I heard a segment on public radio about the perfume industry and the changes it is undergoing.  Apparently a new class of perfumes don’t smell like great perfume, they smell like the person him/herself smells wonderful.  There was a bit on a perfume designer who can allegedly duplicate any aroma: he made a perfume that smells like snow for his daughter.

Who the hell would want to smell like snow when Weird Fragrances exists?

Presumably for the Jones Soda crowd, you can smell like, well, simply weird shit.  Like burning rubber.  Or crisp banknotes.  Magazines.  Fireworks smoke or (aargh) an ashtray.  As of now, you can request a free sample.

Oh, and if anyone remembers the details on that public radio segment, or the book the interviewee wrote, let me know.

Update: This may just be a spam trap.  I have received huge amounts of spam to an email address used only to register on this site.  I haven’t checked my mail yet, so I don’t know if the free samples exist or not.

Dramatis Personæ
Shopkeeper: S.
Patron: JHM

Scene: A., a beautiful young woman, has recently been appearing behind the counter of establishment run by Shopkeeper, frequented by Patron.  A. is not present on this visit.

Patron:  So, A. is your daughter, is that right?

Shopkeeper:  Yes.  Do we look alike?

Patron:  You both have beautiful eyes.

Shopkeeper:  Thank you.  Yeah, A. just got married.

Patron:  Oh, how wonderful!

Scene.

Yeah, that’s the best title I can come up with, let alone coming up with two jokes (no one has commented yet on the double jokes in the post titles and URLs, which means — although I’m still likely funnier than Dane Cook — that it’s not really working.)  Cut me some slack.  You’re reading at a reasonable time.  It’s 01:00 for me.

No, I’m not in Ubuntu yet.  I still have to [illegal] a bit more.  So, a parting thought: I’m giving up some stuff in fleeing Redmond.  Like any abusive relationship, it wasn’t all bad.  There are some things I’ll miss.

Three, actually.  Homebase; Quicken; and Windows-Tab.

Windows-Tab is Irene-Jacob-sexy.  Damn.  It is the coolest fucking thing in the world.  If there is not a KDE clone of it, I’m going to have to write one.  It would be good to keep my coding neurons busy, anyway.  Do they even document this?  Are you on Vista (you poor sod)?  Hold down the Windows key (which has euphemistic names in other PC OSs), and hit Tab.  Oh.  My.  God.

Why isn’t a Quicken replacement available on *nix?  I don’t know.  Maybe nerds don’t want to admit that they can’t figure out double-entry accounting to a sufficient degree to use GnuCash.  And a substitute for Homebase?  Robby’s doing an unbelievable job with Tellico, and he’s even incorporated some of my code as well as written an export template geared towards booksellers at my request (not sure which shows greater benevolence.)  But Win-Tab?  It’s not going to displace Katee — but it might well show up in my dreams.  I can’t wait.

I’ve been meaning to change my Recently Read Books list (now, again, woefully out-of-date) to a series of blog posts that share a tag and that actually review the books in question.  This would ideally be accomplished by starting at the beginning of the trail of books as far back as I can recall their sequence.

But I’ve just got to shatter those plans by recommending a book: a fantasy novel by Rick Cook in which a computer programmer is whisked out our world into a magical realm in which, to save his love, he has to systematize and hack magic.  This is great fun for nerdy FRP folks and fantastically interesting in that I didn’t write it.

I found this entirely by accident.  I was looking for something at the Baen Free Library to send to my Kindle.  I liked the title.  I didn’t know the author, didn’t even know it was the first in a five-book series.  How fortuitous.  Great fun.

Amazon: Wizard’s Bane

Or free etext: Wizard’s Bane

I suppose it was predictable.  I’ve spent a month on my new laptop with a fresh Windows Vista installation.  And hasta.

So, Vista.  It’s not that it’s bad, per se: actually, it’s just like that.  It’s bad.  Unforgivably bad.  I have a 64-bit processor; four gigs of RAM (I’m old enough [my first hard drive was 40 MB] that this is practically inconceivable); and every accessory imaginable.  And what do I get from Redmond?  Well, it takes a couple seconds for my typing to show up on screen.  I have to pay Symantec absurd amounts of money to protect me from malware.  I have “trial versions” of Office, that would cost roughly $100,000 to register.  Non-uninstallable applications.  And fucking blue screens of death.  For real.  BSOD.  In 2009.  At least WordPerfect has forgone the white-on-blue color scheme in the last 15 years.

Vista came “for free” on my computer.  That means that some large amount of money was spent by Hewlett-Packard to buy me a copy of this OS OEM.

Being a Vista user is like being married to a retarded, HIV-positive prostitute — a prostitute who still charges you money for sex, after marriage, and goes on sleeping around; who never gets your jokes; and threatens you with terminal illness every time you attempt to do something fun.

Stop being so smug, Mac-heads.  Being a Macintosh user is like being married to a high-class prostitute who went to finishing school, but who, every time you want to talk about something intimate or important, tells you a vivid Shahrazodian tale to distract you.

I’m going back to Ubuntu.  I’m running towards it.  Using Ubuntu is like having an open relationship with the well-read, clean, natural-fiber-wearing vegan neo-hippie you met at the health foods store: she’s willing to experiment with anything, not opposed to your seeing other people, and if it doesn’t work out, well, the relationship will end with a hug and her packing up the thrift store backpack that can hold all her essential possessions with space left over.

Ubuntu.  That’s the link.  Ubuntu is “free as in speech” and “free as in beer”.  It’s written by volunteers.  It’s maintained by volunteers.  It is configurable down to sub-millimeter scale.  It works anywhere.  It does anything.  And the people who maintain it — and you can be one with a small amount of effort — actually welcome advice and refuse money.  Ubuntu’s main goal?  To be available in every language, even if there are only 100 speakers, and to support any old hardware, even if it’s twenty-year-old crap that the Salvation Army is throwing in the trash.  And to rock while doing it.

It’s one of my basic rules of computing: you can pay for shit, or you can get great stuff for free.  I’ll share my other rules later.  In the meantime I’m going to finish [description of illegal activity redacted] on Windows, then boot off my CD-ROM and go back to a grownup’s operating system.

I’ll see you on the other side.