This is for Rain
The “quote of the day” I just got from logging into elfie:
Fog Lamps, n.: Excessively (often obnoxiously) bright lamps mounted on the fronts of automobiles; used on dry, clear nights to indicate that the
driver’s brain is in a fog. See also “Idiot Lights”.
Today’s Dumb Thing To Say:
Radio Announcer 1: The crows are huge around here!
Radio Announcer 2: They’re like chickens!
Radio Announcer 1: Yeah, well I’d like to see a crow lay an egg!
Today’s Dumb Thing To Do:
After tracing a cryptic 911 call, police found a woman naked, bound, and gagged in the back of a car. When untied, the woman asked, “What are you guys doing here?” Apparently this was a bit of kinky role-playing, and the boyfriend thought it would add spice to actually call the police. The VHF amplifier had no comment. (No, sorry, I made that last sentence up.)
This Morning’s Good Thing:
Despite attempts by a Blacksburg landlord to claim that the hosting computer for elfie.org is actually an international terrorist, elfie is back on-line, and I am once again in e-mail contact with the world. Also, LiveJournal seems to be working again, and I will be very careful with my posting client until I can verify that it’s not the one flooding the network.
Last Night’s Bad Thing:
I spent late last evening and most of overnight blackly depressed. I’ve come out the other side now, but memo to myself: Don’t watch ER when you are feeling that way.
Tonight’s Possibly Good, Possibly Bad Thing:
SheVaCon starts tonight.
Tomorrow Night’s Good Thing:
raininva‘s 3000 point, house rules, massive MechWarrior:DA slugfest.
Recent exchanges in nius‘ LiveJournal got me thinking… healerkou recently told her mom that “Geeks don’t have sex.” This isn’t really true – it is the popular stereotype, and it may be true that geeks find sex less readily available, but that’s changing. And, like so much else at the beginning of the 21st century, we can connect it right to that dang Internet.
Short history of the geek-sex evolution of the Internet:
1) Government-sponsored geeks build a network to talk about nuclear explosions. 2) Those geeks, while talking about nuclear reactions, digress into astronomy.
3) Those geeks, while talking about astronomy, digress into Star Trek.
4) Those geeks, while talking about Star Trek, digress into things they’d like to do with the half-naked aliens on the show.
5) … which leads to Internet porn archives.
6) … which leads to the discovery that the geeks can make money selling porn site subscriptions to non-geeks.
7) … which leads to horny geeks meeting each other on porn sites and *doing* something about it.
Of course, this wouldn’t work were it not for the fact that intelligent women everywhere are discovering this subculture in which they can make as much money as the males, and simply by agreeing to roll a few d20s once a week, they can have intelligent men with paying jobs lined up at their doors.
It’s a rosy future, with hope for us all… assuming the non-geeks don’t catch on that we are finally having sex without them, and blow up the planet in spite.
The Matrix Has You
From the useless-but-cool department…
You can now watch your movie files in ASCII in the Terminal application of MacOS 10.2!
Here’s some shots from a certain video – each image links to a larger version:
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| Space Rogues logo | Brion (Me) |
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| Extra (ypawtows) and Kat (snidegrrl) |
So I don’t bore everyone: if you want to know how to do this, leave a comment and I’ll reply.
dahdahdahdahdah – JunkYard Geeks!
Tonight on TLC Online, our challenge is for mikailborg of the TechnoFetish team. His job – to build a working analog-to-digital video converter from things he finds in his apartment – before the end of the afternoon!
He’ll have an easy time with the digital end – he’s already got a FireWire-equipped computer made for digital desktop video. But, how do things look for conversion?
He’s got a Sony digital camcorder that he’s wired in there! It’s got an analog adapter cable with RCA jacks at the far end, and it plugs right into that computer of his, so conversion is okay. But here’s the rough part – he’s got to find a way to deliver that analog signal, and his wife probably wouldn’t be amused if he borrowed the living room VCR. So what will our challenger do?
Look at that! He’s blowing the dust off a 15-year-old Sharp VCR he pulled from his bottom shelf! I can’t believe that thing still plays tapes – it hasn’t even been plugged into the wall in over 4 years!
He’s got it all hooked together… now he’s changing the arrangement of plugs in his FireWire ports – and it’s working! Image quality isn’t the best, but then most of his originals weren’t that good to begin with! It’s working!!
Thank you for joining us for this edition of Junkyard Geeks. For the benefit of lekythen, subbes, and rubinpdf, this episode will be re-broadcast next month on BBC Online as part of “Scrapheap Geeks”. Join us tomorrow as Richard O’Brien hosts an episode of Sony’s Virtual Crystal MazeQuest Online (subscription fee required).
mikailborg‘s still going to have to return the camcorder, though.
Wonder if my old SE is eligible?
Talk about long-lived hardware… here’s a link to a honest picture of a 1989 Macintosh SE/30 (16MHz, 1 Meg RAM) running Apple’s 21st century OS X operating system on a 9-inch black & white screen!
… okay, so it’s actually an iMac motherboard jammed into an old SE/30 case and hooked to its monitor by some crazy Japanese person. Still kinda cool… like when we were going to hook an LCD screen and battery pack to Ed Philibin’s otherwise self-contained Amiga and make a bulky Amiga “laptop”.
Such a Deal!
Just found this in our paper while doing a spell check:
“IBM PS-1 Desktop Computer. Works Good. $250”
Line forms to the left, folks 🙂
Sigh.
If I shave with an electric razor, the skin under my jaw stays rough and stubbly, and becomes raw and irritated as well, to the point where I can’t wear a high-collared shirt without going insane.
If I shave with a blade, I get a reasonably smooth surface under there, but one covered with tiny drops of blood where the skin there is apparently just uneven enough to take a dozen tiny nicks every time. I can wear collared shirts, but they better be dark if I don’t want the stains to show.
I despise shaving.
Borgus Reviews of Literature
Finally caught up on my reading this weeked… finished re-reading “The Barsoom Project”, read “Idoru” and “Snow Crash”, and checked out some half-remembered passages in “1984”.
“Barsoom Project” is one of my favorite books – it’s set at a Disneyish corporation that runs incredibly realistic Live-Action Role Playing games in a pair of titanic Star Trek-style holodecks. (Paid for by the movie they’ll edit out of the footage, the home game cassettes, and the novels and tie-ins.) It’s three stories at once – you want to find out how the LARP will work out, who commited the act of industrial espionage that drove one of the last group of players insane, and what the game controllers will do when that player inexplicably pops up again in this run-through of the LARP.
“Idoru” is the sixth William Gibson book I’ve read, and the third in a row that I just didn’t like. In “Difference Engine”, “Virtual Light”, and “Idoru”, he writes of helpless characters who mostly stand around open-mouthed as the book happens around them. It’s kind of dull, and uninteresting… you finish the book thinking, “what was that about, and why would I care?” It’s a darn shame, ’cause “Neuromancer” was so good.
“Snow Crash”, on the other hand, more than made up for that. Excellent humor, interesting characters who matter greatly to the plot, intelligent writing, and intriguing speculation about the fragmentation of human language. I just told a friend that the story “begins with a guy who delivers pizza for the Mafia, and ends with a futuristic Ted Turner’s attempts to enslave the population of the world”. If this is the quality of the author’s work, then I am absolutely picking up “Cryptonomicon” as my friends have been advising me.
Finally, after looking at the portions of “1984” where George Orwell (as Emmanuel Goldstein) describes the method by which the Party came to power and maintains it, I have arrived at the uneasy conclusion that the world is still traveling smoothly in that direction, just a lot of years behind schedule. However, I can’t think of a dang thing I can do about it, so I’m not going to stay up nights worrying about it.
Oh yeah, and I finally beat a sub-boss in the fifth act of Diablo 2 that has been giving me serious trouble on “Nightmare” difficulty. So that’s good.
