Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

Every now and then I'll be taking a shower and some song will come to me. Typically its whatever was playing before I went to bed, or some commercial jingle. Sometimes its actually creative. Had the idea for a Bob Dylan remake the other week, and just now got around to writing the whole thing. Without further ado, 'Tapping on my Keyboard':

Nothing's left for me to do
They say that I'm to be abhorred.
Unless they realize its untrue
I'm stuck here tappin on my keyboard.

Tap-tap-tappin' on my keyboard
Writing down my last request
Tap-tap-tappin' on my keyboard
Til they come for my arrest

Nothing's left for me to say
When people want me in the ward.
Now all my rights have gone away
I'm stuck here tappin on my keyboard.

Tap-tap-tappin' on my keyboard
Writing down my last request
Tap-tap-tappin' on my keyboard
Til they come for my arrest

Meaning
The original song (lyrics found here) was from the movie "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid", and used in the death scene of Slim Pickins. My version is written from the standpoint of a hacker who faces criminal charges thanks to a wonderful society where hackers are assumed evil and never have good motives (not unlike the plight of Christopher Soghoian last fall, in fact his case is what I was thinking of while writing this).

About a week ago I asked for a recommendation of a good RPG to play. Having kicked my WoW account goodbye and not really ready to pick up Tabula Rasa for a bit, I've been wanting a good single-player RPG. A friend pointed me towards Oblivion, the fourth game in the Elder Scrolls series. I played Morrowind a few years back, and while I didn't get sucked into the story, the game play was decent enough that I figured I'd give Oblivion a shot.

(Slight Spoiler warning... nothing end-game)
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If you're like me, you like things orderly, but hate having to clean and wait until things get way out of hand and frustratingly hard to use until you do so. My desk is a prime example, I set it up really nice and neat, and just two months later its overflowing with random change, pens, a bottle of "Cheese"-Wiz and other assorted crap. Its starting to bug me so I wanted to clean it, the trouble is all the loose stuff ends up in one pile. Clearly just dumping everything into the same cup isn't making things neater, its putting it into a smaller container. Two night's ago I was reloading my ammo dry box when I noticed something, 30-30 rounds are about the same diameter as a pencil and the tray they came in (from Remington, I can't speak for other brands) looked almost like a pencil holder. Intrigued I put the rest of the 30-30 rounds away and started putting my pens and some dry erase markers into the (empty, of course) tray. They all fit! I've got regular pencils, pens, mechanical pencils, dry erase markers (the small kind) and even sharpies in there now. It is weighted well enough at the bottom that it doesn't randomly fall over, and because its a nice long tray it sits alongside the edge of my cubicle, out of the way yet easily accessible! This little win has given me the drive to start cleaning the rest of my desk up and hopefully I can find some other little tricks to keep it clean this time.

I've been badly addicted to I Can Has Cheezburger for a while now. Like me, those pictures are cute and funny. Unlike those pictures, I know how to grab them all! I finally got fed up with having to click next, and decided "What the hey", I can get all the URLs for the direct images! So I cooked up a quick Perl script that spits out a text file, one line for each image. Of course, once you have the aforementioned file, wget becomes your best friend. I needed a quick script success, and this little tidbit has both provided that, and given me something to do for the rest of the wee--- erm, night.