They order chinese.
Though Moo goo gai pan's tasty
I'll hold like a wall.

When I finish my long "stop estrip from crashing on Safari" journey, I'll probably write a long post about it with all the stupid details. But for the time being, I'll probably use this journal to keep track of how far long I am.

Step 1 Summary

Yesterday, I fired up my powerbook in a fresh reboot and ran only Safari with e-strip loaded on it without having visited any prior sites. I left the machine to sit there idly the entire day I was at work. When I came home and turned on the monitor, I see a crash dialog.

From this experiment, I can most likely conclude that there's nothing special I have to do, such as being in the middle of a post or writing a comment, for Safari to crash on (e:strip). And this is great, which means that there's a lot less slightly different iterations of things I'm going to have to test to get the crashes to happen.

Step 2 will being fashioning a simple, estrip only web browser with webkit, the underpinnings of Safari, and that browser to estrip and leaving it and seeing if it crashes. If it doesn't crash, then that likely means there's some problem with the Safari executable itself and the webkit libraries it uses are okay, although I think that is pretty unlikely.

Another message of interest from an admirer of the silicon variety, this time from match.com

"Here it is possible to write everyone about yourself much, but I think the person it is possible to learn well only then when you will communicate to him some time!"

She looks like Jennifer Aniston but she talks like Borat. I'd have thought the Russian hackers would have spent the extra ruples for some content that almost resembles passable english. If I got a message titled "I need big strong man to pull plow" I could at least give them a few brownie points for humor.

To expand on (e:metalpeter)'s theme of the day...

If she likes homemade mojitos
And gettin' caught in the rain
If she roots for the Sabres
But is okay with the 'Canes
If she likes Saturday lunches, at the India Gate
Then she's likely the woman that I'd probably date.

Just random pieces of doggerel floating through my mind. Move along, nothing to see here...

My old college bud (e:lizabeth) suggested I change my Myspace user picture to one of her suggestion since she thought the current one was hideous. I heeded her advince, and today I received a myspace message from some interested girl, or at least someone purporting to be female (I'll give (e:lizabeth) 10 secs to gloat and tell me "I told you it needed changing" before I go on...one..two..three) Here's the basic gist of the message.

"Hey sexy!

I saw you on myspace in the men's section....blah blah blah...

blah-blah-blah...Long walks on the beach..blah-blah-blah..I'm honest, funnier than Jerry Seinfeld...blah-blah-blah...piña coladas and getting caught in the rain...blah-blah-blah...I'm attractive, spunky...blah-blah-blah...on the rebound after serious relationship...blah-blah-blah...I don't have a myspace account and I'm just using a friend's, so instead e-mail me at random_email@whatever.com

I'll be checking for your nice message!"

Now, I would never look a gift horse in the mouth, and I think I'm at enough time after my breakup that I'd like to start dating other people again. And it would be such an ego boost if a simple picture change were to cause such a sea change. I want to believe, I reallly do. However...

This myspace message seems a bit fishy. Having done the whole match.com thing (which (e:vincent) told me would be a waste of money and he was pretty much right), most of the people mailing me out of the blue were women (at least purporting to be women) in russia who sent overly flattering messages that were so obviously some kind of spam scam. And in those telltale spam messages, there was always the same "cut through all the red tape and e-mail me immediately" reqeusts (can we say e-mail address harvesting?). While the message I received today did actually originate (supposedly) from the account of a myspace user who supposedly lived in Buffalo (whose picture was pretty hot, if it was an actual person), who in the heck actually uses their hot friend's myspace account to message other people? Wouldn't it have made more sense to get their own account? And more importantly, English-speakers' e-mail usually does not refer to a responding message as a "nice message". It almost sounds like a phrase adapted from some foreign language where the use of the world "nice" would be less tacky.

I don't want to be embarrased enough to actual fall for a scam. We've all had the one first time where we encountered our first phishing message, where we nearly gave our credit card to someone who wasn't eBay. I surmounted that point long ago and I'm adequately jaded by ten years of using the Internet. However, at the same time I'm embarrased to seemingly look like I'm not an optimist. Could friends of hot Buffalo myspace chicks actually throw themselves at me? Sure, why not! What's wrong with that?

I guess I'll do what I do best--pocrastinate. Usually anyone who spams myspace gets their account deactivated within several days of me getting the message. If the account's still there is several days, I'll pursue this matter a little more closely.