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").



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   drinking & downloading
Saturday, March 21 2015
We'd be celebrating Nancy's birthday on Monday, so among the things I did today was paint a picture of her dog Jack with Bruce, the large-headed Pit Bull belonging to her brother-in-law that she and Ray frequently dogsit for weeks at a time. It's much easier now than it used to be to surprise people with paintings of things near and dear to their hearts; all I have to is pick through the many photos they or their spouses have posted on Facebook until I find the perfect one. Under my rules, I get to drink on days when I complete paintings, I did most of the painting under the influence of a recreational 120 milligram dose of pseudoephedrine, confident that I would later be able to cushion the inevitable jitters with a powerful depressant. Here is the painting that resulted:


The painting. Bruce is in the foreground and Jack is the black blob behind. These small paintings are like little painted boxes and when I just photograph the main two dimensional image, something is lost, so I've photographed it at an angle.

I don't often have reason to leave the compound, and usually when I do, it's on some social call with Gretchen and perhaps the dogs. Sometimes, though, it's nice to go run errands on my own. Today I didn't have much reason to go other than the fact that there was no good beer in the house, and it's always best when planning a day of drinking to be sure there is a good IPA (or something similar) on hand. So I took the dogs on a drive out to 9W, and I managed to find a few things to buy in both the Home Depot and the ShopRite. I love the feeling of walking around in public when I'm jacked up on pseudoephedrine; in the past I've described it as being like a space probe from an alien civilization effortlessly blending in. But I also feel an uncanny empathy for everyone I see that I don't normally experience. This was true even during my brief foray into the Hudson Valley Mall to see if the Radio Shack there was still in the process of going out of business (it wasn't; everything was gone, including the Radio Shack sign). I've ordered some four-pin Dupont connectors with attached wires for use in my barometric wind direction sensor, but they're on a slow boat from China and I was wondering if perhaps I could get something like that today from the mall. But that is a strangely difficult item to find; the closest thing might be the wires that used to connect CD drives to an audio jack on the motherboard of computers back in the 1990s, though those usually only have three conductors. I need four conductors to carry ground, positive five volts, and both data wires of an I2C connection. It looks like I'm going to have to wait.

Back at the house, I took a number of teevee breaks from my booze-and-pseudoephedrine-fueled computer work, some of which was real work on projects for which I will eventually be paid. When I was at my computer, I tended to listen to the album Rose Mountain from a band called Screaming Females. I would call the music "contemporary hard rock," though for some reason most people on the web describe it as "punk," perhaps because of the assumed attitude of the musicians. What's unusual about it is that the band consists of only three musicians, and is utterly dominated by the vocals and virtuosic guitar playing of the one female bandmember, Marissa Paternoster. Paternoster also has an unusal vocal style. She sings with a rapid vibrato (which is a bit unpleasant to my ear) and she alters the resonance of her vocal tract as she sings, sometimes going from a girlish chirpiness to a doomy bass in the course of a single sung line. (She doesn't do that on Rose Mountain, but she does it in the song "Rotten Apple" I found on Youtube.)
In the course of searching out Screaming Females videos on Youtube, the search algorithm distracted me with a Judas Priest concert from 1983. Watching that reminded me how much I'd liked early Judas Priest, so I went to download Rocka Rolla on Bittorrent. But it was a mistake to be clicking around on torrent sites while intoxicated. I saw .exe files being downloaded, and I think I accidentally launched one in the process of attempting to cancel its download. Note to Google: you have to make the process of halting a Chrome download much less likely to trigger the opening of a .exe. And there's no reason not to always ask if opening a downloaded .exe is a good idea. I think there's a notion in Chrome of certain sites not triggering warnings because they're either digitally signed or they are popular. But I think the lack of such warnings was how I got malware installed on my computer. I was able to uninstall most of it right away and to remove most of its nefarious run items using HijackThis, but there was still a Chrome browser plugin that could not be eliminated. It was called something like SaleeFree, and when I did a Google search for it, I came up with nothing, which was terrifying. Was I patient zero for this infection? The only way to get rid of it ended up being uninstalling and then reinstalling Chrome. This meant that I had to rebuild all my troll profiles (I have 18 profiles in total) by hand. Luckily for me, Chrome stores all my important profile data on the cloud, although I could see that being a problem if a plugin like SaleeFree gets installed without my being aware. According to the Overview screen in Chrome's Extension preferences, it had the ability to "read and change all your data on the websites you visit."


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?150321

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