What kind of geek am I?

gakked from eastrd:

What Kind of Geek are You?
Name
DOB
Favourite Color
Your IQ is	frighteningly high
You are a	computer geek
Your strength is	you can understand and use slang
Your weakness is	electrons
You think normal people are	aliens
Normal people think that you are	satanic
This QuickKwiz by owlsamantha - Taken 189125 Times.

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scarily true

Warnings you never want to see on a food product

Seen on some hard candy Debbie bought me:

"Excess consumption may have a laxative effect."

Hmm ... I wonder what they mean by "excess"?

The Rape of my Childhood is Nearly Complete.

Thanks Warner Bros.! No ... really ... thanks for taking the rape of childhood one step closer to completion. A new, "hipper", Looney Tunes? While the article doesn't mention Marvin the Martian specifically, I can't help but think, with the series taking place in space, that he will be "updated" too. *sigh* No word yet though on if James Dobson is going to protest Bugs for promoting a less than wholesome lifestyle:

FINALLY!

After weeks of trials, tribulations, and mishaps, I finally got the office phone working. The mishap in question involved an exacto knife:

The trouble all started when I went to wire the phone and found this:The device in questions a 66B4-3 66 style punch block. Do a google search ... you won't find this item. After lots of searching I found out that each row constitutes 1 circuit. That means that any wire punched in the first row is connected to every other wire punched in the first row. So if you come to this page searching for 66B4-3, I hope that helps.
That brings me to the wiring of our house. The yellow box is the first floor phone line, the blue box is the den, the green box is the line in. The red box is what my neighbor helped me wire: the basement. Where is the second floor line? I have no idea. Those wires are running somewhere loose behind the walls of my house, but I don't know where. But, after a few weeks of work, the phone in my office now works. YEAH!!!

Pictures

More pictures can be found at http://www.chrispy.net/~brown/gallery. Enjoy!

A milestone

Twench's Guide to Protecting Yourself

How many Firefox users do we have out there? I am an avid Firefox user, but was a little troubled with a recent article on an exploit using Internationalized Domain names. The idea with this exploit is that you would be presented with an URL that looks legitmate. There's just one problem. That letter "a" is not actually the letter 'a', but a homologue (letters from different languages that look the same). So, what can you do about this? If you are a US based user, do the following to protect yourself from accidentally clicking a bogus website:

1. In the URL bar, type "about:config"
2. Scroll down until you see "network.enableIDN" (the list is sorted alphabetically)
   
3. Double click this so that it's value is modified to "false"

Voila! You are now no longer a potential identity theft victim due to phishing with a homolgue URL. What do you do if you use Internet Explorer? You switch to FireFox and re-read this post. :D

Its February ... do you know what that means?

Valentine's Day? Nope! Wrongo! February, apparently, is the official month for Daddy-daughter dances? (ASIDE: Now why would this catch my attention now instead of the 28 other Februaries I've experienced ... 29 if you count being a fetus) Driving to various places, I have noticed about 4 different townships all holding a Daddy-daughter dances on various weekends. Just a little observation.
And to all the ladies reading this ... Hello Ladies! ... when can one go to a Daddy-daughter dance? Is 3 months after her birth too early?

In Honor of the Super Bowl

Perusing some web sites, I came across this very interesting article. When watching the Super Bowl, you may notice a little yellow line that indicates the first down marker. I had figured this was not just a simple "draw a yellow line on the screen thing" because the marker moved with the camera and it never was drawn over a player. Well, this little article gives an overview of what is done to provide that line. The most interesting part? The company that developed this technology is based in Chicago and the entire concept was born out of a horrendous Fox notion to highlight a puck during hockey games!

As a hockey fan, I remember the blue puck on the Fox broadcasts and remember thinking it was the dumbest thing I ever saw. Of particular annoyance was that it would change color to red if it was hit hard enough. Hockey is not a game of watching the puck. If you just watch the puck, you miss a ton of action. You miss all the players setting up a pass or a one-timer. You never see the one guy sneaking past the defense for a one-on-one attempt ... Can you tell I miss hockey? Yes, I know, I'm one of 4 people in the entire US that actually misses hockey, but let's not get into that rant now.

Anyway, when you see that yellow first down line, just remember that you have hockey and a Chicago based company to thank.

One of these things is not like the other

Interesting quotes in this article. Hugh Hefner visits Disneyland. My favorite Hefner quote from the article:

"It is the connection to childhood. There are two 'Happiest Places on Earth': One is Disney, and the other is the Playboy Mansion."

Amen Hugh. Amen!

Question?

Is there a double secret probation in heaven?

I need the weekend!!!

Here it is ... Thursday ... and I am already desperate for the weekend. Work has taken a turn towards the suck this week. Fortunately, I am working from home today or I just might have lost my sanity. Here's been the suck part. For the past several months, I have been loaned out to another group to finish some work that my group will need in the future. My cube is by a window and has plenty of natural light. Everyday this week, I've had to work in the other groups area. The other group sits deep within the bowels of my company across the river Styx where the tortured souls screams for mercy are swallowed by the constant hum of machinery and natural light is a mere myth. In addition to working in an environment that would make the Inquisition seem downright cheery, I haven't been able to leave due to various issues until around 7. Those of you who have read whippetgirl's blog know that this means I get home AFTER Lauren has already gone to sleep for the night. NOTHING COULD SUCK WORSE THAN THIS!!!! Seeing Lauren's big gummy smile when I get home is one of the two highlights of my day. The other is waking up to Lauren's big gummy smile. Ugh!
As if this wasn't bad enough, the work I am doing currently requires active Assembly programming skills. For those of you who don't know, Assembly is a language that resides 1 step above actually writing the 1's and 0's to the processor. Instead of being able to write the following:

(*(volatile unsigned char *) LED_MEM_LOCATION) |= ALL_LEDS_ON

to turn on all the leds, I have to write the following:

andi r27, r27, 0
ori r27, r27, 0xFF
andi r26, r26, 0
oris r26, r26, UPPER_BYTES_OF_LED_MEM_LOCATION
sth r27, LOWER_BYTES_OF_LED_MEM_LOCATION(r26)

Ugh! See what I mean. If this were anymore hellish, I would have to bring 3 steaks everyday so I could get past Cerberus.