I ran across this today in search for an image on the nerds post below and found it amusing:

quinkyle: Hay hay… if you don’t mind me asking, how much did you spend on your engagement ring?

trumwill: Mine was a family heirloom, so $0

quinkyle: Well poo to you

quinkyle: haha

trumwill: … so you… uhhh… looking for an engagement ring?

quinkyle: indeed

trumwill: Outstanding!

quinkyle: Makes me cry every time I look at prices, tho

trumwill: The “norm” is supposed to be two months salary, though I don’t know how many people actually do that

quinkyle: Nah, I’m going sub $1k

trumwill: Hmmm… if you invest that money in a mask and gun you may be able to turn a profit off this aquisition.

-{later}-

trumwill: I assume Lizzie hasn’t said anyting about what kind of ring she would prefer?

quinkyle: Yeah, she’s given hints, but I change the subject quickly. I want to surprise her

trumwill: Hehehe… I did the same thing. I remember at a coffeehouse once she was working the conversation as best she could into her letting me know that she was ready to get married. I changed the subject so fast that she must have thought that I was utterly oblivious, mad at her, having doubts, or the biggest jerk in the world.

quinkyle: haha, I’m a bastard insofar as that’s kinda what I want her to think

quinkyle: but not really… but really

quinkyle: you know what I mean =P

trumwill: Yeah

trumwill: Hey, if she comes home to an empty apartment with all of your stuff gone, that’d *really* fool her.

Reuters has an article on “cyber-bullies” of a particular sort:

“Girls might send [a topless picture] to their boyfriend and she is pressured to do it thinking he’s just going to see it. So she gives in and the next thing you know it’s all over (the place).”

The images are even more likely to be passed on if the couple breaks up, said Mishna who headed a research team that held focus groups with 47 students in grades 5-12.

An interesting article, but I have two problems with it.

First:

Preliminary results from the research show so-called computer geeks are becoming the new schoolyard bullies.

As a so-called “computer geek” I’m sayin’ I don’t think we’re to blame. For better and worse, he advances in technology have made it so that you don’t have to be a computer geek in order to do the things described in the article.

Second:

Students also thought it was pointless to tell parents about cyber bullies because they could not identify the culprits.

If it’s a case of a bitter exboyfriend (or reckless current-boyfriend) letting the picture get out, there’s no anonymity protecting the primary culprit. If we’re talking about online boyfriends that the reluctant strippers don’t know the real name of… well I could only suggest that you don’t do such a thing for a guy whose real name you don’t know.

trumwill: I’ve been getting error messages the last day or two where I’m sending files and the “specified folder” suddenly becomes “unavailable”… boy do I hate moving files in Windows.

quinkyle: Is this with your Egyptian copy of Windows?

trumwill: No, with the plain jane version. On the Egyptian copy, though, I do have this message popping up in Arabic every time I boot up my computer and I have no idea what it means. I need to know what “die infidel” is in Arabic and make sure that’s not on the message anywhere.

The screensavers on all my computers are slideshows. The slideshow that I’ve traditionally used has been a bunch of 3D-generated landscape images. But for my last job I decided to grab a bunch of wallpapers for favorite TV shows, anime, comic books, pictures I’ve taken, and childhood pictures of me. Then, at some point, I downloaded a bunch of anime wallpapers and that’s my third option.

The anime wallpapers are on one of my laptops. Some are from serials that I’ve seen, which is cool because it’s familiar, and some are not, which is cool because I learn about different serials that way. Some, however, are actually somewhat elicit. I’m not sure if there are any that out-and-out show nudity, but they’re generally inappropriate.

For the record, I’ve never been particularly into anime erotica.

At some point I’ll go through all 3000 images and knock out the inappropriate ones, probably before my parents next visit.

In the meantime, periodically Clancy will clear her throat and look at my monitor, and I’ve sorta put myself in the same situation that my best friend and I talked about putting his stepfather in.

Is it me or has the record industry been more successful than usual at shutting down song-lyric sites?

In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve been having some unanticipated technical difficulties here at Hit Coffee. The main page is apparently back up, though you can’t access the individual posts, so commenting is out. Though I am apparently able to post right now, regular posting will resume once you can talk back (though I must confess I’ve been feeling a temptation to write a bunch of controversial things since no one can contradict me!).

A special thanks goes out to my webmaster Sam, who has been working hard on getting things back up and running. It has been greatly, greatly appreciated.

I’m not a kool-aid drinker of the concept of Open Source. I don’t think something is inherently superior if it’s open source. Cheaper, for sure, but not necessarily better. I use Firefox, OpenOffice, and GIMP, but not Linux (yet). I appreciate the fact that open source gives me options, but I’ll only use it if it makes my life easier or more better.

Wikipedia is the information equivalent of open source software. It’s the encylopedia that anyone can edit (within certain parameters) rather than experts being assigned in their field (or however it is that regular encyclopedias do it). A 2005 report discovered that Wikipedia is not markedly less accurate than the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

Even so, when I first discovered Wikipedia I was pretty unimpressed. Basic things like grammar and structure were amateurish at best and the content was frequently biased. You couldn’t use it in a debate because for all you know the person that wrote it was smoking pot rather than doing his homework.

But then I discovered that it wasn’t that Wikipedia was useless, it was that I found the right use for it.

Wkipedia’s critics miss out on its true value: It offers information, or at least a starting point, to areas of interest where no encyclopedia would even think to go. Whether you’re interested in the comic book character Blue Beetle, the anime Ranma 1/2, the Ferengi race from Star Trek, or the political structure in the imaginary world of The West Wing, Wikipedia will give you information that no one else will.

Not all of it will be correct, but the more obscure the interest the more likely it was written by an anal retentive fanatic and the more likely it actually is correct. People think they know a lot more about America’s Founding >Fathers than they actually do. I doubt anyone thinks they know more about the Ambush Bug than they actually do.

It’s helped me a number of ways. When I’ve needed to keep track of characters in the West Wing, for instance, it helped straighten me out. When I wanted to know who Adam Cray in DC Comics was, it gave me the scoop. When I needed to figure out the order of the various Patlabor serials, it gave me the information that I could not find anywhere else after literally spending hours trying to find it.

So yeah, don’t use it if you have something else handy. But next time you wonder where information on a subject might possibly exist, it’s invaluable.

A few weeks ago one of my Pocket PCs had a headphone jack that went on the spritz. So I sent it off to a company to have it “fixed.”

What I sent: A working Pocket PC with a stylus with intermittent headphone jack usage. And $80.

What I got back: A working Pocket PC without a stylus and a headphone jack that doesn’t work at all.

I literally would have been better off just burning the $80. At least then I would have a stylus and intermittently working headphone jack.

I talked to them and they swear that there was no stylus on the unit that I sent, but were apologetic about the whole not-fixing-what-I-paid-them-to-fix-and-in-fact-make-it-worse thing. However, they acted like I should be grateful that it was under warranty. We’ll see how that goes.

—

Apparently, when Windows 2000 said that there was a problem with my harddrive and asked if I wanted to fix it, it meant that there was not a problem with my hard drive and was asking if I wanted to change that.

Before it “fixed” the drive, there were no problems with it. After it “fixed” it, 3/4 of my directories are inaccessible.

Just over a month ago I lectured to Ethan the virtue of keeping all of your data on a separate hard drive (or better yet, a separate computer):

I came by this one the hard way, but I have breathed easier ever since. If nothing else, you can disconnect the second hard-drive if you’re about to do anything potentially hazardous. I’ve twice had partition formatting expand beyond the scope of the partition I had assigned.

Of course, having your data on a separate drive doesn’t do nearly as much good if you leave it plugged in when you reinstall Windows. So it did something to my data drive right after installing Windows 2000. Unfortunately, I was letting it do its thing so I couldn’t stop it in time, but it said that it was fixing it.

Luckily it wasn’t an actual storage drive. I mostly used it as a dumping ground for when I rip and encode video for my Pocket PC. Unfortunately I have been a little lax in getting the actual DIVX files off the drive and some stuff was lost.

Trying to comment over at Bobvis, I learned Blogger’s commenting server is apparently blocked by my employer’s web filter under the category of “sex”. So I can read comments (since those are on Blogger’s regular server), but alas, I have been silenced. I can’t access www2.blogger.com.

A pox on the house of those that talk about sex in Blogger comment sections.