Entries tagged with geekery

Current Music: Rosa singing Mamma Mia

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Only in a geek household

Rosa> Mommy! There's hippogriffs in my soup! Come see!

Rosa> See! Hippogriffs!

Mommy> Just looks like noodles to me...

Rosa> No Mommy, look, it's Egyptian hippogriffs!

Current Music: "The Good Left Undone": Rise Against

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T'other day we drove past a damaged vehicle which I didn't see, and when I asked what Chris had been commenting on, he said, "A car with its side stove in."

At which point I wondered aloud what the present tense verb was. Stave, steve, stove, maybe it's not a verb at all...?

Here's what dictionary.com has to say: ( short version: it's stave )

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(no subject)

Atomic particles form stable triads, film at 11

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Sauces

I typed into google: "Why do cream sauces separate when reheated?"

And this is the first hit: How do chefs stabilize sauces? It's a 20-page essay on common sauce ingredients and how they each affect the resulting sauce. And the answer to my initial question? Because the sauce is an emulsion of fat and water, and as such is nearly as prone to separating as vinaigrette. *sigh* Best to order fettucini alfredo to share, then, rather than take it home.

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Php/MySQL software for possible use on ambercastle.net

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_Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith_

Short review: I generally agree with

ohari. Better by far than
Ep.I or Ep.II, but not on a par with Ep.V or Ep.VI. I'm not sure I'd
give it equivalent rating to Ep.IV either. Lucas's dialog evinces a case
of terminal Tin Ear Syndrome. But lots of juicy explosions and much less
of the feeling I'd had watching Ep.I and Ep.II that he had created
nothing more than a pastiche of the other three movies. ( Spoileriffic comments follow )

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Even more fun

After spending all morning installing and running Ad-Aware, emailing Dana to find out that no, my domain doesn't expire until November (I hadn't thought it was even close!), etc, etc, I find that the problem
with www.ambercastle.net seems to be localized to this LAN.

jilly_bear sees the same interloping page that I do. Chris suggested that the company might have blocked the domain and then this
thing is coming up in the place of the "blocked site" error. It seems as likely as anything else, although I can't see why the domain would be blocked. There's nothing offensive there!

On the other hand, gratuitous plug for

dissolvedgrrl's webhosting service: I can't imagine getting better personal assistance and immediate response when I had an apparent problem. Thank you Dana!

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(no subject)

Apparently, the universe has conspired to deliver me an unwanted
birthday present. I tried to go to my webmail this morning, and got a
splash page (not even liquidesign's home page) saying my domain had
expired as of today. It was there earlier this morning; I saw my
newly-uploaded pics over Chris's shoulder. I was just thinking they
might have been cached on his PC--and they still might--but I did the
upload from here at work, not his laptop, and I don't think anyone at
home got online after I'd done it last night.

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Shag, Marry, Cliff...

A meme from

havocthecat...

Pick three characters from fiction, TV or movies. I have to choose one
to shag, one to marry, and one to push off a cliff.

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Vorkosigan!

bbwoof: "How would you describe Miles?"

bbwoof: "How about...a slightly-dented force of nature."

Entry tags:

geekery,
grammar

Grammar rant, one each, $.02

Remember that old canard about not ending sentences with prepositions?
You know the one, the so-called rule that Winston Churchill memorably
dissed? Well, it really is a rule. No preposition may exist without an
object thereof. It's such a strong rule that I almost can't formulate a
*-sentence (linguists use asterisks to indicate impossible or
ungrammatical constructions) that demonstrates this. But here goes:
*Come into.

There are two different things going on in cases where it looks like
someone has ended a sentence with a preposition. One is that English is
rife with idiomatic phrasal verbs, and the other is that most of the
words we call prepositions may also be used adverbially. Let's look at
some examples.

I put up with nonsense. This is a very simple subject-verb-object
sentence; its only curious feature is that the verb is a three-word
phrase. Put does not mean the same thing as put up, and
they both differ from put up with.

Come in! This is an imperative verb, come, plus the
adverbial in. If you wanted a prepositional phrase here, it would
have to be Come into the house.

Entry tags:

geekery

(no subject)

We now have definitive confirmation that DSL and modem connection can coexist on the same phone line at the same time.

Entry tags:

geekery,
movies

Yippee!

I just received a notification from Amazon that the Fellowship of the Ring DVD is available for preorder.

Entry tags:

geekery

(no subject)

Well, I'm joining the high-tech world. I've just signed up for DSL service. It'll still be a couple-three weeks before I'm connected.

Entry tags:

annoyances,
geekery

(no subject)

The sooner I get my DSL and get off AOL, the better. They're now doing evil pop-up windows when I sign out of AOLAnywhere. Useta was a really nice considerate site that just went away. Then they started having one popup-on-exit window. Now there are two! Paul recommended Pop-up Stopper, and I'm running it, but it doesn't stop any pop-ups that I can see. The only difference is that they pop-up underneath my current window instead of on top of it. Is that because I'm using IE5?

I think I get on the actual AOL service only about once every two weeks, and that only so I can download the mail I want to keep. I prefer AIM chat anyway (for one big reason: it stores the entire session buffer so that if you have to go afk you can catch up when you come back without missing anything), and now that Trillian is working with AIM again (however long that may last) I am using it instead. I'm actually connected on my Y!M id nowadays!

Anybody want to recommend a good IRC channel to try? I never had an IRC client before...

As if I needed more 'net timewasters. ;->

Current Mood: geeky

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Spam that actually made me think!

Well it wasn't actually the content, but the fact that the header ("this is the result of your feedback form", which is fast growing to be standard in spam, and if I had my Em@iler again I'd use it to filter the stuff) was in German this time.

Donnerstag, it said, which is of course Thursday. I looked at the word for a while, remembered a conversation on wombat about Donner and Blitzen, and traced it backward to "Thunderday". "Thursday", of course, I always knew meant "Thor's Day", but it was just now that it occurred to me that "Thor" very likely also means thunder, or is at least derived from the same root.

So I went and checked at dictionary.com. thunder and Thor are indeed clearly related. It turns out that thin, astonish, detonate, intone, and tone are also related.

Because I have always had a wide vocabulary, people used to tease me in elementary school about reading the dictionary for fun, and I always denied it. It was true, of course, though I learned most words from context. If I did look something up, there was always something else interesting on the same page to read about. And then there's times like just now, when I knew perfectly well what the words were but looked them up anyway to read about their derivations.

Current Mood: grumpy

Entry tags:

geekery,
peeves

Pet peeves of the day

People (customer service reps, cashiers, and the like) who blame the computer when they can't do whatever it is that I need them to do for me. "I can't change your address record from here, the computer won't let me. You'll have to call our other department." Codswallop. Give me a couple hours with the system and I could make it do it. No, it's one of several other possibilities, none of which have anything at all to do with the computer. The management intentionally chose not to provide that functionality. They overlooked it. You don't have the kind of security access that would let you do it (again a management decision). The programmers at your company are incompetent. You're simply not allowed to. Or you're being recalcitrant or lazy.

Voice mail customer service systems that ask me to enter my account number on the telephone keypad and then don't do anything with it: the minute the csr gets on the phone they ask me for it again! And then they find I'm not in their service area, and transfer me somewhere else, so that I have to go through the whole rigmarole again.

These are really the same thing: inefficient system design, bad business rules, or bad programming. In a world where it is possible for me to send a message instantly to .jp or .uk or .timbuktu, why can't one branch of the cable company send a message to the other one?

It's a business rule or a failure of design, not the fault of the computer. Computers do exactly what they're instructed, which is both their greatest strength and their most irksome characteristic. As a programmer, there have been many many times I've grumbled "Do what I meant, not what I said!"

Current Mood: complacent

Entry tags:

geekery,
movies

Movies and minor electronics geekery

I finally got my dvd player hooked up to my new TV last night, after going to Radio Shack on Sunday and buying a component-video cable. Neither the player nor the TV came with cables--and after buying one, I knew why. The cable cost forty dollars! Hard to sell a dvd player for under a hundred dollars if you've included a forty-dollar cable. Anyway, I hooked it all up, and put in a disk, which I had also bought Sunday.

It displayed in black and white. That wasn't good. I looked through both user manuals and discovered that if I was getting component video input the TV would display "Component". It was displaying "Video" instead. Hmmm, maybe my cables weren't connected quite right. I crawled back behind the TV and found that the green cable was not fully attached. Aha! This time when I turned the TV back on, I had beautiful color.

The movie was Drop Dead Gorgeous which was recommended by

aliciar. I didn't find it quite as laugh-out-loud funny as she did, but then I rarely laugh out loud when I'm alone. It always seems to take a feedback loop with at least one other person to get me to do that. It did however remind me very much of Heathers, which is one of my all-time favorite movies, and I think I'll be watching it again. Now to find But I'm a Cheerleader, which Al also recommended and I had been wanting to see anyway.

Time to start a Movies I Must See list, and/or a Movies I Must Own list.

Also time to connect the VCR so I can watch Heathers again.

Current Mood: cheerful

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(no subject)

I've just been reading Lapsing into a Comma by Bill Walsh. I read the whole thing cover to cover--I'm obsessed with words--and it made me laugh out loud several times.

Current Mood: amused

Entry tags:

geekery

Internet shopping

Well, I'd been putting it off for a long time, but I finally ordered my Dare to be Average poster collection from Demotivators. This includes the two posters I most wanted, Procrastination and Ineptitude. The Ineptitude poster actually has a very good saying on it, in my opinion: "If you can't learn to do something well, learn to enjoy doing it poorly." I think Julia Cameron would be pleased.

I also ordered the "Destroy the Ring World Tour" t-shirt. While I love the other ones, I don't think they make much sense without having read The Very Secret Diaries.