Over New Year's, my gf and I caught a couple of the post-Xmas sales, and one of the things we picked up was a cute little toiletries gift basket. As a man, I justified my purchase of this by the fact that my having some nice-smelling bath products in my home might make said home more appealing to my girlfriend.

But what really put it over the top was that it came with a little handy neck massager. As I suffer from really painfully stiff necks on a pretty regular basis, this seemed like a godsend (I mean, so did the electric shiatzu massager, the heating pad, naproxin sodium, the sleeping mask (to keep me from contorting away from the light in my sleep), and the memory-foam pillow, but at some point, something's got to work). And indeed, it has served its function well.

The reason this ends up here, though, is that the other night, I had just run the little critter, a sort of less-severe dough-docker, over my neck, and I was, well, turning it over in my hand. Looking down unexpectedly, I noticed that I had inadvertantly reproduced a pretty well-known internet meme, which I won't stoop to mentioning by name here.

And if you don't know what this looks like, you haven't been on the internet long enough.

You might have noticed a new feature down the sidebar, M&M Karaoke MySongs. See, I'm the webmaster of the website for the Karaoke show I frequent. Hey, Blogtimore readers, if you're ever in the neighborhood, come check it out. http://karaoke.trenchcoatsoft.com. Their entire collection of songs can be viewed on-line, and, thanks to a clever little feature I built into the site, every time you visit my page, you'll see a random assortment of ten songs from my own personal favorites list. It's the closest thing to a proper random ten you're liable to see around here, last week notwithstanding.

Anyway, you can check out my own personal list in its entirety at http://karaoke.trenchcoatsoft.com/mysongs.php?u=rraszews. If you decide to become a regular (or, for that matter, just like fooling around), you can make a list like this for yourself and avoid all that tedious looking things up in the printed songbook.

In the mean time, though, here's this week's ten:

1. The Boys of Summer, The Ataris
2. Cradle of Love, Billy Idol
3. Straw Hat and Dirty Old Hank, Barenaked Ladies
4. Angel Eyes, Jeff Healy Band
5. Making Love out of Nothing At All, Air Supply
6. Crazy for this girl, Evan and Jaron
7. Someday, Someway, Marshall Crenshaw
8. You're an Ocean, Fastball
9. In a Big Country, Big Country
10. Superman, Five for Fighting

See you next week.

So, this showed up at BoingBoing.

One of the editors decided that the term "Rim shot" was a sexual euphemism, and that was what made its use in a CNN headline funny.

Now, as it turns out, "rim shot" is a sexual euphemism (here, something between "rim job" and "body shot"), but that doesn't make her right, does it?

I don't think it even counts as an unintentional double entendre, because it is an intentional, non-sexual double entendre.

But what it still leaves me to wonder, does the BoingBoing editor genuinely believe this was an intentional sexual euphemism, or did she just confuse "rim shot" with "rim job" and is now summoning a really obscure secondary meaning to, well, cover her ass?

So it hasn't even been a day since my last post in this category, and I discover that, had I done a little more looking, there's this:
[gizmodo], which looks even more like a color-coded transforming robot team than the last one.

Go go Power Rangers.

Okay, so my gf came down this weekend. And while we did do some karaoke, I was really paying more attention to her than to keeping track of what I was singing. I mean, honestly, how can I be expected to keep notes when I'm enjoying the company of the woman I love? We had a pretty dandy weekend. Trivia. Dinner with friends. Frantic search for a misplaced grandmother. Dinner. Karaoke. Doctor Who marathon. Cooking. Dinner with some other friends. A hair more karaoke. Dog-sitting. In all, a weekend that would have been pretty pleasant on its own, elevated to nirvana because I got to share it with the woman I love.

So, the practical upshot is that I do not remember enough of what I sang to put together a ten list in my usual format, so I'm going to actually give you a random ten this week. I'm turning on my Rio Cali right now...

• 1.The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes, Elvis Costello
• 2.Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover, Sophie B. Hawkins
• 3.Dr. Who On Holiday, Dean Gray
• 4.Summertime, Bachelor Number One
• 5.There She Goes, Boo Radleys
• 6.Breathe Your Name, Sixpence None The Richer
• 7.Daffodil Lament, The Cranberries
• 8.Ball and Chain, Social Distortion
• 9.Cheerleader, Dierdra
• 10.The Trouble With Tracy, Barenaked Ladies

See you next week...

Inspired by This gaming mouse...

The silver one forms the Blazing Sword.

Taken in a Macy's in a mall in New Jersey.

Isn't it strange how jeans look so much better when they're worn out and discolored? My parents got me two very new looking pairs of very unfaded blue jeans, and they frankly look just ridiculous. But, then there's the other extreme:

Faded is cool and all, but me, I can't really see the attraction of the crotch-whisker look.

All of ther friends tell her she's so pretty... But she'd be a whole lot prettier if she'd smile once in a while

1. American Idiot, Greenday
2. Mr. Brightside, The Killers
3. The Downeaster Alexa, Billy Joel
4. Lullabye, Shawn Mullins
5. In The House of Stone and Light, Martin Page
6. Faith, George Michael
7. Hanging By A Moment, Lifehouse
8. Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Greenday
9. Ol' 55, The Eagles
10. Stuck in the Middle With You, Stealer's Wheel

Courtesy of Boing Boing...

1. The New York Times has this article about "Indigo Kids", which, close as I can tell, is this new-agey notion that there's some recent change in humanity resulting in bunches of kids whose minds work a little differently from the minds of you or I (or, heck, maybe you're one of them. For that matter, maybe I'm one of them. As far as objective descriptors go, I seem to match some of the criteria), causing them to be intuitive, be impatient, be empathic, show high intelligence, and glow purple (If you happen to be able to see auras). Indigoness, they say, tends to present as either being what our schools call "Gifted and Talented" or what our schools call "ADHD", but hip new-agey thinkers are proposing that being "Indigo" is evidence of being a more advanced form of human, the salvation of humanity, maybe they've got psychic powers, and we've really got to nurture them and whatnot. Of course, it sounds a lot like crazy talk to more skeptical people (who one of the NYT's interviewees likened to Muggles. I'd have gone with Saps, see below). But who can tell?

Anyway, this notion, or, at least, the term "Indigo kids" dates to the 1970s. About the same time as...

2. The Tomorrow People (wikipedia, tvtropes), a 70s British Sci-Fi TV series about the emergence of a new subspecies of humanity who were intuitive, impatient, empathic, highly intelligent, and glow purple (Well, not purple, I think, but they did glow from time to time). They were also telepathic, and had the power of teleportation. As well as all the associated weirdness of being British teenagers.

Probably it's just a coincidence. Or, perhaps more likely, both were tapping into some cultural meme that was big at the time. But reading the NYT article, I get this very spooky "OMG! Tomorrow People Are Real!" feeling. Maybe I'll have a nice cup of tea and hope it goes away.

(Oh, and the "saps" thing? It's what the Tomorrow People called plain old homo sapiens.)

Courtesy of Hainsworth.com...

So, MyHeritage.com has this thingy wherein you can upload a photo of yourself, and they'll use Sophisticated Image Stuff to work out what famous people you look like.

It's neat, if a little fanciful. So I'll wait here while you go try it out.

You back? Good. Get anyone good? No, me either. For what it's worth, I tried it with two pictures, and here's who it thought I looked like, in order by confidence:

• Olusegun Obasanjo
• Kim Jong Il
• John Major
• Sania Mirza
• Milton Friedman
• Roy Orbison (Okay, I do kinda look like that picture of Roy Orbison)
• Brad Pitt
• Cesar Franck
• Amrish Puri
• Bruce Lee
• Richard Nixon
• Sonny Rollins
• Jacques Chirac
• Anton Bruckner
• Yehuda Levi
• Ole Bull
• Hector Beriloz
• Carl Neisen
• Henri Philippe Petain
• Russel Crowe

So, here it is, on time and everything, the first IT of 2006.

This nutcracker was a gift from my girlfriend's grandparents. I really like it. It's fancy and displayable, but still functional (unlike your traditional ballet style nutcrackers. But did you notice what I noticed?

I expected him to be playing with his nuts, but this is going a little too far.

So I'm reading MAKE:Blog today (see link to the left), and two things caught my eye. I'm throwing this out there to the public. Maybe one of you can build it, maybe I'll build it myself (Though it seems likely that by the time I can afford the development costs, I won't have the time).

Link 1: A detailed review of the Fly Pentop Computer

The fly, if you haven't already heard the hype, is a gizmo targeted at the 8-13 crowd. It's a computer shoved into a pen. You scribble on a piece of paper (Has to be special paper, unfortunately. There's some very clever math in how it works, but the notion is that there's this thing called the Anoto pattern, which the Fly -- and most other digital writing systems -- uses to orient itself), and it does interesting stuff. The most basic of its features is that it can record what you wrote. Of course, since the Fly is, in addition to being a pen computer, a computer pen, you've technically already got a hard copy of whatever you wrote.

But it does other neat things. You can draw a calculator and use it to do math. It's very flexible in this regard; you write a C within a circle, activating calculator mode, then draw a rectangle and put some numbers and symbols in it -- in any arrangement you like -- then tap on them to do math. You can also draw a keyboard and play music. Or insert the translator biochip [2 points], and have whatever you write in English read back to you in Spanish. (Actually, I kinda get the feeling that they invented this thing, then realized that they couldn't think of very much to do with it.)

But limited in use though it may be (for now), it's a really neat evolution of the medium. Which is why an alarm went off in my brain when I saw this:

Link 2: How to turn an optical mouse into a handheld scanner

As you know, an optical mouse is a mouse that uses, very basically, a pretty simple digital camera (or, rather, a CCD -- the bit of a digital camera that takes the picture) instead of a ball to detect motion. As it turns out, there is a way to just pull the image from the CCD on some mice instead of turning it into a direction and distance.

So, here's my big and infeasable idea: Let's combine the information in these two links and build ourselves a Ghetto Fly homebrew pen computer.

There are some obvious problems with this idea. First, the optical mouse CCD has a very low resolution, and probably can't read an Anoto pattern. Second, the Fly is not built from off-the-shelf components. But hey, I just stuck a computer inside a radio. I think we can overcome these problems if we just make everything BIGGER.

I'm now imagining my homebrew pen computer. I figure that the "pen" would be about the size of an electric leaf-blower. A sheet of notebook paper would have to be enlarged to, say, 8 feet wide. It would weigh about 50 pounds.

But imagine pulling that out at a party...

Well, I guess it's about time I did another roundup of the point-scoring answers for the past year. Check out the extended entry for the points awarded in 2005...

• February:
  • Retirony Redux:
    • .2 points: (link)"cromulent": Simpsonsism meaning "legitimate". Only ever used ironically.
    • 3 points: (link) "LIONS!!!". David Cornelson, Cattus Atrox
• March:
  • But the chicken, on the other hand...
    • 1 point: Billy Joel, We Didn't Start The Fire
    • .5 points: The 95 Thesis of Lake Wobegon in Lake Wobegon Days, which the author claims (and I have no reason to doubt him) is the longest footnote ever in a work of fiction
  • Forty-Two
    • .1 point: The answer to the ultimate question of Life, The Universe, and Everything, according to The Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy
• July:
  • Inappropriate Thoughts 1
    • 4 points: (link) Refers to Archie's inability to avoid mentioning Sammy Davis Jr.'s glass eye in an episode of All in the Family, also the tvtropes.org term for gags of that sort
• August:
  • IT 4
    • 1 point: (link) tvtropes term for the thing that is patently, glaringly obvious, but which you under no circumstances are allowed to acknowledge
• September
  • Reverse Psychology
    • 1 point: character from GI Joe, who would often appear in the closing sequence to deliver a moral message, which invariable ended with the phrase, "And knowing is half the battle."
  • Spinoff!
    • .5 points: Troy McClure, The Simpsons: "The Simpsons Spin-off Showcase"
  • I am, as it turns out, the man
    • 1 point: Rick, explaining why he doesn't like Ugarte in Casablanca
  • Volcano Day
    • 2 points: Doctor Who: "The Empty Child"
    • 4 points: Arthur, when asked for a hint about any potentially useful swag to be found in a blacksmith's shop in The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time
  • Everybody Lives!
    • 99 points: Doctor Who: "The Doctor Dances"
  • We are TiVo
    • 3 points: DEVO, "We are DEVO"
• October:
  • Random 012
    • 3 points (link) No explanation, just read the link.
  • Random 10 times 2
    • 4 points: Tonight And The Rest of my Life

  • Looks like a fish...
    
    • 3 points: Ford's description of a space ship's handling in episode 6 of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To the Galaxy
      
  
  
• November:
  
  • Little Jackie Paper
    
    • 3 points: Little Jackie Paper is from Puff The Magic Dragon. "That deaf dumb and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball" is from Pinball Wizard
      
    
    
  • Eternity Alone...
    
    • 2 points: Bender, Futurama: "Godfellas"
      

Hope you did well.

So, as previously mentioned, I was building an mp3 player. It worked for a solid fifteen minutes before the hard drive crashed.

Well, I've replaced the hard drive, and made a few changes that I hope will keep it from happening again (A possibly unsuccessful attempt to make it mount the primary filesystem as read-only).

At any rate, it seems to be working now, though I want to add another control knob to hit a mouse button triggering a soft shutdown in the hopes of keeping this from happening again.

But now that the gift is given and received, I can reveal what it was all about:

I stuck a computer into the chassis of a 30s-style tombstone radio. The body only cost me about thirteen dollars (Two bucks plus shipping), the pedestal is made from scrap wood, and the computer was given to me by a friend's wife when she moved out of town. The speakers were an old pair I picked up years ago, the mouse came with my newest computer (Sacrificed because I had an optical mouse to use instead). The most expensive single component I had to buy for it were the three drawer knobs I bought for controls (About $4 and change a piece). The three knobs on the front control the volume, power, and track. The body came with three drilled holes for the knobs, marked for volume, tuning, and band. I drilled the connector for the volume knob directly into the original plastic volume dial for the speakers, attached the tuner dial to a dowel which presses against the Y-motion wheel from the mouse, and attached the band wheel to a dowel with various nails stuck in it to hit the controls. On the upsweep, toward the AM postion, it hits the power button for the PC. On the downsweep, toward a band which I've never heard of, it clicks one of the mouse buttons, causing the software to pause. One of the other mouse buttons now causes a shutdown. I haven't quite worked out what to hook that to.

For the tuner dial, I found a photograph of a compatable tuner dial on the internet, printed it out, and mounted it over the relevant opening. Right smack in the center, I drilled a hole and mounted a yellow LED to illuminate the dial. It doesn't look quite as natural as I'd hoped, but the other choices I had seemed likely to be even worse (I considered a cold cathode, which would have been (a) too bright, (b) too big, and (c) Too cold-cathodeish. I also tried an incandescent bulb, which burned out instantly. The LED takes its power from the motherboard's power LED jack, and glows apropriately. If I'd had more space and time, I might have tried to wire up a cluster of LEDs to the power supply, but I was on a timetable).

In all, I think it ended up looking quite convincing. If you find that hard to believe, have a look at these grainy, low-resolution pictures (Really got to get a proper digital camera): http://photos.trenchcoatsoft.com/thumbnails.php?album=5.

Cool? I like to think so.

I've done tech support before, so I know how tempting it is to just assume the user is a moron. But as a tech support guy, I always began from the assumption that even if the user was an idiot, solving his problem was my job.

It seems that this is a bizarre notion among tech support people.

I'm the developer for Valpac, an industrial adhesive manufacturer on the eastern shore of Maryland (and no, not the people who mail you coupons.

A few weeks ago, I redesigned the entire website in PHP (You can't see it just now, because it's still in a Seekrit Development Directory until I solve the problem I'm about to complain about). I've grown to really like PHP, and I'm rather proud of the new design.

But there's a problem: the damned thing doesn't work. More specifically, if I access any of the PHP pages, I get a 403 error. Sometimes. In my line of work, I have access to a whole heap of machines, and some of them get the page, and others get the 403. Most of them get the 403. Various proxies and other web services (Like Google's translator and W3C's validator) also get the 403. So this isn't a problem at my end. Doing a little research, I discovered that the web host has more than one servers, and you only get the 403 error when one particular server on their end tries to serve the page. If one of their other servers fields the request, it works fine. So it's not a problem at my end. In fact, it is a problem with just one of their servers.

And I say this not just because I used my deductive logic skills to deduce it. I say it because I called technical support two weeks ago, and after about an hour of haranguing the guy on the other end, he determined that it was a problem on their end with one of their servers. And he promised to fix it.

And he did. At least, the next day, every computer I tried it from could access the page.

And now, none of the computers I tried can access the page. I checked everything, and all the symptoms are the same. So, it's time to contact technical support again.

So, being tired of this, I had someone who could speak with somewhat more authority make the call. The vice president for research and development at Valpac called the web host, explained the problem in detail, and was told to clear his browser cache and try again.

So, it was time for me to actually do my job and contact them myself. I sent off an email in which I detailed exactly what was wrong, I explained that I had tried it in IE, I had tried it in Firefox, I had tried it in Opera, heck, I had even tried it in Lynx (Okay, I really hadn't, but I was hoping that the fact that I knew what Lynx was would convince them that I was technically saavy enough to actually be worth listening to). I had tried it from several computers. I had tried it from computers that weren't behind the same proxy. I had tried it from computers with different operating systems. I had uploaded the php to my own personal webserver and tried it there. The problem wasn't with my computer. It wasn't with my browser. It wasn't with my PHP. It was with their server. I explained exactly what the problem was and what they had to do to fix it.

Guess what they told me? Yep. "Try clearing your browser cache." So I responsed that I *had* cleared my browser cache, I gave them ,as they requested, the version of my browser. I told them what their own diagnostic scripts told me about the server that was giving me the problem. I even told them that the *last time* I'd had this problem, they had fixed it, and I told them how they had fixed it the last time.

They told me, "Try clearing your browser cache".

Bastards.

What bothers me isn't being treated like an idiot. I mean, I don't like being treated like an idiot, but I know full well that 99.99999% of the requests they get are stupid, nonsensical, and sent by idiots, so I am willing to concede that "treat the user like an idiot" is probably the most efficient business model for them to follow. What bothers me is that it is becoming increasingly clear that they aren't even reading my requests. When the very first line of my request is "I have ALREADY CLEARED THE BROWSER CACHE," what other possible reason could they have for saying "Clear your browser cache"?

I'm not asking for special treatment. I mean, it'd be both nice for me and useful for them if I could just, like, say a secret magic word to let them know that I'm not an idiot and they could therefore skip all the question-deflecting crap they normally have to go through, but I don't actually need it, and since I'm not the one paying the tech support guy's salary, it's no skin off my back if he wants to waste time on the bonehead stuff first. All I'm asking is for them to actually do their jobs. You know, read the freaking message.

I'm sure Alex would be proud and all [2 points], but, well, were it up to me, these folks would have already lost my business.

Now, if you don't mind, I have to go clear out my browser cache.