Virtual Thought

I am so getting a Mac Mini this weekend.

It all started when I bought an mAudio Firewire 410 a few months ago. My computer was busted back then for lack of Windows XP (ahem) and, until I could get my hands on a copy that Microsoft wouldn’t object to I was up a certain creek without a paddle. Finally, I got my greasy little mitts on a copy.

But wait! My PC didn’t have a firewire port dammit! So I make my way to Fry’s and pick up a sweet little Pyro 1394b card. This weekend was “add a 250 GB hard drive and DVD-R/CD-RW combo drive” weekend so I thought I’d install the card, finally. That’s when I discovered two things:

1. The firewire card I have doesn’t fit the stupid stinkin’ firewire plug for the mAudio gear
2. Touching two firewired metal bits together shorts out my computer

This whole time while I’m trying to figure this stuff out, a midget with an encephalic head that looks suspiciously like Steve Jobs is orbiting my head singing, “It just works… It just works…”

So… yeah, okay, fine, you talked me into it Mr. Jobs. I’ll join your Mac Cult.

This is the coolest Firefox extension. Indicate an ftp or WebDAV server and it will synch up your bookmarks on start and exit. That way, people like me who use three computers (work computer, notebook and home computer) can have the same bookmarks on each one. This is fantastic.

In the continuing saga of me and Ruby, Ruby on Rails and all things made with it (including Basecamp and 43 things) I got my home computer working again which means I can do two things:

1. Start doing music again with my spiffy new mAudio firewire module once the Firewire card starts working


2. Start attempting some serious Ruby development with Rails et. al. It’s hard to do serious development on laptop keyboards.

I received a weird comment on my Earthsea rant. The comment is from someone named “Yellow Monkey”. This person’s URI is yellowmonkey2.com which doesn’t resolve, currently. The text of the message is this:

Thank you! Chinese Apes.

That “Chinese Apes” thing is a link to chineseapesattack2.com. I don’t want to link to anything because it might be spam of some kind… the e-mail address is one of those super-long spammer domains (aa5362fcef81b36d…).

Also, the IP is 205.234.132.50 which resolves to unknown.ord.scnet.net. SCNet seems to be a large-scale broadband provider that seems kinda shady.

What the hell? My only guess is this is the first finger of some shadowy marketing campaign possibly disguised as a game. I enjoy those (anyone out there love bees?) but not if it just confuses me with domains that don’t resolve.

(Since the original www.ilovebees.com seems to no longer be working, here’s a link to a guy who archived most of it)