I was bouncing around over at Fark, and stumbled across a fun alternate take on the Star Wars mythology that I’d never seen before. Kinda cool theory, I think.
Michael Hanscom
Quotebook updates
Well, when I nuked a fair amount of my site, one of the things I managed to kill was the random quote generator that displays a randomly selected quote underneath the quotebook link in the contents bar and on the quotebook introduction page. So, I’m working on going through my quotebook and re-creating the list of quotes for the generator to pull from, and as I do so, I’m adding hyperlinks where appropriate to the attributions. In so doing, I believe Royce may end up with more links to his site from mine alone than from the rest of the ‘net in totality. Never let it be said I never do a friend a favor — no matter how completely goofball it may be.
Kate and Leopold
Candice and I went out to see Kate and Leopold this weekend. End result from both of us — cute flick. Probably a matinee or renter rather than an evening show, but definitely fun to watch.
AARRGGHH!!
I lost my blog!
I had some problems with my webserver earlier this weekend, which necessitated having to reinstall the system. When I copied the essential files for my website off the box, I forgot one crucial little directory — and managed to completely bork up my blog software. Dammit.
I think I’ve still got all the essential information at the moment, it’ll just be a bit of a chore to see if I can get it all put back in. I don’t have any way of fooling the software into believing that all these files are actually part of the current install, so I may need to do a lot of hand work to get the old posts back in. But — if I can’t do it — well, it looks like I’m just starting over.
Lord of the OS
Recently one of my friends, a computer wizard, paid me a visit. As we were talking I mentioned that I had recently installed Windows XP on my PC. I told him how happy I was with this operating system and showed him the Windows XP CD. To my surprise he threw it into my microwave oven and turned it on. Instantly I got very upset, because the CD had become precious to me, but he said, “Do not worry, it is unharmed.”
After a few minutes he took the CD out, gave it to me and said, “Take a close look at it.” To my surprise the CD was quite cold to hold and it seemed to be heavier than before. At first I could not see anything, but on the inner edge of the central hole I saw an inscription, an inscription finer than anything I had ever seen before. The inscription shone piercingly bright, and yet remote, as if out of a great depth:
12413AEB2ED4FA5E6F7D78E78BEDE820945
092OF923A40EElOE5IOCC98D444AA08E324“I cannot understand the fiery letters,” I said in a timid voice.
“No, but I can,” he said. “The letters are Hex, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Microsoft, which I shall not utter here. But in common English this is what it says: ‘One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them, One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.’
“It is only two lines from a verse long known in System lore:”
Three OS’s from corporate kings in their towers of glass,
Seven from valley lords where orchards used to grow,
Nine from dotcoms doomed to die,
One from the Dark Lord Gates on his dark throne
In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie.
One OS to rule them all, one OS to find them,
One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them,
In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie.
— Source unknown
Free association, job possibilities, and haiku
Hrm. Sorry ’bout the lack of updates recently, but things have been a bit busy. Not the kind of busy that would really be worth writing about, either, which is the bummer. If I’d been kidnapped by alien space pirates and forced to endure hours upon hours of back to back Hardy Boys television episodes overdubbed in Tagalog in a devious attempt to brainwash me and force me to assassinate Sonny Bono (a difficult prospect, considering I’d have to resurrect him first) with nothing but a Ronco Turnip Twaddler, three jars of Neutella hazelnut spread, and a 5-inch length of dental floss — that would be worth writing about.
Unfortunately, life just isn’t that interesting.
Instead, it’s been pretty much the same old day-to-day existence that makes up the majority of anyone’s life. Get up, go to work, come home. Repeat ad naseum.
There may be some interesting options on the job front, however — who knows if this will actually pan out, but if it does, it could be fairly cool. Yesterday word came down that Jenne, one of the people in the Report Production department, was being transferred up to take over the position of a departing Executive Assistant. I’ve inquired about applying to take that position, and have gotten support from the rest of the Report Production people that I work with every day, so as soon as Lee (my Anderson supervisor) has the job posting written up, she’ll pass it on to me so I can formally start the application process. If all goes well (crossing my fingers), I could in theory be hired on into that position and become an actual Andersen employee, rather than my current temp status with three levels of beauracracy to deal with. I’m hoping this can actually happen — it’d finally get me out of copying and into something more office- and computer-related…and the accompanying hike in the payscale would be nice, too!
Other than that…well, there just isn’t a whole lot other than that. I’m kind of killing time right now — my main production machine went down, and I’m waiting on a service call to Xerox to go through so I can get things running again. Until that happens, I’m kind of dead in the water, so it seemed like a good time to finally babble here for a bit. Fun, huh?
Oh, here’s something I was wondering about — are there any decent specifics of what kind of casualties we’ve got in this whole ‘War on Terrorism’ thing right now? From what I remember hearing, so far we’ve been told of one sodier killed by enemy forces, a couple friendly-fire incidents, and then today’s reports of a KC-130 that went down with seven soldiers aboard. We may be taking Al-Quaida soldiers out (either through killing or capturing them) right and left, but have we really been doing a better job of killing our own personel than the enemy has? Kinda makes me wonder. If there’s any better or more accurate info out there, please feel free to share it with me (oh, and as one disclaimer, I’ve yet to really start researching any of that, it’s all just off the top of my head — so if I’m way off base here, feel free to correct me there, too).
And to close for now, an amusing little haiku I found in the comments to a post on Fark:
Nipples; ninja: both
Are difficult to capture
Without an ambush.
Rick sent me this quote
Video games don’t affect kids. If Pac Man had affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in darkened rooms munching magic pills and listening to repetitive, electronic music.
— T-shirt
The new album from M.C. Escher, ‘Please Escher Don’t Hurt ‘Em,’ featuring the hit single, ‘You Can’t Draw This!’
Okay, I’m kind of frightened — as I was making my paper deliveries, the girls up in HR (Can I say ‘girls?’ It’s probably not politically correct, but at only 28, it seems kind of funny to call people within a few years of my age either direction ‘ladies’ or ‘women.’ Not that they’re not ‘ladies,’ I’m sure…it just seems a bit too formal. But I digress….) were listening to MC Hammer‘s 2 Legit 2 Quit. Kinda scary. Kinda funny (especially since all four of them still remembered all the movements…but then, so do I…), but kinda scary. Weird stuff.
Hmm…if I didn’t babble so much, the title of this post would probably be longer than the post itself. Score one for being talkative!
Twitch
This is how my friends drink coffee.
Now that’s a big gun
Maglev technology, basically a big railgun, powering craft from the ground into space. Does my little sci-fi geek heart proud.