I hate Blu-Ray. I thought I was done with it, but apparently, I was wrong. Today I received Dodgeball on Blu-Ray as it was a whopping $5 on Amazon. I popped in the disc and the Blu-Ray software repeatedly crashed. I searched the webs for why and it turns out a recent update for the software broke it in Windows 7 and that to play a disc under Windows 7 one needed to update to the 2010 version of the software. Why the update? Turns out the fact that the software worked in Windows 7 was an accident, and the patched fixed the software by breaking it. I see piracy, a stupid phone call, or the burning effigy of a blu-ray disc in my future.
Tag: technology
Phantom Server
Boss: Terry, did you disconnect that license server?
Me: Â Yea. Â It’s been down for an hour.
Boss: I can still connect to it.
Me: How?
Boss: Well, I can ping it. Â What do you think’s causing it?
Me: Honestly? Â Internet gnomes.
Boss: Gnomes?
Me: Well, maybe faeries, but rarely do web faeries work on the business levels.
Boss: So, gnomes?
Me: Yes, gnomes are well known for finding packets destine for disconnected computers and ferrying those packets to the appropriate computers. Â That’s why my iPhone works in some train tunnels.
Boss: So… what do we do?
Me: Act quickly to get the server back online, otherwise, the gnomes will get tired and turn against us. Â Remember that day we had 10kbps upload to the offsite server?
Boss: Yes.
Me: We angered them without offering tribute. Â They extracted their pound of flesh.
Boss: Hm…
I love knowing I’m going to be fired.
Text Replacement
Text replacement is a standard technology on mobile devices. Â Each dictionary combines common spelling errors with contact names and some logic based on what keys are near other keys. Â I enjoy cursing, so I got around fuck turning into duck and shit turning into shirt by adding fuck shit as a contact. Â Joe has an Android device which goes the extra step where okie turns into pliers. Â So, if you ever get a message with the text of pliers dokie, you know why.
On my first phone, attempts to type cool were replaced with book and I think the following phrase will pop up to confound future linguists. Â “That’s ducking book, pliers dokie”.
Getting Television
I left work early to meet the FiOS technician who was install my father’s TV service. Four months without the Mystical Hitler/Bigfoot History Channel rendered him near catatonic and he clawed open his wallet to fix it. The technician arrived and things went poorly quickly:
Him: Where’s your existing install? We’ll need to replace the router with something that supports the TV service.
Me: NO!!! NOT ABRAHAM LINKSYS! There’s got to be another way to do it.
Him: Nope, the new router manages port forwarding and DNS to get the menu stuff.
Me: So you’re telling me that not only are you going to take my router but you’ll prevent me from custom DNS lookups?
Him: Yes.
Me: Well, can’t we do it as a separate install?
Him: If you were an apartment conplex yes, but if you were you’d need a commercial service.
Me: In fact, this floor is zoned separately from the ground floor. I board here but this closet is shared as part of a communications easement [Editor’s Note: At this point, I began spewing a collection of bullshit that caused the portion of my brain responsible for memory to go into shock. All I remember is that I ended with “so that’s why there’s an exterior door in my bedroom” and he nodded in agreement.]
I don’t think he actually bought what I said so much as he realized the potential problem caused by disturbing a possibly unstable fat white guy who named his router “Abraham Linksys”. Sometimes looking a little batshit crazy helps.
Custom Ice Trays
There are an unusual number of silicone experts at my workplace so I asked one of them if my dream of using silicone ice trays to produce brownie-fists was reasonable. Turns out the answer is a qualified “yes”.
Coworker: Silicone is silicone. If it’s a true silicone ice cube tray it’ll take several hundred degrees C without a problem.
Me: What do you mean “true silicone”?
Coworker: Well, some just use a silicone backbone, so they’d have a low melting point.
Me: I think I’ve dealt with that before.
Coworker:Â What are you trying to do?
Me: Trying to create a silicone tray to make single server brownies.
Coworker: We could make our own. I asked Dow for some sample silicone and they sent me 70 kilos that’s body-safe. We’d just need a sample shape.
I’ve been avoiding learning our CAD design, rapid prototyping and thermal simulation software. I think I now have a reason to.
Meeting the Vacuum
My cleaning methods are stepwise. Rooms or sets of rooms are purged of the extraneous. This has included trashing vestiges of youth, vestiges of family, and, in some cases seemingly, vestiges of others’ sanity. I recently attacked the chunk of rooms around my father’s bedroom and he decided to clean too. He filled four or five garbage bags with un-needed clothing and decided to do something he simply may have never done: use the vacuum.
I love our vacuum. It’s an early model Dyson and is capable of pulling a cats worth of hair out of the carpet. My brother and I have logged near a hundred hours on it and my dad broke it in ten minutes. Ten minutes. 10.
Me: How did you break the world’s greatest vacuum cleaner?
Him: I don’t know.
Me: Fix it!
— 12 hours later —
Him: Well, I think I fixed it.
Me: What was wrong?
Him: I somehow sucked up a ballpoint pen. I thought the Dyson was poorly designed but after the third hour I came to an understanding. The vacuum was more than the sum of its well constructed parts. I once thought it was overhyped plastic but I have learned. I’ve made peace with the vacuum.
Good to know my father’s enough of a man to be able to make peace with an inanimate object. One day I shall too.
RAM Reject pt II
So, after yesterday’s incident I got thinking “why doesn’t this RAM work?” I checked on-line and the RAM appeared compatible so I contacted their tech support who said the RAM I used was generically non-compatible. I said this to a coworker who was curious of my methods:
Him: These are high-end machines, how do you know it meets the system minimums?
Me: The systems were top of the line years ago, now they’re nothing.
Him: But how do you know the RAM’s fast enough?
Me: The number on my RAM is higher.
Him: Well then, it’s confirmed: The iron law of technology “higher numbers are better” says so, IBM’s tech support is full of shit.
Blu-Rage Vol. II
Contains cursing. A lot.
I wanted to give blu-ray another try after rage-quitting Netflix to see the 900 extra scenes or what have you that were part of the Watchmen Director’s Cut. Considering the hype, I was expected Zack Snyder to not only guide me through the infinite intricacies of the deleted scenes but to also give me an hand job which I think was added in Blu-Ray 1.2. Anyway, I tried a few pieces of software and found one I liked that was reasonably priced and purchased a physical copy of it which was $50 cheaper than the digital download. Maybe that was my first indication that the software was designed by Faulknerian Idiot Man-Children.
I removed the demo and installed the software and immediately got an error message: “0 Days of demo remaining”. Really? I understand you ignore the customer’s wishes when he or she clicks “uninstall” and your shitty software leaves turd smears on the rug so when I try to reinstall the demo I can’t because you’re so fucking smart. But to create a retail release that isn’t even smart enough to know I upgraded from the demo and assume I’m trying to steal your tard-ware? So, I removed everything, rebooted, ran CCleaner, and still got the same “we assume this copy is stolen as no one actually pays for Blu-ray software so we’re going to gimp your install, fucker” message I received previously.
So, I went through the registry and literally removed every registry key that contained the word “Corel”. It worked but proved a Pyrrhic victory as I found that not only did every mention of Corel go away, but every mention to something that contained Corel went away… So, every CoreLocation key which tells Windows where the program is broke. Great. But at least I can watch the blooper where get to see the side of Silk Spectre’s boobie!
Wanna use legit blu-ray software after using the demo (which is the entire fucking point of the demo)? All you have to do is nerf your registry to make sure that the secret juju that “protects” their software is gone. Go Corel!
Photo Coupon Recursion
I returned to CVS to pick up my passport photos and in the meantime I’d found a 2 dollar off coupon on my phone while in line. I hit the register and I informed the clerk I had a coupon and presented the barcode that was clearly visible on my phone screen to which he responded quizzically. He summoned his 20-something manager with spiked bleach-blonde hair and a sweet tribal tat on his arm who told him “scan it”. It scanned and the manager did his little “damn it worked” dance and then looked me in the eye saying
Him: We can’t take it, all our coupons have to be submitted to the manufacturer. We can’t submit your screen.
Me: But it’s a service coupon. The manufacturer is CVS, so you.
Him: We need a physical coupon.
I thought for a second and came up with a plan; I’d take a screen cap of the coupon, email the screen cap from my phone to the CVS automatic printing processor, wait a few minutes, collect my print, pay for it, and get a hard copy of the coupon on beautiful photopaper to save me $2.00 on my passport photos. Hazaa!
iPhone: $299, CVS express remote printing service: $1.70, delaying the whole line to save 30 cents through an egregious application of technology: priceless.
In TI We Trust
I was on my treadmill talking in Team Interrobang’s VoIP client when another member said they had a favor to ask of me. We move to another channel and he asks me to order him a pizza from a place down the street from him which is still 900 miles from as he lives in a college town in Kentucky. Apparently, his girlfriend took their mobile phone to work and with no landline I, walking on a treadmill 900 miles away, was the only impediment to him dying of starvation. So he gives me his order, address, and his credit card number. All goes swimmingly, the delightful accent of the sorostitute that answered the phone, the country/western hold music and the order itself, until she asks the following:
Pizza Shop Employee: Ok, so that’s one Baldie’s Special no olives. What’s the phone number for this order.
Me: I don’t know.
Pizza Shop Employee: Uh…
-Contemporaneously with yokel confusion-
My Brain: Fool! You’re using a phone give her that number!
Me: Yes. I just got a new Google voice number, I’ll use that.
My Brain: Now you’re thinking. Good thing you didn’t give her the number for the phone you’re currently using that you could respond to immediately, that would make sense.
Me: *gives Google voice number to which I only get messages as a mp3 in my inbox until I setup forwarding*
My Brain: You’re a genius!
I later found out that his orders can be practically delivered on foot and he probably could have ordered by opening his appartment window and yelling. I guess in his imaciated state he lacked the energy to do such. I was miffed until I realized something: I still have his credit card number, expiration date, and card verification code in a text file on my desktop that’s been recently renamed “Blitz_Blackmail.txt”.