Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").

links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   testdrive its algorithm
Thursday, May 9 2002

I was researching the AMD Athlon XP the other day and ran across a curious page where Arthur Andersen signed off on performance tests whereby 1.4 GHz processors were given the 1700 "model number." What made the page curious was that it was still on the site. You'd think corporate websites would be moving like liars with pants on fire to shed web pages having the disgraced Arthur Andersen signature. If anything, that signature (dated late February, 2002!) draws more, not less, attention to the discrepancy between the model number and the gigahertz rating. Mind you, I love Athlon processors and think it's great that Intel has a competitor, but for the love of God, we're talking the folks who lent their John Hancock to Enron and countless other Ponzi schemes here.

On a completely unrelated note, I love how when I search for "vodka tea" in Google, it suggests "vodkatea." This indicates that Google's decisions about what is a word are entirely automatic, not human-dictated.
Since Google is widely-regarded as the best-provider of relevant search results (it is, after all, catalyst by which Gretchen reunited with me after a 12 year estrangement), it's always fun to testdrive its algorithm with words near and dear to my life (and the lives of others I know). Here are some results that give me particular pride:

bathtub (or bath tub): #1 is Bathtubgirl.com
randomly: #1 is Randomly Ever After
appalachians: #3 is my father's Forests of the Central Appalachians Project
big fun: #2 is my The Big Fun Glossary
tussin: #1 is my Tussin Adventures in Charlottesville

trench coat (or trenchcoat mafia): #1 is my Trenchcoat Mafia page

Sadly, I just noticed that searches for dextromethorphan place my DXM Page in sixth place (it was second until very recently). Then again, I haven't edited that page since April 29th, 1998 and its links are probably all dead. (I can actually remember the time before I thought the web was a labor-intensive media.)

This afternoon I spent a considerable time in the basement Batcave, the first use I'd made of that computerized office in over a month. I spent the time surfing the web, drinking vodka, and being outgoing in AOL Instant Messenger. That last activity is rare for me.

For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?020509

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