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Corrections: Squirrel Nut Zippers

2012 Feb 15, 5:11

Awwww

Staff writer J.O. Rolston’s Jan. 28 feature “Swing Set,” about swing revivalists Squirrel Nut Zippers, was mistakenly written in 2012. He meant to write it in 1997. The Onion regrets the error.”

I like Squirrel Nut Zippers…

PermalinkCommentshumor music squirrel-nut-zippers

zerodaythebook.com

2011 Jan 23, 4:49Sysinternals Mark Russinovich writes a novel (fiction) and gets a Bill Gates blurb for the cover: “Mark came to Microsoft in 2006 to help advance the state of the art of Windows, now in his latest compelling creation he is raising awareness of the all too real threat of cyberterrorism.” —Bill GatesPermalinkCommentsbook security microsoft sysinternals mark-russinovich novel fiction technical

draft-nottingham-http-portal - The Network Authentication Required HTTP Status Code

2010 Oct 4, 2:05Proposed 428 HTTP error code for hijacking proxies to indicate to the client the user needs to login to the network etc. Glad to see this one's finally happening.PermalinkCommentshttp http-status captive-portal hijack proxy authentication technical rfc reference

Comcast DNSSEC Trial FAQs

2010 Feb 25, 4:10Comcast is running an opt-in DNSSEC trial for all Comcast customers. Their FAQ covers the incompat. of DNSSEC with their Comcast Domain Helper (typo DNS redirects to Comcast ads... bleh!): "What happens to Comcast Domain Helper, which offers DNS redirect services, when you fully implement DNSSEC? We believe that the web error redirection function of Comcast Domain Helper is technically incompatible with DNSSEC. Comcast has always known this and plans to turn off such redirection when DNSSEC is fully implemented." Yay!PermalinkCommentsdns dnssec comcast faq internet ip security technical

Keep Calm and Carry Yarn poster 12 x 18 red by jenniegee on Etsy

2010 Jan 26, 1:42
PermalinkCommentshumor photo sign terrorism propaganda yarn

Emanuel Derman's Blog: Trading Places

2009 Dec 31, 1:50Har har: "I had a fantasy in which the Fed and the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) switched roles. If a bank failed at 9 a.m. one morning and shut its doors, the TSA would announce that all banks henceforth begin their business day at 10 a.m. And, if a terrorist managed to get on board a plane between Stockholm and Washington, the Fed would increase the number of flights between the cities."PermalinkCommentseconomics humor airplane emanuel-derman tsa fed government

RFC 959 - File Transfer Protocol

2009 Sep 9, 5:35The FTP spec's section 3.5 'ERROR RECOVERY AND RESTART' describes how to resume an FTP download.PermalinkCommentsietf reference ftp rfc resume download internet technical

Netflix Watch Instantly Recommendations

2009 May 3, 9:17
WeedsAvatar The Last AirbenderPaprikaGrindhouse Planet TerrorOutsourcedThe King of KongPrimer

Netflix lets you watch a subset of their movies online via their website and a subset of those movies are available to watch on the Xbox 360's Netflix app. so its not always easy to find movies to watch on Xbox 360. Yet, I regularly see my Xbox friends using the Netflix app and its a shame they didn't make an easy way to share movie recommendations with your friends. Instead we must share movie recommendations the old fashioned way. Here's the movies I've found and enjoyed on my 360.

Weeds
You don't have to be a stoner to enjoy this humorous and dramatic satire featuring a widow trying to raise her children and deal pot in suburbia.
Avatar The Last Airbender
An American animated series that's an amalgamation of various Asian art, history, religion, etc. that maintains a great story line.
Paprika
If you enjoyed Paranoia Agent you'll enjoy this movie in the same animation style and by the same director and writer, Satoshi Kon. Its like a feature length version of a Paranoia Agent episode in which a dream machine lets outsiders view one's dreams but eventually leads to blurring the dreams and reality.
Grindhouse Planet Terror
I didn't see either of the Grindhouse movies when they first came out, but of the two, Planet Terror is the more humorous and exciting gore filled parody.
Outsourced
A refreshing romantic comedy that still has a few of the over played tropes but is easy to enjoy despite that.
The King of Kong
A hilarious documentary on the struggle between the reigning champ hot-sauce salesman and the underdog Washington state high school science teacher to obtain the Donkey Kong world record high score. After watching, checkout this interview with the creators of the movie and the villain.
Primer
I've mentioned Primer before, but I put it on here again because its really good and you still haven't seen it, have you?
PermalinkCommentsmovie personal netflix

Remixes of the paranoid London police "anti-terror"/suspect your neighbours posters - Boing Boing

2009 Mar 26, 2:24"Yesterday's remix challenge -- to mock the ridiculous new "anti-terrorism" posters the London police have put up that tell you to spy on your neighbors -- was a smashing success. I've collected the 25 or so that came in to date below". I enjoyed: "A bomb won't go off here because people tend to be quite nice really." "Terribly convenient, isn't it? Incriminating evidence left right out where you'll spot it and call it in..." "A bomb won't go off here because the true likelihood of you being the victim of a terror attack is really very low, especially when compared to other causes of death or injury."PermalinkCommentshumor politics poster paranoia security via:boingboing.comments photoshop privacy

DIY Pepsi Challenge

2009 Jan 25, 5:39

Deutsches MuseumMicrosoft isn't completely shielded from our economies issues but I still have a job and still get free soda. While that's all still the case, I decided to test Sarah's claimed ability to differentiate between Pepsi, Coke, and their diet counterparts by taste alone. I poured the four sodas into marked cups and Sarah and I each took two runs through the cups with the following guesses.

Soda Identification Challenge Results
Drink Sarah Dave
Guess 1 Guess 2 Guess 1 Guess 2
Coke Coke Coke Pepsi Diet Pepsi
Diet Coke Diet Coke Diet Pepsi Diet Coke Diet Coke
Pepsi Pepsi Pepsi Coke Coke
Diet Pepsi Diet Pepsi Diet Coke Diet Pepsi Pepsi
Total (out of 8) 6 3

As you can see from the results, Sarah's claimed ability to identify Coke and Pepsi by taste is confirmed. The first run through she got completely correct and on the second run only mistook Diet Pepsi for Diet Coke. Her excuse for the error on the second run was a tainted palate from the first run. I on the other hand was mostly incorrect. Surprisingly though my incorrect answers were mostly consistent between run one and two. For instance I thought Pepsi was Coke in both runs.

PermalinkCommentscoke microsoft waste of soda pepsi waste of time soda

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> I played WoW, I became a terrorist (story!)

2008 Dec 29, 12:22"This wasn't my fault. Anyone could have dropped his stupid iPod in the toilet. It's really the government here. I mean, at this point the building contained six customs officials, an army of policemen, people from various security agencies, a bomb squad, and a couple of detectives."PermalinkCommentsipod toilet humor airplane plane security terrorism wow

Sonja Eddings Brown is Rather Unpleasant - The Rehabilitated Student

2008 Nov 16, 10:13"Imagine my mild surprise when I discovered that the woman who terrorized me in my final days in high school is the face of Proposition 8. Sonja Eddings Brown is everything you would expect a Proposition 8 supporter to be: someone with misplaced values and a knack for being a big bully. Yes, a middle-aged mother of three went out of her way to threaten to kick a high school senior out of her valedictory speaking position simply because the student refused to have (strange) words placed her mouth and to be used as a propagandistic advertising vehicle."PermalinkCommentspolitics education california sonja-eddings-brown high-school via:kris.kowal

Tom Ricks's Inbox - washingtonpost.com

2008 Oct 13, 2:40Watch out for too good to be true washing services (or free network traffic anonymization): "The laundry would then send out "color coded" special discount tickets, to the effect of "get two loads for the price of one," etc. The color coding was matched to specific streets and thus when someone brought in their laundry, it was easy to determine the general location from which a city map was coded. While the laundry was indeed being washed, pressed and dry cleaned, it had one additional cycle -- every garment, sheet, glove, pair of pants, was first sent through an analyzer, located in the basement, that checked for bomb-making residue." From the comment section of Schneier on Security on this topic: "Yet another example of how inexpensive, reliable home washers and dryers help terrorists. When will we learn?"PermalinkCommentssecurity history laundromat ira terrorism bomb

ANTLRWorks: The ANTLR GUI Development Environment

2008 Oct 2, 9:37Cool graphical ANTLR IDE! They didn't have this the last time I used ANTLR. "ANTLRWorks is a novel grammar development environment for ANTLR v3 grammars written by Jean Bovet (with suggested use cases from Terence Parr). It combines an excellent grammar-aware editor with an interpreter for rapid prototyping and a language-agnostic debugger for isolating grammar errors. ANTLRWorks helps eliminate grammar nondeterminisms, one of the most difficult problems for beginners and experts alike, by highlighting nondeterministic paths in the syntax diagram associated with a grammar."PermalinkCommentsantlr ide graph grammar tool free download development opensource java

Business & Technology | Jobs with real authority: working on Microsoft's spell-checker | Seattle Times Newspaper

2008 Sep 30, 11:05Article on the team that owns the Office spell-checker: 'But, the team asked itself, should "calender" be flagged, or squiggled - have the red squiggly underline that indicates a misspelling? Yes, because letting it go through as correct "more often masks the really common spelling error that people make for calendar."' I didn't even realize they had written calender rather than calendar in the articlePermalinkCommentsmicrosoft office spell-check language

Bogotissimo! / the aesthetics of being wrong

2008 Sep 29, 1:41"Lately I have been thinking about Glitch-Art, an emerging aesthetics inside Digital Art which takes the computational error as its subject."PermalinkCommentsart computer error glitch

Anecdotes from Work

2008 Sep 23, 2:15

Diveristy in NumbersThe names in the following anecdote have been changed. Except for my name (I'm Dave).

I got a new laptop a while back. I had it in my office and Tim came in to ask me something but paused when he saw my laptop. "Oh, is this one of those new touch screen laptops?" he asked, the whole time moving his hand towards my laptop and punctuating his sentence by pressing his finger to the screen. "No" I responded.

Walking down a hallway I heard Winston, one of our managers, say, "Hey Tim!" Winston catches up to me and asks, "Are you almost done with the XYZ bug?" I realized Winston was talking to me and got my name wrong but I figured I'll ignore it and perhaps he'll realize his mistake. Winston continued "I just talked with some people who say they're blocked and waiting for Tim to finish the XYZ bug." "Dave" I said helpfully attempting to diplomatically correct Winston since he apparently hadn't realized his error. "No, it was Jeremy and Bill." Winston said naming the people he had talked to who were waiting for me to fix the XYZ bug. At this point I decided it would be easier to just answer his question and end the conversation than to get into this whole thing. As far as I know, Winston has not gotten my name wrong at any other time.

PermalinkCommentswork nontechnical

philosecurity - Blog Archive - Guerilla Public Service

2008 Aug 11, 3:58Fellow kindly fixes spelling error on trailer mounted electronic roadway message signs. Pulls up, connects keyboard, reads password off the side of the enclosure, etc. "Not far from my house is one of those temporary trailer-mounted variable message signs, which for the past several weeks has been advising motorists that ..." I always wondered what it would take on those signs. And if all the passwords are four characters long...PermalinkCommentssecurity hack howto sign humor

Language Log - Honest but unhelpful

2008 Jul 3, 11:50Another translation error. At least they're upfront about it though.PermalinkCommentshumor chinese china english language translation error

NetFlix Media Center and Ong-Bak

2008 Jun 15, 7:57

Ong-Bak movie poster.I just installed vmcNetFlix which lets you watch your on demand NetFlix movies via your Vista Media Center or any Media Center Extenders like the Xbox 360. It works well but fails poorly with some cryptic error messages and long timeouts. Be sure to get NetFlix on demand movies working in your browser before installing this plugin. Once I did that everything worked very well.

To test it out I watched Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior in which Ting must travel from his country village to Bangkok where he works with his cousin in the city to recover his village's stolen religious artifact. Its a mix of Perfect Strangers, Street Fighter and Pad-See Ew. Martial arts movies, like porn and video games, aren't required to have a strong plot but Ong-Bak has a fine plot line and enjoyable Thai martial arts. I saw the Tiger Knee in there several times. An enjoyable movie that reminded me of watching martial arts movies with my friends in high school.

PermalinkCommentsmedia-center thai netflix ong-bak vista
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