No Hat

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I found the store in Georgetown, near Wisconsin Ave. and N Street, and I found the hat bin, but the specific kind of hat I was looking for — a snug, round $8 Pakistani wool cap — was no longer there. The storeowner offered me instead a bulky multilayered Afghan affair with a flat beret-like top, for $15, but it would have made me look like a New York taxi driver, so I declined.

The whole time, I was IM’ing The Dane, who urged me to just go for a hip-hop doofus sports hat. I did check out the ones at Urban Outfitters on M Street, but they were too goofy, and too pricy. The only cheaper ones were Jamaican rainbow caps, which I had not the nerve to come close to. Yeah mon. (cue beachy reggae music)

Globe of Blogs

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Globe of Blogs, eh? I hope it lives long and prospers; these expansive weblogger directories tend not to last too long before being overwhelmed by sheer volume.

Searching for a Hat

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I’m in Georgetown right now, searching for a little South Asian imports shop I saw a few weeks ago. There’s a certain type of Pakistani wool hat I’m looking for, which does a great job of keeping my head and ears snugly warm on cold nights, without making me look like a hip-hop doofus. If I can only find that shop.

“If he’s in Georgetown looking for Pakistani hats, what’s he doing on the Internet, then?” some of you may be wondering. Well, that’s the other chore for today: download Mozilla 1.0 rc 1 and an old copy of Netscape 4.x at Kinko’s. And we mustn’t forget Lynx, though that hardly needs a broadband connection to download.

Hmmm. Netscape’s archives don’t seem to be working. I’ll just have to use the links from the SillyDog archive instead.

Free, free!

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My ISP woes are solved for now, with this compromise: AOL free hours for web browsing, Netzero free hours for POP/SMTP access. Netzero’s 10 hours/month should be enough to handle the mail side of it, and I still have over a month to use up these AOL hours before I decide to cancel. For the time being, the internet remains free for me. Then, I’ll probably go with Slingshot Prepaid.

Randomizer on the way!

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I’ve just finished a basic PHP weblog randomizer — with thanks to Rich for a very helpful snippet of code — and reduced several .txt includes to simple, easily called functions. Now all I need to do is recode these blog indexes.

One down, fifty to go. It’s going to be a looong time before anything new gets uploaded. :P

The Anonymous Thought Police

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Make a gross Erap joke, and suddenly the Anonymous Religious Thought Enforcers (ARTE!) are all over you. Fine, fine, I apologize for my tasteless humor, and I deeply regret if any of my posts have brought on the unwanted image of Erap shamelessly sodomizing his overweight son in their luxurious medical detention suite in VMCC.

Now we can all give each other a ginger, manly hug and pop a bottle of strong, manly beer while we beat our chests in righteous, manly self-satisfaction?

Die, AOL, die.

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I am really disliking AOL today.

When I first installed AOL from one of those ubiquitous free CD-ROM’s, I had assumed that it would just give me a simple dial-up console and some free hours. Little did I know that this was to be one of the most awkward, obnoxious, intrusive software experiences I had ever encountered.

It asked for everything: name, address, phone number, mobile phone number, credit card number, bank and bank account number. Then, it installed itself — and RealPlayer — into my hard disk, littered my desktop with extraneous icons, and copied several unwanted “FREE SOFTWARE!” folders into my root directory. After that, it took my screen name, made the first letter capital against my will, hijacked my CD Player without asking and made itself the default multimedia app, and started up a nightmarish browsing window covered with redundant GUI elements and unsightly ad popups. Periodically, without even the courtesy of a dialog box or a Cancel button, the same browser would suddenly begin downloading updates for itself, reassuring me that this would not be charged to my online time. The control panel gave no way to rectify this dastardly automation.

Today I discovered that their STMP server has not been relaying mail sent from my external client, despite feeding me “Message Sent” confirmations. Almost no one I’ve emailed in the past two weeks has received my messages.

That’s it. This isn’t even worth the free time I’m getting; I’m going to cancel my account and sign up with a cheaper, more reliable ISP. Even Netzero’s free access is better than this.