Slowly but surely, things are improving. Trackback is working, anyway, sort of kind of hopefully.

Of course, Trackback is also shaping up to be little more than a whizbang doodle, at least around here. It's a way of automating those "I responded to your post on my blog" comments, if you happen to be using a blog-tool that handles Trackback pings (that's Movable Type, Movable Type and Movable Type). Maybe it will grow to be other, more interesting things; maybe it won't.

Meanwhile, here is a gratuitous meme seen at leuschke. Any excuse for a ping.

yami is:

• a complete and consistent environment
• finally getting the recognition he deserves
• a small hardware interface
• the marriage customs
• typical fishing-practicing people
• made of shrimp tempura, cucumber and cream cheese
• the key to the offense

Well, there's lots broken. A post and a couple of comments were lost in the upgrade; sorry about that. The photoblog is out of synch. Trackback is funky, in the way of cheese that's been left out too long. The stylesheets both need tweaking. But hey, there's two stylesheets now! Check out the view->stylesheets menu if you're on Netscape 6 or a Mozilla spinoff.

I need a shower, and some lunch, and a few money-making hours as a guinea pig for experimental economists. Things will begin to magically fix themselves tomorrow, probably.

Now that I'm revelling in my bounteous unemployment (financial aid has not yet processed my request for summer workstudy, so I can't even do much job hunting) it's time to bid farewell to a splendiferous gang of guestbloggers. Thanks, guys, for keeping the place so warm and cozy!

And with the guestbloggers safely out of the way, I'll be able to start on all those jizzilicious upgrade projects. First up: MT 2.21, and the dubious novelty of Tracking Back.

As I was walking home after handing in my sloppy-but-passable and oh-so-finished report on this particular patch of ground where we dragged around a few wires last week, some guy pulled over and called out that I had the nicest breasts he'd ever seen. He didn't call them breasts, of course, but I figured out pretty quickly what he meant. My response to that kind of thing is always to think up some snappy comeback a la Al Jafee, and then keep walking without a hint of response. Because I know damn well that any snappy comeback would inevitably devolve:

me: Oh, so how many breasts have you seen, then?
creepyguy: Fifteen.
me: Fifteen? What, you bite off yer ma's nipple trying to suck on it after she'd been in labor for thirty-six hours to get your fat head into the world?
creepyguy: ... hey, baby...
me: Dude, you need to get out more. Go find a strip club, you can see all the nice boobies you want there.
creepyguy: (here comes forth a soulful ode to the virtues of the honest, unaltered breast, wherein creepyguy paints himself as a sensitive, modern man in words of one syllable or less, all the while referring to me as "girl" or "baby" and staring at my chest for signs of nipple.)
me: ... (blank stare as I realize once again that pop culture feminism has somewhere gone terribly, terribly wrong) ... look, just fuck off, okay?

It's not so much the sexual objectification that disturbs me - after all, I can read a full issue of Cosmo without puking once. It's the fact that, unlike Cosmo, creepy guys give you no reasonable path to conversation.

Is the Earth's magnetic field nuclear-powered?

And how does magnetic pole reversal fit into this scenario?

Put your name on a distant rock.

More fun email from Physical Plant:

This morning at approximately 6:15 a.m. the City of Pasadena suffered a temporary power failure of less than a second. The glitch was caused by a crow that flew into a 17 KV power feeder.

That'll teach 'em to wake me up in the morning. Now if only a scrub jay could be thrown into the power plant as a warning to the rest of annoyingbirdkind...

My paper is writing itself as I post this. No, really, I can hear the seismograms conferring among themselves.

... is a quirky and intelligent and above all actually funny webcomic I have recently stumbled across (well, OK, someone pushed me, but it still made me stumble). Go take a look.

Since the messager wrote "monkey monkey monkey", I'll add a DumbMonkey and The Monkey Can Type.

A friend of mine wants to be on the Nintendo street team. The online voting is non-binding on the corporate team-pickers, but why not vote for him anyway? The video's a hoot.