I bring in brownies on Monday, and as coincidence would have it another coworker brought in massive muffins. My too polite coworkers would see one, and take one, then see the other and not wanting to insult the provider, would take one as well. At about 11:30 this morning most of the too polite coworkers were stumbling around in insulin shock and the number of random requests for computer aid dropped precipitously. I should try to coordinate this “coincidence” more often.
Bug Light
Three years ago I replaced the incandescent 150 watt bulbs in my office with 150 watt-equivalent fluorescent bulbs and hated the light. I replaced them later with “natural light” bulbs that transmit a broader spectrum than your standard CFL and could blind you at 100 yards as you drove up the driveway. Today, my father replaced our dead floodlight with a bulb of a similar spectrum and it’s changed the house. Everything in our driveway looks really small as the light looks like it’s coming from a desk lamp. Bugs don’t circle it probably because they’ve been blinded by its full spectrum. Even our dog Max is slightly confused. We’ll let him out and he’ll look around tentatively before tinkling probably thinking he’s still inside, missing the forceful yellow of the sodium vapor bulb. He’ll adjust eventually, and probably take dump on the green carpet of my room. Life goes on.
Team Fortress 2 Missionaries
A charismatic Team Interrobang member proposed we change our names to AFI top 100 villians and raid other servers and try to make friends. So, 16 of us gathered and I as Auric Goldfinger raided some servers. The first server had 10 people or so in it, and after joining all but 2 of them left leaving a 9 to 1 ratio of Team Interrobang members to pubs. The second server called me for mic spamming for asking what stats package they used. Finally, we found a 32 person server with 18 slots and we piled in only to be greeted as some sort of TF2 savior for filling their server. One admin changed his name to “OMG Our Server’s Full” another wondered aloud if they could handle so many people. It was quite sad.
So, what started out as a recruiting expedition turned into some sort of bizarre deliverance for a failing servers. But it wasn’t a total bust, we’re thinking for a small fee a server that has trouble filling could rent us to create some sort of gaming Potemkin village. We could throw the same softball questions each time like to make them look good like “Is your server always this awesome?” and “do you have a program where I can pay money to you for guaranteed placement?” and for a little more, we’d even engineer it so the side of the renter’s choosing would win. Direct all paypal payments to teaminterrobangpayments@gmail.com at a rate of $3.00 per shill/hour.
Team Fortress 2 Missionaries
A charismatic Team Interrobang member proposed we change our names to AFI top 100 villians and raid other servers and try to make friends. So, 16 of us gathered and I as Auric Goldfinger raided some servers. The first server had 10 people or so in it, and after joining all but 2 of them left leaving a 9 to 1 ratio of Team Interrobang members to pubs. The second server called me for mic spamming for asking what stats package they used. Finally, we found a 32 person server with 18 slots and we piled in only to be greeted as some sort of TF2 savior for filling their server. One admin changed his name to “OMG Our Server’s Full” another wondered aloud if they could handle so many people. It was quite sad.
So, what started out as a recruiting expedition turned into some sort of bizarre deliverance for a failing servers. But it wasn’t a total bust, we’re thinking for a small fee a server that has trouble filling could rent us to create some sort of gaming Potemkin village. We could throw the same softball questions each time like to make them look good like “Is your server always this awesome?” and “do you have a program where I can pay money to you for guaranteed placement?” and for a little more, we’d even engineer it so the side of the renter’s choosing would win. Direct all paypal payments to teaminterrobangpayments@gmail.com at a rate of $3.00 per shill/hour.
Mug Travesty
The Playwicki Dinner was un-remarkable. The Roast for Lew Mohr involved some strong language and I got to jab him for my hatred of his damn-near jingoistic emails that he refuses to recognize as spam despite having 2000 recipients all listed in the “To” line and enough flag gifs and smileys to reduce 1997 to tears.
They also had a silent auction which I a novel way to minimize donor value by having someone donate 40 dollars of stuff that may sell for 20. I received a Starbucks Gift box that probably sold for something egregious during the holidays for $12.00. I don’t drink coffee but I do enjoy large mugs (cappuccino mugs, apparently) that can hold a whole can of soup. I brought my package home and threw out the rock candy and “tasting squares” which would make fun-sized candy appear brobdingnagian. I grabbed the mug, held it up to the kitchen light in triumph and saw clear through it. Mind you, the mug was shrink wrapped and there was no chunk of ceramic tumbling in the faux woven basket that would have filled the 1/4″ hole. Did someone shoot it with a BB gun in the factory before packaging it? Was it hit by some particle weapon in transit? Maybe this is why the gift basket was donated.
Mug Travesty
The Playwicki Dinner was un-remarkable. The Roast for Lew Mohr involved some strong language and I got to jab him for my hatred of his damn-near jingoistic emails that he refuses to recognize as spam despite having 2000 recipients all listed in the “To” line and enough flag gifs and smileys to reduce 1997 to tears.
They also had a silent auction which I a novel way to minimize donor value by having someone donate 40 dollars of stuff that may sell for 20. I received a Starbucks Gift box that probably sold for something egregious during the holidays for $12.00. I don’t drink coffee but I do enjoy large mugs (cappuccino mugs, apparently) that can hold a whole can of soup. I brought my package home and threw out the rock candy and “tasting squares” which would make fun-sized candy appear brobdingnagian. I grabbed the mug, held it up to the kitchen light in triumph and saw clear through it. Mind you, the mug was shrink wrapped and there was no chunk of ceramic tumbling in the faux woven basket that would have filled the 1/4″ hole. Did someone shoot it with a BB gun in the factory before packaging it? Was it hit by some particle weapon in transit? Maybe this is why the gift basket was donated.
Benefactor Perks
I lost a day of work making sure my mom didn’t somehow injure herself during the period where she had an eye cap on after cataract surgery and laser vision correction. I slept poorly as she has nothing besides a floor that can accommodate both my head and feet simultaneously while supine. I endured missing a day of Internet access on April Fool’s Day, the IT equivalent of Holloween and New Years. But it was all worth it. The knowledge of helping my mother? No.  The two free nice meals? No. The real joy was watching her repeatedly poker herself in the temples in an attempt to adjust her non-existent glasses.
Benefactor Perks
I lost a day of work making sure my mom didn’t somehow injure herself during the period where she had an eye cap on after cataract surgery and laser vision correction. I slept poorly as she has nothing besides a floor that can accommodate both my head and feet simultaneously while supine. I endured missing a day of Internet access on April Fool’s Day, the IT equivalent of Holloween and New Years. But it was all worth it. The knowledge of helping my mother? No.  The two free nice meals? No. The real joy was watching her repeatedly poker herself in the temples in an attempt to adjust her non-existent glasses.
pr0n Witch-hunt Casualties
I sold a laptop to a Team Interrobang friend that had previously been used as a long-term loaner-top for the past three years. I removed most of the applications except Office and went through my normal laptop cleaning routine before shipping it out.
Yesterday, I received a Facebook message that the receiver’s girlfriend had found porn and in the process of frantically removing it broke the sound card. I consider this equivalent to vacuuming your car so hard the stereo breaks. I picture the person finding porn, deleting it all, seeing the thumbs.db file and deleting every folder containing on through guilt by association a la “Hm…. the System32 folder had a thumbs.db file in it as did all these folders I’ve never heard of full of .reg files. They must be up to no good.”
Then the bug of curiosity hit and I asked him what the “content” was. His response narrowed the window of download based on popularity, site watermark, and performers to probably summer 2007. And thus the field of forensic pornography is born.
Vista, the Dull Child
Windows 7 was nice. Taking a trip to the near future was quaint despite failing to deliver the ZFS filesystem I’d been promised years ago as well as the virtualized hardware model I read about in 2002 that won’t be out until Midori which may beat the Mayan Apocalypse. The last straws were the idea that I’d probably have to do two reinstalls of an OS before I could call it stable and somewhat hairy nature of the beta video card drivers on which no blu-ray codec could run.  My personal favorite was the three part cycle of errors when I changed microphones. The first told me the existing microphone didn’t exist and I’d have to pick a new one. The second one told me I had two selected and that I’d have to restart. The final one told me the new default device wasn’t valid and it’d default back to the previous device from which I was trying to change. The only way out was to interrupt the 2nd “searching for a solution” dialog, not the first nor third would do.
So I reinstalled Vista and I felt at home again:
- I installed Office 2007 without a registration key, when I entered it after reading the Excel file containing it, the installer started to reinstall, stopped halfway through, said the install failed and then produced the “Successful Installation” dialog.
- Vista would report an error with a hardware device, recommend I update to a new driver and then show me one older than drivers I have.
- Finally, I had to have admin access to remove a shortcut from the desktop.
I have a theory, Microsoft was concerned people found computers intimidating, nothing brings one’s opinion of something else down faster than watching it fail. Vista reminds the user of his or her relative competence in spades. I missed you, Vista.