Amusing

Birthday Boy

Posted on by Patrick

Birth­day Boy
Dis­cov­ered in Patrick Johan­neson’s Flickr photostream. 

Just me, wear­ing my new T‑shirt.

My bro-in-law exposed his sons to the Orig­i­nal Tril­o­gy, and ever since then they’ve been deeply into the Star Wars phenomenon.

I actu­al­ly was at their place when they watched Star Wars (you know, A New Hope). I was away the next day, when they watched The Empire Strikes Back. At sup­per that night, the old­est boy (he’s six) was agi­tat­ing to watch Return of the Jedi, so that he could see how it all played out. But it was late, so my sis­ter made him wait till the next day. He was grump­ing about it a lit­tle bit, so I told him, “I had to wait three years to find out what happened.”

“Why?” he said.

“Because that’s how long it took for the next movie to come out.”

He looked at me with a lit­tle smile, and said, “Boy, I’m glad I was born in 2000.”

Yeah.

Frightening

Posted on by Patrick

I have GMail. I use GMail a lot. GMail has some built-in spam fil­ters. It’s rare, in fact, that an email makes it to my inbox offer­ing to enhance or expand my body parts, or give me 10% of the Crown Prince of Nige­ri­a’s mon­ey trans­fers, or any­thing of the like.

Every once in a while, I go into the spam fold­er to clean it out.

One thing about GMail is that it scans my mail for key­words, and presents rel­a­tive­ly unob­tru­sive links on the pages based on what it finds. Things I might be inter­est­ed in.

I’ve noticed that the links in my spam fold­er are down­right scary. Not that it’s ads for Herbal V1@gr@, no. Some­how it’s worse:

French Fry Spam Casse­role — Bake 30–40 minutes
Savory Spam Cres­cents — Bake 12–15 min­utes or until gold­en brown
Spam Con­fet­ti Pas­ta — Prepa­ra­tion time 30 minutes

With­out a word of a lie, those are the last three links that I’ve had. I feel like I have my very own ver­sion of James Lileks’ Gallery of Regret­table Foods.

“Truth” in advertising

Posted on by Patrick

Last night I saw an ad for Eragon, which ran a bit like this:

“The crit­ics are in agree­ment! [praise for Eragon]! [praise for Eragon]! Now playing!”

I could­n’t help but notice that they had all of two quotes prais­ing the film, so I decid­ed I’d do my own research. I went to that clear­ing­house of crit­i­cal opin­ion, rottentomatoes.com. Regard­ing Eragon: The film had a 12% rat­ing. (Hmmm. Overnight it’s climbed to 13%.) This means that 13% of the crit­ics weigh­ing in on the film had a high opin­ion of the movie, and 87%, well, didn’t.

The crit­ics are in agree­ment, but I don’t think that’s the kind of mes­sage that puts but­tocks in the­atre seats.

You may address me as “Your Worship” from here on out…

Posted on by Patrick

…since, thanks to Doug, I now know that my Pecu­liar Aris­to­crat­ic Name is Bish­op Lord Patrick the Gluti­nous: of Heffton St Mal­let. Note that’s “Gluti­nous”, like “Pills­bury Dough-boy”, as opposed to “Glut­to­nous”, as in “Hen­ry VIII”. Not sure that it’s real­ly any bet­ter, mind you, just dif­fer­ent.

End com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

Flickrblogging — 9684

Posted on by Patrick

IMG_9684
Dis­cov­ered in car­olyn­hack’s Flickr photostream. 

Ladies, Gen­tle­men, I present to you the cov­er art for my newest how-to guide, “Mak­ing a Cyborg on $6 a day”. This one is an illus­tra­tion from the “Opti­cal ‘Enhance­ment’ ” sec­tion. You’ll note the quote marks around the word “Enhance­ment”; my lawyers, God bless their black lit­tle souls, sug­gest­ed that, in the inter­est of avoid­ing law­suits, I use lit­tle so-called “irony quotes” around cer­tain terms.

Please note also that there is a sub­stan­tial adden­dum to the book, and that the major update to the “Opti­cal ‘Enhance­ment’ ” sec­tion points out that, due to the $6 nature of the “Infrared” Eye “Aug­men­ta­tion” “Device”, you can’t actu­al­ly set fires with your new-found “heat” vision. Or per­haps that should be “vision”.

* * *

Ran­dom Flick­r­blog­ging Explained
Tech­no­rati: flick­r­blog­ging

Amusing comments

Posted on by Patrick

I like find­ing that peo­ple who write code have a sense of humour:

This lets you spec­i­fy which char­ac­ters are per­mit­ted with­in your URLs. When some­one tries to sub­mit a URL with dis­al­lowed char­ac­ters they will get a warn­ing message.

As a secu­ri­ty mea­sure you are STRONGLY encour­aged to restrict URLs to as few char­ac­ters as pos­si­ble. By default only these are allowed: a‑z 0–9~%.:_-

Leave blank to allow all char­ac­ters — but only if you are insane. 

Well, it made me laugh.

You learn something new every day

Posted on by Patrick

So we have this lit­tle time-waster com­put­er game that is a bit like Bog­gle, in that you have to cre­ate words from a clus­tered bunch of let­ters. I was play­ing it, and in a des­per­a­tion move I spelled the word ZARF.

And it took it.

Hmmm, says I. So I end­ed the game and went to that great agglom­er­a­tion of knowl­edge, the internet.

What­taya­know, it is a word, and what’s more, I’ve used one and nev­er known what it’s called.