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February 4th, 2010
02:52 pm - Conversation O' the Day
Boss: [Pulls out phone and reads] Campus police have nabbed laptop thieves on the mall. For more information, see www.umdps/alerts/news underscore alerts underscore 319 dot cfm.
Me: [Pulls up browser on iPod] Do you have a bit.ly version of that?
Me: [Types in umdps.net <return>]
Boss: U-M-D-P-S dot net...
Me: I wonder if they have a mobile browser version of this site. [Sticks m. in front of the domain name.]
Boss: ...slash alerts...
Me: No, they don't. [Clicks on "back", looks around for a "latest alerts" link or something.]
Boss: ...slash news underscore... Are you following this?
Me: I was, but then you got past twelve characters and I lost interest.
Boss: You're the perfect candidate for Twitter.
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February 3rd, 2010
03:31 pm - Conversation O' the Day
NetApp salesdroid: Blah blah blah product line blah blah increase disk utilization by 50% blah blah...
Me: Excuse me, what do you mean by "disk utilization"?
Droid: Things like getting rid of redundancy and reducing the amount of storage you have to deal with.
Me: Oh, you mean like removing the parity disk from a RAID?
Droid: Yeah, like that.
Current Music: Real Synthetic Audio
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December 25th, 2009
02:35 pm - Mmm... Mmm... Soup is redundant food
Spotted at the local Safeway in the soup aisle:
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December 15th, 2009
11:28 am - YA flavor of geekiness
So I was listening to Elastica's self-titled album, and caught myself thinking, "Hey! The opening of Connection is a total rip-off of Wire's Three Girl Rhumba!" I think that means I'm turning into a music geek.
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October 6th, 2009
September 28th, 2009
06:19 pm - Monty Python re-meets reality
Forty years ago, Monty Python's Flying Circus aired a sketch called The Mouse Problem, a mock-documentary about people who dress up and act like mice.
From the mouse-man interviewee's (John Cleese) answers, it's clear that the sketch is a parody of homosexuality. But if it were filmed today, it would be a straight-up documentary about furries.
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September 25th, 2009
12:14 pm - The Oh-So-Very-Wrong O' the Day
Finnish Viking-Metal cover of Rasputin:
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September 24th, 2009
04:46 pm - Hobbit 419
Hobbit 419, because any number of y'all will enjoy it.
(via Boing Boing and ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) curvemudgeon.)
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August 18th, 2009
06:07 pm - What sucks about accurate meteorology
Since forever, "accurate weather forecast" has been considered a humorous oxymoron, perhaps even an archetype. But I must say that in recent years meteorology has become remarkably accurate.
And the problem with that is that if, on Sunday, the weather report says that Tuesday will be hot and muggy and miserable, I can't tell myself "Ah, it's still two days away. By Monday night, maybe they'll be predicting clear skies and temps in the 70s." Because they won't. Monday's forecast will be pretty much the same as Sunday's, and Tuesday will turn out to be hot and muggy and miserable.
But that's okay, because the Wundermap is one of the coolest toys to come along in a while.
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July 31st, 2009
01:49 pm - Obituary O' the Day
Nancy Lee Hixson (1944-2009).
In addition to being a teetotaling mother and an indifferent housekeeper, she was a board certified naturopath specializing in poisonous and medicinal plants; but she would like to point out, posthumously, that although it did occur to her, she never spiked anyone’s tea.
Now go read the rest.
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June 18th, 2009
12:12 am - Police Fail
I've just had some weapons-grade fail inflicted upon me.
I was heading out to happy hour a little after 7:00 this evening (well, technically yesterday), and found a ticket on my windshield. Okay, it's pretty annoying that a cop would come onto my property and ticket my car. But what makes the fail massive is the "Violation" section, which says "Code: 26-127.02b PARKED ON PRIVATE PROPERTY".
Yes, that's right. I got a ticket for parking in my own driveway.
I had parked on the street earlier this week, and at first I thought maybe I got ticketed there, and didn't notice the ticket when I moved the car to my driveway. But no, the timestamp says 06/17/2009 06:56PM. So if I hadn't tried to hook up with $FRIEND and left ten minutes earlier like I'd planned to, I wouldn't have been ticketed.
Thank you, PG county cops.
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June 12th, 2009
03:56 pm - Stereotypes
While shopping at Target, I couldn't help noticing the layout of the shoe department:
- 6 shelves of girls' shoes
- 3 shelves of boys' shoes
- 3 1/2 shelves of men's shoes
- 13 1/2 shelves of women's shoes
No comment on whether they're promoting a sexist stereotype, or merely giving customers what they want.
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April 10th, 2009
12:53 am - Robyn Hitchcock at the Black Cat
Around 5:00, a coworker called me up saying he had an extra ticket to see Robyn Hitchcock. I suppose it says something about how little I know about the artist that I had to ask whether Robyn was, in this case, a male or female name.
Anyway, I figured this was bound to be more fun than any other plans I had for the evening, so we went down, and that proved to be a good call. He didn't play Listening to the Higsons, one of the few songs I YouTubed while deciding whether I wanted to go, but I might have to pick up that album.
Musically, the show was all over the map. My friend and I were discussing how he should have described Hitchcock to me, and I suggested "folk-rock", though with the caveat that that's about as useful as saying that a particular person lives in Asia.
The spare earplugs turned to be unneeded; the concert wasn't anywhere near as loud as I was expecting. Of course, since Hitchcock's been doing this for thirty years and hasn't graduated to playing football stadia (or choked on vomit), presumably most of his fan base is in the "turn down that racket!" age range. Then again, we were in the back and had the whole one-over-distance-squared thing going for us.
He also had weird nonsensical rambling introductions between songs, about hang-gliding over Rehoboth beach and looking down at a sea of Darth Vader helmets; and driving through Nebraska past an endless train and trying to figure out whether you're moving, or the train is, or whether the crop duster in the background is being towed by a spaniel, and it turns out that the train is actually in a loop and you're stuck inside. Oddly enough, these little rambles were connected to each other, and carried on from one song to the next.
Oh, and he had the most hideous shirt of anyone in the business, with the possible exception of Jimmy Buffett.
So yeah, that was fun.
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February 4th, 2009
09:32 pm - For mcoletti
( Click to embiggen )
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/charitycam/goth_boy/artistic.gif) creative
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December 16th, 2008
05:46 pm - EULA O' the Day
The EULA for the MozyHome remote backup software reads, in part:
THE FOREGOING LIMITATIONS OF LIABILITY SHALL APPLY WHETHER THE DAMAGES ARISE FROM USE OR MISUSE OF AND RELIANCE ON THE SOFTWARE OR SERVICE, FROM INABILITY TO USE THE SOFTWARE OR SERVICE, OR FROM THE INTERRUPTION, SUSPENSION, OR TERMINATION OF THE SOFTWARE OR SERVICE (INCLUDING SUCH DAMAGES INCURRED BY THIRD PARTIES). DO NOT TAUNT HAPPY FUN BALL. SUCH LIMITATION SHALL APPLY NOTWITHSTANDING A FAILURE OF ESSENTIAL PURPOSE OF ANY LIMITED REMEDY AND TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW.
If you accept these terms, are you liable for infringing SNL's copyright?
(HT TDWTF)
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04:12 pm - Ding dong, the witch is dead
At one point in the distant past, $OTHER_DEPT put a bunch of their machines in a row of racks in our machine room. These machines became the bane of ednoria's existence, then slightlymadmom's (yes, I'm talking about the B-S***** machines), then mine.
We finally managed to get $OTHER_DEPT's sysadmin to agree to let us get rid of them, and today he came down to point out the one that still needs to be up for now, and the twenty or so that we could get rid of.
This should have freed up some racks. Unfortunately, the one machine that has to stay up because it's running Important Mission-Critical Software is in the rack at the very end of the row.
The rack next to that now contains only a single network concentrator. We can't move, rewire, or get rid of that without causing a network outage, so the entire rack has to stay.
The rack next to that now contains only a single console box (kinda like a network concentrator) with only one cable going to it, for the console of The Box That Stays For Now (see above). Yeah, we could've moved it, but it didn't seem worth it for just one rack.
So bleah. But come January, we're freeing up a whole lotta space in the machine room, baby!
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December 9th, 2008
05:22 pm - Heard at the Staff Meeting
$BOSS: All of the data has been moved off of foo1.dom.ain, so it can be decommissioned. $PERSON says he's working on moving data off of foo2.dom.ain, so we'll be able to decommission it in a month.
$COWORKER: No, I need to wait until foo2.dom.ain is ready, then decommission both of them at the same time.
$BOSS: Oh? Why's that?
$COWORKER: The labels fell off. I don't know which is which.
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December 7th, 2008
03:05 pm - Another year older
Happy birthday, caryabend!
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November 1st, 2008
12:12 am - Vote!
I'm still working on bitch-slapping all the people who reelected the Shrub in 2004, but I'll tell you what: if I haven't gotten around to you yet and you vote for Obama this time around, I'll cross you off the list.
If you didn't vote for Dubya in 2004, you're still not off the hook: you still have to go vote this time around, or you're going on the new list.
Vote!
( Read more... )
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October 27th, 2008
12:12 pm - Bug O' the Day
I found a bug in my Ajaxy web app this morning. Bleah.
Checked CSS-browser compatibility. Checked PHP syntax. Copied known-working code from a different PHP script. Made sure the JSON syntax was correct. Made sure that the JSON-encapsulated-in-XML was correct. Made sure the server was sending the correct Content-Type header, with quirk-workaround magic. Added tons of debugging.
In the end, it turned out that the server was sending state = ok, but the client was checking whether status == ok. A three-keystroke change, and all is well.
Grrr.
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