January 2009 Entries
A couple of weeks ago, some friends and I got together and came up with a variant of poker that we called, "Geek Poker." Geek Poker is like regular poker, except it's played with PCMCIA, CardBus, and ExpressCard cards instead of a standard paper deck. The deck is created by pooling all the geeks' cards, and several categories are chosen appropriately. If there's a category with only one card, then it's permissible to make that category a wildcard (for instance, our wildcard was a TV tuner). Here's an example hand:
The cards are:
Megahertz 14.4k V.32bis fax...
Rather than simply throw out my non-landfill-friendly trash, I keep my so-called "e-waste" in a box underneath my bed. Needless to say, it's starting to fill up, and opening the box can sometimes make my eyes begin to water. This box is home to dead hard drives, useless write-once CDs, damaged floppies, blown electrolytic capacitors, burnt-out fluorescent light bulbs, and some dead (and even leaking and sulfated!) batteries. So therefore, this box contains varying amounts of lithium, sulfuric acid, zinc, manganese, mercury, cadmium, and various other heavy metals. Does anyone actually dispose of these by any particularly "safe"...
This is how I communicate with the rest of my family. To Antony: the container and the toaster in the background are both from the 1970s.
From the garage of my friend's uncle comes some more old tech. First up is a Dell OptiPlex GX1. It's one of those older, late-'90s Dells with a desktop form factor. The specs appear to be a 500MHz Pentium 3 CPU with 128MB of PC-100 SDRAM and a 6.4GB hard drive. I can't figure out anything else about it just yet: while it was preloaded with Fedora Core 3, I don't know any of the username/password combinations to actually log into it, and I can't seem to get the CD drive to read burned CDs. It's a good candidate for...
I'm actually adding new content to my website for the first time since last February. Who saw that coming?
Around this time last year, I switched from my old analog phone service to digital GSM through T-Mobile. Service was prepaid, so I loaded $100 onto it and forgot about it for the rest of the year. Just a few days ago I got a message stating that the funds I had loaded on were about to expire. To my surprise I still had $16 left. That works out to just seven dollars a month. By comparison, the cheapest plans I've been able to find start at $19.99 a month, and even then I do know people that can rack...
Mountain Dew has gone through a few logo changes since I first started drinking it, but this new one's downright weird. "Mtn" Dew? I can only assume that the new generation of Mountain Dew drinkers has an attention span of three letters.
As with the old Mountain Dew logo changes, it doesn't look like the drink itself has changed (anybody remember the "Same Dew, New View" ads?), as the ingredients on the back of both seem to suggest.
Then there's the issue of the new logo background. I'm not entirely sure what it's supposed to represent, perhaps shards of glass or,...
Just yesterday, a few friends and I were stuck at school until 8:30 at night (ceremonial reasons). Here on campus, a 20oz/591mL bottle of soda costs $1.25 and even a small bag of chips is $0.75, so we decided to go across the street to the nearby Shaw's supermarket to see if we could get a better deal. Some interesting numbers I saw while I was there:
20oz/591mL bottle of soda: $1.50.
2-liter bottle of soda: $1.79
Small bag of Peanut M&M's: $0.79
Small pack of breath mints:...
I woke up this morning with "WEAR SHOES" scribbled on my hand. At the foot of my bed is a pair of shoes, no pun intended. After the disorientation of the first five seconds of wakefulness dissipates, I remember that I stepped on a light bulb yesterday, and that there are probably still small glass fragments on the floor.
I also notice that it's dark - darker than usual, at least for 8:45 in the morning. But of course, we can blame that on me too, for leaving this in front of the window:
Using the canned air I got for...