I just described something as “rather the worse for wear,” and followed it up with, “Who was the person that described?” After receiving blank stares, I explained that I distinctly recalled those words being the last description of some literary figure (an author, not a character), but I couldn’t remember who and no one had any clue what I was talking about.

A quick bit of Googling backed me up. A well-known author was, indeed, described this way just prior to his death:

“[A] gentleman, rather the worse for wear… and who appears in great distress… I assure you, he is in need of immediate assistance.”

So pop quiz: who was the author described this way? No fair looking it up.

A friend once told me a story about her troublemaker of a brother. One day, as a young kid, the dog came running into the house whimpering, and my friend’s brother immediately exclaimed, “I didn’t stab him!” Since no one had accused him of doing such, and since no one had yet realized that the dog had, indeed, been stabbed, his attempt at proclaiming his innocence ended up being a guilty plea.

It’s easy to dismiss as something little kids do, but I think the same sort of thing is happening in world politics. Every time North Korea releases a story about how great Kim Jong-il is doing, the fact that he’s most likely terminally ill becomes even more apparent. (And, by launching a ton of rockets into the ocean, they’re drawing still more attention to their leadership.) And you could say the same sort of thing about Iran: everything they say about being stable and thriving seems to be a pathetic attempt at denying the reality. Or like when the police investigating Rihanna’s beating had the police photos leaked to the press, and came out saying that they wouldn’t confirm whether they were real or a hoax, but that they would fire whoever leaked them to the press.

I’m a bad liar. The uneasiness in my voice and my panicked, paranoid look gives me away almost every time. But it sometimes seems that I can do better than the propaganda departments of some countries.

Radiant CMS is a small CMS written in Rails that looks full-featured without being bloated. If I were to design a new semi-static site, I think I’d probably give it a whirl. It’s got quite a few extensions, too.

There’s also a Twitter gem that Rails (or just plain Ruby) developers can take advantage of. Without actually trying any, it seems that Fleakr may be the best available gem for Flickr. There’s also flickr-fu. Most irritatingly, the top gem, called “flickr,” seems like it hasn’t been worked on in a long time and never left alpha.

I sometimes see people post on Twitter to the #followfriday category. Today I decided to go for #unfollowfriday.

It was a tough decision, honestly. I like the variety of what the people I follow on Twitter bring. Some are of a professional interest, others were of more personal interest to me, and still others were friends. But I have so much crap flying by on Twitter that I rarely even fire up a Twitter client because I just don’t care.

So I went for broke and removed most of the high-volume Twitterers I follow, along with a few that I never should have followed like snoopdogg. I hope I haven’t hurt anyone’s feelings, but I just couldn’t keep up with all of the tweets. Now I’ve got a pared-down offering so I can savor each tweet.

Russian gas giant Gazprom formed a joint venture with Nigeria’s state-gas company, and chose to name their new venture Nigaz. Most people reading the news respond with, “Are you serious?!,” or just burst out laughing.

The BBC has an article about the poor choice, explaining that it’s not pronounced the way you might be tempted to pronounce it (but not in mixed company), and interviews a branding consultant who states, “People will soon forget that the name sounds bad.”

Really? People will soon forget that naming your African joint-venture “Nigaz” sounds offensive?

What do the gurus think of this (barebones motherboard + Dual-core Atom 330), this case, and a pair of these? Oh, and go whole hog on the memory.

$335.45 for a PC-based fileserver with 2TB of disk, 2GB RAM, and minimal power usage. Put Linux on it and make it an iSCSI target, or use NFS. And Samba gives Windows clients support, too. Maybe you want something like Openfiler?

In an ideal world, I’d spend a bit more and have a machine with a “good” NIC (a high-end Gigabit card), hardware RAID (just basic support is fine), and three or more disks. But this is small and simple. I want to set it in a corner and forget it, and just mirror the drives via software RAID. Thoughts, anyone?

Could I just go on record as stating that raining nonstop for a month is not natural? Something is wrong.

I just checked the 10-day forecast. Guess what? Eight days of rain! Saturday, July 11 will be warm and partly cloudy. Although, frankly, I don’t believe that.

Anyone want to help me build an ark?

How does one go about shipping a 65-pound box? Does FedEx have offices like the Post Office where I can mail it? Is it cool with them if I wheel the box in on a dolly?

I’m looking into trying to ship it from work, since UPS and FedEx will come to our offices to pick things up, whereas they probably will not come to my home. I tried to get an estimate, and accidentally discovered a useless bit of information: shipping a 1×1x1″ square box weighing 65 pounds, with a declared value of $1, from Boston to Chicago costs $26.27 via ground, and up to $267.60 to overnight it.

What I want to know is why FedEx thinks a 1×1x1″ box weighing 65 pounds—clearly a revolutionary scientific breakthrough—would be worth $1? Failing that, I’m curious about why they would assume a box weighing 65 pounds would measure 1×1x1″, and never ask me what its actual size is? Furthermore, I wonder if it’s even possible to ship a 1×1x1″ box? Could you fit all the information on it? Does anyone else really want to try?

A local DJ was talking the other day about how The Black Eyed Peas are always at the top of the charts, and how it seems like it’s probably a record.

For the past month, Boom Boom Pow has been up there, and last week, I Gotta Feeling has surpassed it. And then there was even more attention on the Black Eyed Peas, after trashy blogger Perez Hilton went off on the Black Eyed Peas, insulting Fergie and calling will.i.am a “faggot,” and then got punched in the face by some unknown person that he erroneously named as will.i.am himself… (And I’m yet to hear from a single person who was saddened by his assault.)

The Black Eyed Peas have an official YouTube channel. Most artists sue to keep their music off of YouTube, while the Black Eyed Peas upload their own music there and draw millions of views. I was looking through, and found a bunch of hits that I’d forgotten were the Black Eyed Peas’.

Fergie and will.i.am, both tremendous successes in their own right, are members of the Black Eyed Peas. will.i.am’s Yes We Can became one of the most viral videos of the 2008 campaigns, and was even performed live at Invesco Field. But We Are the Ones wasn’t quite as big a hit, even though it should have been. And I just bought It’s a New Day, the post-election followup.

It does not appear possible to buy stock in a band.

Why does Debian (and thus implicitly, MySQL) feel compelled to replace the “root” user in MySQL with “debian-sys-maint”? If there was a debian-sys-maint for system stuff and a “root” user for root to use to administer MySQL, it would be fine. But instead, the only user created is debian-sys-maint, so the user is left to either (a) suffer through a bizarre setup for no good reason, or (b) manually add the grant for user root.

Plus, I’m trying to install cacti, and the Debian package blows up because it tries to let root create the database, not debian-sys-maint.

Argh!