You know how you watch gory, gut squirming videos on cracked.com (or break.com) and subconsciously write them off as fiction, make-believe, jokes, “can never be that bad”, etc. (except for those who tend to believe everything they see on the internet – like the existence of the Illuminati), well, I’m about to force feed you with an encounter I had with something that began life as a mustard sized devil.

I woke up on a Saturday morning and felt some sort of pain on my back and neck. Thinking it was just a mosquito bite, I ignored the pain and went about the day’s business. Monday came and the pain got worse, it even added occasional sharp sting sensations as a bonus and the spot on my neck was already slightly swollen. Perhaps, the mosquito bite got infected. Whatever. I thought I should probably take antibiotics but I’m not a fan of drugs, so I ignored it altogether.

Tuesday...

Ok, so I downloaded and installed Visual Studio 2012 two days ago and OMG using it is euphoric. When it dawned on me yesterday that my days pretending[1] to be a .NET programmer will soon be over and I’ll be back to my CFWheels/Railo development and Rails experimentation and lackluster IDEs, I decided to put Google to use: “develop ruby rails visual studio”.

First result was a Stack Overflow thread started by a developer who shared my exact concerns, only that he posted his question in 2009 which means Visual Studio 2008 was the wonder IDE he was jerking off to. One of the comments to his question was a link to a coddinghorror.com article with the accompanying line: “Just remember that they hate you”. Who hates me? I wondered. I clicked through to read (as I would click any link I find anywhere on the internet that contains codinghorror in it anyway – yes, I love Jeff Atwood).

...

Just because I can.

I’ve actually been trying to come up with one long ass post for a while now (in my head, that is). I’ll probably just abridge it and post anyway. Nothing too serious; it’s the usual self adoring shit I’m used spewing.

Fuck off.

I know I’ve not posted shit in a long time. Heck, I’ve not posted anything at all in (*trying to calculate number of days… *giving up). Twitter is really the death of blogs. Haha, it wishes. This is more like a comeback post. You really don’t have to remind me of the fact that I’ve said this before, do you? Anyway, what better way to do this than list the highlights of my life between July last year and today? Here goes…

July last year, I was half jobless. My company was distressed. It was only a couple of days since we were paid for the month of May. Trust me, it wasn’t funny. Second week into the month, a meeting was called and it was announced that the company was shutting down. My getaway move for this period was posting crap on Twitter. It helped, I guess.

August, I was still jobless. I wasn’t actively searching for a new job though. Why? Two directors of the defunct company...

Over the weekend, myself and a couple of friends started talking about the FIFA 2010 World Cup and the octopous that suddenly gained celebrity status for correctly predicting the outcome of 8 matches. Needless to say, I don’t follow football so I’m usually the last person you’ll find in a conversation about it, but the lure of the possibility of something supernatural was impossible to ignore.

During the afore-mentioned conversation, the octopus’ ability to predict the outcome of matches was attributed to the devil. As one of his numerous gimmicks to deter people from concentrating on what is important. It was even said that God would one day srike the octopus or something. You know, the usual overly religious christian crap. Rather than call BS on the whole Devil/God thingy, I decided to go by the Bible itself for starters.

The two interesting cases of divination in the bible was said...

I forgot to add TM. And no, this is not another joke post. My Twitter account has been hijacked for about a week now.

The attack was classic (I feel so probably since this is the first time I’m a target of one). My email address ([email protected]) was compromised at around 10pm on 14th of January, 2010. I must admit, I use a very weak password. Even by 1999 standards, its a pretty weak password.

11:52pm, a password recovery was performed on my Twitter account. About 3 minutes later, the associated email address on my account was changed thus relieving me of any form of control over my account. I knew this from a mail sent by twitter to my email address notifying me of the change. Problem is, the new email address wasn’t stated.

Complained to Twitter, got a reply after three days that a support ticket was opened for me with a message that needed my response. I followed the link and...

True story. And guess what my first tweet was…:) Thanks to a Twitter rep called ‘tiger’. What a weird name for a cool guy (or girl?). Maybe he helped me out because of my extreme feline love.

So its back to (the) business (of tweeting)… And oh, before I forget, a huge middle finger to the attacker, whoever the fuck you are!

It feels so good to be baaaack! Erm, did I really go anywhere? I know, its January 12 already. Guess a lot of peeps have forgotten they even had a holiday. No, I’ve not. I’m still living it. And hey, did I say I had the best Christmas break ever? Mum should definitely not see that – we haven’t seen each other since April last year. I’m currently less than 40 kilometers to her so I should go say hi to her very soon.

A lot of things have happened since I last blogged. I’ll mention two notable ones.

Michelle, my queen, gave birth to 4 kittens. Junior, Brenda (the girl in the picture), Alex, and Kaytee. The kittehs are soooooo cute. Two of them have gotten themselves good foster parents already. Seriously, I would have loved to keep them all.

Next, I made a really good friend. ‘Nuff said. :p

Anyway, I’m looking forward to an awesome year ahead and I’m sure you guys are doing the same.

Dear Henry,

Last week Tuesday morning, you woke me up from sleep. It was so unlike you. I felt loved and couldn’t resist playing with you before going to the office.

You were on my mind all day at work. On my way back, I got you your favourite treat – mackerel in tomato sauce (popularly called geisha in these parts of the world). I knew you loved it. Yes, it was written all over your face.

I don’t know why I had to spoil the fun by letting that girl have you for the night. She came to me asking that she needed one of you guys to stay in her kitchen for the night to scare the shit out of the rats in there. I knew I wasn’t supposed to honour her request…but I don’t know why I still went ahead and did. I picked you. I believed you would make a good soldier.

On my way down the stairs, I saw the fear in your eyes but I chose not to acknowledge it. Stupidly. Heck, you even buried your...

Microsoft, the laughing-stock of the browser/open source software community, finally came out with a new search engine. To those who follow tech news and trends, this isn’t exactly surprising as the story has been on for a while now – as far back as November 2008.

When TechCrunch covered the story about the rebrand (and the project codename: Kumo), readers scoffed at what seemingly looked like Microsoft trying to beat a dead horse. A few examples:

Changing name is an interesting idea but does NOTHING to solve their fundamental problem, the lack of vision in Search to begin with. Google has its flaws, paying people to search and other marketing ploys do nothing to help get users using your platform over the long run. This is nothing but a stunt that will lead them to loose even more market share (even if they do buy Yahoo). - Jon

Most of Microsoft’s users are the 35+ year-old that...