Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

A long time ago I ordered a set of keychain lockpicks, but never really tried them out. The other day using the sweep tool, though, I succeeded in opening a tiny practice lock!

On my way to work I pass by Lehman Brothers, and every day its electronic sign that spans the entire front of their building seems to have one problem or another. First it was just random corruption of a few LCD displays:

Then, on September 28th and today, the 29th, we noticed that their date had stopped working and was stuck on 27:

Weird, no? I wonder when it will get fixed…

Today I had the pleasure of a man dressed in a black skirt introduce me to a men’s cologne which combined vanilla, amber, and musk to attract a maximum number of ladies. My reason for being at Macy’s was actually to acquire a pair of shoes that a lady could appreciate, so I let him stop me and spray his expensive french cologne over various limbs.

It was then that I realized that a musk-based cologne simply simulates the odor produced by a sweaty male body. Wikipedia writes on the topic:

Musk is the name originally given to a perfume obtained from the strong-smelling substance secreted by a gland in the abdomen of the male musk deer, and hence applied to other animals, and also to plants, possessing a similar odor.

It was at that point that I wondered why–besides the hot euro-salesmen in black skirts–would anyone buy the stuff. Personally, I prefer a much more subtle scent.

Design Detector has an awesome article which details the problems faced by IE7. I’ve pointed out font problems that I encountered myself, but the real sticker is that IE7 doesn’t feel sleek, new, or awesome. It’s better than IE6, but it still lags way behind firefox in terms of general usefullness. Why are people going to use Microsoft’s browser when it doesn’t perform better than Firefox?

My habit seems to be to enjoy a glass of wine before I roll into bed, with a book. Right now I’m reading a book in which the author appears in character as himself, which is quite distressing. Even worse, he writes about his fictional character as him through the hindsight of fame, but before he (in this world) became famous. The final straw is that he suggests that works of fiction are real narratives dictating life and events in other worlds. This distresses my free will, and so I sip Pouilly Fuisse.