Monthly Archives: December 2004

Too much fun.

My wife is having too much fun with American Sign Language. Last night she figured out that she can combine the signs she knows into the phrases “Bacon juice” and “Making gravy.” For some reason this makes us both laugh (or as she says, “laugh like GOONS”). I fear what sort of reaction we might get from any deaf person who ‘overhears’ our vastly stupid conversations.

Pizza shears

Anyone else out there remember the big deal about scissors in grade school? You used to have to use these extremely horrible plastic scissors with metal edges when you where in kindergarten. By first or second grade you could use the moderately horrible metal scissors with rounded ends. If you showed sufficient competence with them, you could graduate to the slightly-less-than-moderately horrible metal scissors with pointy ends.
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That song lyric thing

Stolen from too many people to guess, at this point:

Here’s how the game works:

Step 1: Get your playlist together, put it on random, and play!
Step 2: Pick your favorite lines from the first 15 or so songs that play!
Step 3: Post and let everyone you know guess what song the lines come from! (Artist & title as best applicable)
Step 4: Cross out the songs when someone guesses correctly!
P.S: no cheating and pasting the lyrics into a search engine.

This was a bit tough for me. I had to skip all the songs that came up that weren’t in English, mostly because I couldn’t figure out the lyrics well enough to type them in. And, obviously, the instrumental tracks were pretty useless for this too. There were a surprising number of both of those.

And now for the tough part for you all. With comments disabled, you’re going to have to e-mail me your guesses. Send ’em to quirkblog – at – gmail – dot – com
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So quiet. So peaceful.

Ah… How restful. No spam messages for the past few days, and all I had to do was break the commenting system completely.

Of course, that’s sort of like burning down a house so that you can rebuild it a different color, but that’s not the point.

The point is, I think, that I’ve set up an e-mail account specifically for folks to send me comments. It’s an idea that my Wife came up with that I’m blatantly stealing borrowing. If you’ve got something to say about something I’ve written, send it to me here and I’ll post it:

Quirkblog (big swirly ‘at’ symbol) gmail (little tiny dot) com

Replace the parentheticals with the appropriate symbols and it should all work fine.

Still killing spambots…

Ok, it looks like the little kill script isn’t 100% effective at stopping posts. On the other hand, it does seem to have kept the kruft down to about 150 entries over the last few days. Still, I’m going to be going through the old posts and closing off comments on older entries.

Alignment Quiz

You scored as Chaotic Good. A Chaotic Good person is someone who has little intrinsic respect for laws or authority, seeing them as insufficient to sustain what’s right. These people work according to their own moral compass which, while good, is not necessarily always aligned with that of society. Despite their chaotic tendancies, these people are good at heart.

Chaotic Good

60%

Lawful Good

55%

Neutral Good

50%

True Neutral

45%

Chaotic Neutral

35%

Lawful Evil

25%

Chaotic Evil

25%

Neutral Evil

25%

Lawful Neutral

15%

What is your Alignment?
created with QuizFarm.com
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All back from Alabama

What a very strange sensation… I’ve got an odd combination of tired and wired going on. I attribute it to lack of good sleep, shifting time zones and strange climatic changes. Long story short, my Wife and I zipped back and forth to Birmingham over the weekend. Short story much longer in the extended entry.
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Comments Closed…

Sorry readers, but it’s time to close off the comments. Spam has gotten to be enough of a problem that it’s slowing down a server we use for work. MT-Blacklist isn’t taking care of that part of the problem, so I’ve had to add a bit of fun to the server itself. Basically, every five minutes, the server looks for the mt-comments.cgi script and kills off the multiple copies of perl that it’s spawned.

Here’s the command, just in case anyone else needs it:
ps -ax | grep mt-comments.cgi | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill

Put that in Root’s crontab with a 5 minute refresh and watch all your load problems fade away…

Handy tips that mean NOTHING

This will make no sense unless you’re having the exact same problem I was, in which case this will be the solution that saves you hours of experimentation:

An open A6 card is almost the same size as a C5 envelope. It’s close enough to fool the printer at any rate. Just remember, outside down, cover first, and open the back panel on the printer to save wear and tear.

No need to thank me. It’s all part of the service I provide here…

Working on my management gut

It’s kind of a scary time at work. We’re expanding pretty quickly, and we’ve hired on some really cool people who are crackerjack computer programmers and a couple of awesomely talented designers. For me, that means I’m getting bumped up more toward a management role. Basically, instead of doing design and computer stuff I’ll be passing that work along to the new folks and coordinating their efforts. On the up side, that means we’ll be able to handle more projects and jobs. On the down side, that means I’ll need to get larger pants to handle the inevitable.
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