Our Dumb Blog

I just got the second best voicemail ever:

Alright, I’ll talk to post painting give me a call when you get a the problem and Friday night buddy, Hey. He’s danced.

The best was this one, on my birthday:

Hello Berck, this is okay. I don’t like you, happy birthday. Actually, it’s the 19th. The error that was my birthday but it’s still dignity there, but that we could do it all but one on doll happy birthday happy birthday happy birthday. Give me a call at your do a good day pack. Hope your day’s going to bed. Should Brian well. 1 top and.

Google Voice isn’t really all that bad, but it doesn’t like messages left from handsfree devices in cars.

Obama’s recent decision to hold Yemenites in Gitmo forever is probably his most disappointing action yet. As usual, Dahlia Lithwick speaks some good sense.

Okay, since there was much grousing about the insoluble captchas, they’ve been removed. It appears that they’ve been cracked anyway. 2,801 spammy comments got through in December, and another 1,145 in January alone thus far. I’m guessing they just run the audio through a speech-to-text engine. The audio gets randomly distorted so you can’t do binary matching on it, but Google could still do speech-to-text on it pretty well, I bet. That’d be how I’d do it. Make Google do the crunching for you. Fortunately, WordPress is really good figuring out what’s spam and what’s not, so I’m not going to worry about it, unless spam comments start appearing.

I’m not asleep. I haven’t slept well the past couple of days. Tonight, I was reading the internets on my Droid in bed, when Joanna woke up and told me, “Why don’t you go drop your cheese in there?” I’m not really sure what that means, but I gathered it meant the light was bothering her. She doesn’t like it when I Droid in bed, but, of course, she doesn’t notice unless she wakes up. So I left. The advantage to Droiding in bed is that when I get tired I’m already in bed, and can go straight to sleep when I get tired. If I go into the study, I get engaged in some project and won’t realize when I’m tired enough to go to sleep.

I’ve been trying hard to remain on a semi-sane sleep schedule even though I’m unemployed. It would be so easy to drift, but I find my projects go better when I’m on a normal schedule and Jonah gets less annoyed. The short days aren’t helping, either. I don’t mind the dark at 4:30pm, but I find that my mood gets substantially worse when the sun sets. There’s a gnawing sense of hurriedness and unaccomplishment that starts out imperceptibility and grows subtly, but eventually becomes so irritating that I take notice. When I do notice, I realize that it’s been going on for several hours. I can’t prove it’s related to the dark, but it feels like it is. I’m not sure how I’ll do in Alaska if I ever get there.

Alaska jobs hire in the spring.

The bittering agent in my cans of compressed air annoy me, not because I’m trying to get high from inhaling it, but because it’s so intense that blowing the dust off a strip of film leaves a bitter taste in my mouth for hours.

Does anyone still say, “the net”? It sounded weird when I heard it on Buffy last week.