One of the standard operating procedures in the online courses I’m taking is that all the class participants have to post a small autobiography so that we can all "get to know each other". An unspoken social convention holds that everybody in the class posts replies to everybody else’s biography, and sometimes some small talk is made around any interesting items.

All too often, the reply is either a simple "hello", or something along the lines of "I’m really looking forward to working with you" that somehow manages to come off as both completely dispassionate and unsettlingly enthusiastic at the same time. Misanthrope that I am, I have avoided replying to these obligatory pieces of boilerplate, and simply slap my canned post up onto the server and participate no further in that thread. I’ve had the sneaking suspicion that few people even bother to read the biographies, anyway.

In my latest class, I resolved to test this. Inserted into the latest version of my biography were a couple of tidbits that I had not previously revealed about myself: one, that at my last job I learned the trade of squid husbandry in addition to systems administration, and also that my left elbow exudes a natural pine scent that has baffled men of science for many years.

Only three people in the class seemed to notice. Nobody else commented on these rather unusual attributes. It’s entirely possible that more people actually read the thing and simply refused my implicit challenge, where I specifically stated that I was now deliberately writing weird things in order to see if anybody really read the biographies, but I strongly suspect that most of my virtual classmates are just going through the motions. For my next class, I’m going to write something completely outré from start to finish, and see how many responses I get. Unless my initial sentence contains some horrifying scatalogical joke, threat of grave violence, or blatantly offensive sexual imagery, I’m guessing that it, too, will pass largely unnoticed.

God damn it. Me and my big mouth. Give people an inch, and they’ll "give you nine where the sun don’t shine".

Because I had some available cycles, I agreed to update a list of known application issues that hasn’t been revised in almost a year and a half. Audaciously, I assumed that relevant but raw content about the particular application component involved would be funneled my way, and I would then reformat it and translate it into an approximation of English for general publication. This was not to be.

Instead, I now have to plow through 16 months’ worth of bug tickets to figure out which problems reported in the old document are still extant. Since the problems reported in said earlier document were paraphrased from the original tickets, they can’t be easily matched up with ticket titles. This means that in order to produce this revision, I have to go through and read each and every ticket closed since July of 2004. It doesn’t help matters that all this is within the scope of a particularly arcane portion of the application that I have never, ever worked on before.

When I pointed out the horrible inefficiency of this process, the support engineer responsible for the component (who had originally asked me to revise the list) replied "well, if you don’t read them, then I have to". Heaven forfend! There’s apparently only one other person in this whole division who might know the answers off the top of his head, and, brilliant though he is, his response time is often measured in geological epochs. I hope nobody needs this document soon, or, if it needs to be finished quickly, little details like veracity aren’t considered important.

Jeez, I didn’t realize CafePress tacked four bucks onto the thing for shipping, so I whittled the base price of the thing down to compensate for it. What a deal, a poster that brings the funny straight to your cubicle for eleven bucks, shipped.

A while back I made a little one-off poster for our office manager when one of our coffee machines broke down. Done in the style of a pharmaceutical ad, it turned out to be pretty popular. I spent a little bit of time improving the copy, images, and resolution. The happy result is now available for purchase! It’s only eight bucks and guaranteed to be hilarious, or I’ll refund you the entire price of the product, multiplied by the sales tax*.

Remember, if you don’t continue spending, the terrorist liberal homosexual hurricanes and their Darwinist allies win.

^{*As computed in Alaska}

Here’s a fun piece of paranoid conspiracy from our Paynim friends far away across the seas. According to the fevered brains of some in the Arabic-speaking world, the Coca-Cola logo contains (deliberately, of course) a terrible and blasphemous slander against God and His Prophet (image courtesy of the horrible infidels of Jihad Watch).

This has apparently gained so much traction over time, that Coca-Cola has had to get Islamic scholars debunk it. There’s even a small portion of Coke’s website devoted to Mideast rumors. At first, I was going to rant about how small-minded and ridiculous this was, especially since the bit about Burger King was still in my head, as well as the recent story of the shock and disgust our tolerant and loving Saudi allies felt at discovering the grave Zionist threat presented by disposable cups.

Then I remembered that hysteria over asinine theories like this is certainly not confined to Islam. Remember the old Procter & Gamble logo? It used to appear on every tube of toothpaste, every box of soap they sold. It’s a superb art noveau sort of design, but some are convinced it’s some sort of Satanic seal, I guess because it has 13 stars on it. Does this mean that the United States, with its 13 colonies, is an entirely Satanic construction? That would explain things like Velveeta, Paris Hilton, and the RIAA, but it all just goes to show how much bunk all this stuff is.

Except for my own theory about the underground Armenian gerbil-smuggling trade and its sinister influence on global politics since 1969 when the real President Kennedy was secretly assassinated on the NASA movie set used to fake the moon landings… which was built by Nazi Freemasons. The implications are obvious.

I’m generally a big fan of installation art pieces, particularly ones that are big enough to clamber onto or wander around in, like The Gates in New York.

When I saw this giant, hapless bunny corpse project, I thought, "hey, cool, I’ll bet the artists have even more cool stuff displayed on their site. I’ll just surf on over there and check it out."

Oh God.

OK, they’re obviously into some weird stuff. You might not want to click on some of these links if your supervisor or coworkers are loitering anywhere near your cube. You’ll be gossip-fodder for a few weeks, even if The Man doesn’t come down on you. This is stuff beyond the avant-garde, though it wasn’t until I had the misfortune to find their giant Russian piss icicle piece that things started to get disturbing. I stopped at the "human birthday cake", though less out of a sense of propriety or offended sensibilities than the sudden realization that they’re just latter-day Dadaists.

Occasionally, this sort of stuff holds my attention, but after a short while it gets kind of annoying, like when a kid is trying really hard to gross you out with the contents of his nose proudly displayed on the tip of his finger. The first time, you have that visceral reaction they’re looking for, but then it’s just like they’re trying too hard.