The annoying people

My girlfriend has a friend who looks like Miss Piggy. The thing is, she has a worse personality than Piggy as well.This chick married a dude who I really didn't like. Nobody liked him. She came up to my place to visit my girlfriend, and I barely was able to not kick her out of the house.

She showed us their wedding picture, and exclaimed, "Look at that expression on his face! He looks like Kermit the Frog!"So I said, "That would make you... mmfffmmmmffffioeohnop!" (That last bit is approximately the noise I made when I realized I didn't want to say what I had started to say and I grabbed a handful of cookies and shoved them in my mouth in order to stop myself).

I tried to convince my g/f to dump her friend - neither of of liked Piggy, and Kermit just dragged the whole thing down well below tolerable.But she was timid about it - we all saw that Seinfeld episode where he had to break up with an old friend.

So Kermit and Piggy invite us to an engagement party at their house in NJ. We went, and I resolved that I would never show more love for my girlfriend than I would by simply behaving myself.

Kermit left to pick up some chips or something, and Piggy told us this story:

Everyone hates Kermit. And that goes triple for people who have to work with him. So he can't hold a job to save his life.While they were in the midst of wedding plans (and living together), he got fired from his insurance job. Instead of telling her this, he got up every morning, dressed for "work", and went to the mall to sit around for eight hours a day. His voice mail at work still worked (although they took his name off of the message, he could still retrieve messages), so every hour or so he would call in to figure out if she called him at work. If she did, he'd call her back and tell her that he was too busy to get the phone.This went on for about three weeks - she saw little signs here and there, but ignored them. And he never told her that he didn't have a job, and continued to dress and leave every day for "work".

He decided to get a new job, and he figured that the best way to go was to fax resumes around. But they didn't have a fax machine. So he bought one so he could fax resumes when she was out.

One day she decided to do laundry (NOT her normal gig), and when she opened up the dryer to insert the clothes, she saw something in there. HE WAS HIDING THE FAX MACHINE IN THE DRYER!!!!So the jig was up - she put the pieces together and yelled at him when he got home that night.

And then, to punish him further apparently, she went ahead and married him.

On the three-hour ride home, I told my lovely girlfriend that she had to break up with Piggy, otherwise those two would come visit us more. They had, of course, driven away all of their friends who have any sense. She had come to the same conclusion, so didn't need much convincing.

She broke up with Piggy on the phone the very next day. As far as I know (they don't talk to us anymore), they're still married.

Talk about a warning sign - from her perspective, that must have given her a really big indication. If he's uncomfortable telling her the truth about that, how is he going to react when one of those really big marriage issues come up?

first-person shooter video games with an agenda

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfenstein

This is a link to the very first shooter game that I remember playing. It was rumored to have an agenda back then; the Wikipedia entry doesn' t really mention this.

Back then, I had heard rumors that the game was financed by the Nazi party (whether the American or German branch, I don't know), and that it was pro-Hitler. I didn't play it too often, but I remember thinking that this was hooey - I never saw any particular glorification of Axis stuff.

Open Source and Linus Torvalds

This is a particularly illustrative Wired Magazine article about Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux and the father of open-source computing.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.11/linus.html


Wikipedia weighs in on Linux:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux

The big intellectual property corporations are shaking in their boots and trying to discredit Linux and Torvalds every chance they get. At stake is their very profitability and thus survival.

But at a consumer level, allowing the users of a system to change the system to meet their needs makes a lot of sense. Who better would know what they need?

Open Source has incarnations throughout history, but Henry Ford's Model T automobile is one of the first widely-hacked consumer products. Ford built it with an eye on the end user being able to fix it and even modify it slightly, and Open Source as a business model was effectively born.