription medication has been a boon to the pharmaseutical (sp) companies, and there is some speculation that it is having the obvious effect (that consumers go to their HMO agents asking for drugs by their brand name). This is probably leading to unnecessary prescriptions of drugs (particularly the psychoactive ones), although it will take a few more years before the studies start piling up.

At least the woman in the adult ADD ad is sexy. Much better than those nasty ads for Paxil, which would probably grant a depressive incident to anyone healthy who watched it, unless they mistook it for a Red Bull ad. These ads are in the same school as the irritating ads for prescription sleep aids which air late at night and into the morning. I think it all began long ago with advertisements for analgesics that actually tried to give you a headache even if if you didn't already have one. The ads for migraine treatments .. Even thinking about those is not recommended.

Oh well, M*A*S*H is on soon.

Poor Annabelle. She has a bit part in one of those 1-800-DIAL-NTT commercials. And the show about sex dreams wasn't much of a step up from "Dinner And A Movie." Was Paul so hard to work with? In related news, Rhonda Shear is apparently still hosting Up All Night. Or so they said in her blurb as a guest on "Ask Rita".

Oh, one more thing. If someone would kill the woman who sings the EBay musical spots, it would help with the slow progress of humanity towards civilization. If you just take out the EBay executive veep responsible, I suppose that would be good, too.