Because I didn't get enough gay at Folsom Street Fair yesterday:

moar funny pictures

I had dinner with thomasroche on Friday night, and the subject came around to social networking. I secretly loathe the fact that a small portion of my life has been consumed by updating crap on about 6 different social networking sites. I wouldn't mind making it just one site, but just as surely as demographics rule the social networks, I'd lose certain parts of my demographic that I just can't bear to be without.

For example, MySpace. There are some total retards on MySpace that I could totally do without, but my honestly nice but technologically impaired friends will be left out if I vacate MySpace. So I have to do that one. I have to do Facebook as well - a majority of folks seem to have migrated to this, even though I am sworn to create a Facebook group called "If this Facebook Group reaches one million I will kill the next person that makes a stupid Facebook group". This will be right after I fake starving a peccary in the name of Art and broadcasting it via a webcam just to get people on Facebook to protest. I can't do without LinkedIn, either. I actually USE it, although I can't say it's made me any money yet. I did get help with a SAN problem via LinkedIn. THAT ruled.

There's too many social networking sites out there. They piss me off. It's easy enough to want them all to die, but would that really solve the problem?

I'm making gumbo tonight for thomasroche. I don't make it like most folks because 1) I like butter and 2) I like okra.

Darren's File' Gumbo

1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup flour
1 large onion, diced
1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley
1/2 cup chopped celery
1 cup chopped banana pepper
1 cup sliced okra
1 chopped and seeded jalapeno pepper
6 cloves minced garlic
4 cups chicken broth
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon gumbo file'
2 lbs of sausage and shrimp.

Combine butter and flour in a pot and cook for 5 to 10 minutes, stirring constantly, until it starts to turn a golden brown color. This is the roux.

Pan fry the cut up okra in some butter.

Add onions, parsley, celery, peppers, and garlic and cook about 10 more minutes or until vegetables are tender, stirring regularly.

Add broth, salt, okra and creole seasoning.

Cover pot and simmer 15 minutes stirring occasionally.

Add your meat at this point and simmer an additional 10 minutes.

Ladle over steamed white rice.

Tags: recipes

Bruce Sterling writes a blog for Wired, and I've known him ever since the Electronic Frontier's Foundation hooked me up with him while he was writing the HACKER CRACKDOWN (which you can read for free on the Net). I recently started reading his blog again, and was absolutely amazed to find that the Department of Homeland Security and NIH decided to put a Level 4 biocontainment lab in Galveston, a city that was destroyed by a hurricane (wait, wasn't there only ONE American city ever destroyed by a hurricane?) in 1900. There are two being built -- the other is in a residential area of Boston. Don't you all feel safe now?

The movie clip is one of Thomas Edison's first movies, showing men searching for one of the 6000 fatalities of this storm in the rubble of downtown Galveston. As the article says, imagine this movie in the present day, and they're looking for ebola and lhasa infected ferrets and monkeys!

I posted "Sloppy Drunk Lisa Nova" before on this LJ, but since yesterday I've been watching Lisa Nova's "Is McCain Palin's bitch?" and laughing my ass off just because. Today she added this video, featuring herself as Sarah Palin in a slapfight with Barack Obama.

Lisa Nova's pretty damned funny!

Today I made a flippant remark that generated a fuckload of publicity.

I'm not used to doing this, at least not on this level. But I really had no idea what my words entailed for me or my company. Basically, I am in the middle of a giant recabling/equipment upgrade project for tribe.net and in the middle of this we have to take out the load balancers and reprogram them to be redundant. Because of this, we couldn't use the normal site down page on tribe.net so I told a contractor exactly the following: "We just need to get a site down page, put something up and we'll replace it with the regular page later."

Well, the contractor replaced it with this:

===
We're down, but don't worry, we'll be back up soon!



We promise to buy you all a pwnie when we're done

===

For those of you not thoroughly enveloped in the exploding sack of excrement that is Web 2.0, The Fail Whale is the perfect example of a meme perhaps becoming bigger than the organization or network that spawned it. I have my doubts about Twitter ( http://www.twitter.com ) personally, mostly because I have that "show me the money" attitude towards every Web 2.0 company I see. How does Twitter make money? Well, personally I think that the Fail Whale has made that point moot. No matter what Twitter does, whatever accomplishments they may achieve in the future, it will all be completely and horribly overshadowed by their contribution to society in the area of humor in regards to failure. In other words, nothing they ever do will ever erase the Fail Whale.

The Fail Whale is the creation of a Chinese born artist, Yi Ying Lu. It's a perfect example of instant fame created out of thin air. The Twitter folks needed a error.html page -- the page you see when the server is overloaded. Looking on a stock photography website, they picked the iconic image of a whale being hoisted aloft by doves with ropes -- a folly as surely doomed to failure as a poor single webserver trying to keep up with 5,000 requests per second (that would actually take about 4 webservers before I was comfortable with handling that many requests). As Twitter felt growing pains (and all web sites do, don't let anyone fool you), the image got burned into users brains more and more.

I love this image. My contractor knew I did too. So I laughed my ass off when I saw it, and then I told him to link to http://www.failwhale.com so maybe we could send some of our 129,000 people a day over to Yi Ying Lu to buy a Fail Whale coffee mug or t-shirt. This is one meme near and dear to my heart at the moment, because my job is pretty much like trying to move a whale by myself -- a fact very few people really give two shits about but it is turning out to be far more rewarding than I thought. And now it turns out that my offhand comment to "just throw something up" has given me a little bit of a boost to get through this day full of fail. And folks have started buzzing about it, which was completely accidental -- much like the Fail Whale's original fame.

There's no question this work on tribe.net was needed. The site has needed a major overhaul, starting with the servers. I am just scared now that my offhand comment has drawn more attention to tribe.net than I meant it to, and that when the site comes back up it will have a crush of visitors. You folks have no idea how much we DO NOT need that at this point -- I'm only halfway done with everything we are installing!

So, I just have to say this in closing: to all you tribe.net users -- we'll be back soon. But we may have a new "Site Down" page.

So, last night I forced myself to take some time out to get out of the house. I've been doing a lot of walking but not a lot of socializing, and with my friends that usually means alcohol. Of course, the standing Tuesday night haunt is Drunken Monkey at Annie's -- cheap drinks, no cover, and games -- card games, dominoes, and a couple of broken down wheelchairs to drunkenly race around the nightclub once everyone's got a belly full of whiskey.

Last night, blaugirl and penguinoid introduced me to Uno.

Now, I love card games -- games you play with a deck of cards. My grandmother and I used to play a neat game called Spite and Malice, which is still my favorite game. I learned Hearts and Spades in jail (yes, we played for cigarettes), and poker is a recent obsession -- I only played Texas Holdem recently, but I've been playing Five Card Stud as long as I can remember.

UNO, though. Why have I never played this game? OK, so it's not played with a standard deck. I can't imagine why I never played this, though. I liked it immediately, as there was a little bit of strategy involved. Melanie won the first and second game due to my newbie mistakes, but the third game? ALL MINE BABY. I think I am going to play this game again.

UNO. Who wants some?*

*I am probably adapting this attitude because Evil Dead 2 was playing on the TV.

I am too, but it's mostly thinking about everyone else's hand-wringing and hyperbole. Watching Ray Nagin call this the "storm of the century" and scaring everyone to 'get out' mostly. Nobody remembers Betsy. Nobody remembers Camille. Nobody remembers Rita. So many hurricanes have hit or have hit very close to New Orleans, and the only one everyone can remember is Katrina, mostly because Anderson Cooper had the bad taste to take pictures of bodies floating in the scummy floodwaters. I know the truth -- that there's no way things will be as bad as Katrina because the worst hit neighborhoods probably haven't been rebuilt.

Now I'm watching Ray Nagin saying "Looters will be arrested". Um. Yeah. docbrite is holed up in her place with a large handgun, as are most of the New Orleans residents that learned their lessons last time and are staying in town -- who are you kidding? Looters will be fucking SHOT, as it should be.

What pisses me off most is that I watch memorial videos that call Katrina the "first destruction of a major American city in the US's history", the "greatest loss of life in a natural disaster on American soil" and crap like that. Everyone always forgets San Francisco in 1906... except the people who live here. I'm still blown away by people who prefer hurricanes and tornadoes to earthquakes, but I am very glad that the scale of recent hurricanes is teaching greater numbers of folks the lessons that we can't seem to forget here in earthquake country: get a gun, always have enough food and water for a couple of weeks on hand, and don't expect the government to come save your collective asses or be any kind of help -- but support your local emergency responders as much as you can and be prepared to get involved in helping your neighbors.