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This is the archive of my oldest front-page ramblings, from before I switched the site to a PHP-based database-using thingy. 1-12-2003: Placeholder Okay, there's not terribly much to this update. Okay, so maybe it's not technically an update at all, then. Okay, maybe I've been lazy about the site lately. Okay, maybe 'lazy' isn't so good a term as 'downright negligent'. Okay, maybe I've used the word 'okay' more times in the last few sentences than I have in the past year. I'll stop now. In other news, I finally found a real job, so I'm no longer actively searching for one. So I put a note on my resume to that effect, but I'm keeping the resume itself up there, just in case anyone out there wants to tempt me away with a really nice offer. Hey, stop laughing. I can dream. Anyway, I've got a couple of actual 'update' updates in the pipeline. In a transparent attempt to build anticipation, I'll give you a clue about one of them: it's a sequel to an existing feature. And probably not the one you'd actually want me to do. -Jason 6-7-2002: Chex Redux As you may recall (or may notice if you scroll down a bit), a while back I went on a little diatribe about how horrible all the available check designs are. Well, everyone talks about it, but I actually did something about it! Sort of. I've come up with a few rather interesting designs, and I'm sharing them with all of you. Don't you feel special? If so, go read! -Jason 3-30-2002: Hire me! I really don't expect someone just surfing through to suddenly say to himself "This Pop Chaos stuff is brilliant! The author must come work for me immediately!" Well, actually, that probably happens a lot, but only by the people who say that about every web page they see. Plus their cat. And the lamppost outside. (I understand the lamppost currently has the job title of Assistant Widget Illuminator.) But I just put my resume up on the web so that in case I encountered a potential employer while I didn't have a paper copy of it to hand, I could send them here. So I just figured I'd mention it here on the front page, so you can all go laugh at me for trying to get a job as a programmer in today's market. -Jason 3-30-2002: The DMV I recently renewed my drivers license, and on the back of my new one is a big mysterious machine-readable patch. Consumed with curiosity about what it contained, I made it my mission to find out. -Jason 3-14-2002: Arthur Predicts (Insert here my usual message about how I know it's been a long time since the last update.) I ran across an old article by Arthur C. Clarke, written in 1966, giving his predictions for life in the year 2001. Now that 2001 is safely behind us, let's have a look at how he did. -Jason 12-28-2001: Chex I recently had to order new checks. I decided to go with something different, since I've had the same old design for quite some time. I rather quickly learned something about the available check designs. They suck. I suppose they're great if you like that sort of thing. But I don't want my checks littered with pictures of kittens, or NASCAR races, or infants dressed up like flowers, or Scooby Doo, or sylvan glens. Or lighthouses, or puppies, or afrocentric symbols, or classic Ford Mustangs. Or baby polar bears, or William Shatner, or the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Or golf balls, or Bible verses, or Celtic symbols, or Mickey Mouse. Or cornball home-sweet-home iconography, or black-and-white-but-colored-with-pencil photographs of children handing flowers to each other. So in the end I went with the same old design. Oh well. -Jason 8-24-2001: The Interplanetary Jack Chick Chain Yank My months-long email prank has come to fruition at last! It's a rather long affair, which went through a couple of twists before settling down into its final format. It's long enough that you may want to get a sandwich or something before you sit down to read. Essentially, it's a test of the gullibility of a certain insanely fundamentalist publishing house. As it happens, they scored better on the gullibility scale than I figured at first, but by the end they were swallowing all sorts of zany stories. This has to be one of the crueler things I've ever done. Check it out! -Jason 8-9-2001: Honing my mocking skills Yes, yes, it's been months since the last update, but I'm back with another feature so forgive me. As you may know, the name of the new Star Wars movie was recently released, and the fans have been going all kinds of crazy about it. Read my overreaction to one other guy's overreaction to a bunch of other people's overreactions. -Jason 6-6-2001: Huzzah! An update at last! Okay, so it's been weeks and weeks since I last updated the page. My apologies to the three of you out there who hit this page during the intervening time. But at least I'm back with something good - the first Pop Chaos Feature! It's some thoughts on the packaging of a free promotional item I got at work. Assuming that last sentence hasn't caused you to click the hell off of my page to go find something more interesting, like a farm report, check it out. In other news, it seems Alex Chiu has decided to drop my worthless ass from his free-rings program (see a few updates back). My username just doesn't exist anymore. Oh well, I only had about 15 of the 40 IPs I needed to get the free rings. Suck. -Jason 5-18-2001: An interesting nomenclatural phenomenon A bit earlier, someone I know had occasion to do a search on Google for his own name, and turned up some ancient history from his early days on the net. I was inspired to do the same, and I ran across a few references to me on friends' pages. Whee! Following that, I figured I'd just do a search on my last name, which (to those few of you who don't know already) is the not-too-common "Slovacek", and see if any of my long-lost distant relatives were up to anything interesting. I discovered a bit of a pattern, with a rather glaring exception. Of the first ten results that came up, fully three of them were college professors (and my dad, also a college professor, wasn't even one of them) and another works at the Johnson Space Center. There seems to be some mystical attraction between my last name and the world of academia. But that's when I saw a link to slovacek.com. The Slovacek Sausage Company. Sausage. In someplace called Snook, Texas. SNOOK. I gotta lie down. -Jason 5-16-2001: This is what goes on in my head I've had an odd thought. It's just not something I've ever particularly thought of before, and it goes like this: Where the heck do we get helium from? I mean, helium doesn't like to form chemical bonds with anything, right? So it can't get bound into rocks or anything. And conditions to make it anything but a gas are rather hard to come by on Earth. So okay, if there's some gaseous helium floating around on Earth, now wouldn't you think it'd make its way to the extreme upper atmosphere and maybe even get lost to space? And our transmogrification technology isn't exactly up to the challenge - the only way I know of to make helium from something else is as a byproduct of nuclear reactions, and somehow I kind of doubt the stuff in party balloons comes from the power plant. So you'd think this stuff would be rare as all hell. Anybody know where the heck we get helium? -Jason 5-15-2001: I want free immortality rings! One of my favorite nutjobs, Alex Chiu, the creator of the AMAZING MAGNETIC IMMORTALITY RINGS, has this thing going where if you link to him and get forty different IPs to click through, he'll give you a free set of the rings! Wow! How amazing! I've been rather curious to see these alleged medical miracles but didn't actually want to pay good money for them. However, I'm certainly not above selling out all my friends to get a pair for free! (When and if they actually arrive, I'll put up a full report.) So show your support for insanity and click that link! It's for a good cause. No, really. -Jason 5-15-2001: The Story of Pop Chaos Okay, a couple of years ago I was over at Sam and Genna's house and we happened across a really insane website. We got to thinking that we could fake our own insane science even better than these professionals. So we came up with the craziest concept we could think of - using popcorn to predict the future - and set about trying to come up with a vaguely-scientific-sounding way of explaining it. We came up with some nonsense about chaos theory. Hence, Pop Chaos. We (and by 'we', I mean 'Sam') at once registered the domain and a few days later we raided American Science and Surplus, gathering together junk to build into the Pop Chaos Device, a scary-looking machine centered around a popcorn popper that we were to claim predicted the future. We were all set to start building and writing. And that's pretty much where things stayed for the next two years. Damn we're lazy. When the domain came up for renewal and we (and I again mean 'we' as in 'Sam') realized we ('Sam') had spent seventy bucks to have a page that said "There is no content yet. Please check back later!" for two years, Sam quite wisely offered to sell me the domain. So anyway, while I may at some point in the future tackle the Pop Chaos Device project, I've decided to make popchaos.com into my own personal soapbox. Sort of an unholy union between a weblog, Something Awful, and Parade Kid. Enjoy. -Jason