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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Geekery

  • Thyme Laps Video

    I bought a new tablet. I installed Lapse It Pro onto the tablet, and this afternoon the clouds were rather pretty and scudding across the blue sky quite nicely and… this happened:

     

    Not bad, eh? Now, for this video I basically just propped the tablet up on top of one of the living room bookshelves, opened the window, started the recording and walked away for an hour or so.

    And walked back, and walked away, and walked back, and finally decided I should go play a game or something for a while because otherwise I was going to be tempted to tinker with things while the recording progressed. Ahem.

    I’m hoping to do more like this, but I’m mostly looking (once the tripod mount arrives) at doing some time lapse “build” videos, such as for assembling one of the very small Gundam models whose boxes have been collecting dust for a couple years now. (A devoted modeler I am not, apparently.)

    Why not use the Pentax? Because I don’t want to assemble these videos from a pile of raw images by hand, that’s why. The additional expense of shutter timer equipment is also a factor.

    So here we are. A guy needs a hobby, right? It’s not so much about the Gundam model as it is about what kind of video I can make out of the process of building the model…

     

  • The File That Crashed Word 2013

    My morning started with a ticket assigned before I got here, scheduled for first thing after the morning “huddle.” The dispatcher pitched me to the client as “the best person at this sort of thing,” having wholly misunderstood the nature of the call. (They thought it was a backup-restore situation, when in fact it was an Office Behaving Badly situation. D’oh.)

    I was, in fact, able to quickly recover the desired information from Word’s auto-recovery files. This made the client very happy. Unfortunately, unless we could figure out why Word was crashing so reliably (as it were) in one particular set of documents, the problem was going to come back again and again. In one location on the network could be found eight similar Word DOCX files.

    The symptom: Open a file, scroll down into the numbered lists, go to the end of a line of text and press the Enter key to initiate a new numbered line. Word 2013 immediately crashes.

    The things we tried:

    • Open the document in Word 2010: No problems at all.
    • Use Word 2010 to save into 2003-compatible DOC format: Word 2013 still crashed.
    • Launch Word 2013 in Safe Mode: Word 2013 still crashed.
    • Use Word 2013 to open-and-repair the file: Word 2013 still crashed.
    • Repair Office 2013: Word 2013 still crashed.
    • Copy & paste the document contents into a whole new file and save (into either 2003-style DOC or 2007+ DOCX): Word 2013 still crashed.

    I lost an hour and a half on this just of my own time, and then brought in a couple members of my team to bash on it as well. One of them figured out the problem:

    The numbered list formatting was broken, somehow, in a way that only Word 2013 had a problem with. If we select the document contents and simply choose another numbered list format/style preset… the problem vanishes.

    Yep. Seriously.

    So, that was a fun way to spend the first half of a Friday!

  • If Skulls Were All

    So, it started with a tweet from Jeph Jacques, webcomic demigod.

    JephJacquesLoveSkullsAnd I thought to myself, “Self? How many song titles could we mangle like this?” I opened up MediaMonkey and, after some arguing with its search settings so that only titles appeared in the rankings, I found myself looking at a list of 182 songs which include “love” in the title. Now, that’s not precisely what Mr. Jacques instructed; he’s talking about lyrics. I don’t have a lyrics library to search, however, so we’ll have to make do with song titles. And because it’s been that kind of week and I need something to amuse myself during lunch, here’s a list of the highlights out of that search result, skulls-ified for your pleasure.

    Note that I’m leaving out duplicates, remixes, and entries where the word replacement just doesn’t scan very well at all. (Which is to say: It didn’t make me laugh, so I chucked it.)

    • All My Skulls – Led Zeppelin
    • Almost Like Skulls – Yes
    • Baby Really Skulls Me – Dada
    • Big Skulls – Robert Plant
    • Break For Skulls – Pet Shop Boys
    • Can’t Refuse Your Skulls – The Sighs
    • Can’t Stop Skulls – Two-Mix
    • Chains Of Skulls – Erasure
    • Church of Logic, Sin and Skulls – The Men
    • City of Skulls – Yes
    • Crazy Skulls Vol II – Paul Simon
    • Digital Skulls – Daft Punk
    • Do You Skulls? – Natalie Imbruglia
    • Don’t Take Your Skulls Away – VAST
    • First Skulls – Cellarful of Noise
    • From Rusholme With Skulls – Mint Royale
    • Get Down, Make Skulls – NIN (Queen cover)
    • Higher Skulls – Depeche Mode
    • I Am In Skulls With You – Imogen Heap
    • I Don’t Believe In Skulls – Queensrÿche
    • I Don’t Want Your Skulls – Duran Duran
    • Interstate Skulls Song – Stone Temple Pilots
    • Skulls Can Kill You – BT
    • Skulls Comes Again – Tiësto
    • Skulls etc – Pet Shop Boys
    • Skulls Is A Battlefield – Pat Benetar
    • Skulls Is Stronger Than Justice – Sting
    • Skulls On Haight Street – BT
    • Skulls Rescue Me – U2
    • Skulls Siren – The Men
    • Skulls Slave – UNDER17
    • Skulls To Blame – Apoptygma Berserk
    • Skulls Voodoo – Duran Duran
    • Skulls Will Find A Way – Yes
    • Skullstown – Peter Gabriel (yes, this one was a reach, I don’t care)
    • Luminous Times (Hold On To Skulls) – U2
    • Make Skulls – Daft Punk
    • Nothing But Skulls – Seabound (also the name of a Jan Hammer track from Beyond The Mind’s Eye)
    • One Year Of Skulls – Queen
    • Only Skulls – Way Out West
    • Outbreak of Skulls – Midnight Oil
    • Power Of Skulls (The Tao Of Skulls) – Rick Springfield
    • Prayer For Skulls – Dolce Triade
    • Pride (In The Name Of Skulls) – U2
    • Prisoner Of Skulls – Tin Machine
    • Real Skulls – Yes
    • Rhythm Of Skulls – Yes
    • Send A Little Skulls – Dream
    • Shine Your Skulls – The Breeze
    • Sign Of Skulls – Immi
    • SOS (Anything But Skulls) – Apocalyptica
    • Soul Skulls – David Bowie
    • Spacy Spicy Skulls – Mejale Pirates (Voice artists from the Vandread anime)
    • Stadium Skulls – Metric
    • Tainted Skulls – Nikolaj Steen (that’s the cover version I have in the library, anyway)
    • The Dumbing Down Of Skulls – Frou Frou
    • The Game Of Skulls – Daft Punk
    • The Skulls Thieves – Depeche Mode
    • The Meaning Of Skulls – Depeche Mode
    • The Night I Fell In Skulls – Pet Shop Boys
    • The Speed Of Skulls – Rush
    • This Is Skulls – Tony Banks (the judges would also have accepted the different song of the same name by The Space Brothers)
    • This Is Not Skulls – Jethro Tull
    • This Must Be Skulls – Phil Collins (thus completing the trilogy…?)
    • True Skulls – Wang Chung
    • When It’s Skulls – Van Halen
    • When Skulls Comes To Town – U2
    • When You Give Your Skulls To Me – Kevin Gilbert
    • Whole Lotta Skulls – Led Zeppelin
    • Wreckless Skulls – Robert Plant
    • You Can’t Hurry Skulls – Phil Collins

    We now return you to your regularly scheduled broadcast day.

  • I Quack To Believe

    DuckActionShot_XFilesRiff

    This is what happens when I have a few minutes at work, access to FireWorks, and someone posts an action shot of a rubber duck on Tumblr.

  • House of Clubs

    You have a weekend to burn, and you’re planning a viewing marathon of a TV show on Netflix. If that’s your thing, who am I to judge? Perhaps I can help you make a decision, however, on what show to watch.

    The first season of Netflix’s version of the show, “House of Cards,” totals 13 episodes at just under an hour per episode, give or take. The only existing season of the anime, “Ouran High School Host Club,” totals 26 episodes at about twenty three minutes per episode, if you don’t skip the theme songs and previews. The run lengths balance out, more-or-less, for each show’s initial season outing.

    “But Karel,” I hear you asking, “what is it about either of these shows which would make me choose one over the other?” Well, let’s put it this way:

    One show centers on a group of rich and powerful people who use their money and influence to shape the world according to their whims, leverage the media to fashion narratives of their choosing, trample the fourth wall, shamelessly exploit taboo behaviors, and engage in complex schemes which would never actually come to fruition in the real world.

    The other show, of course, stars Kevin Spacey.

  • To Allow Comments, Or Not To Allow Comments

    Out of curiosity I ask you: If I were to start posting installments of the aforementioned story project to an appropriate website, should I or shouldn’t I turn on comments for those installments?

    On one manipulatory appendage, comments are a great way to gauge appreciation and interest as well as to directly interact with the readership.

    On the opposite appendage, a trailing dangle of comments following one’s story installment may detract from the tone and presentation.

    I haven’t decided yet, so now’s the time to chime in. Posting should start… soon.

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