Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

A drug called Resveratrol appears to have the ability to prolong our lives 20 or thirty good years. Maybe it should go into the water supply!

This 2TB external hard drive from Western Digital makes warm inside. It comes with RAID and USB or Firewire connectors.

I was imed today by a 19 year old girl Beila, who decided because she wanted to, to send a stream of non-stop photographs of herself. At any moment I expected it to become an enticement for an adult website, or some other kind of spam, but she signed off and I have the impression that this girl was just bored. She wanted to see my photo so I sent her lots of pictures of Wendy and I.

Here’s the text bit of the convo… so weird. Names have been anonymized:

(10:50:17 PM) Beila: hi r u mick
(10:50:30 PM) me: oh hai lololololol
(10:50:43 PM) Beila: r u mick
(10:50:52 PM) me: im not
(10:51:07 PM) Beila: ooops sorry then who r u
(10:51:13 PM) me: elliott
(10:51:15 PM) Beila: im beila
(10:51:16 PM) me: i don’t think u know me
(10:51:26 PM) Beila: got a pic elliott ?
(10:51:43 PM) me: yes… but i have a feeling i am too old for you
(10:52:32 PM) Beila: how old r u
(10:52:33 PM) me: You look like my little sister
(10:52:40 PM) Beila: u serious
(10:52:41 PM) me: I’m 23, Beila.
(10:52:42 PM) me: Yeah.
(10:52:47 PM) Beila: im 19
[random images come my way]
(10:53:26 PM) me: who took it?
(10:53:26 PM) Beila: how old is ur sis
(10:53:30 PM) Beila: my dad
(10:53:32 PM) me: it’s a very interesting composition
(10:53:37 PM) me: my sister is 17 now
(10:54:00 PM) Beila: can i see ur pics now
(10:54:07 PM) me: Sure, let me see.
(10:54:42 PM) Beila: whos the girl
(10:54:49 PM) me: that’s my girlfriend, Yunming
(10:57:23 PM) me: So what’s all the photos for?
(10:57:34 PM) Beila: i dunno
(10:57:42 PM) me: bored huh?
(10:57:44 PM) Beila: just like sending them
(10:57:53 PM) Beila: u got more
(10:59:25 PM) me: I am running of photos I want to send you.
(10:59:31 PM) me: But I’m finding this highly amusing.
(11:01:40 PM) Beila: those were all old pics
(11:01:52 PM) Beila: this is wat i look like now
(11:06:15 PM) Beila: i g2g im tired bye
(11:06:20 PM) me: cya

I’ve had friends send me much racier pics than this:

So I sent her things like this:

I suppose in the end it was just a young teenager trying to express herself. What’s odd is that the photos she sent were not all of her–some were disconnected social dialog. Try and make sense of this, these 20 or so photos which were sent to me seconds apart:

WHAT IS THIS!??!?!?!?! I can only assume it’s a weird expression of independence, sexuality, deviance, and what I will unfortunately label “emo.” But, why am I the victim of her stream of consciousness? I’ll never know

Shares of Apple (AAPL) are up $13.06 or 9.52 percent in after-market trading after the computer maker said after its third quarter profit hit 72%, beating analyst expectations.

The company made $818 million, or 92 cents a share, compared to $472 million, or 54 cents a share last year. Revenue rose 24% to $5.41 billion from $4.37 billion last year. The gross margins also improved, to 36.9% from 30.3% a year ago. Thomson Financial forecast Apple to earn 72 cents a share on $5.29 billion in sales, but they have way exceeded! Congratulations to Apple for putting itself in the same category as Amazon this quarter–the new tech bubblers!

If you are reading this, we just moved everything to a new server. The box is a Core 2 Duo 64bit machine w/ 2 GB of RAM, and a 160GB ATA hard disk, hosted by our buddies at Cari.net, the best web hosts ever!! If you’re wondering how we plan to transition, we moved all the files and DNS to this machine, and the DB is hosted still remotely on the old box. When the DNS has solidified, we’ll just scp over the database and everything will be 100% good to go.