Saturday, July 31, 2004

You know you're a geek when...

The company I work for develops software (among other things). A colleague was trying to dummy-down the description of one particular program when we began to goof around, describing it as the 'hall monitor' of the network:

Me: Where's your hall pass SMTP packet? Aren't you supposed to be in Spam Filtering class?

Colleague: But I have to TCP/IP!!

Best.Comeon.Ever

If I were to ask you for sex, would your answer be the same as the answer to this question?

Scoobie snacks!

So I have this idea for a money making machine...

When the federal government legalizes personal marijuana use (come on, you know it'll happen sooner or later), I'm going to buy up a bunch of ice cream trucks and convert them into mobile miniature convenience stores that roam the neighbourhoods after 10pm. The trucks will have huge "Mr. Munchie" signs and old mellow Floyd tunes will play over the loudspeaker to entice the stoners outside for their fix of snacks. We could sell pizza and other hot food too. Cool eh?! I think it could make a fortune.

People who like this band also like...

If you're into music as much as I am, you probably appreciate the Internet for its ability to introduce you to new genres of music and bands. I mean after all, we can't just depend on radio or Much Music to show us what's out there. For those of you who are looking for something new and just don't know where to look, have I got a site for you.

www.musicplasma.com Enter in the name of a band or artist you like and it will show you a graphical representation of other bands you might like too, colour coded by genre or musical style. It is one of the coolest sites I've come across in a long time.

Don't visit this site stoned...

Who comes up with this stuff?

Fave line Bart Simpson wrote on chalkboard for detention:

"I will not hang donuts on my person"

Fave Homer quote (this week):

"Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel."

Best.Innuendo.Lyric.Evar

"Stick out your can...here come the garbage man"

(sorry, it made me laugh)

Raidneg bteeewn the wrdos

I thought this was neat:

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, olny taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pcleas. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by ilstef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Self - aim at foot - fire at will!

One more reason why I have no sympathy for the Music Industry:

I listen to the music channels on Shaw Digital from time to time - some of their offerings are pretty good and you get to hear some music you surely would not hear on radio (at least not commercial radio). Once in a while, I hear something I like and want to know who / what it is, but wasn't paying attention to the TV screen when the name is displayed.

So I wrote an email to the people at Galaxie: "This is just a suggestion, but I often find it frustrating trying to figure out who I was listening to on your channels a few minutes ago. I can always check what's playing now, but not 10 minutes ago. It would be nice if we could view an official track list on a web site."

Here's the answer I got: "We cannot provide you with a playlist as Galaxie has an arrangement with the Music Industry not to provide such a list in order to discourage piracy."

(Later that day...at HMV)
Hi........ummm..........I heard this cool tune on digital cable earlier today, but I have no idea who it is or what it's called.............can you help me find it so I can buy it?

The king is dead...long live Mozilla

If you are disappointed with Internet Explorer, I urge you to give an alternative a try. I'm talking about Mozilla Firebird. I started out as a Netscape user, then I ended up switching to IE because more and more web pages were only working properly with IE. I found I had to deal with many unexplained crashes with IE and of course there were the always publicized security vulnerabilities.

A friend recommended Firebird and I gave it a try. I haven't looked back. It's lean, portable and has a number of nice features IE is only introducing in their next version, like built-in pop up blocking. My favourite feature though is tabbed browsing. No more multiple windows and no more having to resize the window. Firebird, like all Mozilla products, allows you to have many web pages open all in one browser window, with a tab for each across the top. I haven't run across many pages that don't work in Firebird (Windows Update being an obvious exception). Another cool feature - you can assign key words to your favourite web sites. The key words are simply extra properties saved in the bookmarks (equivalent of IE favourites).

Is it void of problems? No. But so far it's a lot easier to tame than IE. I still keep IE around for those special web sites that were written specifically for IE, but that's it. Give it a try. You have nothing to lose. You'll notice on the mozilla site that they also have a stand alone e-mail client called Thunderbird. And yes - I'm using that too...

When you feel like following the crowd...

If you've ever wondered what new web sites to visit but didn't know where to start, why not check out which sites are most popular right now? Check out www.popdex.com for a list of web sites in order of current popularity.

And so it begins...

Those of you that know me well will agree - I like to hear myself talk. OK, you can stop laughing. At least I'm being honest.

So what's up with this blog? I've decided that abes.arsonal.com was not the appropriate venue to share my thoughts with the world, so I figured a personal blog would be a good idea. I will still make contributions to the ABES alumni forum, but I'm going to take a few steps back from it and let it drift in whatever direction it wants to go.

White Noise? Yeah, that's my way of saying I'm going to share whatever is on my mind, stuff I think is interesting, etc. I hope you can take something from it.