Egosurfing yields comics of old

I totally forgot about Misc. Kitty, my old comic on StripCreator.

Good times, good times.  My favorite is this one.  Make sure you disable the obscenity filter.

After all these years…

I finally sat down and watched THX 1138 from start to finish last night, and I’m glad I did.  I didn’t understand it at all when I was younger.  I’d try to watch it and get bored, or something would happen, or I would catch it halfway through or something.  As a fan of the original Star Wars trilogy, and George Lucas’ American Graffiti, and as a sci-fi nut in general, I had been meaning to watch it for years and years.

I wish I could have seen it all the way through when I was a bit younger.  It’s kind of like The Catcher in the Rye in that it’s profound when you encounter it when you’re young, but you don’t fully grasp it until you’re more experienced.  For me it’s a good pre-middle-age movie.

I saw it on Netflix Instant, which has a pretty nice collection of movies.  It’s good to finally grasp what that string of letters and numbers really means.  I knew the gist of it, but man, it’s one of those movies that alters your thinking and perception for a while.

The office sounds totally different to me right now.  I sit by a printer/copier, and the hums, screeches and whirrs it makes are straight out of the techno-nightmare world of that film.  I work at a large telecom company, and so the banter I hear is mostly corporatespeak laced with various high-tech sounding terms.  Throw in the occasional loud rumbling of an aging HVAC system, and you’ve got yourself a premade ambient track for THX 1138 II: Bald Revolution.

I’m amazed at how prophetic the sounds were.  I’m hearing voices over several speakerphones and the garbled din is eerily similar to the intercom chatter in the movie.

As I look around the sagging beige fabric walls of my cubicle, I suddenly realize that I definitely need to add some more flair to my personal workspace.

Photoshoppery: “Because He Is Awesome”

Modified this lolcat poster…

to make this…

Weapons of Great Despression: We are down, and we’re about to be kicked.

So we’re giving a $700 billion check to somebody to try and get out of this economic crisis.  I don’t know where that money is going, and frankly the complexity of the situation overloads my brain and forces me info my default state, which is apathy.  What I am concerned about is that we (meaning the United States or Western Civilization in general) are down and we’re ripe for a good kicking.

Al Qaeda (which is not so much an organization as a mindset, kind of like “Flintstones Kids” – 10 million strong and growing, by the way) is probably looking at us and going nuts trying to figure out the best ways to take advantage of our misfortune collective stupidity.

I can tell you a couple of targets that are definitely not on the short list of terrorists-in-the-know: the New York Stock Exchange and any public building in Washington, DC.  Whereas back in the day you had the Red Brigade targeting politicians and people in high finance, your modern asymmetrical warfighter understands that the best way to defeat us is to let bankers and our government give us the slow, gentle, yet unlubricated butt-screwing they think we deserve.  All they had to do was set the tone, and our fear was enough to give too much power to idiot politicians and completely lose faith in our system of fake money.

$700 billion is about the size of a decent modern war budget.  So I’m thinking that right now we’re fighting a war on three fronts – Iraq, Afghanistan/Pakistan, and now we’re fighting to save companies that specialize in promising to give people money that they don’t have if something bad happens.  Which brings up an interesting point:  Who acts as the insurance companies’ safety net if something bad (as in, “people no longer believe your bullshit.”) happens to them?  Oh, that’s right – the US government – you and me, the American Taxpayer.  So they insure us, and in a Turkish bath-worthy reacharound kinda way, we insure them.  As if we weren’t racking up enough debt, I hear Mr. Ponzi would like royalties for the use of his scheme.

What I’d like to know is what slice of these companies we’re bailing out is foreign-owned, and can we get some of that money back?  Can we invade those countries who don’t put up their shares of the bailout?  Will we need to borrow money from them in order to invade them?

Name change.

I have once again changed the name of this blog.  At first it was “SL and SL”, and was to be my Second Life and Silverlight development blog.  Then it was “Building With AJ”, and was broadened to overall development stuff.  Now, it’s just “AJH-1138″ – a nice, ambiguous, generalized name for a blog that will contain every random crap thought that I care to make public.  The reason for this change is because I have some stuff I need to say and I don’t want to have 300 blogs out there in order to say it.

New Skull Stuff at Serious Wood’s!

Over the past week I’ve built and released two new items: Terrence, the Flying Flaming Skull Greeter and the Sceptres of Doom.  I plan on adding a LOT of creepy/halloween stuff to Serious’ line of products.  You can find ‘em in-world at my shop.

Both of these bad boys were made possible by this kick-ass single-prim skull by TheFriedGeek Althouse.

Terrence is the creepiest thing I've built so far.

Oh yes, they're downright deeee-monic!

Business Intelligence != Success

At my new job I’m currently studying whether or not to use a (gigantic) business intelligence suite for a particular project.  The company already owns the software, has it implemented, and has a huge staff of people trained in its use, maintenance, development, etc.  I think I’m obligated to take advantage of it.  The software is damned impressive, and while it probably has way more functionality than we could use on this project, I think it’s the right choice.

That being said, let me rail against Business Intelligence (BI) in general…BI is becoming yet another crutch for corporations, and yet another way to make the shareholders feel like something is being done to make them more money.  Instead of focusing on innovation, customer service and making good products, we’re supposed to “mine” a bunch of data and magically pull out numbers and statistics that will point us in the right direction.

It’s crap.  The whole idea is crap.  It’s just like Six Sigma and all the other corporate culture garbage.  It’s the lingo of d-bags in polos and khakis.  BI is an attempt to aggregate buttloads of data and try to share it and display it in ways that are beneficial to all of the divisions of your company – and that’s a noble thing to do and probably helps in many ways – but I’ve seen cultish devotion to BI and I want to slap people around and try to make them see that they’re not going to read the customers’ minds with it.

There are a lot of corporations out there that are good at one thing – being corporate.  BI is making them even better at it.

Ripped Off!

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  If that’s the case, then I’ve received a double-dose of flatterization this evening.

I’ve been stuck in World of Warcraft *a lot* the past few months and haven’t been active in Second Life at all except to answer a few questions and handle some small issues for customers.  In that time, it seems, the imitators and thieves have been at work.

Imitation is something I can handle.  It has happened on the FunSign – most notably by the XtremeTag, which is a *great* product and has several advantages over my product; and on my Farty Follower Advanced – there’s a guy selling a “Fart Follower”, but based on his ads/marketing I’d say it’s nowhere near my quality.

I was told about the “Fart Follower” this evening , checked it out, and to be honest I’m not at all worried about losing market share in the virtual flatulence area.  But I did some digging around tonight on SLExchange.com and found some douche had COPIED, almost word for word, my description for my Sic Title product on his (vastly inferior) “Fun Title” pile of crap.  Horrifying!!  I sent a message to SLX’s merchant help folks and we’ll see how speedily this guy’s wee-wee is spanked.

Use my ideas – build a better mousetrap – make improvements and do your thing…but don’t ever, EVER plagiarize my marketing text!