In 2010, the first signs of artificial intelligence were discovered growing in a closet of discarded electronics. Somehow the inorganic material had self-organized into a living body with a mind of its own.

Check the blue wire

My internet connection has been going in and out all day. Old building, so I thought maybe it was something in the wires (sometimes it does this) and only paid it a mild frustration until it finally went kaput. I can only live without my connection for short bursts of time, so I'm like grrr. I'm thinking it's something in the settings so I spend an hour looking into that. Nope. Then I figure it's AT&T's fault–I hate AT&T as much as a vegetarian hates McDonalds. But before I go off on them, I pause and wonder, did I pay the bill this month? Can't call them and bitch if I have no moral high ground.

Tracie handles all that, so I call her. She says it's not due until March, but will call them anyway. I'm like cool, and do some offline work for awhile thinking it'd only be a few minutes. An hour later–'cause AT&T's customer service is like the fastest in the world–she says nope, we're all paid up, they said call tech support.

I mumble: They got me f-upped. I ain't callin' no tech support when they won't f-in' fix the f-in' wiring... All they're going to do is tell me to check the settings and I already did that... Blah, blah... Paying enough for it already... Blah, blah... AT&T sucks... AT and T... AT-AT... Star Wars... Lightsaber!... Gimme back my connection or I'll lightsaber ya mo' fo's!

Hmm, maybe it's this blue wire hanging out the back of my router? (Oops).

The funny thing is, that's my line. Whenever someone asks me why their computer isn't working (thinking I'm tech support), the first question I ask is "Is it plugged in?" I'm only half joking when I say it, because sometimes that's exactly the problem. I had a friend who works for Dell down in Lakeland, Florida. He was sent out on a support call and is paid $90 an hour, with billing set in one hour blocks whether he works a full hour or not. The call was to Orlando, one hour away ($90). Once he got there he realized they hadn't plugged it in, so he plugged it in for them ($90). Then he returned home ($90). $270 to plug the computer in. Nice.

The blue wire had come loose while wrestling with my dog near the computer earlier in the day. I plugged it back in, the internet worked, I lowered my lightsaber, and AT&T lived to see another day. I'll get them next time.

Dear City of Maysville...

I live downtown. I really enjoy living downtown and would like to thank you for all the extra perks you've provided those of us who do live downtown. You've really outdone yourself. This past Christmas season in particular, with all the decorations and lights, made it a wonderful holiday atmosphere, and for that I say thanks.

I was caught charmed one day a few weeks past when I woke to the sound of Christmas music wafting through my windows. Thinking it an odd time for carolers, I rushed to the windows and looked out. It was then that I noticed there were no carolers; Instead there were tiny, but apparently effective loudspeakers perched upon the lamp posts. What a nice touch, I thought, and listened to some old Christmas favorites while I sipped my morning coffee. It warmed my heart to hear the songs of yore and, yes, I was caught in the spirit of Christmas. Job well done. I could imagine holiday shoppers enjoying the sounds of the season as well and thought, what a great time of the year! What other town in the country has Christmas music piped into the streets?

As the weeks rolled on and that good ol' Christmas music played day and night, and day and night, and day and night, I grew accustomed to it. Sure, I heard the exact same song played twenty times daily. Sure I heard it twenty times more as each artist's remake was played right along with the original. It's Christmas and it's festive, so it was no inconvenience at all that I had to turn my television up a few notches to drown it out. Besides, it was a lot better than the usual train whistles at one in the morning, or that crazy guy who feels it is absolutely necessary to honk his horn repeatedly as he drives home from the bar each night. It's all in the spirit of Christmas, and though I heard the same song over and over and over and over again, maybe some kid out there was hearing it for the first time, like I did when I was a kid, and maybe this Christmas season would set the tone for all the seasons to come.

Merry Christmas Maysville and thank you for the six hundred plus hours of carols you provided me to make it that much more festive!

Now that it is 1 a.m. two days after Christmas, I was wondering if you could kindly pull the plug on the artificial street music? At some point several hours ago, while I was tossing uneasily and dreaming of silver bells on every street corner, every-single-street-corner-over-and-over, in the form of tiny but apparently effective loudspeakers, the Christmas music was somehow replaced by one of those soft popular music radio stations where they sing depressing love songs over and over again, and over and over again. Sure they sound somewhat different, and are sung by different artists, but come on, aren't they all just one single song played twenty-four hours straight?

Statistically speaking the holiday season has a higher rate of depression and suicide. Some psychologists believe that this is due to the lack of sunlight during the winter. That may be true, but I now believe that it is in at least some way related to Lionel Richie.

Dear Maysville, please stop playing Lionel Richie over and over through my bedroom window. I really can't take that much more of it. Even my dog seems depressed, and my dog usually needs Prosac to calm down. Honestly, I stopped listening to Lionel Richie years ago when as a kid I realized all of his depressing love songs were all about the same thing, some sort of true love that he appeared to sing about with sincerity. I stopped believing in the sincerity of Lionel Richie when I saw him on MTV singing about everlasting love to a different girl in each video. To my impressionable young mind, "everlasting" came to mean when the "album sales ran out". Ask my old girlfriends, Lionel Richie did some serious psychological damage to me. Please Maysville, I don't want to be electrocuted cutting the wires on a lamp post, but you leave me little choice. I was passing the hair treatment section of Walmart tonight and cringed at images of Jheri Curl mullets.

In the very least, can you put the Christmas carols back on? Mr. Scrooge gives good advice: "I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year." I'm with him on that. We should totally start by playing Christmas bells again instead of pop music. Gimme back my Saint Nicholas. I need some St. Nick cause Nicole, as in Richie, is sounding more and more like the spawn of Satan as each hour passes into the night.

Very truly yours,

Devoted Resident

Street signs are eductational

Really? I had no idea.

If architects had to work like web designers

I didn't write this, but it so true.

Dear Mr. Architect:

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don't have nearly enough insulation in them).

As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminum, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminum, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)

Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.

To insure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, make certain that you contact each of our children, and also our in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year. Make sure that you weigh all of these options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any choices that you make.

Please don't bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet.

However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.

Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.

While you are designing this house specifically for me, keep in mind that sooner or later I will have to sell it to someone else. It therefore should have appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers. Please make sure before you finalize the plans that there is a consensus of the population in my area that they like the features this house has. I advise you to run up and look at my neighbor's house he constructed last year. We like it a great deal. It has many features that we would also like in our new home, particularly the 75-foot swimming pool. With careful engineering, I believe that you can design this into our new house without impacting the final cost.

Please prepare a complete set of blueprints. It is not necessary at this time to do the real design, since they will be used only for construction bids. Be advised, however, that you will be held accountable for any increase of construction costs as a result of later design changes.

You must be thrilled to be working on as an interesting project as this! To be able to use the latest techniques and materials and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can't happen very often. Contact me as soon as possible with your complete ideas and plans.

PS: My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions I've given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. I have tried in the past and have been unable to accomplish this. If you can't handle this responsibility, I will have to find another architect.

PPS: Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but a travel trailer. Please advise me as soon as possible if this is the case.

Public school system, pwned by church revival!

Hmm, methinks someone in the local area wants to send a big F-you to the folks who believe religion has no place in public schools. Nothing says screw you like an old fashioned Baptist Tent Revival right on school property : ) Great plan: Forget school levies to pay for textbooks, the Gideons will provide them for free! I'd probably be more concerned about this if it weren't so funny, and so BAM-in-your-face-Darwin!

What's a liberal?

Kobe is my nephew. He's a political commentator at age eleven.

I got together with some of my family on Memorial Day to grill out at the park. They tease me about being "liberal," though I'm actually pretty moderate in my political views. I'm liberal in that I believe in spending to support the arts, but I'm conservative in that I believe in controlled spending. I like to think my opinions cancel each other out and leave me neutral, but I must admit I'm more liberal than anyone else in the family. They like to mess with me about it.

So, we're at the park and Justin (my brother) tells Kobe, "Ask Uncle Jeremy what a liberal is." Apparently he had already asked his dad before.

"Uncle Jeremy, what's a liberal?" Kobe asked.

"Well, a liberal is someone who believes in individual personal freedoms," I replied.

He looked at me a moment, and I thought he was going to ask something related. He did. It was in fact very related and straight to the point.

He said: "Uncle Jeremy, can you take out that earring? It's kind of scary. Why would a guy wear an earring?"

I couldn't think of what to say because I couldn't stop laughing. I told him that he had just earned a post on my blog. So here he is: Kobe, 11, political commentator.

Cheat sheet for the un-geek

You may have seen these code snippets on t-shirts and thought wtf? For those un-1337, like my Mom, I reprint them here w/ translations.

There's no place like 127.0.0.1
All network connections are assigned a numerical address. 127.0.0.1 is the local address of your computer for internal communication. In other words, this reads "There's no place like home."

10 print Home
20 print Sweet
30 goto 10
In BASIC (a programming language), code is written in numbered lines and performed in sequence. This says to print "Home", then "Sweet", then go back and print "Home". "Home Sweet Home".

There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't.
Binary code answers questions in yes (1) or no (0). You probably read that as "10" if you're not geek.

01111001 01101111 01110101 01100001 01110010 01100101 01100100 01110101 01101101 01100010
Obviously binary code, but what's it say? Well, it says "You are dumb".

$> cd /pub
$> more beer
UNIX for "Go to the pub, get more beer".

SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue > 0
Information is retrieved from databases via Structured Query Language (SQL) statements like this one that literally reads "Select all users where clue is greater than zero". In other words, "Select all the users that have a clue".

$> man woman
$> Segmentation fault (core dumped)
Pretty much self explanatory. UNIX combines man and woman. Sad things happen.

Roses are #FF0000
Violets are #0000FF
In HTML, colors are expressed in hex codes like these.

RTFM
This is an acronym that most un-geeks don't understand. If they did, they wouldn't have to hire geeks so often. It stands for "Read the fucking manual".

PEBKAC
Variation on RTFM. You may have heard tech support tell you that it is a PEBKAC problem. Sadly, it stands for "Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair". Yes, that means you.

Got Root?
In Linux, root privileges gives you complete power over the system. "Got root?" means "Have you hacked it?"

/(bb[^b]{2})/
Regular expressions are used in programming to find strings of characters that match a certain pattern. For example, the expression "g*gol" matches ggol, gogol, googol, gooogol, etc. This expression reads "To be or not to be", one of Shakespeare's famous lines.

01111001 01101111 01110101 01100001 01110010 01100101 01100100 01110101 01101101 01100010
Still means "you are dumb". Just checking if you're paying attention : )

i > u
The ultimate inequation. "I am greater than you."

42
The answer to life, the universe, and everything. Duh.

And for my 01001101 01001111 01001101 who can't read any of this, that means "MOM".

PSA: Don't let anyone play with your instrument

Speaking of musicals, just today Tracie was watching The Music Man (1962).

"Hold on, you've got to hear this," she said (DVR makes for a lot of great pause and rewind moments).

Harold Hill talking to a boy confused about his French horn:

[Boy asks how to hold his instrument. Teacher laughs and says...]
Hill: Experimentation! Trial and error!
Boy: Could you show me professor?
Hill: Son, I'm gonna tell you something the great Gasepi Creatori (sp?) said
to me once under like circumstances...
'Professor Hill,' he said. 'That is your instrument. Hold onto it. Cherish it. Don't let anybody else play around with it, not even me, not even you. Until you feel you are ready.'

Ah yes, great advice for little boys everywhere : ) Don't let anyone play with your instrument, not even you, until you are ready.

The easter bunny hates you

if (u celebrate e) {
     print "Happy Easter";
} else {
     print "Happy Spring!";
}