First result. Yes, that is me in the picture. If it changes in the future, here is the direct link: http://lavincolindo.net/hosted/ag.jpg.

Sadly enough, yours truly now has an online journal. But in my defense, I get to write Perl and learn MySQL and XHTML and CSS in making it, so not all is lost. Also, the CGI module in Perl requires you to specify the DTD yourself if you want XHTML 1.0 Strict, probably because it outputs XHTML for forms that is valid Transitional but not Strict. Otherwise, however, it works fine. I wonder if that is something they are working on.

About a week ago, I was walking home when I noticed a graffito written in large white letters which read "STOP BUSH." I neither hate nor love Bush, but overall I found it somewhat amusing, particularly since I live in a rather conservative town (River Forest, IL if you were wondering; it's next to Oak Park, an incredibly liberal town). Anywho, several days later, somebody used black paint to write "VOTE" over the word "STOP." I wondered whether the person who did this was an indignant Bush supporter who also happened to condone graffiti, or perhaps someone rebellious enough to disagree with the original writer for disagreement's sake. Lo and behold, the very next day someone writes over the word "BUSH" in black letters. What did he write? Why, "KODOS!!" of course. "VOTE KODOS!!" I have no idea whether there were three culprits, or perhaps just two.

You might be wondering why I wrote this. Part of the reason is that I thought, "Hmm, I should take a picture," each time it changed, but never did. Another reason, however, is that it reminded me of /. in its own way. The people essentially turned the wall into a public but anonymous forum. Isn't the whole exchange really the same as "STOP^H^H^H^VOTE BUSH^H^H^H^HKODOS!!" in less nerdy terms?

The other day I went to the new Ultra Foods grocery store in my neighborhood. I notice that the checkout computer is running Windows XP. Nerd that I am point out that it should be running an embedded OS, preferably *nix. (Windows stability aside, there's no reason to run a PC OS on a checkout computer--running Mandrake would be stupid too.) The clerk then told me that the computer had crashed four times that day.

It's not that I'm virulently anti-Microsoft (after all, I was against the antitrust lawsuit), it's more that I'm against stupid computer decisions. After all, when the local Jewel switched from IBM machines with green-on-black displays to newer comptuers with LCD monitors, at least they had the sense to use a DOS program.