Our boss is ever on the lookout to improve processes, increase knowledge, and expand skillsets in our department. Nothing wrong with that. To that end, he’s got subscriptions to, and memberships in, various professional organizations, newsletters, and other industry-oriented stuff, and often forwards it our way. Nothing wrong with that, either.

I must admit, however, a certain trepidation about listening to things published by HDI’s Support Professional Information Network. Maybe it’s just me, but an information source named SPIN doesn’t win any instant points for reputability.

I was looking over my hit logs and found a number of hits from the IP address 255.255.255.255. “Ha!” I said. “Obviously a spoofed address.” Either that, or the hitcounter couldn’t properly resolve the address of a host visiting from behind a proxy. But then I started to wax metaphysical about it. It’s literally the ultimate IP address. The ne plus ultra of the digital world: no higher-valued network address exists*. At the very end of the total range of all possible addresses, it is also the ultimate broadcast address.**

What could this mean? I puzzled for a moment longer, then realized: oh, shit. God visited my blog. I’m screwed now, just like the idiots who flunk job interviews because their MySpace page is full of posts about how much weed they smoked over the weekend. St. Peter is going to to search the Great Blog and say, “well, there’s just this little problem with your post of March 23rd, 2011…”

* God obviously doesn’t use IPv6 yet. You got a problem with that?
** Yes, I know that 255.255.255.255 is really a limited broadcast address for all nodes on a LAN. I’m waxing metaphysical, remember? I’m not interested in reality at the moment.

Apparently some asswipe named Glenn Beck recently said that Californians hate America. I almost missed hearing about this comment because I was busy burning American flags during my commune’s reading of The State and Revolution we held right after the gay orgy.

His precise statement (that has, not surprisingly, earned him much hatred amongst San Diegans and expatriates like myself) was:

I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today.

Never mind, of course, that San Diego is home to Camp Pendleton, MCAS Miramar, and the Coronado Naval Base (they all must be full of the “phony soldiers” his soulmate Limbaugh was talking about). Or that Santa Clarita and Escondido, both areas impacted by the fires, are listed by VotingResearch.org as in the top 30 most conservative cities in America. No, never mind all that! Obviously this is happening because we hate America.

Yeah. Obviously.

Fuck you, Glenn Beck.

Somebody brought a sack of malted milk balls into the office. Since I love malted milk balls, I filched a couple of bags and set about devouring them at my desk. Since I am a decent touch-typist, there was no need to look down at the morsels to grab one and pop it into my greedy mouth. With my supply of sucrose at hand, I entered autopilot mode and started going though the morning’s Jira tickets.

Unfortunately, I also keep an old roller mouse ball on my desk next to my keyboard. It also happened to be right next to the open bag of malt balls. I think you can figure out what happened next.

The funny thing is, it actually took a few seconds of chewing the mouse ball before it dawned on me that malted milk balls were not supposed to be so extraordinarily resilient.

Sometimes I think that if I had to choose between upgrading WordPress or contracting colorectal cancer I’d be taking a good, hard look at polyp styles and options. In a nutshell, WordPress 2.3 hosed my development site (and thank God I chose to do the Right Thing and avoided the temptation to throw it straight into production, or I’d be having conniptions right about now- or perhaps I should say my current conniptions would be far less intense).

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I finished the much-anticipated Half-Life 2: Episode 2 over the weekend. I have to say I wasn’t very impressed. If it wasn’t for Team Fortress 2’s inclusion in the Orange Box I’d be feeling pretty ripped off. I was eager to see more of the Half-Life story unfold, and in this, Episode 2 did not disappoint. The atmosphere and graphics were stunning as always. The gameplay? Unimpressive. Perhaps it’s just my impression, but Episode 2 seemed to deliver noticeably less content than Episode 1, and much of what it did bring to my desktop was lacking in excitement.

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