Beer, coffee, and tablets

Last week, the fancy schmancy new Google Nexus 10 tablet was released. Usually I take a wait and see stance on new technology these days, but it received such glowing reviews, and I was in the immediate market for a tablet, so I ordered one. As of today, the online order status still gives an estimated shipping date of November 15th. I spoke with them Friday on the phone, and called them again today. This time I spoke to the quietest support rep I've ever dealt with. I had to crank the volume on my phone to "granny's hearing aid." Plus English was clearly not this mousy chap's first language.

Rep: What is the email address you used for your order, sir?

Me: afterglide at [the rest of it]... a-f-t-e-r-g-l-i-d-e

Rep: I'm sorry, sir, can you spell that more slowly.

Me: a... f... t... e... r... g... l... i... d... e at [the rest of it]

Rep: Ok, let me spell that back: a-f-t-e-r-g-l-o-d-e...

Me: No, g-l-*I*-d-e

Rep: Ok... [typing] I'm sorry, sir. I am having trouble finding your information. Let me make sure I have your email right. a-f-t-e-r-g-l-o--

Me: [interrupting] *I*. No 'o' in it. a-f-t-e-r-g-l-*I*-d-e at...

CES 2012 Preview: Life Alert for Heirs

While most of the buzz around the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas centers around the latest smart phones, touchscreen pads, and 3D televisions, a surprise entrant in this year's fray is Life Alert. Life Alert is most famous for its commercials featuring frail pensioners flailing about on the floor, woodenly wailing "Help! I've fallen, and I can't get up!" For nearly 25 years, the company's bread and butter has been selling products and services geared toward the health and safety of senior citizens. However, jumping into a market apparently spawned by the economic downturn of recent years, Life Alert will soon sell a service aimed toward children and grandchildren of the elderly teetering on the brink of poor health and mobility.

The equipment for the new service, dubbed Life Alert for Heirs, looks identical to the current incarnation, but the system does not contact an ambulance or fire department when the button on the pendant is pressed. Instead, it will play a message previously recorded by one of the ailing elder's heirs. In the promotional video shown to reporters this morning, a thin white-haired senior writhed on her kitchen floor in pain. In response to her button press, the system barked in the tinny, digitized voice of a husky sounding man. "Hello, Grandma. This is David. Sorry to do this, but this system won't contact emergency services until you agree to sign over your power of attorney and assets to me. To approve this, simply press your pendant button three times in a row. Per your contract with Life Alert, this will act as a legally binding electronic signature. Once this signal is received, emergency services will be contacted. Love you, Grandma!" Less expensive versions of the system will simply make passive note of the emergency request and send no help.

Patent application - male shocker device

Abstract of the Disclosure

The male shocker device is designed to provide the male equivalent of a sexual maneuver known colloquially as "the shocker." By definition of function, the original version of the shocker can only be delivered to a female or transgendered individual retaining ownership of a vagina. The shocker involves insertion of the little, or "pinky" finger into the rectum, retraction of the ring, or fourth finger, against the hand, insertion of the middle finger and index finger into the vagina, with the thumb being left free to stimulate the clitoris.

The male shocker device allows the equivalent maneuver to be performed on a male or transgendered individual retaining ownership of a penis. The male shocker (Fig. 32) involves insertion of the little, or "pinky" finger (323) into the rectum, wrapping the ring, middle, and index fingers (322) tightly around the shaft of the penis, with a partially straightened paper clip firmly attached to the thumb (321). While the pinky finger is moved around in the rectum, the ring, middle, and index fingers retain the grip on the shaft, moving up and down and/or squeezing the shaft as deemed desirable by the recipient. The straightened portion of the paper clip is inserted into the male's urethra, and the thumb is moved in a manner such that the paper clip is moved in and out of or simply moved around inside the penis. This double insertion spanning the taint, sack, and shaft, and the object poking around carelessly in the penis, replicates for the male the awful, mind-blowingly ham-fisted sexual technique that is the shocker.

Ware is Ang? Tired uv ur crap.

Taken with the camera and flash on my fancy schmancy new Palm Pre. Preeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! I am finally part of the touchscreen smartphone crowd. But I'm still not cool. Dang.

Fuck Funai

Normally this is my niche, getting burned by a company and lighting them up in an enraged blog post. Unfortunately, two factors have prevented me from posting anything about this debacle. First, I simply have not had the time to write a blog post to do it justice. Much of my time writing about it has gone into writing complaints to the company and requesting help from various media watchdogs. Second, I will openly admit that this experience has pushed me over the edge from seething anger to an uncharacteristic feeling of helplessness and defeat. With all of the other stresses going on in my life right now, I do not have the emotional energy to expend on this. Which is a shame, because I normally can burn holes through concrete with my rage. Ang, however, summed it all up far better than I currently can.

Harsh system responses to stupid users

Jeremy responds in a brief and humorous manner to a technology news headline because he doesn't have time to write a proper satirical response

Robot Does Breast Biopsy

The only problem is that the robot was a Roomba and no one asked it to perform one.

Rimjob! I mean rimshot!

Found code

Rediscovered Easter eggs hidden in my previously written code.

//Words to never capitalize
excludeWords = new Array();
excludeWords[excludeWords.length] = "an";
excludeWords[excludeWords.length] = "the";
excludeWords[excludeWords.length] = "at";
excludeWords[excludeWords.length] = "by";
excludeWords[excludeWords.length] = "for";
excludeWords[excludeWords.length] = "of";
excludeWords[excludeWords.length] = "in";
excludeWords[excludeWords.length] = "up";
excludeWords[excludeWords.length] = "on";
excludeWords[excludeWords.length] = "to";
excludeWords[excludeWords.length] = "and";
excludeWords[excludeWords.length] = "as";
excludeWords[excludeWords.length] = "but";
excludeWords[excludeWords.length] = "if";
excludeWords[excludeWords.length] = "or";
excludeWords[excludeWords.length] = "nor";
excludeWords[excludeWords.length] = "a";
excludeWords[excludeWords.length] = "cuddlemuffins";

Last remaining still camera manufacturer to cease production

For millions whose hobbies are rooted in yesteryear, it has most certainly been a tough few months. Polaroid will soon stop producing its once-synonymous instant film (and has thus far declined to license its patents). And recently QRS, the last maker of player piano rolls, announced they are abandoning the rolls to focus on more lucrative digital player piano technology. As if that wasn't enough, Canon has announced they will no longer produce still cameras of any kind. No digital, no film. Canon, Olympus, and the other camera makers, including those who manufacture camera parts used in mobile phones, have all moved on to 3D video capture technology. Canon also announced that its next generation of 3D video cameras will record a scene down to the molecular level, allowing scientists to remotely study inaccessible and inhospitable environments and for perverts to peek down a subject's underpants. What a marvelous time we live in.

Netflix movie streaming on Tivo

Eight winters ago, I bought a fancy little gadget called a DVD player to go with my new Dolby 5.1 surround sound system. I joined Netflix and took full advantage of the service by watching movies almost nightly. Then spring rolled around, and I had little desire to spend my evenings hold up in the house. When it got to the point that I didn't watch or return any movies for weeks on end, I canceled my membership.

Last night I decided to give Netflix another try after the latest service update for high definition Tivo models added Netflix instant streaming to my beloved DVR. I wanted to give it a try because while Amazon has offered a standard definition streaming pay-per-play rental system through Tivo for quite some time, Netflix offers high definition television shows and movies. Not only that, but Netflix's monthly membership fee includes unlimited streaming, even with their $8.99 tier.

I popped my streaming Netflix cherry with a viewing of National Treasure: Book of Secrets. Say what you will, but I thoroughly enjoyed the first admittedly ridiculous historical puzzle solving romp, despite its simultaneous oversimplification and overcomplication of our nation's history (did you know that Ben Franklin peed on a robotic possum from the future to discover electricity?). Its sequel, Book of Secrets pretty much delivered the same schlocky fun, and I was impressed with the picture quality, even if it wasn't one of the HD streams. Although I did test the HD pictureby watching a couple of scenes from a movie I'd seen before, Pan's Labyrinth, and it was comparable to watching the HD broadcast I had originally seen on HBO.

Ah, but if I'm writing this, there has to be a complaint in here somewhere, right? Yes and yes. First and foremost, the selection of movies available for streaming is shit. New releases? Forget about it. Think License to Drive starring the two Coreys (Messieurs Haim and Feldman) and Peggy Sue Got Married, the types of movies my mom would bring home on VHS from the rental store. If it's got Billy Crystal, Eddie Murphy, or Anthony Michael Hall in it, it is most assuredly available for streaming on Netflix. Oh sure, you've got classics like Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day, but half of this shit I haven't even heard of. At least some of them appear to be titty flicks designed for an underfunded chuckle and dry toss bought on an overdrawn line of credit. Malibu Spring Break, Bikini Squad, Pool Party, and Sizzle Beach, USA all sound like a good time when Ang is out of town, and my internet connection is down, cutting off easy access to videos of Asian girls ass fucking horses with table legs and jointless prosthetic legs. I'll just have to settle for having to burn myself with cigarettes so I can climax instead of someone else doing it.

My second complaint stems from what could very well be a fluke. Tonight we attempted to watch An Evening with Kevin Smith, and the stream kept skipping forward several seconds at a time, recaching, then jumping forward again without playing more than a couple of seconds of video. We finally gave up after several tries. Oh well, more time for cigarette burns for me!

NASA to sell "luxury" bottled water

After years of budget cuts and program cutbacks, NASA has decided to capitalize on its name by selling its own brand of high end bottled water. The new product line, called NASA Splash, will demand a high price due to its source and high tech distillation process, involving a $250 liquid recycling machine that will purify astronaut urine, sweat, and air moisture on the International Space Station. "We've determined there is a huge market for water made from astronaut pee," said NASA spokesman Hugh Cosetta. "We will also sell zero-calorie fruit-flavored waters and later plan to sell a line of fudge bars made from dehydrated astronaut poop and white chocolate. And by white chocolate, I mean ass peanuts." NASA Splash, with a suggested retail price of $450 per bottle, will go on sale in January, 2009. The currently unnamed fecal fudge has not yet been priced and is expected to be on the market late in the summer of 2009.

How not to recruit IT professionals

If you're an IT person, depending on the economy, you probably get the regular phone calls and emails from various headhunters looking for a payday by helping their clients fill open positions. Some of them send regular emails inviting you to various workshops and networking events, and some of them have the VP of their IT recruiting company send out this warm Thanksgiving greeting shouting a series of randomly capitalized, misspelled words in a nice size 157 point pumpkin pie-colored font. Because, after all, apparently one of the joys of a given holiday is expressing to someone that you wish that the particular holiday in question is happy. Just like one of the joys of tucking and rolling into a twice-baked potato is hoping that it somehow leads to a dashboard-painting orgasm after the apéritif. Oh, and as for why I'm protecting the guilty with a healthy blurring of the name and contact info, the Twin Cities IT community is surprisingly small and incestuous. Even if there are 50 other recruiters who are all after the same gig, there's always one guy who has a lead on a job no one else does. It would be just my luck to need a job and have to go through Johnny Pie Plate here.

Click the image for actual email size.

So to you, dear readers, I wish a yam-colored Happy thanks space Giving and a firm yank to the unexplorables.

Roomba by the tomatoes

Is that sanitary? Seen Wednesday in the kitchen at Khan's Mongolian Barbeque in Richfield.

Tech peek: new list type

Most folks with even a passing knowledge of HTML are familiar with how to create a list on a web page. There is the ordered list, sometimes referred to as an enumerated list, which automatically numbers the list items.

Ordered List HTML:
<ol>
 <li>Turd</li>
 <li>Log</li>
 <li>Steamer</li>
</ol>

Result:

1. Turd
2. Log
3. Steamer

Additionally there is the unordered list, which is simply a bullet point list. Just replace the <ol>...</ol> tags with <ul>...</ul>

I'm quite proud to say that I was a member of the consortium that created the latest version of HTML, which includes my creation, the unencumbered list (<uel>...</uel>):

PAUL-E

Has a lonely robot found a friend at long last?

A curious hole (in Google Street View)

In the process of looking for an address in the Highland Park area of St Paul, I noticed a curious gap in Google's Street View coverage of that part of St Paul. You'll notice that nearby suburbs like Sunfish Lake don't have much coverage either, but zoom out farther, and all of St Paul is pretty well covered from block to block except Highland Park and other areas near the Ford Plant. I find it rather strange that in one of the two major cities comprising the urban metro area has such a huge gap, particularly in one of the more prominent neighborhoods of St Paul.


Also, I found this totally pimp ride:

Shitty computer code angers me

Sometimes I run across code that former employees or contractors left behind years ago and realize why they are former employees or contractors. Sometimes I'm pissed off enough to leave a comment on their shit-brained logic in the software's source code for all those to follow (proprietary information blanked out).

"Alright, this friggin ------ vs ----- code crap is all over the place like a water weenie covered in baby oil. Screw this. I'm not spending another minute deciphering this Escher painting. I'm querying right up front whether or not this is a damn ----- or ----- and superceding the convoluted three-ring circus happening below. Signing off, Angry Jeremy is angry."

I later explained my solution in an email to my boss:

"...It's tiptoeing through the donkey crap with sandwich bags on your feet instead of cleaning up the crap, but your mom is buried in the crap and you might stab her with the shovel if you try to clean it. Worst analogy ever."

Google is disturbed by me

I was reviewing my google search referrals for today and noticed one for the phrase "jew and improved," which led someone to this post from a couple months back. I was curious where my link ranked, so I ran the search myself. Lo and behold, my site is the first link returned. But above the search results, was the curious assertion, "We're disturbed about these results as well."



For a moment, I was flattered. "Google thinks I'm offensive! Nee haw! I've finally made it, Conan!" Then I realized it was because the search had the word "Jew" in it. As Google explains in the link next to their message, "Jew" is frequently used in an anti-Semitic, Mel Gibson-ish fashion. It's hard to argue with that, but I find Google editorializing its search results a rather interesting move.

I was also curious if they showed a similar message for patently offensive, pejorative terms used to describe people of various races and religious backgrounds. You know the words I'm talking about, so I'm not going to reprint them here. Oddly enough, not a single one came back with a similar message. Maybe because people using those search terms already expect disturbing results?

Photos are fucked

You may have noticed that photos and other images aren't always displaying properly this afternoon. I host most of my images on Picasa, which appears to be having some major difficulties at the moment. I keep telling them to lick my balls, but I'm not getting a response. You get what you (don't) pay for.

FIXED! Stuff your cod with that, momma's boy!

NERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRDS!

I'm blogging to you live from the cf.Objective() conference at the Crowne Plaza in beautifully overcast downtown St Paul. There are a lot of nerds here. I keep searching the room for the hugest nerd, but I can't see -- oh, wait. OH. MY. GOD. Look at that dude! Ha ha! Oh, who dressed you, Sparky, your mom? Oh, Lordy I -- oh, that's a mirror. *cough*

UPDATE 9:47 AM: Well, the conference is off to an interesting (and hopefully not unfortunate) start. I didn't quite see what or who went down, but someone a couple of rows directly in front of me had a medical emergency during the keynote in the ballroom. They have cleared the room to give the ambulance crew room to work. Hope the person is OK.

UPDATE #2: Dude that collapsed during keynote evidently was OK. He walked out of the room on his own.