editor's note: anyone who prefers to think that girls do not actually urinate, and instead have their bladder transform the pee into golden fluff, which is then extracted by angels while they sleep and sent to line the beds of newborn pups, had better not read this post.

dear medill newsroom bathroom,

hi. first off, i just wanted to let you know that i'm a big fan. it must be said that you are nicer than any other office-environment bathroom that i have ever used. you have four roomy stalls; you are decorated simply but elegantly (i especially admire the marble sink counters and the shade of beige on your walls); your lighting is perfection - none of the blaring flourescent nastiness for you - the dim glow of your sophisticated lightbulbs always makes me look wonderful in the mirror; you've got nice touches, like a close-up mirror for applying make up in the mornings and a never-ending supply of aveeno hand lotion to moisturize after washing with your pleasant-scented soap.

we have to talk.

you need to know that your toilets are the bane of the existence every single female in the newsroom. your commodes, while equipped with fairly modern-looking automatic flushing devices, actually hail from the backwaters of azerbaijin. or possibly rural communist china. i know, i was surprised too. they're nice, and clean, and the first time i used them, i thought, "what nice, clean toilets." i should have noticed the 52 signs plastered inside each stall that implored you to "PLEASE FLUSH!!!! DON'T FORGET!!!!" in some grating, squiggly microsoft font. "why ever would we need to be reminded to flush when there are such lovely automatic motion-sensor devices equipped here?" i queried myself innocently. but i thought no more of it.

until the toilet automatically flushed all its nasty toilet bowl water upwards with the force of a fire hose into my special area whilst i was in the middle of, well, you know. and it has continued to do so nearly every time i use the toilet. in fact, your motion sensor is an eager one. it flushes when i enter the stall; it flushes when i sit down; it flushes when i go. in fact, it flushes almost every time i so much blink an eye at it.

EXCEPT WHEN I ACTUALLY FINISH. YOU KNOW, THE ONLY TIME IT SHOULD BE FLUSHING AT ALL, YOU MOFO.

going to the bathroom has become a deadly game of mental tug-and-war between me and the toilets' sensors. i approach the entire act of peeing with dedicated stealth and thought-planning. i really shouldn't have to expand so much mental energy on peeing. i'm a journalist, people. i'm working here. except when i'm peeing. then i'm slipping in the door, closing it with the softness of patting a baby's head, attempting stuff like trying to sit down on the toilet from the side so the sensor doesn't, um, sense me, and holding so goddamn still while i pee that you could balance a freaking book on my head. it almost never works, but every once in a while it does, and then i go have a beer, because that is a serious accomplishemnt. every time the toilet doesn't flush on me is a victory for the entire goddamn gender.

of course, after the beer i need to pee again, and we're back at the beginning.

meanwhile, post-pee, i've tried everything in my right mind to get the sensor to work. i dodge. i weave. i do little up and down dances. i flick it with my thumb. but does the sensor see me? does it even ACKNOWLEDGE THAT I'M RIGHT THERE, trying to get it to flush? no. the sensor, it is a cold, unfeeling bastard. so on the rare occasions that i haven't already been flushed on, i must press the button on the sensor, therefore rendering the whole "automatic" thing moot.

i was in the bathroom the other day and a friend walked in. we were chatting to each other through the stalls, when, you guessed, i got flushed on. normally i would retain some decorum and pretend like it didn't happen, but that was, like, the 8th time it'd gone on that day, and i just could not take it any more.

"FUCK." i exclaimed. "this goddamn motherfucking toilet won't stop flushing on me."

"oh i know," my friend, a lovely, demure southern belle replied. "that middle stall is the worst. i almost always try to avoid it if possible."

we are now strategizing our toilet use. middle toilet? 88% chance you'll get flushed on. first stall? maaaaybe 70%, if you're lucky. and the handicapped stall. don't get me started on that dirty whore.

do you see what you have reduced us to, medill toilets? instead of writing meaningful, educational and revealing articles, i am now wondering how many times i'm going to get toilet water sprayed on me that day. it's a near obsession. i feel twinges of hyperventilation whenever i enter the bathroom. so, you need to stop. if not for me, then for the sake of the entire profession of journalism.

think it over.

thanks,
catherine

everyone knows the people behind 37signals are smart (who doesn't use backpackit, or writeboard, or any number of their easy-to-use online tools?). but who knew they were KINDA HOTT. ? not me.

chicagoist has an interview with them today. it's pretty good reading.

It's been a few weeks, but I wouldn't be living up to this blog's titular mission statement if I didn't write something about the presents I got for my birthday. That's right: me me me.

Charles got me some instant-win scratchoff tickets. Partly this is because he's a nice guy, and partly it's because he enjoys gambling vicariously. As you can see, he selected "Blackout Bingo". I don't think he paid much attention to which game he was buying, but it's an accidentally perfect reflection of his personality.

My SMS project remains in limbo — the Gammu project maintainer and I have been emailing back and forth, but I'm not optimistic about getting the software working with my phone. Most likely I'll have to buy a cheap, old, maximally-compatible model off of Ebay. Oh well. I'll give him another week.

Other projects are also frustrating: my VGA to NTSC converter has mysteriously died, putting the planned Linux reinstall on hold until I collect a monitor. I owe everyone a final Python tutorial, but more for the sake of completeness than anything else — I think I underestimated the scope of the project. I'm not feeling up to it quite yet.

So, lacking anything immediate that I can work on (or, more accurately, that I want to work on), I'm thinking about learning ActionScript, Flash's built-in language. Mostly I just want to screw around with Flashr and write something that talks to Flickr — a little slideshow for the sidebar that automatically grabs new photos from Catherine & my photostreams, maybe? That'd be kind of neat.

Anyway, in the course of looking through other people's code I came across SimpleViewer. It's not what I want — it's a full-featured photo gallery, not a sidebar widget. Besides, what I'm after most is a learning exercise. But it is a pretty slick slideshow app. And it's free! Any photographers out there (I know there are at least a couple) could do worse than to use this on their portfolio sites. Those of us unconcerned with publication rights and hotlinking ought to eschew the razzle-dazzle and stick with permalink-able formats, of course.

a few of my photos from the trip to d.c. are up, if you're into that sort of thing.

For some reason I'm watching Deal or No Deal at the moment. As you might imagine, it's approximately the stupidest thing ever. That's fine; gambling is basically about dressing up random chance in as elaborate a wrapper as possible. If some TV executive wants to spend his production budget on a fancy set and Donald Trump cameos instead of paying someone a pittance to design a "game" with "entertainment value", well, that's his prerogative.

But here's the thing that really blows my mind: tonight's show, at least, centers around the contestant choosing numbers to open suitcases. Assuming that the show's not rigged, this exercise is completely random. Yet the audience is offering suggestions! And the guy's listening! Carefully!

Well, good luck, moron. I hope you're good at guessing who's good at guessing.

UPDATE: JESUS CHRIST, THAT'S HOWIE MANDEL!?! Terrifying. At least he's found a good niche for his unique brand of talentlessness.

Weird, weird, weird.

Via Emily, Justin, Metafilter, Internet, France, etc.

this article is a couple of weeks old and probably many of you saw it already, but i just wanted to note it. it's about modern liquors, the liquor store a couple of blocks up from tommy and charles' apartment in shaw. and it is the best. the guy who works the counter there is the sweetest; they hold wine tastings every once in a while; and best of all, you don't feel like some shady, gross crack ho prostitute when you go in there to buy stuff. it's nice, and clean and well-lit. etc. a model liquor store!

but as the article shows, it didn't always used to be that way.

To make a living, Ed and Anna Fleming did whatever it took. When customers paid by pulling crumpled dollar bills out of their shoes, Ed and Anna would dip each buck into a big jug of green disinfectant. Half a dozen times a year, the place was held up. Anna had a gun pointed at her 15 times. Once, Ed was shot right through the groin. The bullet hole remains in the back wall.

Modern Liquors never generated the easy money associated with liquor stores. Not at Ninth and M streets NW. In the four decades since Ed Fleming bought the place, the city tore down blocks of rowhouses to build a college campus that never happened; homeless people were kept for years in trailers on a vast parking lot; the streets were closed off in the early 1990s to dig Metro tunnels; and the Flemings' block was turned into a construction site through the late '90s to put up the convention center.

Customers who managed to get to Modern tended to be winos and druggies. The bestsellers were 32-ounce bottles of King Cobra malt liquor, pints of Wild Irish Rose and half-pints of Velicoff vodka, Skid Row's finest.

Then, over the past few years, the storm surge of gentrification hit Shaw, just north of downtown Washington.

blah blah gentrificationcakes blah. anyway, modern liquors is awesome, so if you need to grab some booze while in that area (9th and M streets NW) i highly recommend it.

has anyone else's gmail chat function gone missing in the past few days? mine disappeared last week and I WANT IT BACK.

back and not really refreshed from a wonderful weekend in d.c. my flight left the district at 6:30 this morning, and as soon as i landed i headed to the newsroom for some fun and fabulous journalism work. as i'm sitting here brainstorming and tapping away, i had to take a blogging break to talk about what went on:

thursday night: unbuckled. dc9. olivia mancini and the housemates; the hard tomorrows. you saw the pictures here.

friday night: tommy and i decided kind of last minute to head to coppi's, a pizza and italian joint on U street. though dcist reviewed it back in november, we had never been there and in fact hadn't heard much about it otherwise. walking in at 7:30 on a friday night without a reservation, we weren't surprised at being sat at the bar, which turned out to be nice and cozy, with an excellent view of the wood-burning oven, and an attentive bartendress. we started off with some excellent calamari, a bottle of red and then two small pizzas - i forget what was on tommy's, but mine was prosciutto and funghi. though the crust was a little iffy, we both thought their pizza could easily place a very close 3rd in district pies, after two amy's and pizzeria paradiso. i can't believe we'd never dined there before. fairly reasonable, as well. (though that's always easy for me to say when tommy foots the bill, as he almost always insists on doing.) 1414 U street.

saturday: i hit up the glorious, glorious tyson's mall with my family. we ate at brio, which, for a chain restaurant in a mall, was actually pretty decent. then my mom bought me a pair of editors pants at express. discuss: editors pants from express, best pants ever? i own like six pairs.

for dinner that night, tommy and i went to queen of sheba, a recently-opened ethiopian restaurant. pluses: a block from the apartment; nice space; pretty great ethiopian food. minuses: no liquor license (though hardly their fault); about, oh, a FIVE HOUR WAIT for food. well, more like 40 minutes, which struck us as pretty ridiculous seeing that the restaurant wasn't even half full. maybe they're still just working out service kinks, but until they start getting their food out in a timely manner, i'd go to sodere or dukem.

UPDATE: man, MT fucked up the rest of this entry. i talked about the rest of saturday night and EVEN sunday, too, but it somehow ate it. quick recap: ellington party, fries at the saloon, sunday lunch at saint-ex, and attempting to convert tommy and charles to grey's anatom. which i don't think worked.

...for d.c. as the saying goes.

there's a quick piece in the reliable source column this sunday where tommy and i are interviewed about the Legend of the Butterstick. though tommy isn't given really proper credit (he came up with the name, but the article doesn't mention that), AND our blog URL is not mentioned (le sigh) it is still a nice article, and, hoorah! and it mentions dcist a lot, which is awesome. anyway, there we are: our names in the washington post. maybe one day i'll actually get mine in there for something non-zoo critter related.

1. These new VW "My Fast" commercials. Maybe I'm confused, but I think we're supposed to be clamoring for some kind of squat, unappealing plastic figurine all of a sudden. And this somehow induces me to buy... cars, I guess? Catherine reports seeing the campaign extended to fake Craigslist missed connections postings, which, if you know me, you know I find appalling. What happened, VW? Where's the Nick Drake & artful mysteriousness? It feels like you finished selling cars to hipsters who miss Suck.com and moved on to targeting their asshole younger brothers who spend all their time playing GTA and buying DVDs that star Vin Diesel.


2. The IT Crowd. I really want to like this series — the people at BoingBoing are nuts about it, the set's littered with EFF stickers, and the BBC is giving away episodes for free on the internet (hurrah for IP socialism!). The only problem: it's just not very funny. Like, at all. The first episode featured two jokes about a non-technical management type trying to use appliances when they weren't plugged in. Done properly, this would build in a way that makes the second time much funnier than the first. But in practice, it just seemed like the writers had forgotten that they'd already used that lame gag ten minutes earlier.


3. The Boondocks Cartoon. The IT Crowd is bad in a passive, hapless sort of way. The Boondocks is aggressive in its awfulness. That it's not remotely funny sort of goes without saying — I've always felt that, despite occasional signs of talent, Aaron McGruder's success owes more to liberal guilt than genuine comedic talent. But even his occasional humor is completely absent from the cartoon. It doesn't even try to be funny. What it does try to be is in-your-face. Mostly this just results in it not making any sense, and doing so in as unpleasant a way as possible. One episode ended with the grandfather killing a blind man, then getting left off the hook for some reason. They finished by throwing in a nice little coda about the pointlessness of the victim's life. Classy, guys.
   
   Another had the grandfather open a soul food restaurant, then tried to use the premise to simultaneously score points about drug addiction and obesity in the black community, but succeeded only in producing an incoherent mess. Whatever they were trying to do, the episode ended with a woman ruining her life and debasing herself, begging for a cheeseburger in a way that was not at all funny. The mind behind the show seems to have no talent for anything but cruelty. Oh, and the voice acting for Huey and Riley is mind-bogglingly bad (this is more a casting than a performance issue, though). All in all, it's probably the least appealing cartoon I've ever seen — and I've seen Urotsukidoji.

food network: please stop making your female tv cooks, especially the barefoot contessa and giada de lalalawhatever, make sit down meals where they have to eat with their husbands. it is weird, and painful, and ugh. for all i know, the barefoot contessa likes to do this, because as charles and tommy and i have long speculated, her marriage has gone down the crapper and she keeps trying to lure her husband back in with food and prove to the world that they are rilly in luv. but it does not work! you could take the two most in love people in the world, sit them down with some delicious food, yell action, and all you'd get is 60 unnatural, awkward seconds of the woman laughing too hard at unfunny things her tv-shy husband burbles up, and lots of awkward silences, and the husband unconvincingly mmm-ing really hard. just make it stop.

my love for the tv show grey's anatomy has only recently been expounded about 10 billajillion times by the fact that it has got to be one of the most web-friendly shows out there. by now you all probably know about the writers' blog, which is fantasic. there the authors of each episode explain their motivations and ideas behind each episode, often delving into experiences from their own life that influenced them to write the show in one way or another. it's good reading. and they've got comments. and they READ the comments. and they answer them. it is, like, interactive and stuff.

there are also several other blogs, two of which are admittedly extremely retarded because they are "character" blogs, ie, blogs written from the point of view of a couple of minor characters on the show. they're extraordinarily stupid, as are all blogs written by fictional personas, so just skip over them. but the site also has a blog exploring the medical situations that take place on each show. they've got a blog listing all the songs used in every episode from the music supervisor of the show. and they have TEH PODCASTS as well. somewhere on itunes, apparently. i have to admit to not really ever having gotten into the big old podcasting scene so i haven't listened to them yet. but i am sure they are wonderful.

anyway. if only all tv shows employed the internets in this way. especially the writers' blog. if you could have a peek into the minds of the people behind your favorite show, it would clarify things in a way that is both revealing and interesting. grey's anatomy isn't going to change your life, but it's a funn, well-written comedy-drama, and its writers seem to realize one key to its success is a) realizing your fans are what drive the show b) engaging with them.

tommy's got a bunch of great photos up. unfortunately, my flight was delayed so i missed all of olivia mancini and the housemates' set. i would like to say i had an opinion of the hard tomorrows, but frankly, i was too busy being one of those annoying people who talks at concerts because i was so eager to catch up with everybody. so i didn't really pay attention. but everyone else thought they were excellent. hooray!

i'm back in d.c., and it is teh awesome and teh perfect all together. dcist's unbuckled concert was an unqualified success, and everybody, including myself, had a fabulous time. hoorah. that is all. cause i'm a little drunk. more d.c. updates to come.

i'm looking for people in chicago or illinois who have used match.com, eharmony.com, etc, for an article i'm writing. (really.) it's about a bill going to the senate about online dating safety regulations. if you know anyone, shoot me an email!

UPDATE: how morally dubious would it be for me to create and post a profile, then interview anyone who contacts me in the next few hours?

the supreme court issued a few opinions today, one of which was one siding with a woman in a case against the postal service wherein she slipped and fell on a bunch of packages left on her doorstop. the merits of that case aside, i found this excerpt from a medill article on the case funny:

On Aug. 25, 2001, a postal worker deposited the mail on the porch of Barbara Dolan's Pennsylvania home. The pile left behind consisted of letters, packages and magazines.

Later, Dolan slipped and fell on the mail and suffered injuries as a result of the fall. She filed an administrative complaint with the U.S. Postal Service, which was denied on April 18, 2002.

Six months later, Dolan filed a complaint under the Federal Tort Claims Act against the USPS with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Her husband, Michael Dolan, also filed an FTCA claim stating that his wife's injuries had precluded her from fully performing her spousal role.

let's hope dolan's idea of what duties comprise a spousal role aren't anything like this guy's.

me: omigod
jodi wilgoren who changed her name from the nytimes is in the newsroom
and she was just introduced as wilgoren
and she's all like, "actually, now it's RUDoren"

I'm still annoyed, but it turns out that Shepard Fairey is the real victim here:

(What portion of the proceeds do you think he means?)

Apologies to any theoretical blind readers, but as I mentioned before: I really don't want to encourage this guy.

This new "DHTML chat window popping up in gmail whenever someone IMs me thing"?

SHIT HAS GOT TO GO.

a question from a reader, michelle, that i am unable to answer! i thought you expert cultured folks might know better than i do in regards to this:

In one of your posts you mentioned Illy coffee. I am not sure if you brew it at home. If you do, I need some advice! I have a french press and am having major issues getting a cup that's just right. I'm usually dealing with a feeling that its too watery or too strong. Any advice would be so appreciated!!!

what say you?

I'm really just working this stuff out for my own benefit. You should ignore it unless you're working on something similar. Seriously.

that's what it is! and frankly, it is awesome.

I've been meaning to write something quick about the state of console hacking, but kept getting sidetracked. Might as well do it now, before the news gets completely stale:

Xbox 360
Xplorer360 was released a little over a week ago. The app lets folks read and write to the Xbox 360's hard drive — but don't get too excited. The hard drive isn't encrypted, it's just in a mildly exotic format. This is a useful tool, but not a breakthrough in and of itself.

In other Xbox news, the "kiosk disc" was disabled by the latest Xbox Live update. You might remember me talking about it before — the disc was electronically distributed to retailers for them to play in display units. But recipients were expected to burn the disc image to a DVD-R, bypassing the console's usual prohibition on playing writeable media — this made it an intriguing means by which hackers could potentially inject their own code. The executable files were still encrypted, but the media assets (an in particular, Flash files) weren't and could be replaced. All of this looked like a promising, if less-than-surefire way to find an exploit on the 360. Sadly, that avenue is now closed for anyone with an up-to-date system.

Nintendo DS
But although the news for the 360 crowd isn't as encouraging as it might have first seemed, owners of the Nintendo DS now have more capabilities than they used to. Via BoingBoing I learned of the PassMe, a slick add-on for the DS. But BB got their facts slightly wrong — the PassMe isn't the only thing you need to hack up a DS.

Actually, all the PassMe does is transparently pass traffic back and forth to a genuine DS game (necessary because of the platform's encryption) — with one exception. When it sees a specific instruction — one that tells the DS to begin executing at an address corresponding to the beginning of the DS cartridge — it rewrites it, telling the console to go to the Gameboy slot instead... in which you presumably have a writeable flash cartridge (aka "flash cart") onto which you've loaded your hacked applications.

There are a lot of flash carts available for the Gameboy Advance, and they're all roughly compatible with the DS. But if you want to play "commercial backups" (aka pirated DS games), you'll need to use one of two specific brands, and you'll need to use some custom hacked ROMs that have been released by a group called Golden Sun. You can find details on all of this here.

So, sadly, the cost of modding your GBA isn't as cheap as the $20 PassMe, despite what BoingBoing thought. You also need one of those two brands of flash cart, which will run you another $125-150. For once, piracy doesn't come cheap.

And hey, while I'm at it...

PSP
It's cracked yet again. I can't afford a PSP, and don't really want one, so I haven't been tracking this particularly carefully. But last I checked, you can run homebrew apps, emulators and commercial backups on all firmware revisions.

this post over at jolienyc about allure's feature on cheap makeup thrills reminds me of a few bargain bin products i've been enjoying myself. not that i've ever enjoyed products from anywhere else but a drugstore; grad student budget doesn't exactly let you go shopping weekly at sephora. but anyways!

garnier fructis fortifying deep conditioner: this is supposed to be a once-a-week-or-so deep masque for your hair, but i love it so much, i use it every day. it's amazing mostly because i have fine, tending-to-oily hair, but it rinses super clean (as long as i just use it on the ends) and makes my hair all nice and soft and shiny. and the kicker: it smells yummy. one recommendation: the packaging - a plastic tub - sucks. it's difficult to open in the shower, and if you drop it, the top'll shatter everywhere.

clean and clear oil-free dual action moisturizer: perfect for those with skin like mine that tends to get super dry in the winter, but that will break out into nastiness if you even think about putting moisturizer on it. this gets rids of the dryness but doesn't make me break out.

curel ultra-healing lotion: i think curel must be undergoing a product redesign and shedding all of its old-looking tubes, because i came across a different-looking minitube of this lotion in osco's bargain bin. 25 cents. how could i pass it up. and i loved it so much i came back the next day and bought, i shit you, 10 more minitubes. it's a little bit greasy, but lightly so, and moisturizes really well. my hands are not disgusting and red and cracky any longer!

and thus ends the temporary transformation of the blog into beauty tips galore! but feel free to leave your own in comments. i very rarely buy a product unless recommended by friends, and i'm always looking for recs to help along my product obsession.

UPDATE: i made some other drugstore recs a while back.

our lovely legal instructor loves us all so much that as we're all desperately struggling to finish our terrible 1200-word articles, she ordered us lunch - pizza from piece (her husband is an investor there). unfortunately for me, it's located somewhere in wicker park and not really accessible to my 'hood, but i'd highly recommended it. yummy thin crust.

i love this article:

Just over seven months after he made his first appearance at the National Zoo, giant panda cub Tai Shan, has apparently discovered that he and his mother are not alone.

Zoo officials say that over the weekend, he began staring into the outdoor enclosure next to the one where he has been playing over the past few weeks with his mother, Mei Xiang.

Consumerist brings news that TechCrunch (which appears to be down at the moment) has just reviewed the private beta of a service called FlySpy. It looks fairly neat — enter your origin and destination cities, and get back a graph of fare prices for the coming month. You can overlay graphs for different airports, adjust parameters, and generally short-circuit the airlines' confusing pricing schemes.

Or that's what it looks like, anyway (there's a screenshot on Consumerist). The site is still in closed beta. So, on the off chance that anyone has invite capabilities... yeah. Drop me a line.

via peter, a really kind of fascinating article on, of all things, ice worms!

Thriving in conditions that would turn most living things to Popsicles, these inch-long earthworm cousins inhabit glaciers and snowfields in the coastal ranges of Alaska, British Columbia, Washington and Oregon. They move through seemingly solid ice with ease and are at their liveliest near the freezing point of water. Warm them up slightly and they dissolve into goo.

Their life cycle remains a mystery.

But ice worms are beginning to yield their secrets to a few hardy scientists who see broad applications from understanding one of the planet's oddest inhabitants.

NASA anted up $200,000 last year to explore the worms' cold tolerance and what it might say about the possibility of life on Jupiter's icy moons and other planets. That work could also improve cold storage of organs and tissues for transplantation.

As glaciers shrink in the face of global warming, interest is growing in ice worms and other animals whose habitat could melt away within the next 50 years. National Geographic funded one of the first field surveys to focus on ice-worm ecosystems.

"They're kind of hot right now," Lee said as he and roommate Dave Eiriksson strapped on their gear and headed up the slopes above Paradise.

i should feel shame at seeing people fall and potentially hurt themselves very seriously, but when they are wearing the outfits that these ice dancers are wearing, i can only feel utter glee and manic laughter. check out the blow-by-blow photo gallery here.

y'all, one of the things you are lucky about is the fact that you get to read this here blog, and you get to see the intimate workings of a Real Live Journalist. not THAT intimate, sicko. but you know, thought process, research, super interview tips (hint: super interview tips do not include dropping contents of purse on interviewee's floor including, ahem, lady things, and inadvertently yelling, "shit!", not that i do that kind of stuff).

i thought as, you know, an extra special treat for you all, i would document my inner monologue as i attempt to complete a 1200-word article that is due, uh, tomorrow.

start: sit down to computer, full of two homemade cappucinos, buzzed, elated, ready to CHANGE THE WORLD with my story because i am a Journalist and we can change the world and shit.

write lede.

word count: 42 words. shit.

think: hmm. most heinous lede ever? well, what am i going to do about it? it's already there. jeez.

add quote. wow. adding a quote adds, like, a lot of words. hmm.

cut and paste about 17 unrelated quotes from pages of typed-up interviews. word count: a lot more! jeez, i'm practically done! now all i have to do is construct some sort of coherent narrative, with flow and wisdom and insight. easy peasy. totally rocking the espresso. you can totally do this, Reporter Catherine!

hmm.

i really hope george didn't sleep with meredith. lordy. that would be bordering on, like, nasty incestuous, also, i would have to kill meredith. with a pointy stick. that had been rubbed with chili powder.

espresso really, really...starts to kick in. in a bad way. goddamn. write two or three paragraphs very quickly with laser-like intensity. no matter they barely make sense and, uh, could potentially be incorrect. libel schmibel! the editing comes later! hey, i think the computer screen is starting to shake for some reason.

beer would be good way to counter espresso buzz, no? yes, yes i think it would.

word count. has not change since the 37th time i've word counted. microsoft should really do something about that. i should also really do something about only having miller lite in my midget fridge.

write a couple of seriously lame sentences.

fuck.

fuckity fuck fuck.

give up to chat on IM and rewatch some veronica mars. story isn't due till 5pm tomorrow; only 800 words to go. totally doable, no?

see, y'all don't need to be worried about the future of journalism! you have bright young things like me to carry the torch forward!

Via Make, an amazing collection of links to Halloween DIY projects. It's less than nine months away, you know.

I've got a feeling that I might just be the last person on the internet to see it — but if you haven't watched Muppets Overtime, you really ought to. It's a beautifully-made and surprisingly sad five minute animated short.

But for the record, I still think that a Muppet retelling of the New Testament would be the ultimate application for the franchise.

The Governess says she feels like the Jenny Lewis album is a retread. I can't really speak to that, having not heard the album (although I haven't heard anyone say they really love it, aside from RCR). But I, too, have been trying and failing to find a new album to love.

The Subways? Too hard a sell. It's The Killers all over again. Also, there's the fact that the album is just OK.

How about the much-hyped Arctic Monkeys? I'd like to think that I'm past the point in my life where I have to dump on Next Big Things in order to make myself feel better about my own occasionally deeply suspect musical taste. Maybe I'm not. But the AM album just doesn't do it for me. It sounds like Dischord-influenced high school bands. If I lived in the UK and had an email address ending in @nme.com, I could see why that'd sound like the fifth best English album of all time to me.

Okay, actually, no. I can't possibly conceive of that. But I can understand the enthusiasm. And I've only listened through the thing once. Maybe it's a grower. It seemed pretty boring on the first listen. It struck me as a less-catchy Bloc Party done in self-satisfied keys. To be fair, I said similar things about the Wolf Parade album after the first couple of listens, and now I'm deeply, deeply sorry. But for now: pass.

Yet! I'm hopeful that salvation is at hand. The Islands album drops in not too long (or, here on the internets, not too long ago), and not only features prominent ex-Unicorns, but also cameos from Wolf Parade and Arcade Fire members. Canadag, yo.

Anyway, I've secured through the (in)appropriate channels. So far, not an Abominable Snow level of catchiness. But it's definitely interesting and definitely good. And Nick Diamond has earned multiple listens on the strength of this alone. March 9, people. With Metric, who I am assured are good, or at least attractive.

Among the many things I like about my new job is that it's given me the opportunity to learn a bunch of new technologies. Email triggers, .htaccess files, SVN repositories, XML, and of course the power to raise the dead (from the command line!) — lots of good stuff.

And useful stuff. For instance, this morning I finally fixed out broken archive URLs. Movable Type 2.66whatever built entries in the format

• /blog/archives/000001.php
• /blog/archives/000002.php
• etc.

But since the upgrade to 3.2, we've switched to a more useful format, oriented around a value that MT generates called the basename (which is basically an abbreviated, URL-safe version of the title). The new URLs look like this:

• /blog/archives/2004/01/22/round_the_world/
• /blog/archives/2005/12/16/sweet_nostalgia/

The problem is that there are still lots of links to the old URLs, both within entries on this site and elsewhere. That's no good, since they don't get rebuilt when new comments are added, or when their entries are updated, or when we redesign, or when anything else happens on the site.

But now I can do something about it. And since it took me a few hours, and since it might help someone else, I thought I'd post my solution.

Today's Post has a an interesting profile of a botnet operator — one of those jerks who remotely infects computers, amassing swarms of enslaved machines that are then used to send spam, extort websites, steal information and generally do nasty things. The subject remains anonymous, only identifying himself as a high school dropout living in a small midwestern town. The three businesses closest to his house are also mentioned, but not named.

Except — whoops! It looks like the Post failed to scrub its photos very carefully. Within thirty minutes of the story being picked up by Slashdot, a user had noticed that the Post's photos contained metadata saying "Location: Roland, OK". Which, as you may have deduced, is a small midwestern town (pop. 3000). Another slashdot commenter googled for the businesses mentioned and was able to take a guess at the