Internet Lesson #802.11:
People are much more interested in your webcam if you have mammaries.
That’s okay, I should put the camcorder away and get a real (cheap) webcam that won’t give me a heart attack if it falls off my desk.
Thanks to Technicon’s White Elephant auction, I’ve read nearly the whole Christopher Stasheff “Warlock” series in the space of a week and a half. Good books… “what if a bunch of SCAdians founded a colony world, forgot their technological origins, then developed enough psi to have some magicians lying around?”… but one really shouldn’t read 7 of the same author’s books in a row. It tends to dull the effect a bit, as I leaned a few months back when I read all the Frank Herbert “Dune” books at once. A bit of advice – don’t do that either.
Things to do with technology
Cool, an expensive Sony FireWire camcorder, and right now it’s sitting here playing webcam. I finally got that to work!!
Let me know if you want to play voyeur, and see an office so deep in books and papers that the government considered hiding the Ark of the Covenant here, knowing it would never be found again. I’ll pass along the link. Sometime I’ll be live, and sometimes not :p
Left the geeks alone in the lab again, huh?
Looks like some folks are doing early warp dynamics studies on the upgraded Constitution-class vessels…
You can check out the results at the University of Queensland’s Laser Diagnostics site.
Geek Moment!
So, I’m playing the 3D cyberpunk video game “Deus Ex” yesterday… I find a note that an engineer has left for his superior, alerting him that the new root password for the local computer system is “reindeerflotilla.”
I sit there and think, “That sounds so familiar… why is that familiar to me?”
Turns out it’s the internal level 6 password to the Emcon mainframe that Jeff Bridges uses in the movie “Tron.”
Why does my brain only store this stuff? Why can’t I remember anything useful?
Wow, the Internet really is vast and complex!
My Internet access is working again.
Yesterday: “It’s your Ethernet card.” “I have four machines here with cards from three different manufacturers. None of them are working. I don’t think it’s the card.” “Uh, okay, you don’t have your Windows Network control panel properly configured for TCP/IP.” “This is a local intranet consisting of two Windows machines, one Mac, and a BSD Unix box. What do you think I’m configured for, carrier pigeon?” “Uh, okay, your modem’s bad. We’ll send a guy over with a new one tomorrow.” “Fine.”
Today: “Hello, we aren’t going to send you a modem yet, the tech support person you talked to has been screwing up a lot lately. What’s the hardware address on your modem?” “Blah-blah-blah-blah-4C.” “Okay, that the problem, we have it here as blah-blah-blah-blah-4L.” “What? How can you have an L in a hexadecimal number?” “… Just reboot the modem and try again.”
So I’ve got access… and about 300 unread messages. 🙂
A quick comment on meiran‘s cosplay postings: I am still trying to find the picture I had from an old VTSFFC Halloween. It’s myself as Tuxedo Mask surrounded by the Katsucon 1 Sailor Senshi from Blacksburg. The anime freak where I work doesn’t believe me when I tell him I did that, though it’s funny watching him trying to decide whether I’m 1) lame for being in a Sailor Moon costume group, or 2) way cool for being in the company of five women in skirts that short.Interestingly, when you search the web for Sailor Moon cosplayers, you find a lot of men playing the senshi. A quote from one male Sailor Moon: “I get a lot of female attention. Apparently chicks dig the bows.”
Pre-lunchtime thoughts
The Macintosh SE gathering dust in my office is currently worth about $15 bucks on the open market. It was a $3700 system when it came out (thank Ghu I didn’t pay that.)
To prove my geek credentials, I got the Tron 20th Anniversary DVD a couple weeks ago. If that movie had nothing else (and many would say that it did have nothing else), it had great visuals that drew you in when the ‘story’ and ‘acting’ couldn’t. The art director for the film makes an interesting comment on the DVD, claiming “If we’d had the technology then to produce the realistic effects we can now, I’m not sure that the visual style would have been as memorable.”
Sometimes artistic beauty springs from limitations.
I’m also amused that the Light Cycle contest, a sequence took weeks of pre-rendering at the time, can now be rendered on the fly as a playable game by any competent desktop computer.
Ahhh… the technology curve.
The Vulcan databases have no such record…
Woohoo! I’m in the top 15 members of the SETI @ VTSFFC project!
If I’m the first to find E.T., I’ll introduce him to all of you. 🙂
I am going to rant now.
A friend of mine has a website she updates once a week. I have been visiting and enjoying this site for two years, chatted with her about it on Yahoo! Messenger, and corresponded with her by e-mail, We’ve exchanged pictures of spouses and (in her case) child, and get along pretty well. But she has other things to do besides learn HTML, so she has a friend build her site with updates she passes along.
And now I can’t get in her site. Why? Because her webmaster has fallen in love with the nonstandard JavaScript tricks available to Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.
I use a Macintosh. I don’t apologize for that, I love it. It’s not perfect, I can point out some of the issues involved long before any Windows user can, but it’s a solid machine that I can get all my work done on. Just about the only thing I haven’t been able to do with my Mac is play “Half-Life”, and even that’s been ported to the PlayStation 2 now.
So I write politely to the webmaster, pointing out that the latest IE I can access is 5.1, and suggesting that he might want to design a more flexible site. Heck, with JavaScript you can ask the browser who it is and reconfigure on the fly.
What do I hear back? “Can’t be bothered. Your machine sucks. Why don’t you buy a PC?”
I gently point out that there are still plenty of users out there who don’t use Windows. Heck, some of the Windows users I know won’t install IE 6 ’cause (I’m told) it’s a buggy, bloated piece of work that rewrites half your system when you install it. Does he want to block every one of those users from his sites?
Response? “Don’t care. Buy a PC so you can look at my site. If Macs were so great, they could handle IE 6 JavaScript.”
At this point, I realized, I was talking to a brick wall. I’m not bothering to respond by telling him that I can, if I want, run a more cutting edge version of MS Office than he can and get great framerate in Quake III at the same time. But I have to miss out on a friend’s website because he’s some l33t idiot who figures, “The hell with standards; it’s from Redmond, so it’s perfection and the wave of the future!”
I’m done now. I wish to point out here that in no part of this rant have I been rude about the general capabilities of PCs as hardware, or of Windows as an operating system.
I’m back, and I brought links!
After 6 years, I have finally updated my website. Now Rain no longer needs to be mad at me that she’s not even mentioned, but my last cat was.
The web site is:http://elfie.org/~mikail/
Please take a look, and if you find any dead links, or stuff that doesn’t work, let me know. I write my HTML by hand in a text editor (“In six feet of snow! Uphill! BOTH WAYS!!”) so sometimes weird things occur. I know a couple of links (to “In progress” pages) are dead ’cause I haven’t put anything there yet.
I apologize for being behind on comments to people’s postings – well, this is why. The sad thing is, I’m already looking at the site design and thinking about ways I’d change it if I was starting over…
New iMacs are up
Pictures leaked courtesy of Time Magazine.
Should be easy to recognize these puppies on TV or magazine photos!
