Author: Nate

Ok. Call me a grognard if you like…

…but this seems to take the fun out of it for me. They’re trying to get rid of “monopoly money” in the UK edition of the game:

In-game advertising comes to Monopoly

7/25/2006 11:39:06 AM, by Nate Anderson

In an effort to remain relevant, venerable board game Monopoly has been given an electronic European makeover. Capitalist robber barons in the UK will now have the option of making a cashless fortune thanks to a new version of the game that features an electronic card from Visa instead of paper money.

The new card, which resembles a debit card, is inserted into a small plastic reader/writer that can display and update the balance on the card. Traditional money is gone altogether, though purists can still purchase the original version. Visa’s partnership with Parker Bros. seems designed to bolster the belief that using paper money is baffling and insecure.

Grab Bag update.

First, saw Clerks 2 tonight. Best movie… ev… well, not quite, but certainly best comedy in quite a while and a truly fitting finale to the New Jersey saga.

Second, file under unclassifiable 100 Reasons Why I Hate My Husband; sad, but very funny.

Lastly, via RASSF, on MSNBC we get: Outer-space sex carries complications

Experts say new devices and data would be needed to hit the zero-G-spot

LAS VEGAS – Having sex in the weightlessness of outer space is the stuff of urban legends and romantic fantasy — but experts say that there would be definite downsides as well.

etc… it mentions briefly sex during Zero-G flights (such as on the “Vomit Comet”) – which has been done in an adult movie, Private’s The Uranus Experiment

And that’s all for today.

Colors to do personality profiling?

I ran into this a while ago, but I think it was before I was blogging. I was recently reminded by a friend of it, and thought it worth a mention.

There is an explanation at the overlying site, but the fun part is to simply go to the Colorgenics profiler itself and give it a shot.

My results for the curious:

You are always alert and keenly observant. You are not truly satisfied with your everyday status and you are seeking fresh avenues which can give you the opportunity to prove your worth. You feel that there are still many barriers that stand between you and recognition – but one by one you will overcome them. Your tenacity is your one good point – like an English Bulldog, once you take the bite, you will seldom let go.

Always anxious to accept the role of the leader, as indeed you often work well with people – but try to stay out of the limelight. You’d like a life of ease with no one to rock the boat and someone who understands you is so important in your life.

Being a very proud individual, you tend to hold yourself aloof pretending that you are stoical – indifferent to pain and pleasure. This is not so, for in truth you are an extremely emotional individual, one that may make a hasty decision and perhaps regret it at leisure. It is time now to break the bond of detachment and be the ‘you’ that you would like to be – give vent to your emotions and enjoy yourself.

You are being unduly influenced by the situation that is all around you. You do not like the feeling of loneliness and whatever it is that seems to separate you from others. You know that life can be wonderful and you are anxious to experience life in all its aspects, to live it to the full. You therefore resent any restriction or limitations that are being imposed on you and you insist on going it alone.

You are anxious about all the limitations to which you are subjected to at this time. You feel that you are not valued for what or who you are. You need OUT. So why procrastinate any longer – MOVE!

Hanover Keystone Kops

A tale from my Alma Mater, via DBA:
De-Sanitizing the Police Blotter

The police did not determine her error through close and careful questioning of the jogger, which would have established that she was observing 4 Valley Road, whereas she lived farther down Valley Road at another number. The police did not determine her error by noticing the absence of evidence supporting the hypothesis that this was a burglary in progress — there was no getaway car, no damage to windows or doors and no suspicious activity occurring within the house. The police did not determine her error through the application of inductive knowledge which would indicate the unlikelihood that a burglary would be in progress on a Sunday morning in a small, college town in rural New Hampshire. The police did not even establish her error by a combination of these factors. The police “quickly established” her error by laying an unannounced, intimidatory siege to our house, accompanied by screams telling me to come to the door with my hands up. They then proceeded to draw a gun on me that was menacingly pointed at my chest as I stood there in cargo shorts, t-shirt and bare feet! After further screaming and questioning, the police finally realized their mistake — 10 minutes later the officer who pulled the gun came over and apologized.

An interesting night…

  • First, I discover this afternoon that my server has rebooted on an older Kernel and the SATA drives aren’t being recognized. No wonder it’s going so slow; the RAID is running in degraded mode (not inherently slower for RAID0/mirroring, but in practice it’s going to mean that the system does everything much more carefully wrt flushing buffers and stuff.) So I had to rebuild that tonight; the Linux mdadm tool made that surprisingly easy.
  • Second, the phone line has gone tonight. No DSL, no nuttin’ – I host my own server, so I can post this now, but who knows when y’all are going to get to see it. And I think I’m going into some minor case of internet-access withdrawal (no dialup backup, since the voice phone is down too, but at least I have my PDA thing… slow though it is at home.)

30 Things You’d Never Think to Ask (Another silly blogmeme…)

This one from Gareth’s LJ (it’s long, sorry):

30 Things You’d Never Think to Ask

1. Have you ever been searched by the cops?
Nope, nor ever arrested. Stopped in traffic a few times, usually for something boneheaded whether I got a ticket or not.

2. Do you close your eyes on roller coaster?
Usually. I’ve got a touch of acrophobia, though the sensations are fun either way.

3. When’s the last time you’ve been sledding?
I’m not sure I’ve ever been sledding. Not even using cafeteria trays, while in college.

4. Would you rather sleep with someone else, or alone?
Depends on with whom, but in general with the right company I’d rather not sleep alone.

5. Do you believe in ghosts?
Nope. Nor souls, nor reincarnation, nor any other sort of life after death.

6. Do you consider yourself creative?
No, and it frustrates me to no end since I’d very strongly LIKE to be.

7. Do you think O.J. killed his wife?
I have no idea, and thanks to the folks who put him on trial screwing up so badly, there’s no way anyone but OJ will ever know for sure.

8. Jennifer Aniston or Angelina Jolie
Jennifer Aniston by default; I find Angelina Jolie to be one of the least sexy famous women this side of Tipper Gore. (As an aside, this same question came up in Russ Lieberman’s recent Interview in GQ –

Okay. Real quick: Jennifer or Angelina?

Jennifer? Jennifer who?

Oh, come on, Senator! Jennifer or Angelina?
Jennifer who?

Aniston. [silence] Oh, God. You don’t read the tabloids, do you?
Can I have a third choice? Can I pick Sharon Stone?

…and my own thought was “put as just Jennifer or Angelina I wouldn’t have gotten the question either.” Sharon Stone would not be my pick over Jennifer Aniston, personally but then my tastes run more to Kate Winslet or Roselyn Sanchez.

Much more after the break…
Continue reading “30 Things You’d Never Think to Ask (Another silly blogmeme…)”

So I downloaded the Vista beta/preview…

…and tried it out on my laptop, using a spare hard drive. It installed easily, but recognized relatively little of my hardware. The performance was very poor, despite a decent system; part of that may have been the video, which despite a terribly common video card (Radeon Mobility 7500) was not recognized and was running using the standard VGA driver (VESA, probably). Neither was the internal NIC, despite being a truly ubiquitous 3Com chip (3c920, compatible with the 3c905). The XP driver for the video card would not install; fortunately the NIC driver did.

I am highly undecided on the new UI elements, a lot of which seemed too great a departure from existing Windows UI – I mean, if I have to learn something entirely new, I’m going to just bite the bullet and start using Linux full time and just boot to Windows for video games, and it’s bordering on that big of a change. We’ll see how it looks in final release.

Futurama coming back?

If stories are true, WOO-HOO… via RASFW, we find that the best Sci-Fi TV Series since Babylon 5 is coming back…

BACK TO THE ‘FUTURAMA’

ANOTHER ‘TOON RESURRECTED

By DON KAPLAN

June 22, 2006 — ‘FUTURAMA” is officially back from the dead.
The quirky animated show from “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening was canceled by Fox about two years ago, but will return with at least 13 new episodes on Comedy Central by 2008.

This is only the second time in television history that a show sent to TV’s trash heap has been resurrected. Curiously, the first was “Family Guy,” also an animated Fox show.

The tale of “Futurama’s” dramatic revival roughly follows that same path that “Family Guy” did.

In both cases, the shows have been successfully airing on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim late-night programming block. They both also turned into hot-selling DVD box sets.

“Family Guy” returned to Fox earlier this year, while last fall, Comedy Central outbid Adult Swim for the license to air all 52 episodes of “Futurama” and whatever new episodes might one day be produced.

This week, deals were inked to secure all of the original voice talent and the production staff of “Futurama,” paving the way for the series’ return to TV.

Woof! Woof!

Too cute not to pass on, from the Washington Post, via RASSF:
A Bite and Bark That Saved a Life

Cellphone Chomp Called 911 for Beagle’s Owner

By Leef Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 19, 2006; Page B01

Belle Weaver is flying into the nation’s capital today to receive an award for saving a family member’s life. Before she leaves town, she’ll meet with her congressman, accept a certificate autographed by a football great and bow her head to receive a medal.

Stories such as hers, of heroism and quick thinking, are always inspiring. But this one has a twist, and not just because Belle is 3 years old.

You see, Belle Weaver is a beagle. She used her owner’s cellphone to call 911.

Her owner, Kevin Weaver, 34, was in the throes of a diabetic seizure, lying unconscious on his kitchen floor in Ocoee, Fla., when Belle located his phone and chomped down on the keypad, triggering a call.

I biked to work, once. (so far?)

Have you ever seen the film “Johnny Dangerously”? Not a tremendous film, but a funny one… and the villain in it has this schtick where if someone does something that angers him he says, “You better not [whatever] me, [whoever]! My [family member] [whatever]ed me! …once!”

Right now my back/legs/lungs are telling me “You better not ride to work again, Nate! You rode to the old Kana! …once!” The scary part is I feel about equally beat up now after ~3.5-4 miles (home in Foster City to Guidewire) as I did then after ~10 miles (home in Mountain view to the old Kana building on Woodside in Redwood city.

And therein, I suppose, lies the difference in being 25 and being 30. F–k. I will definitely have to work up to this before doing it again, but I really really am going to try to do it again and repeat until it’s relatively routine.