The list of available selections is somewhat arbitrary, but the results are still mildly amusing:
Keep in mind that if you decide to make your own, you’ll be dealing with German-language instructions. Your mileage may vary.
Category: Geekery
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Photo Periodic Table Posters
So. Who wants to pony up and buy a late birthday present for everyone’s favorite little grey duck?
Okay, I kid. I’ll probably buy one myself at some point in the near future. I just wanted to get the link posted here so I won’t forget that I want one, let alone where I found them.
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Two time zones for the price of chaos.
The “DST 2007” fallout isn’t quite as bad as I originally feared, but I’m not completely out of the woods. For instance, there are all of those Outlook recurring appointments to help people straighten out. The stunner, though, is that for some reason certain copies of Windows XP selected the wrong Pacific time zone when they received the DST update patch. What used to be “GMT-08:00 Pacific Time (US & Canada); Tijuana” is now “GMT-08:00 Pacific Time (US & Canada)” and “GMT-08:00 Tijuana, Baja California”.
Spiffy. Guess who gets to figure out how to find and squash this particular dilemma? Sure, it’s not a difficult problem to fix on an individual machine, but try scripting the fix across hundreds of client machines in a variety of environments without breaking something else in the process. My efforts aren’t helped by a (possible) bug in our managed services platform which is preventing me from checking the value of a Windows registry string.
Of course, thanks to the DST change itself, I’m handling all of this after getting up at what felt like four-thirty in the morning. I’ve had worse Mondays, I suppose…
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Ubuntu Forums: More Accurate Than My Mom
I received the following email at 4:00 in the afternoon today, the 7th of March:
We at Ubuntu Forums would like to wish you a happy birthday today!
Well, at least they’re more accurate than my mother. The Ubuntu Forums are only off by about eight hours, while Mom called three entire days early. Still, I appreciate the sentiment, automated as it may be…
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Upgrade Blues
I just upgraded this site to WordPress 2.1.1. I’d be happier about this if a) I’d had much of a choice in the matter, and b) the upgrade hadn’t broken the most important set of sidebar widgets I use. That’ll teach me to use seldom-updated German code, eh? At least I’m now protected from the known vulnerabilities in the core software. Yay.
Links and buttons and a few other things are broken, and will continue to be broken until I can spend some quality time making things work again. I imagine I’ll have to do the fixes the hard way… dammit.
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How to destroy the Earth
If you’re anything like me, which in this case means “a geeky weirdo with a fascination not only for the physical sciences but also anything which involves what Marvin the Martian once called an Earth-shattering kaboom,” a description which probably applies any number of Mythbusters fans, you might want to read up on how to destroy the Earth.
Here’s a sample quote to whet your appetite.
The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you’ve had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.
I believe I’ve found my new favorite bedtime reading…