False Positive for Bad RAM

Hey! If you ever want to create a false-positive for bad RAM in the new MacBook series, I’ve got a foolproof way to do so!

You’ll need two MacBooks. Put them both on a flat surface. Close one of them, then set the other MacBook on top of it. Power up the top MacBook. It will start up, and a few seconds later the power light will start gently pulsing but the screen will remain black. No matter what keys you hit, it won’t wake up.

Ta Dah! Those are the symptoms of a failed Power On Self Test due to bad or missing RAM.

What’s actually happened is that there’s a little rare-earth magnet in lid of MacBook that closes a switch in the body of the MacBook when the lid is closed. The magnet in the bottom MacBook is closing the switch in the top MacBook. The top MacBook will not wake up – as far as it is concerned, its lid is closed.

License Plate Wisdom

There’s a travel game we play where you look at a license plate and reverse-construct an acronym to produce the letters in the plate number.

This is what led to this morning’s discussion about the Ventilation Monkeys.

The plate isn’t important anymore. What’s important is that there are tribes of wild monkeys living in the HVAC systems of many large buildings. They sneak out at night and steal pencils. They rearrange office furniture so that you always wind up with the chair with the squeaky seat. They make bananas in the break room turn brown.

Through fear.

The bananas turn brown out of fear of the ventilation monkeys. Now you know.

Is this thing on?

Hey! Just an update – we’re still around.

St. Patrick’s Day

So, here’s a quick update on the weekend so far….
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It will never sound the same…

It’s like a centrifuge

This week’s comic keeps things separated.

A Bottle of Jack Kerouac

In one of the classes where I’m a projectionist, they showed a documentary on Jack Kerouac. It included a few clips from this episode of William F. Buckley’s show “Firing Line”…

Honestly, I’ve got very little sympathy for Kerouac – showing up drunk for the show and blabbering on like he does is beyond unprofessional. But I can see why he’d need some insulation between himself and reality here. Every time Buckley opens his mouth and drones on in his smug, condescending voice… Well, if he were alive I’d want to slap him. As it is, I fight the urge to rent a back-hoe, dig him up and turn his blithering skull into a bathroom fixture.

Cinematic dream

The scene opens from the driver’s point of view in a car, with a folded newspaper on the passenger’s seat. There’s an advertisement reading “Drivers Wanted!” in colors very similar to that of a major pizza chain. Just above the fold, the ad continues: “No experience necessary! Our hardened mercenaries will teach you.” The driver unfolds the paper revealing the rest of the ad copy: “Everything you need to know about delivering pizzas in the post-zombie world!”
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Digital Housekeeping

Yes, it’s been a while since I’ve posted here on a regular basis.

Here’s the deal. I’m going to try to post here more often, but no promises. I’ve been doing some server maintenance that had fallen by the wayside, and it kind of kicked off my urge to vent more in public. Y’see, the hosting company got hacked back in January and I needed to reset my login passwords. Then I checked the server logs and found that I had an insecure installation of some gallery software that had become a link farm for spam sites. And some Russian streaming music site had somehow sucked up half my bandwidth.

So obviously I haven’t paid enough attention to this place for far too long. To make up for it, I’ve just gone through and back-linked a whole slew of comics. Read, enjoy, comment on them here. I’ll post other stuff too, I promise.

That Doggie In The Window

You may find this week’s comic a bit disturbing…