Let's Make Contact...

I recently started reading The Salmon of Doubt, the "missing novel" by Douglas Adams. It's actually a compilation of, essentially, the best of what was on the hard drives of his collection of Macintoshes. (Macintoshi? What is the correct plural form of Mac?) He had several Macs. It is an awesome (awesome as in awe-inspiring, not awesome as in dude-speak) collection of Adams' musings, magazine articles, and unpublished writings. As I read tonight, I began bookmarking pages with passages I found to be exceptionally good or profound or funny, or in a couple of spots with things I wished to Google later. This effort soon proved futile, as I was tearing my paper-scrap bookmarks smaller and smaller to facilitate the marking of every fifth or so page. As much as I love the Hitchhiker's novels, as well written as they are, there is a beauty, depth, and mastery of the craft of writing to Adams' writing not even hinted at by of the astute jokes of Arthur Dent, the uncanny but true observations of Ford Prefect, the selfish humanity, despite not being human, of Zaphod Beeblebrox. This is on no way meant to say his quality of writing was in any way hampered by being comedy: even his serious pieces were humorous. Several times so far I have laughed out loud, twice such that I had to briefly stop reading. I will soon have to purchase my own copy (this one belongs to the local library) so I can make markings in the margins and leave it full of post-it notes. If you have the opportunity, please read this wonderful tribute to the late, great Adams. Pay special attention to the article "Riding the Rays."

After the last upgrade of Firefox on my desktop box, most of the extensions stopped functioning. All of them, actually, though a couple were soon updated and resumed their normal functions. Most of them were fairly non-essential, but I've been missing my AdBlock. I don't block all banner ads, but disabling those horrible "swat the fly" and "shoot the papparazi" or whatever type of ads with the obnoxious noises was quite nice. So tonight I installed Firefox on the decrepit laptop I use at work while I'm busy staying awake all night. I was trying to think of ways to streamline my browsing and speed up my use of the 28.8 dialup (not that I'm complaining about the speed, it's free dialup.) AdBlock popped back into my mind, and I grabbed the latest version. I opened the preferences window and set "*" as the default blocking rule, thus blocking all ads, images, Flash, scripts, basically everything except text and hard-coded colors, borders, and frames. This sped up my browsing tremendously. Seriously, pages load nearly as quickly as my parents' bottom-tier cable, and equally as quickly as browsing with Lynx, without the incredible inconvenience of browsing with Lynx. One problem: any button or other item I may need to click, if it is anything except text with a hyperlink, is not there. Things like, say, the "new post" button. Since I've already said this whole narrative was tonight, I guess there's no point in trying to pretend it was the cause of three weeks (three? Has it really been three weeks?) of no posts. Even if I have to frequently change the default blocking rules, its still faster than it was.

At this job where I have to stay up, I am known as a "Life Skills Trainer." Or maybe I'm not, there have been so many changes lately to job titles around here I'm not entirely sure what anyone is. I do know my manager is now my team leader. Our mutual supervisor, though, is still our supervisor. I brought up the job so I can tell a little story. As a life skills trainer (LST), or whatever I am, I work at a group home for adults with developmental disabilities. All of my guys (guys in the generic, we have both male and female clients) have mental retardation, and several have autism as well. One of the guys with whom I was working tonight is a young man with autism. He is never shy about his desires, and tonight, like most nights, one of those desires was to lean through the slats of the picket fence and urinate in the front yard. I sympathise. I have the occassional outdoor urge, usually in a yard or a parking lot. I never do it unless I'm outside of town, like in the woods, or a field or something, but I feel the strong want to do so, so I can appreciate what he is going through while I am forced to prevent him from doing so. I am consoled by the fact that, although he doesn't often choose the back yard, I am allowed to let him pee in the back yard. If it wasn't for the traffic, and the fact that a police officer once came to the door of another house to inform me of another of my guys urinating in the front yard, ("I wouldn't bother you with it, but two old ladies saw him,") I'd let him go whenever, wherever. He did grow up in a rural area, it was normal for him as a kid.

I wanted to rant for a while about the recent expansion, *deep breath*, EXPANSION of the Patriot Act. I'm not going to actually discuss the expansion here, because honestly I'm just too pissed to think coherently about it.

It had to happen sooner or later. Some genius committed murder over a computer game, specifically over the theft of some virtual property therein.

I forgot to mention in my last post, the New Scientist link about dinosaurs was given to me by Lisbeth, without whom the last post wouldn't have existed. Not just because she sent me the link, but because the post started as me cracking jokes about the article in real life, then saying I should blog about it, then forgetting the whole incident until she reminded me. Also, on a competely unrelated note, Lisbeth and I had a great time yesterday reliving a small piece of our childhoods by watching the first two episodes of 3-2-1 Contact, thanks to the internet. Oh, Internet, how I love you so. Sometimes you ruin my memories of television shows I once watched, sometimes you make me late for work, but when you do something right, you really do it right.