Who ordered the scrambled brains?

A couple blurbs for you.

Happy Birthday, Natalie!

Yes the birthday locomotive continues it’s long trek through April. “Choo choo! Chugga chugga, chugga chugga!” We all know that Natalie is my corazon, my muse, my special girl, and so on, so if you don’t want to upset me and my homicidal army of recycled, reawakened broken-down thrown-away old, forgotten collection of 386s, 486s, Power PCs, and the like, you best make like an ex-sausage factory worker and wish her a happy birthday, fer Chrissake! We’ve got big big plans for the day, beginning with Christopher Riley playing Elliott Smith at the Getty Center (rich snobs), wining and dining at El Conquistador in Silverlake (poor snobs), and then whatever happens to tickle the fancy of our discerning urban nightlife sensibilities (hobnobs). Like Traintown at Griffith Park or dropping water ballons on the heads of unsuspecting cholos. It’s gon be GREAT!

Pumpkins Redux

Yes, it’s finally happened. We can all grow old, fat, lazy and die now. The Smashing Pumpkins have reunited.

Of course that probably just means Corgan and Chamberlain are gonna be pumping the jam with other ex-grunge rockers. But it’s still big news. They were one of my favorite bands in days of yore, right up there with Yanni and my CD of Gregorian chants. But the C+C (Corgan and Chamby) music factory is gonna need more than their 90s grunge chops to compete with today’s music powerhouses. Are they gonna go contemporary and emphasize the synthetic elements of their sound to try to elbow The Faint out of the indie-dance-goth-rock scene? Are they gonna go Madonna-style and bring in William Orbit for production to obscure their wrinkling wrinkles? Or are they gonna pick up where Kelly Clarkson and the Matrix left off for some hard-hitting Avril Lavigne imitations? Maybe they’ll roll with some phat hooks, spit mad rhymes like lyrical spooks, uncreative music makers juke the the big record dukes, forgot the lessons from their music books, just one listen and then you’ll puke, frontin like the weather, stealin’ the sun like crooks, unstoppable like an army of wook…ies, who got the bees knees, in alternate realities, furry-legged dancing machines ruling over the galaxies… You know lyrics a la MF Doom, dropped onto a Dan the Automator-tracked sampling smorgasborg. Maybe they’ll round out the group with James Blunt or Michael Buble or Josh Groban and update that “Tonight, Tonight” ballad flavor. Or maybe they’ll just be lazy and round up an all-star ensemble of American Idol rejects and take the A Train to Sugar Hill in Harlem. I’m not sure which it will be, but I’m willing to bet my bottom dollar it’s one of those.

Geek walks into a bar…

Small example of why I get along with my co-workers. Emphasis added.

On 4/20/06 2:28pm Mike wrote:

Bruce, I thought you might be interested to see this. It’s the HTTP-level Ajax message that is sent by your Gradebook application. Extremely efficient.

POST /[omitted].ashx HTTP/1.1
Host: cis.ucla.edu
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.2) Gecko/20060308 Firefox/1.5.0.2
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,
text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: close
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Ajax-method: [omitted]
Content-Length: 81
Cookie: edu.ucla.isis4.loginType=B; SITESERVER=ID=5f97f28ba060ce489d9fc2a5845d3f11; DESKTOP=bg=&org=100; ASP.NET_SessionId=lqxvdo55x3ytrmqsjyc5pgzm
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache

{"studentUID": "000000000", "newGrade": "U", "srs": "000000000", "term": "06S"}

It’s funny, the payload in these Ajax HTTP messages isn’t even XML-formatted!

(Wow, that sounds like the punchline to a joke only a geek could tell. So maybe “funny” isn’t the right word, but it is interesting! Hehe.)

On 4/21/06 9:13am Bruce honorably replies:

Actually, that did surprise me. I was kind of expecting that this would be in a SOAP wrapper. It’d be interesting to see how it’s passing some objects, like I’m now doing with webmail, rather than simple strings.

I can actually visualize that, a geek comedy club, with some coarse woman up on stage saying, “And to top it all off, when I got his payload, it wasn’t even XML-formatted!”. The crowd snickers, while a few pimply geeks quietly ask themselves “Gee — I wonder if mine is XML-formatted?”.

Follow me on Twitter for the latest updates, and make sure to check out my community opinion social networking project, Blocvox.