State of My Life

It’s been a while since I posted, mainly because I’m taking community college courses (as I explained in my last post). So here’s an update on life, the universe, and everything:

College feels odd, but I’m doing fine in it–I should have the degree in time to find a job that’s actually decent.

Finding that last piece for my Jurassic Park costume is like trying to find a chicken with three heads. If you know of a place I can get a 2.5-inch Jurassic Park logo patch without paying $10 to get it flown here from Britain, I’m all ears.

I think I’ve worked out a formula for how quickly YouTube Poop videos drain your intelligence: {3 YTP’s:1 IQ point lost}.

Storm Chasers annoy me, mainly because when they flip on their amber flashing lights, they go all Rambo and fly past me on the highway at warp speed.

Dubstep still baffles me. When I first heard it, I thought my computer’s sound card had gone wonky. Then my friend informed me that it’s supposed to sound that way. Humph. The only use I can think of for dubstep is to scare my pet.

Obama’s State of the Union address didn’t have as much comedic value as Bush’s.

and finally, John de Lancie was confirmed to be attending the next BroNYcon. That man is genius, I tell you. He was amazing in Star Trek, amazing in Days of Our Lives, amazing in Invader ZIM, amazing in Assassin’s Creed, and he followed the trend by being amazing in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic as the voice of Discord.

That ends this minor update. In the future, I’ll follow up on some of these things, and develop them into their own blog posts. Until next time, stay frosty.

Bigfoot Strikes the Internet Again

I just spotted this advertisement on the interwebs:

I’m taking this to mean Animal Planet has officially run out of ideas for interesting new shows, so they’re just giving us… this. Let’s see how long before they air episodes of “compelling” new tooth fairy evidence.

The Maniacal Printer

I want to feed this thing to the Sarlacc.

I recently inherited an old Kyocera printer / scanner / fax combo thing to replace my crappy HP Deskjet. Don’t ask for the Kyocera’s full name, because it’s something like “FS-1118-9000-Mfp_47b” (I think they just make those up off the top of their heads). Its features include:

- Random beeping and flashing buttons

- A scanner that makes documents look like smeared watercolors

- Sudden and unexpected whirring and clunking noises, to scare the crap out of me (it sounds like it needs an exorcist)

- Confuses the heck out of Windows 7 when I plug it in

- Creates ambiguous error messages like “MP load tray error – check paper spool drive.”

- Uses ink that costs as much as pure unobtainium

I’ve tried everything to make it work better: I replaced the toner, cleaned the scanner’s glass, re-installed the drivers, played it calming classical music–but nothing worked. Come to think of it, though: it would make an excellent target for the shooting range.

The Leaf Truck People

I live in a community where, every autumn, municipal workers come ’round with a vacuum truck and suck up all the leaves that people were too lazy to properly bag. I (and indeed the community in general) call these workers the “leaf truck people.”

Unfortunately, I also live in a community where the municipal workers are all second cousins, smell of smoke and beer, and still manage schedules on their Commodore 64s.

I had a fascinating phone conversation with one of them about when on earth the leaf truck people would be doing their job. Here’s the bit I remember. I can’t remember the lass’s name, so I’ll just call her Mayella.

me: Hello

Mayella: Who’s this?!

me: I’m a resident of this city. I’m curious as to when the municipal workers will be here to vacuum up the excess leaves that I wasn’t able to get around to bagging.

Mayella: So what do you want?

me: I want you to tell me when the leaf truck people will be ’round to suck up my leaves.

Mayella: Well, it’s not going to be any time soon, because Bob is on a hunting trip with Billy and they’re the only two people with keys to the leaf truck.

me: You mean to tell me that in the entire city, there are only two people with keys to that truck?

Mayella: Well Jim has a set too, but he’s home sick.

me: I see. You wouldn’t by any chance know when “Bob” or the other one will be back from their trip, do you?

Mayella: Nope, I don’t reckon they said anything to me.

me: Ah. Well then, thanks for your help.

Mayella: Uh-huh.

The conversation ended thusly. That whole exchange pretty much sums up the way things happen (or indeed, don’t happen) in the small town I live in.

How To Stay Super Busy

If I ever feel like no one needs or wants me, all I have to do is go into the bathroom and “sit down.” Instantly, everyone needs me / wants me. The phone rings, the kitchen timer goes off, someone starts knocking on the door, and that “new chat” alert keeps dinging on my computer. For those ten or so minutes, I feel like the President of the United States.

I still haven’t figured out how the entire world knows when I’m in the bathroom, because that’s the only time they call. And text. And chat. And knock.

That Ignored Feature

By now, every human being in the solar system is familiar with the infamous:

The number you called is not available at this time. At the tone, please record your message. When you are finished recording, you may hang up or press “1″ for more options.

I’d like to know the last time someone actually pressed “1″ for more options. I can’t even fathom how many other (useful) options there could be. I mean, I’ve left my message. Done. Challenge completed. There’s nothing left to need.

A Visual Comparison

Web Design–You’re Doing It Wrong

One thing you can't get a good sense of in this screenshot is the incessant piano riff going on in the background.

This is what happens when a madman codes HTML in notepad. It looks like someone ate every text box on the internet and vomited it up onto a photo collage of randomness.

If you want to know how to do fantastic web design, just do the opposite of this.

The screenshot above is the home page of http://yvettesbridalformal.com.

Taylor Swift’s Kitten

Something that frequently amazes me is the kind of topics that appear on the “Popular Now” part of Bing. I can’t remember the last time I saw anything of any importance there, it’s always just music / movie stars’ names. Every once in a while, the herp gets derped in Libya and that’ll be on there. This time though, the meaninglessness has gone too far:

It's like one of those games where you find which one doesn't belong.

It really is amazing how much I don’t care about Taylor Swift’s kitten. I understand if you’re absolutely obsessed with her, you might do something like tweet about her kitten (after all, Twitter is the original medium she used to announce the acquisition of the feline).

But Bing isn’t like Twitter. On Twitter, you read large amounts of pointless garbage, and you go there will the full knowledge that garbage is what you will find. Bing is a search engine. For something to appear in Most Popular, people had to actually take the time to specifically search for that thing. I’m sorry, but there has to be something, anything, happening right now that is more important than Taylor Swift getting a cat.

Also, it’s almost insulting to see “Taylor Swift’s kitten” next to “Tappan Zee Bridge,” as if the former rivals the importance of the latter. In case you didn’t know, “Tappan Zee Bridge” is referring to the guy who dangled for hours from said bridge, just to make the point that Rockland County officials are corrupt. In my book, that counts as important. Taylor Swift’s kitten does not.

Hatsune Miku

After Justin Bieber, I thought humanity had run out of talent. Then this came along. What it is, is a voice synthesizer that (surprisingly) sounds realistic. “Fair enough” I thought. After all, it could be fun to play around with something that sounds like a singing female Microsoft Sam (which is what the majority of pop stars sound like, with all the auto-tune going around nowadays).

Here’s where the weird part comes in, though: the application’s anime mascot is actually a pop star herself, and has a loyal following in Japan. She performs concerts by appearing on a projector screen, and some smoke and mirrors are used to make her look like she’s actually real. Videos of her concerts are all over YouTube and have gone viral.

I guess humanity really has run out of talent, and so now we’re turning to computers to make our music. That’s right: unthinking computers have more talent than real people now.