worthy investment?

I was watching TV in our family room the other day, when I noticed D had been wrestling with something in the kitchen sink for awhile. I asked him what he was doing and he showed me that one of our small Corningware bowls had gotten wedged into one of our larger Corningware bowls. He'd tried using soap (didn't help), knives (too thick), cardboard (still too thick!), and some other solutions, but had been unable to dislodge the bowls. I thought for a couple of minutes, and finally decided to see if heat would do the trick. I boiled some water, put the larger bowl in the pot until it was too hot to touch, took it out (using dish rags), and then banged it against the counter, making sure the rags would soften the impact. Bingo!

On the way out, I remarked to D that it appeared my very expensive engineering education was good for something after all.

sweeeet

$ cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 24739480 kB

(finally rebooted to install my new RAM)

travel note

I want to post more last week's East Coast trip later, but one quick note: I got to use the "mobile boarding pass" system for the first time flying out of SFO on United. There was a slight hitch: only one of the security lines was set up to scan the pass, so my security guy had to hand my phone to another security guy to scan it. But, overall it was still fairly quick and totally paperless! Yay.

that's a first

It appears that I am going to (part of) a bachelor party tonight. I'm pretty sure I was only invited because D is going to be at a different bachelor party in New Orleans and they need even teams for Starcraft, but whatever, I'm not passing up a SC LAN party. If there are strippers, they better be dressed up as zerglings or something.

just fix it

For the past few weeks, there's been a little orange bubble on top of the "options" icon () in all of the Chrome windows on my work desktop. It was pretty small, so it was probably hovering just below my annoyance threshold, and I never bothered to figure it out. Also, I think in the back of my mind I thought that it must have to do with my Gmail chat status somehow, even though that makes no sense whatsoever.

Just now I clicked on it and got this message:
Old school is not cool. Google Chrome is woefully out of date because it hasn't crashed or restarted in weeks. Restart to apply update.

Pretty cute message and all, but I really hate restarting my browser, partially because I always have like three or four windows open with five tabs apiece, and partially because we have an OTP authentication scheme at work that requires me to dig up an OTP keyfob every time I start a new browser instance. Anyway, I grumbled about the convenience for a couple seconds but decided to restart anyway. I clicked on the icon, Chrome restarted itself, and magically opened up all my windows and tabs again. Awesome sauce (with no orange bubbles)!! Yes, I know that's how it's supposed to work, but I find I'm often amazed when software works properly.

cars and computers

A coworker referenced this quote today. I've heard it before, but it was still funny to me.

"If cars were like computers, you'd be able to buy a car for $1000 that gets 500 miles to the gallon and goes 300 miles per hour. Of course this car would occasionally explode for no reason, killing all the occupants."

Singapore Airlines runs Linux

Halfway through my flight from Melbourne to Singapore, my personal entertainment unit rebooted itself, and I was confronted with this screen:

It appeared to be a variant of Caldera (!!), which I guess would explain why it had crashed.

these guys crack me up

One of my coworkers is having a baby, so this morning he put up a form asking people to submit name suggestions.

About half an hour he posted this message:
Ok...I'm all for getting creative name suggestions...but I can tell you now that "Optimus Prime" isn't going to make the cut.

strategy

Overheard during an epic 4-on-4 battle, at our Starcraft LAN party on Friday night:
"We just have to hold out for another 15 minutes and <opposing player> will give up. He has RSI."

We're all good friends, really! (He did give up.)

omg pink ponies!

Earlier today, I was much amused by an Easter egg on the espn.com website. If you typed in the Konami code (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, enter), a bunch of silly graphics would appear. They took it down pretty quickly, but it's still reproducible in the Google cache.

Here's a screenshot:

easily amused

This totally cracked me up just now. From Matt Maiocco's 49ers blog:

"At some point, perhaps on the second day of the draft (April 26), the 49ers will select a running back to complement Frank Gore. (Unless, they take a guy who is going to just walk around all day and tell Frank how great he is. In that case, they'll be getting a running back to compliment Frank.)"

Sports commentary with grammar/vocab jokes! How can you beat that?

almost time

Today is 1234567890 day...Unix second 1234567890 will occur at 2:31 PST. It's also Friday the 13th. That is all.

feeling gleeful

About a year and a half ago I moved from an area with lots of high speed internet choices to an area with far fewer choices. Originally I had Speakeasy DSL which was awesome and amazing and recommended by me to everyone. After the move, I was stuck with Comcast cable internet, which made me very unhappy, because I hate Comcast with a passion. Not only do they have horrible and clueless phone support, they charge $50 every time a technician comes to visit, they have sketchy bait-and-switch pricing schemes, and one time when the Comcast guy came to "fix" our internet service he "accidentally" broke our satellite TV connection. Yeah, right.

Sometime last December, we received a letter from Comcast saying that the rate on our internet service ($42/month) was a "mistake" and that it would be changed to the "correct" price of $58/month, effective in January. The letter was printed, with color graphics. I sincerely doubt that we were the only customers to receive it. Anyway, it went on to say that we could elect to add cable TV service, and if we did so, instead of being charged $58/month for just internet, we would pay $52/month for both internet and TV. Of course, the catch was that the $52/month rate would only apply for a year.

That was motivation enough for me to start researching ISP alternatives again, and I was surprised and happy to find that AT&T DSL was available in our area. I promptly ordered AT&T service, and the technician enabled our line, but my old Speakeasy/Covad DSL modem unfortunately didn't work with AT&T's service, so I had to wait another few days until AT&T could send me a new modem (which, incidentally, was free with a 1-year contract).

The modem arrived yesterday afternoon, and after dinner and games with some friends, I started configuring the new connection around midnight. After going through the installation process (which unfortunately required a Windows machine and Internet Explorer, so I had to dig up a laptop), and debugging the PPPoE settings for a bit, I finally got everything working around 1am. This made me ridiculously happy. I felt like I was finally free! I didn't get to bed until 2am because I was aimlessly surfing the web, just reveling in our new faster, Comcast-less internet. Yeah, I'm a huge geek.

We got Comcast cancelled the next morning. Yay!! Take that, stupid Comcast policies!

eyeballing

I just took this eyeballing test twice and scored 4.15 both times. I'm particularly bad at finding the centers of triangles, and I'm good at midpoints, bisecting angles, and convergence points. I'm amazed looking at the high scores...how does someone score below a 2.0 on this thing?

favorite movies (or, insuring against future data loss)

Back when I signed up for Facebook, I installed a bunch of applications and started to use them. One of the apps was Flixter Movies. I actually sat around rating movies and making a list of my favorites. Then, when Facebook switched over to its new interface, I was suddenly unable to access my movie list (at least on FF/Linux) and it was really freaking me out. I hate data loss of any kind.

Anyway, I guess they finally fixed the app for the new UI, because I checked this morning and I was able to access my movie list. I'm posting my "all-time favorites" list (as of 2007) here so I won't lose it again. It's ordered by date of release.

The Princess Bride (1987)
When Harry Met Sally (1989)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
The Usual Suspects (1995)
臥虎藏龍 (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) (2000)
The Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers (2002)
Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003)
The Incredibles (2004)

I also loved Immortal Beloved, but I think primarily due to all the Beethoven music. Hmm, I realize I do have somewhat generic taste in movies. Ah well.

geeks go shopping

This xkcd comic is so descriptive of me that it kills me:


I've referenced it like two or three times in conversation already over the past few months, but it's really hard to explain a comic out loud.

blue-green blindness?

Apparently I just love online tests. Here's a hue discrimination test I just took. I scored a 4, with all the mistakes falling in the blue-green border:

typing test

After getting confused on the first try, I managed to score 103 WPM on my second try on this typing test. Of course, I may have cheated slightly by picking a passage from the Wizard of Oz, since I read fiction particularly fast.

Full result:
Net Speed: 103 WPM
Accuracy: 99%
Gross Speed: 104 WPM

foil-covered workspace

...aka what happens at work on a Friday around 6 or 7pm after a bunch of us have drunk most of a keg and gorged ourselves on homemade-from-scratch Rocky Road Chocolate Fudge ice cream cake.

the internet is broken

Amazon.com is down. It makes me feel strangely uneasy.