They have borked my email, it may be time finally, after many friends and co-workers have begged me, to make the big change.

All in all I can only think of a single, mega-successful software company that fucked up as bad as AOL has. That would be Novell, the one time networking giant which had about 80% of the business networking market in 1991, at the dawn of the dot-com boom. And yet somehow Novell utterly failed to hold onto to enough of that market to prosper while every other firm with a transistor or chip in its balance sheet soared skyward on the NASDAQ. As a stock-broker at the time I assumed, wrongly, I would never again see such mismanagement. And that was a valid assumption, until AOL in the last decade.

Transdermal Buprenorphine, has anyone ever heard of or have experience with this stuff? The reason I ask is my doc put me on it. I’d never heard of it, some research shows it appears to be some kind of morphine knock off. I slapped on the first patch Saturday morning, it seemed to work OK and they’re each supposedly good for seven days, although I noticed a little perspiration from time to time. But when I went to sleep last night I woke up half an hour later in a fucking pool of sweat. [Read more…]

So I was down for the count with a stomach ailment for the last 36 hours or so. And I do mean down, as in delirious and flat on my back for most of it. It struck me during the rare, lucid moments throughout the whole miserable experience that our innate system for dealing with such maladies is not exactly ideal. Projectile vomiting and trips to the bathroom every ten minutes? Really, Yahweh, that’s the best you could come up with?

Fortunately there are some real designers, albeit less supernatural and far more recent in time, who have developed working solutions for such conditions. Without which I’d probably still be stuck in an endless delirium of mutant dreams and walking nightmares, where the only possible silver lining is rapid weight-loss: between the injury last month and this deal I’ve dropped 15 lbs.

Like a zombie rising from repeated bullets to the brain, the Republicans have proposed what they call the real jobs plan, and guess what’s in it? No seriously, take a wild guess? [Read more…]

This giant prow as seen by a digitally reworked image provided by Dawn rises three times higher above the surrounding crater basin than Mt Everest is above sea level on earth. Click to embiggen

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