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August 27, 2002

red fish, blue fish

Once upon a time, a man took a bag of squirrels, and he shook it - and it was good. Then he opened the bag, and showed the squirrels the light, and there in the light lay two hoops for them to leap through - and it was good.

And the squirrels said:

"Hey - I'm going back in the bag! Shake it again, man!"

or

"Hoops! We don't need no steenking hoops! Choice is an illusion!"

and

"Look! Is that a third hoop, lying yet unconsidered over there?"

or even

"If you really sit down and think about it, the mouth of this bag is technically a hoop-like structure, in that one passes through its circumference on the way to somewhere else - but by leaving through it we have already made our decision about the kinds of hoops we're going to jump through in life, and all following hoops will eventually derive from that initial decision, and are therefore judgmentally founded in another type of hoop - an a priori super-hoop that..."

and sometimes

"Hey - I'm a square peg - and that there is a round hole!"

and so on.

So the man decided that it was time to close the bag, tie it off, and throw the whole thing in the river - and it would have been good, but the squirrels were too fast for him, and they swarmed out, crawled up his arms, and burrowed through his eyes and ears to the center of his skull, where they have been living ever since - after they put in fresh carpeting and track-lighting, of course.

August 16, 2002

fight

"You don't just lie out there and stare at the stars, Hawks! You'll just get rain in your face. You reach out and grab them sons of bitches and you live!"
- Arnold Nagy, Jack Chalker's Masks of the Martyrs

August 14, 2002

circumvallations

Why does Derksen update ever so infrequently?

Today, let's explore the path a file must travel to reach your screen!


  1. First, Derksen must move the file from his computer's hard drive to a 3.5" floppy disk. He must use the floppy and not FTP as he has no home internet access at this time.
  2. Then Derksen must take his floppy to a public library, where he must upload the files, and e-mail them to himself as either text or an enclosure because the public library's security system will not let him FTP directly to the TUG server.
  3. Now Derksen must go to his office at work, log in, download and save the attached files to that machine's hard drive. He can not simply bring the floppy in to work, as the office machines have no disk drives.
  4. Once this has been accomplished, Derksen may finally FTP the files to the TUG server.
  5. Using the magic of the internet, and the browser of your choice - you can download these files from our server, and view them on your computer!

Sheesh.

Needless to say, this involves quite a bit of driving from place to place - and if at any point a file chooses to become corrupted, it usually means starting right back over at step one again.

This sort of thing can become very frustrating, very fast.