Month: July 2011

To Las Vegas, and Beyond!

[picture the Las Vegas sign here. WordPress for iPhone hates me]

Edit: Found a computer lounge and hijacked a laptop to insert the image

You know what they say about what happens in Las Vegas, right? Thats right, it stays in Vegas.

As of this morning at 6:00 AM, Im off to Fabulous Las Vegas for a work-related conference. When I come back, Ill transition right away into vacation time until August 2nd.

Im not exactly sure what I will do for the next 21 days, but I will try my best to stay away from the Internet, Twitter, Facebook, Email, Flickr and all other plugged-in things*. Im willing to bet Ill have a lot to tell you when I come back.

Until then, there will be a lot less activity on this blog. It was either that, or a series of Batman / Joker strips.

Youre welcome.

See you on August 2nd!

* Of course, the odds of me being able to completely go off the grid are next to none. But well see how it goes.

My senior moment

Well that’s it. I’m old.

Yesterday I had some trouble with my main computer at work (W7 SP1 wouldn’t install), so while I was troubleshooting this issue I thought I would use my laptop to work. No point in just sitting and watching the progress bar go up on an install, right?

So I logged into my laptop, and sure enough Windows Update tells me that there’s 2,974,997 urgent updates available. I figured I could just hit “Yes, update the whole thing” and go to an early lunch.

Well, long story short, some emails came in and I didn’t immediately leave, so I was there when my laptop rebooted itself and stopped at the login screen. I typed my password and hit enter.

Wrong password.

Well, that happens sometimes, you know me and my enormous sausage fingers, I’ve been known to mistype passwords and other stuff. You should see what this post looked like before I removed all the typos. Well, most of them.

Anyways.

I retype my password, making sure I’m extra careful.

Wrong password.

WTH? Again, this time slower.

I said wrong password, dumbass!

Wow, Windows 7 is really personalized. Not to worry, I do have this amazing password safe where I store all my precious information. A quick peak in there tells me that I was using the right password. Now I’m really confused. Let me try that password again, this time hitting the keys one by one. Enter.

W-R-O-N-G   A-G-A-I-N   B-O-Z-O-!-!-E-L-E-V-E-N-!

Ok, what exactly can be wrong here. Maybe the keyboard is in a different language. Nope. Maybe I just forgot that I use a slight variation of the password. I do have 10-12 password schema that I repeat over and over again… Let’s try the other possibilities.

Wrong password.
Wrong password.
Wrong password.
Wrong password.
Wrong password.
Wrong password.
Wrong password.
Wrong password.

Then on the 27th try, the system started to “think”, and I thought I had finally figured out–

Haha! Wrong password! Made you thought you had it, huh?

Windows 7 is a dick. Well screw that. As if I need a password to get into a Windows machine. There’s a plethora of password crackers out there, I think I even have one on a USB stick.

Yes, every geek that respects him/herself has a password cracker on hand. Look it up, it’s in the geek book. Page 42.

Oh sh*t, it’s for Windows XP. No worries, I’m sure the Internet can help me find one that’ll suit my needs. Because at this point, it looks like a complete re-install if I can’t figure a way to get in the system.

So while Googling for this, I found the actual Microsoft help page if you ever lose your password. I tried their methods without success (I’m skipping all the details here, because it’s boring!), and ended up downloading a “password resetting tool”, which didn’t work either. Then another.

Damn. I admit that I cursed myself for not being one of those people with passwords on post-it notes under their keyboards, or simply using “12345”, “trustno1” or “password”.

So I re-installed everything from scratch. To be more accurate, I’m re-installing everything from scratch. I wonder why I always forget what a pain in the ass re-installing a whole system, and how long it really takes. Because it’s never the Windows installation that kills you. It’s all the vendor specific drivers and utilities you have to get – and by the way, it’s awesome to not be able to use the network before you install a driver found only on the Internet, I wonder what people with only one computer do in this situation – all the other programs you have to install and setup properly.

And the password recovery emergency CD. I didn’t skip that step this time.

Riddle me this

As  I recently discussed, I’m not one that looks at traffic, visitors and blog statistics that much.

But this morning, looking for some kind of inspiration to blog about – there’s only so much you may be interested to hear about my fantastic espresso machine or the excellent bagel I had for breakfast – I opened my WordPress dashboard and something caught my eye.

Web Ninja is cool, but takes a while to display.

I’m almost okay with the fact that my most viewed post is just a graphic that I borrowed from Threadless tees (Somebody put it on “StumbleUpon”). It’s been years now, and I can’t fight it. I’m actually thinking about putting ads on that specific post. 🙂

More than anything on this panel, it’s the “Top Searches” that trouble me the most. I keep reading these posts by other bloggers with all the funny things people Google to get to their blogs, and I hoped I could eventually do the same. What do you think? Of all the searches that bring people to this blog, the top two searches are:

“throat anatomy” and “anatomy of the throat”

Seriously?

Of course, I had to Google “throat anatomy” and “anatomy of the throat” to see where  my blog ranks when those terms are searched. My blog doesn’t appear in the first 8 pages of the Google results, for either of those terms.

So, if you’re one of the many people that get here after Googling something about throats, please let me know how you managed to get here. 🙂

The rest of you, what’s the weirdest thing people Google for to get to your blog?

Influenced

We’ve always been avid TV watchers in our house.

Not my TV, but we have the same model.

Like most people of our generation*, we rarely just “watch TV”. Ever since laptops became part of our daily routine (and then iPods, Blackberries, iPhones and iPads) we can often be seen watching TV while surfing the Web, reading the news, playing a game.

*I don’t think it’s really a generation thing. When people talk about the raise of Digital Multitasking, they mostly talk about the Millennials (or Generation Y) or the Digital Natives (Generation Z), but I’m a Generation X myself and I’ve been “digitally multitasking” ever since I could get my hand on an electronic device. Anyways.

The evenings in our house are pretty relaxed. TV playing in the background, and us sitting on the couch with our iPads. This is the joy of a DVR, you can always rewind if you missed something important.

On Monday night, we were watching “Les Chefs”, a quebecer version of “Top Chef”, and LovelyWife would comment that we should cook this, and maybe we could put that on the menu for next week, and maybe we could cook a sabayon soon because it looked easy enough to do. Nothing too extraordinary here, I’m sure we all do this. For example, whenever I watch the DIY Network, I’m taken with this urge to tile something. Nothing wrong with that, right?

But then I started noticing that LovelyWife would make comments that were in line with the commercials shown. LovelyWife has always been “in tune” with advertisement, but she was taking it to a whole other level. And this is from a woman who would probably be buying every Snuggie, Baby Bullit, Magic Bullet,

A grocery store ad would come on, and she’ll say: “Maybe I could be a butcher as a second career?”

An RV ad would come on, and she’ll say: “Do you think we should rent an RV for our summer vacations?”

An ad for a deck sealer would come on, and she’ll say: “I wonder if the neighbor will repaint his fence this year?”

You might think that it’s a bad thing to be influenced by TV like that. I don’t. In fact I absolutely love that LovelyWife is influenced by what she sees on TV.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to add the playboy channel to my subscription package.

1.19 – A tale of urban reality

I’m a fairly laid back dude, there’s not much that makes me completely lose my mind. But I think I’m finally about to lose it.

Let’s say you’re driving around, and you then realize that you’re running low on gas. Well, not you per say, but your car. You then spot a gas station and read this on their sign:

Regular
1.19 /l

Tell me, how much do you think you will pay at this very specific gas station for a liter of regular gas? If you answered 1.19$, you are WRONG. Let me give you a hint, in a form of a slightly different question: How much do you think you will pay for 10 liters of gas? What? 11.90$ you say? I’m sorry, you’re wrong again.

My receipt.

It turns out that the price of a liter of gas is actually 1.199$. Do you know what happens when you put exactly one liter of gas in your car? That’s right, you pay 1.20$. If you do the simple math, I should pay 58.11$ for 49.834 liters of gas, not 59.75$.

That’s 1.64$ difference. 

You think I’m crazy for flipping out about 1.64$? Is is really crazy? How about this:

A paper holder, because this is really crappy.

Assuming that all taxes are included, would you flip out if you get to the check out and were charged 26.00$ for this? How about this:

Socks, because we’re sock puppets.

Would you agree to pay 6.01$ for this? Why not? The more I think about this, the angrier I get. I mean, why are we just going along with this? It seems to me like the big gas companies are already making millions of dollars on our backs, and this is adding insult to injury.

Seriously, Is this even legal? 

Is this what we’re going for?

Because I can totally see myself with that haircut.

Picture this!

Soooooo…

About 13 years ago, we bought ourselves a Canon EOS Rebel X camera.

Canon EOS Rebel X.

That camera was bought mainly to snap pictures of our new born daughter. It was a splurge for us at nearly 500$!

Of course, over the years, we upgraded to a small digital point and shoot, then to a bigger point and shoot, and today we’re using a digital SLR Canon Rebel Ti.

When we upgraded, my dad asked if he could borrow the film camera. Since we had no use for it anymore, we gave him the camera, and he had it for over 10 years. Last weekend, he gave the camera back to me – he has a digital point and shoot now.

Here’s the fun part.

Unprocessed but used film.

That was also in the camera bag.

Now if you were me, would you have those rolls processed? Would you be a little worried of what could be on those rolls? I’m thinking this could ba an awesome blog post…

What say you? 😉