Jesus H. Christ on a Popsicle™ stick, but it’s hot in the office today. The A/C conked out earlier this morning when the power went offline briefly, and now the vents spew hot death, discomfort, and woe to all denizens of the cube farm.

Compounding my suffering, ironically, is the Übershanty that I have cunningly constructed from spare and pilfered cardboard over my desk to shield me from the cruel flourescent light that glares mercilessly down from the ceiling above the neighboring cubicle (the light above my own having been long since disabled by yours truly). The solid construction of said shelter from the Light That Burns Our Pallid Skin keeps the hated photons away, but also retains the prodigious heat pumped out by my old CRT monitor.

At first, I thought it was this heat buildup that was responsible for the rising temperature, and I began devising ways to construct a vent of some kind to release the heat. Though I have several spare 80mm square case fans to hand, I figure that a simple chimney made from a paper cone and a toilet paper roll would suffice. Not that it would matter, really; we’re all baking. Of course, now I’ve got my heart set on making the chimney, so I’ll have to brave the bathrooms and see if I can find (or, to the chagrin of my colleagues, make) an empty roll. I’ll have to take some pictures of the shanty when it’s finished. It’s actually looking pretty good. But now it needs a chimney.

It’s not quite piracy, and it isn’t illegal either: I’ve finally been turned on to the quasi-legal Russian music downloads at Allofmp3.com and mp3search.ru. If you haven’t already taken advantage of these services, good Lord, go ye forth and download forthwith!

Last night, I bought a 192kpbs-sampled soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? for $1.17 from the latter site, which offers all its music for a flat 10¢ a track. Allofmp3’s 1¢/MB pricing is a better deal, though, and you can choose the bitrate and format of your downloads. I happened to choose MP3Search because they had the track I was looking for, and Allofmp3 didn’t. But still. An entire album for $1.17. I shamelessly squandered what, 50¢, for content that would have cost me $16.83 from the iTunes store. The RIAA has got to be beside itself in paroxysms of foaming rage over the legal loophole the Russkis are using; their wroth likely compounded by the fact that there’s no DRM in these files, either. I mean, how the hell are BMG, Sony, and Virgin executives going to afford to snort all that coke and ketamine off of hookers’ stomachs if we’re not paying full retail prices? Poor bastards.

It’ll be interesting to see whether or not the Russian government closes the loophole as a result of some well-moneyed RIAA comminations, or if they’ll keep it open, influenced by the money the site operators bring to the table (not that anything so base as money would influence contemporary Russian politics, heaven forbid). In any case, it’s probably a good idea to stick your face in the trough before The Man empties it. If they do get shut down, you at least got it —legally— while the gettin’ was good. If not, you’re still buying music for pennies. It’s pretty much a win-win situation down here among us mortal folk.

I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been sick, but I’ve been having some weird goddamn dreams lately. I haven’t had a fever, nor have I huffed any industrial solvents, but my latest adventures in the Dreamtime have been pretty odd. I have singled out two as particularly bizarre.

In the first dream, I was owner/manager of some kind of privately held fire station in Mexico. Why Mexico, and how did I know it was in Mexico? I don’t know. There was a swell old-timey fire engine in the garage, and the station itself was gaily painted, and perched right above a shimmering beachfront. It seemed very pleasant. The next thing I knew, I was walking from the station onto a vacant lot in the middle of a bustling city, marveling at a parade of freaks who were also walking on to the vacant lot. Men in diapers, people dressed as if for some kind of gothic Mardi Gras, and other completely deviant modes of dress that I cannot now recall. While I goggled at them, an ornate green double-decker bus drove up onto the lot, driven by an old, gray man wearing an old-fashioned train conductor’s cap (I suppose his hat wasn’t out of place, given the vehicle he was driving).

True to the labile nature of dreams , I was suddenly in a room inside the bus, watching a sales pitch for books of some sort, conducted by someone I once knew in high school and haven’t seen for years. To my right, Ron Jeremy sat next to me, making cynical quips about some unremembered topic, which I found highly amusing, though I can’t recollect any of them. Ron’s apparently a pretty funny guy, even if it is disturbing, in retrospect, to sit next to a shirtless Hedgehog at a book fair. I suppose I might have learned more from the Porn King if my alarm hadn’t woken me up before I could ask him anything.

I began the following night’s dream by sitting at a café table with a companion who was, according to the curious "pre-established backstory" such dreams often have, a friend of mine, though I’m sure I’d never seen him before or since. We were having a conversation of some forbidden, political sort that was overheard, much to the anger of local ZANU-PF thugs, and they started chasing us through fields and ditches. As is the way with such dreams, I realized I was nearly naked in the bargain. I hate that. Especially when I don’t have any shoes on. That really pisses me off.

So anyway, I’m unshod, and chased by a small mob of angry Zimbabweans, and decide to hide out above a circular stairway in a round tower constructed of terra cotta and stucco, in the Spanish style. Things seemed good, and the goons didn’t find me, but then, to my dismay, a policewoman started up the stairs. I held my breath as she walked beneath me, unawares. It was then that I realized I was holding what I would describe as a mass of fettucine alfredo in my hands. Even in my dream, I asked myself, "what the hell?"

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to hold onto a wad of cooked noodles, much less noodles covered in a savory cheese sauce, but it ain’t easy, friend, let me tell you. Despite my best efforts, I dropped some of the accursed noodles right onto the cop.

The red-haired, good-looking cop. I normally have a marked distaste for redheads, and have no earthly idea what sinister plan the ZANU-PF hatches by employing white women as police officers, but said officers are apparently possessed of a marked lenity, so I followed her smiling face up the tower stairs into the shower. I still bore the telltale pasta in my hands, but just as the adventure was about to blossom into a lascivious frisson, my kids ran into the room and started jumping on the bed.

Damn kids.

I’ve been sick, and hence, no updates have been posted in a while. I won’t go into the gory details; let’s just say I drove the bus around the block a few times.

In other news, if you hadn’t heard already, Jack Kilby, the inventor of the microchip, died late yesterday. Granted, about 56,000,000 people die every year, so, philisophically, Mr. Kilby doesn’t even rate as being a drop in the bucket, but he helped shape the world with his brilliant insight of 1958. While reading his story, I couldn’t help but wonder who will inadvertently kick off the Next Big Thing, and what it will be.

Thank the Lord for Java. And iTunes. And college students. And newly-hired employees. All these sundry elements add up to one thing: a new and massive expansion of my home music library.

If you didn’t know about it already, the OurTunes utility (available for download either here or here), written in Java, takes advantage of iTunes’ ability to share one’s music library across a local network. Lots of people here share their libraries or playlists, and we have a pretty decent selection of different tastes and styles to choose from, should our own libraries seem stale on any given day. OurTunes allows you to save those shared files to your own hard drive, so that you can add them to your own library. (Along the way, I also found Coveralia, a great Spanish site that has high-resolution scans of CD jewel case inserts, and even disc art, in case you want your plunder to look as legitimate as possible when you burn it.)

I use OurTunes on my laptop to sift through the offerings of my colleagues, then merrily take my purloined items home to be imported into my iMac’s library. At least one other happy pirate and I gleefully sack each other’s music treasuries on a regular basis. One apparently undiscriminating fellow now has some 60GB of musical swag. I download some EMF and a previously unheard Devo track along with the last Gravity Kills album while somebody else helps themselves to my Einstürzende Neubauten. We are glutted and content, despite the RIAA’s insistence that for every song that is illicitly downloaded, a quadriplegic kitten dies in agony after being raped by drug-dealing terrorists.

As big and filled with Macs as our office is, the well had pretty much run dry; the entire building had been pretty thoroughly pillaged. Here and there, one might glean a previously overlooked track or two, like sharp-eyed but desperate carrion fowl swooping down to glean some infitesimal scrap off the dessicated bones of a lonely carcass. Now, though, like the Serengeti after the annual rains, the herds are swollen and fattened again by a large crop of newly-hired employees. The hunters rejoice again, as we run riot through new audio collections, greedily adding them to our bloated hoards.

Life is good again.

My current workload is so heavy, I don’t even have time to surf for Sinhalese wart fetish porn these days. For some stupid, naïve reason, I must have thought that writing for a living would be an effortless endeavor. Well, it’s certainly less effort than dealing with the great unwashed masses on the telephone, listening to how nobody specifically told them they couldn’t delete entire database tables without repercussions.

So now it’s my job to write the documents that the unwashed should read but never do. Manuals for data integrity utilities, technical customer communications, knowledgebase articles. Dry stuff, this. The sort of stuff most users don’t bother to look at.

I have a whole lot of it on my plate right now, though, so updates to this page will be a little erratic for the next week or so. That’s erratic, not erotic, so keep your sweaty finger off the reload button.