British women have interesting taste in footwear. I captured the following image from the front page of eBay, sometime in the middle of July:

These things were all the rage this summer, and last year as well, if I remember correctly. There’s nothing like a fishbelly-white pair of legs sticking out of a pair of hairy boots to make you think Sexy!

I’m not sure why a woman would choose to wear mukluks in the middle of summer. English summer, mind you, isn’t much distinguishable from any other time of year here, but still: It’s the principle. It’s simply taboo to break out the mukluks before Labor Day.

While traipsing around the Farnborough Air Show over the weekend, I saw this:

I have no idea what they’re selling. It’s in English, I suppose, but it’s like they wrote the entire thing with leftover pieces of one of those refrigerator magnetic poetry things. It sort of reminds me of Naked Lunch.

And then, I saw someone with the Best Job Title Ever:

How’s that for a business card? “Customer Support Bombardier”. In Belfast, no less.

There were a few planes for the budget-minded, for example the legendary MiG-29’s, “upgraded to NATO standards”:

Nice Mario Bros. paint job, Ivan. But it was nice to get a chance to kick the tires on it, albeit not too hard:

Apparently NATO standards don’t include rotating the tires once in a while. We watched the two MiGs take off on Monday morning, flying back to whatever Communist hell-hole they were on loan from. They left trails of black smoke behind them, like they had a leaky gasket somewhere. What a rickety piece of shit.

There were all the things you’d expect from an airshow, even a World War II-vintage Avro Lancaster flying around, which was a special sight. One thing I didn’t expect to see, though, were Muttley and Dick Dastardly:

Huh? Are the pimping a Laff-a-Lympics movie now?

You may think you have distractions in your workplace, but take a look at what’s been outside my office window all week.

That’s some exotic hardware being collected for the Farnborough Air Show, which starts next week. So far, we’ve identified:

• Apache (Longbow maybe? It had the pod)
  
• WWII-vintage Spitfire
• F-15
  
• F-16
• F-18
• F-22
• Avro Vulcan
• Eurofighter Typhoon
• Airbus A380
• Whatever trainers the RAF Red Arrows are flying these days
• many more that we haven’t been able to ID yet

All of these beautiful flying murder machines are out in our back yard, kicking ass and tearing shit up. The Avro Vulcan is probably the most striking aircraft I’ve ever seen, and it snuck up on us a couple of days ago. I just looked out the window and it looked like a huge manta was about to attack the building. But it just started doing some lazy loops and turns, and eventually disappeared. It didn’t land at the airport, sadly.

We are having a fine time in the office, but I felt bad for the customer I had on the phone when the Red Arrows started their 30-minute rehearsal today. They actually took off with the smokers going, in formation. Show-offs. I went out onto the roof of our 5-story parking deck to watch them go, and man, what a glorious chaos of noise, smoke, and low-flying metal.

My desk is right across the street from the runway where all this is happening. Being right on the airport, we’re pretty used to hearing planes taking off and landing. The windows are thick, sound-proof slabs that are supposed to block any noise that comes at them. But when an F-22 buzzes your office building (as one did Thursday during a meeting), there isn’t much any glass can do about the roar of those wonderful, CO2-pumping engines. In fact, any time a military aircraft is getting started the noise level is so intense that the entire office stops working, walks over to the windows, and waits for the show to start.

When the F-18 started doing loops and vertical climbs, a buddy and I went out to have a cigarette and enjoy the show. Right when we opened the door, it blasted past us at about 200 feet off the ground. Every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It was fucking awesome.

Oh, Harry Potter, you sly, precocious rascal. How I thrill to the adventures you have, and hiss whenever Messrs. Malfoy and Snape ooze across the page. Hmph. The third book of the series is less boring than the first two, and somewhat longer. It also includes a word or two that wasn’t in the movie, which makes this the first of the series to qualify as “worth reading”.

It is not really a bad book, but when you’ve just read the previous two books in rapid succession, you’ll notice a certain formula developing. Namely, not enough sex. Not that it’s promised by the garish and childlike cover, or the complete lack of sexual identity among the characters. There was only the mildest hint that Harry even notices chicks, with the allusion to Chang Choi Hoi or whatever her name was, the little Chinese maiden, being somewhat pretty, and causing a lump in Harry’s throat. But Harry’s thirteen in this book. When I was that age, even the smell of a girl’s pencil box caused a lump in my pants. Harry doesn’t even look up her skirt when she’s riding a broom. Why? Because Harry is a homo. He would rather play sports and eat chocolate than whack it to the eight-minute reel of upskirts and keyhole peep-shots that loops permanently through the mind of any normal thirteen year old boy.

I also liked the movie much more than the previous two. I enjoy any movie with Gary Oldman, no matter how bad it is. Even Batman, where Oldman was Worst Commissioner Gorden Evar. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he was on the screen for a grand total of 47 seconds, but I still enjoyed his performance. I still think he could’ve brought a bit more of the Sid and Nancy vibe to the screen, though.

Tell me that wouldn’t have been sweet! Now, though, I’ve got some serious reading to do. In the time it took to lay this book aside and write this here review, I’m already halfway through the Sixth Book of the Year, and looking anxiously forward to the Seventh. Tallyho!

More, more.

Hmm...you know you’re an old fogey when you see a list like this, and it’s completely, utterly the opposite of you:

When it comes to desktop operating systems, your choices are really pretty narrow. You either run Windows, or you do some Unix-like OS. There are the 12,000 different Linux distributions. There’s always FreeBSD if you prefer your Unix without a Finnish flavor. You could go the vendor route and run AIX or HP-UX. Sun has Solaris, and as much as you might want to, you can’t forget SCO. And of course, there’s always Mac OS X. Although it may sound like variety when it comes down to it, it’s still Windows vs. Unix.

[From 5 of the best desktop operating systems you never used | Classics Rock | TechRepublic.com]

I used each and every one of the Five Best Operating Systems I’ve Never used quite extensively. The operating systems in question?

OS/2
I used OS/2 as my primary desktop for about 3 years between 1994 and 1997. I played with it on and off up until I finally got rid of my last PC back about a year ago. It was ugly, it crashed on bootup more than it actually, you know, booted up, and had the most hideous fonts you can imagine (about like the ones you see in Java apps to this day). I guess it made sense to forego eye-candy like antialiasing and hinting. Nevertheless, it let corporate behemoth IBM feel like a scrappy little underdog for a while.

NeXT[sic]
I used NeXTSTEP back in college, and it’s probably the best OS ever made, taken in context. It was Steve Jobs’ playground, with goofy, exotic hardware choices and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare installed by default. To this day, I still use the lookalike WindowMaker for my desktop at work; it’s lean and mean, and looks like a million bucks. At home, I use Mac OS X, which is the intellectual heir to NeXTSTEP, and enjoy the benefits of its heritage. DisplayPDF is a fine thing.

BeOS
In my old office, we actually had a gaggle of BeBoxen. They were terribly ugly machines, but BeOS rocked back then, and is still the best, most full-featured operating system for old hardware. I installed BeOS Max on a creaky old Vaio Laptop with 1998 specs just a couple of years ago, and everything zipped right along and worked splendidly. Try that with any modern Linux distribution and you’ll be hating life.

DESQview
This was not an operating system, as noted in the article, but a task-switching shell that basically served as a front-end to QuarterDeck‘s QEMM386 DOS memory driver. It did what it said, swapping DOS programs in and out of EMS, and it did it pretty well. It was a nice toy for WordPerfect and Lotus junkies. I used QEMM386 on all my machines, and used DESQview for things like running Crosstalk IV sessions in the background while updating AWK and SOUP packets with whatever the fuck am I talking about?

GEOS / GeoWorks
GEOS was a sweet shell for the 8088 and 80286-based computers. It ran like greased butter (?) on that hardware, which seemed to be available for free everywhere after Windows 3.1 came out. I had it running on a sweet old IBM PS/2 Model 50 for a bit, until I woke up and discovered girls.

I wonder why people make lists like this. Are they really fishing for the Get-Off-My-Lawn demographic?