zhasper.com

Today's wackiness bought to you be the letters D and E and many steins of bier.

(strangely - I knew it was a german project just from the way the english words were used. It's a bit scary when you can identify nationality based on grammar...)

It's amazing what you find digging through trash.

Take the business card I just found. The front has a picture of a blue sky with fluffy clouds, and the words "Bliss and Beyond" superimposed in a red calligraphic font. On the reverse, we have:

THERAPEUTIC MASSAGE
JOHN Pract. Rem. Mas.
----------------------------
Experience Swedish and Remedial massage in a supportive, caring
environment at the hands of an intuitive and attentive therapist
----------------------------

This was given to me by a.. let's be polite, and call him a fairly mature gentleman, at the
Mardi Gras opening party this year (incidentally, this was the afternoon I left my last job - so I was rather jubilant at the time). I've met him several times earlier (but not since, thankfully), and he's always full of suggestions that I should come over to his place for "coffee" - or maybe a massage.

No thanks mate, I'll be right.

Outages: Yes, there was an outage. all day yesterday. I'm not overly impressed by this. It is, though, one of the few major outages I've had in about 2.5 years of having this server with this provider, so that's not too bad.

I'd been considering moving though, to a real server. At the moment, I'm thinking of a server from Hetzner.de, a German company. I'm also going to be working with a friend to get some stability and redundancy for both of us. More power, more ram, more disk.. and only a little more expensive, it's hard to resist.

Unrelatedly, I came across this story in the Guardian: a group of French cleaning ladies who saved money by organising a carpool with their own cars are being sued by a local bus company accusing them of "an act of unfair and parasitical competition".

As for the tapdancing.. there's no actual tap dancing at all. that was just to lure you in.

In case you've not already seen this:

Neverending Fall

A female mannequin falls through an infinite universe of bubbles. If she gets stuck, click and drag her with the mouse to help her out..

I was in the city last night, heading for the bus stop, when I was approached by a well-dressed young woman.

She began by saying hi, introducing herself, asking if I was a local (and revealing that she wasn't local).. all the while, she was being very friendly, even charming - but also very obviously embarrassed and flustered and the neccessity to talk to me..

Eventually, she got around to the point - her car had run out of petrol in the middle of the city, she didn't have any cash, nor any cards on her... at this point I decided I couldn't wait any longer for the inevitiable, so I short circuited the conversation by offering all the cash I had on me - a total of just under $3.50.

Finally, someone who puts some effort into their asking for cash and makes it entertaining. Who knows, she might even have been telling the truth.. she certainly seemed vague enough to head out in a strange city with no cash and no cards, and not notice the petrol getting low..

Unrelatedly, lookint at the stats for my site, I notice that someone has come to my site from a link on http://www.empius.com.au/. I can't figure out why...

Also, someone came to my site by googling for "95 theses on the religious right". I did make a post the other day which referenced these, but so did lots of other people - I was surprised to find that anyone would find my site by googling for that. However, there's three hits in the log, and the other parameters in the url indicate that I was somewhere within the top 10 results at 05/Jul/2005:09:22:33 +1000, but I'd slipped to only somewhere in the first 20 by 05/Jul/2005:11:55:18 +1000. Incidentally, the hits appear to be coming from the same source - same IP, same browser version etc. They apparently found my site at 9:22 - and found it interesting enough that two hours later they went as far as the third page of results looking for my site again.

And now, time for me to go away and sneeze..