Category: Geekery

  • Thank you, Mother Nature…

    Oh, goody. Because there’s nothing I want more to be doing on my birthday (and the days immediately following) than dealing with possible snow, possible hail, possible lightning & thunder, probable high winds and a definite downpour. If I was (still) the kind of guy who looked for signs in everything, I’d say the universe in general was trying to tell me something.

    Apparently, that something would include the phrase “don’t forget your inversion-resistant umbrella.”

    Geeky side note: I know some “blog” authors like to use the feature of their chosen software that turns the entry title into part of a unique URL instead of just using the index number, but it doesn’t really work out very well in most cases. The “easier to remember” idea is bunk, ’cause the entry address tends to include things like date information, and who’s going to remember that, eh? Another problem is that the URL tends to be insanely long. The most amusing failing of this technique, however, is the way that longer entry titles get truncated arbitrarily. For instance, “Storm on the Horizon” becomes “storm_on_the_ho.html”.

    Methinks it shall storm on the ho and the non-ho alike.

  • Does this qualify as “filk?” I hope not.

    I went to several minutes’ work to create this little monstrosity for a comment on a LiveJournal entry, so by golly I’m going to inflict it on… I mean, share it with my adoring fans. Sharing is caring, after all.

    To the tune of Midnight Oil’s “Blue Sky Mine.”

    So I’m caught at the website still waiting for torrent posts
    Wipe sweat off my brow, keep on clicking search engines
    Hope the crumbs in my keyboard can keep me for another night
    And if the fansub torrent posting scene won’t come to my rescue
    If the anime dubbing industry won’t save me
    Who’s gonna save me?

    But if I click all day at the torrent site
    (There’ll be files on the hard drive tonight)
    Still I scroll up and down on the torrent site
    (There’ll be high bandwidth usage tonight)

    And some have RAWs from a distant shore
    And the fansubbers take what the fanboy hordes want
    And nothing’s as anxious, as a codec not found…

    No, I didn’t “do” the whole song. Would you want me to? I didn’t think so. Hah!

    For those of you desiring context, you may find it at EK’s LJ post which started things off…

  • After a while, you stop counting the hours or risk going mad.

    Here it is, one o’clock in the fine, fine morning. I just got home, and am working on the dinner I bought some seven hours ago. Once I crank out this entry and decompress a bit more from the evening’s fun-and-frolic, I’m going right to bed.

    I, along with the other two-thirds of the “engineering staff,” put in *mumblemumble* hours today, first doing our normal work and then doing a three-sided server swap on the digital audio system. We took Enco-PDX, the former primary server, and made it the secondary server. Enco-FS1 is the new primary, while poor old Beast is finally retired. (Don’t worry, I’ll find something to do with an 800 GB drive array. Bwahahaha.) We faced a myriad of challenges tonight, including “how to recable the entire Enco networking system without taking any stations off the air.”

    We were thorough, we were organized, and we were careful. I know; I’m just as shocked as you are. There’s even a chance I won’t get called on my day off tomorrow… er, today. At least, if I get called it shouldn’t be about anything we worked on tonight. Heh.

    During my lunch break (oh, let’s not think about how many hours ago that was) I installed Spam Karma 2 on both this site and the anime site, ’cause I’m tired of “moderating” annoying spam comments that WordPress 1.5’s built-in system can’t quite prevent me from seeing. Oh, and don’t go trying to sell me on that Akismet thing of theirs… anything that has to “phone home” every time someone posts a comment is something I want to avoid. Hell, I eventually gave up using Blogrolling.com because I don’t like being reliant on anyone else’s servers to keep my content running.

    Anyway. I need to get some sleep tonight. And clean up the place a bit in the morning. And meet my beloved at the train station on time. And… well, you get the picture…

  • The Simpsomaker

    This is all Sarah’s fault.

    There aren’t really very many options to choose from, so this is the best I could do. You’re welcome to make your own, of course. And how amusing is it that the site is called DevilDucky, eh?

    Bear in mind that there’s no option (that I could find, anyway) to save the image other than printing it, so be prepared to use whatever screen capture method works best for you. (When in doubt, for Windows users: Alt+PrintScrn, then open whatever image editor you have on hand and Ctrl+V to paste. Crop as needed, then save.)

  • My First Compy

    This News.com.com story takes some famous names in the IT biz and asks them each what their first computer was. Then the story invites readers to share their own “first computer” info.

    But… you have to subscribe to their website to do so. Wow, no, thanks, I’ll just… hey! I have my own site!

    Anyway. I must have been about twelve years old, as I’m pretty sure this was during the later stretch of Mom’s marriage to Mike Schomler, and we were living in the (rather nice) double-wide on the hillside above the Westerdahl property. (My stepdad worked for them at the time. I’ll have to tell some more stories about those years, later, won’t I?) I don’t remember how I came into possession of such a thing, but my first computer was a quirky self-contained lump of metal and plastic dubbed the Commodore PET 2001. It sported a built-in (cassette) tape drive and a quaint chiclet-style keyboard. Yes, it was many years later that I learned to touch-type, as it’s nigh-impossible to do so on a purely rectangular layout. Almost all of the actual programming (from scratch) that I’ve ever done in my life was on that machine, though. Hell, I even still have some of the tapes… though I’m pretty sure they’re degraded beyond all use, now, if not entirely copied over with music I recorded from the radio. (My other favorite toy during those years was my portable cassette/radio deck, after all.)

    While I made use of a variety of other machines (those of friends and classrooms) in the years since I gave up on the PET, it wasn’t until the mid-’90s that I owned a computer of my own again. Ah, back when a 486 was a wonder to behold…

  • ED: It’s not just for heroes anymore.

    As I scrolled through the collection of work email messages I knew I’d be deleting momentarily, one subject line caught my eye. It assured me that ED is a problem for many people, and promised me a way to take care of it. I thought, “Wow, that’s some really well-targeted spam. How did they know I’m a City of Heroes/Villains player? Why yes, Enhancement Diversity is a sham and a pox upon the playerbase.”

    Then I thought some more and… laughed. No, sorry, I don’t have that problem. Thank goodness.