We went to dinner last night with Ellie and Gwen (Ellie's daughter). Ellie's husband Wade was using our 'net connection at home to teach an online seminar. Ellie, Gwen, and Lorien were waiting for me at the restaurant, and when I arrived I was sorely tempted to tell the hostess "I'm meeting my wives here for dinner" just to see what her reaction would be.
I resisted, but only barely.
Last week my boss had a problem with the docking port in his laptop. When I connected it to another docking station, we got the same results and quickly concluded that the problem was the laptop itself and not the docking station. So we called Dell and got a technician on the line. Now, unlike most times, I got a good tech right off, and he quickly realized I was a technical person and in under 3 minutes had concluded the same thing I had—a bad motherboard. He set us up with a replacement and a technician to come out and replace it. This all happened on Friday.
Today when he got in, his docking station wasn't working. Fearing that the station he has at home was somehow frying the port on the laptop's motherboard, I ran down to his office with the docking station I have to test it out. I saw all the cables unplugged, and thought he did that in anticipation of me bringing the other station down. Fortunately, that was not the case. We'd never reconnected the power to his docking station after testing it last week.
Today's tech support troubleshooting lesson: Even if it sounds stupid, ask if it's plugged in first.
I'm working on installing a copy of Intel's VTune performance analyzer on the current release version of Ubuntu. I fetched the kernel sources and was perusing the Makefile when I ran across the kernel name: Erotic Pickled Herring. WHAT YOU SAY!! (Gratuitous AYBABTU reference here)
Anyway, this lead me to a a list of Linux kernel names. Honestly, I have a hard time picking my favorite!
If I get over 500 iPhone crash logs generated in one year, at least some of them can be entertaining:
ate bad food, hehe.
Coworker 1: I think that's a ladder.
Coworker 2: Yeah.
Coworker 3: It's a kayak, I've never seen anyone put a rudder on a ladder.
FTW!
Sarah, one of my cow-orkers, pointed out a funny comment on a web forum:
The difference between this post and my previous one is that this guy doesn't pretend to be a journalist.
Today's pictures for sad children is funny.
Today's great T-Shirt is Shakespeare Hates Your Emo Poems.
Funny!
Last night, on a whim, I reviewed Peanut M&Ms on Costco's website. I have no idea if it will pass their "review filters" so here's a picture of my review:
I think the part about the weasels may be the reason it doesn't make it. But now I can't help wondering: do they have two M's on them, or just one? Only one way to find out!
Oh, and take this:
My mom passed an "Amish Friendship Bread" starter to me several days ago. I ended up cooking the "Amish Friendship Bread" yesterday.
I have some observations about the recipe. First off, I have a photocopied page of a computer-generated recipe. I've seen some pretty complicated, hand-crafted models of computer memory made of wood, but I'm pretty sure it didn't support clip art.
Nextly, the recipe absolutely forbids you to mix in a metal bowl. I can only assume this is because metal is the Devil's technology. I'm pretty sure His High Popeness' royal haberdasher himself may have, at one time, brushed up against my KitchenAid mixer though, so I think it's okay. I used it anyway.
The page also states that "only the Amish know how to create a starter." I happen to have an internet somewhere around here that says otherwise. The recipe calls for a box of instant vanilla pudding, so I suppose the Amish grind their own pudding mix from vanilla pudding tree roots or something.
My favorite part has to be the starter though. After ten days of "mashing" and adding milk, sugar, and flour, you get to split the starter off and hand it to your friends, the Amish equivalent of those annoying email chain letters you have to forward to ten people or something bad will happen to you. The funny thing is you add more ingredients to the starter, measure out several cups (each one for a friend), and then you use what's left for the bread. The starters you hand off are reset to day one. So you're making the "Amish Friendship Bread" with day one starter. Had I read the entire recipe through when I got it, I may have just cooked the thing right up, because it needs no time to ferment.
According to Wikipedia, the source of all truth and knowledge in the universe (cf. the article), there's nothing Amish about "Amish Friendship Bread." But the thing about the metal makes it sound kind of official. Official like that Bill Gates Email Tracking Software reward that you never got.
I laugh, hard, every time I listen to Woot's Oreo Cereal Recipe podcast. It's only three and a half minutes. I guarantee it might make you laugh. If you didn't like it, get off the Internet, we don't want you here.
Every weekday they podcast a new song about the day's sale item. They're nearly always funny.
Yesterday I had a brush with fame. I posted the picture of the Naturally Occurring Mr. T and tweeted it on Twitter over to Michael J. Nelson (of MST3K and RiffTrax fame), who almost immediated re-tweeted it.
This is what happened:
Woohoo!
I ran across this on Monday while in Seattle and just had to get a picture of it!
It's a yummy FAIL!