Quotulatiousness

September 10, 2009

I guess they can update RFC1149 now

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

I guess that this story means they’ll have to update the old RFC 1149: Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on avia:

Broadband promised to unite the world with super-fast data delivery — but in South Africa it seems the web is still no faster than a humble pigeon.

A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country’s biggest web firm, Telkom.

Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles — in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.

Telkom said it was not responsible for the firm’s slow internet speeds.

September 4, 2009

Yesterday, the wine. Today, it’s the candy label.

Filed under: Britain, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

After yesterday’s indecent-in-Alabama wine label, today’s outrage is a German candy wrapper that has raised someone’s ire in Britain. Here’s the Telegraph report:

Obscene_candy_wrapper

Simon Simpkins, a father of two, said he was shocked at the “pornographic” poses when he bought the sour candy for his children Benjamin and Ofelia.

Mr Simpkins, of Pontefract, West Yorks, told The Sun: “The lemon and lime are locked in what appears to be a carnal encounter.

“The lime, who I assume to be the gentleman in this coupling, has a particularly lurid expression on his face. I demanded to see the shop manager and, during a heated exchange, my wife became quite distressed and had to sit down in the car park.”

H/T to Christian T. for the link. Roger Henry quickly commented:

I can understand why his wife became distressed and had to sit down in the car-park. Probably overcome with hysterics after watching her husband make an absolute public prat of himself.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

September 3, 2009

That’d better be a really, really good concert

Filed under: Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

Colby Cosh reposts a very odd craigslist posting (well, I’m assuming that it’s not representative of typical craigslist postings . . .)

September 1, 2009

The suffering . . . the suffering

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:10

Dark Water Muse has a terrible weekend:

Offline nobody can hear you scream

Like, Oh My God! WTF!? You so totally won’t believe what I’m going to tell you.

I lost my 5mbs DSL home internet connection sometime after 14:43 and before 15:00 on Friday August 28, 2009.

Now, it’s 19:29 Monday August 31, 2009. Still nothing. I’ve had a high speed DSL connection since the mid-90’s. I was among Bell Sympatico’s earliest subscribers. I shouldn’t be exposed to this kind of thing now. It’s unnatural. It’s the 21st century.

I’ve been forced to endure this for over three days. Can you imagine?

The horror.

The inhumanity.

The uncertainty of where to rest my thumbs if not on the space bar.

I only just managed to survive throughout the weekend. I ate fresh grubs and tender bamboo shoots until my fourth floor apartment condo neighbors caught me and forced me back into my apartment by whacking me with a broomstick. So, at least part of my weekend was normal.

August 30, 2009

Always remember to RTFM . . . or else

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 18:59

Life is too short for man pages, but occasionally much too short without them

If you’re not already reading xkcd, why the hell not?

August 27, 2009

Now it’s Star Trek‘s turn

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 15:59

John Scalzi returns to the well of nerd bile (see last week’s geek-disturbing here), this time he’s aiming at Star Trek:

Me: Star Wars design is so bad that people have to come up with elaborate and contrived rationales to explain it.

Star Wars Fanboy: YOU ARE SO VERY WRONG AND I WILL SHOW YOU WHY WITH THESE ELABORATE AND CONTRIVED RATIONALES.

It’s a little much to hope for (or fear) the same result two weeks in a row, but nevertheless I promised everyone I’d point and laugh at Star Trek design, so here we go. I’ll confine myself to things in the movies. There are eleven of those, so it’s not like this will be a problem.

V’Ger
In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a Voyager space probe gets sucked into a black hole and survives (GAAAAH), and is discovered by denizens of a machine planet who think the logical thing to do is to take a bus-size machine with the processing power of a couple of Speak and Spells and upgrade it to a spaceship the size of small moon, wrap that in an energy field the size of a solar system, and then send it merrily on its way. This is like you assisting a brain-damaged raccoon trapped on a suburban traffic island by giving him Ecuador.

August 25, 2009

Now I have seen everything

Filed under: Humour, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 22:00

Visited the local outlet mall north of Zelienople today. In one of the stores was this fascinating wine:

PennsylvaniaBurgundy

Yep. It’s a Pennsylvania “Burgundy” — made of hybrid grapes — in a “Bordeux” style (the image doesn’t quite let me determine if Bordeaux was actually misspelled, but I thought it was).

For the vast majority of you who are not wine snobs, “Burgundy” is a reserved term for wine made exclusively with the Pinot Noir grape, and grown, pressed, and vinified in the French region of Bourgogne (aka Burgundy in English). “Bordeaux” is also a reserved term for wines grown in the region around the city of Bordeaux in southwestern France, using a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Petit Verdot, and/or Malbec grapes. None of these grapes are considered “hybrid”.

I didn’t dare taste it.

August 19, 2009

QotD: The annual Beloit College Mindset List

Filed under: Education, History, Humour, Quotations — Nicholas @ 12:12

If the entering college class of 2013 had been more alert back in 1991 when most of them were born, they would now be experiencing a severe case of déjà vu. The headlines that year railed about government interventions, bailouts, bad loans, unemployment and greater regulation of the finance industry. The Tonight Show changed hosts for the first time in decades, and the nation asked “was Iraq worth a war?”

Beloit College, 2009-08-18

ONN reports on President Obama’s Bipolar Disorder

Filed under: Humour — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:43


White House Reveals Obama Is Bipolar, Has Entered Depressive Phase

August 17, 2009

QotD: The perils of being a retail customer

Filed under: Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:38

Of course, it’s entirely possible I was simply bored. Numbingly bored after meetings with financial planners over the preceding two days and being forced to repeatedly use the, impossibly awkward to enunciate, word arithmetic to correct suggestions from across the table that mathematics was in some way directly relevant to my cash flow model questions which arise when considering any investment model strategy. Then again, maybe I just wanted to be recklessly adolescent in that rather staid, middle aged, considered manner one does when one throws their Infinity VISA card at the clerk who a moment ago was convinced you were invisible and who then has to dispel his anxiety over whether or not you are going to hit him up for spare change or a smoke, maybe with an offer to squeegee his cash register monitor or, in exchange for a 10% discount, offer to blow him over there behind the flat panel 1080p display.

Such moments, me the cash — them the goods, remind me why I hate being a consumer. “Hey, Buddy! It’s money. My money. Take it. Take it!” You’d think, by now, Sony would know that the only reasonable outcome to expect from hanging a crisp white shirt and Windsor knot tied tie on a monkey is only slightly better than, well, a perhaps well dressed monkey dressed well. “Buddy! Wake up. Can’t you stop grinding that organ for one second?” But, even dressed up, it’s just a monkey which can’t seem to speak intelligently to confirm information and facts I’ve already fully digested from online product reviews and support documents. “Can’t we skip a beat to do things a little different this time? How about you agree to take your hand off your organ long enough to take my money. That’s it, Buddy. A little closer, now. Sorry?” What’s my monkey up to now? “Of course I don’t want to buy an extended monkey warranty. Do I look totally bananas to you?” I’m more certain than ever before the monkeys were different when I was young. “Hey! Don’t lick my credit card. Stop that.” Stupid monkey. “And I expect you to wash it before handing it back to me.”

Dark Water Muse, “The Stupid Monkey (or ‘Why it sucks to be a consumer’)”, Dark Water Musings, 2009-08-09

August 12, 2009

Even more “rejected from the App Store” tales

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:26

Lore Sjoberg joins all the other sad-sack would-be iPhone/iPod Touch developers, having had all of his application rejected by those capricious Apple gatekeepers:

I, myself, have submitted several applications to the iPhone Developer Program, and have been rejected every time. I think if you look over my list of apps and the supposed reasons for their rejection, you’ll see that Apple’s decisions are pure whimsy, drawn up from the whimsy mines deep beneath the company’s headquarters in sunny Cupertino, California.

Low-Fat Chicken Breast Recipe Book
Apparently, Apple can’t even handle the word breast, because it rejected this app, which is nothing more than a guide to cooking healthful, delicious, boneless, skinless chicken breasts. Each recipe comes with detailed instructions and a helpful video showing the dish being prepared by a naked porn star.

[. . .]

Steal Me!
This handy app uses motion detection to determine when your iPhone has been set down for three minutes or more, at which point it begins to yells a recorded message: “Steal me! Just grab me and run! You can get a hundred bucks or so, easy! Spend it on drugs! Anyone who buys an iPhone has too much money anyway! Go for it!” I have no idea why Apple rejected this app, but I suspect the company is working on its own version and didn’t want the competition.

August 4, 2009

Libertarian paradise

Filed under: Africa, Humour, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:25

Just in case you think that anarchy is great, here’s visual evidence to back up your theories:

August 1, 2009

Tweet of the day: Casablanca, musically speaking

Filed under: Humour — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:05

“In Casablanca, the Marseillaise does eventually drown out Die Wacht am Rhein. But one does notice how well they go together…” Colby Cosh

July 28, 2009

Did James Lileks like The Watchmen?

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:23

One quote from a fascinating take-down:

. . . it’s a sign of the movie that leaving in the giant squid would have made it less ridiculous.

Haven’t seen the movie myself, although Victor said he liked it.

July 26, 2009

QotD: Over-eager fans

Filed under: Books, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:14

Whoever asked “What’s next?” Note that I just finished the book on Tuesday.

There are people who inquire brightly of new mothers, as they are being wheeled out of the delivery room, “So, when are you going to have another?” These people would deservedly be in want of their kneecaps, if only the mothers could get up.

Lois McMaster Bujold, posting to the Bujold mailing list, 2009-07-26

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