Category: Life

On the other hand, my beautiful wife has a low geek threshold.

Although she’s a software developer who has affinities for gaming systems, Samus Aran, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Lord of the Rings, does reach her geek threshold early.

For example, although “Hey, let’s watch all 32 episodes of Buck Rogers starting right now and not stopping until we’re finished tomorrow” sounds like a good geek idea, she doesn’t think so!

Sorry, honey, I had to warn the other geeks in the audience. I hope we can still have the next Atari Party, though and please don’t throw my full size arcade games out now….

I prefer PCs to Macs because I’ve been weaned on them since I was a whelp, through which as a mangled metaphor you can understand I prefer going to the store for a steak to animal husbandry. So pardon me while I extrapolate on the little things that I’ve uncovered that are undoubtedly some part of an insidious plot to annoy people who try to use both Macintoshes and PCs on a daily basis.

• In default message boxes, the OK and Cancel buttons are transposed.
  In Windows, the OK button is on the left; in Macintosh, it’s on the right. Crikey, now I have to read the buttons before I just click.

• The bottom row keys are different.
  On Windows keyboards, it’s CTRL, Windows Key, ALT, Spacebar; on Macintosh, it’s CTRL, ALT, Open Apple (oops, perhaps I have experience on older pre-Macs), Spacebar. It’s just a simple transposition, but for those of us who like to do things like use keyboard shortcuts, it means we hit the wrong keys for the shortcuts 90% of the time on our non-dominant platform (Macintosh for me).

I would wager that someone on one side of the idealogical divide did this consciously. Also, I thank goodness the Linux set doesn’t have its own keyboard yet.

Sure, they’re small things, but when you’re at the keys for ten or more hours a day, it’s a little fleck of sand under your contact lens.

If it’s anything less than a Quantum Sleeper, the bed that folds into a safe room, you haven’t been watching the news enough lately.

Here are some things that I can actually remember, and it makes me feel old:

• Party lines.
  No, not dollar per minute means to talk to people in your area, free means to be unable to use the phone because your neighbor won’t get off the phone. I kid you not, certain parts of Jefferson County, Missouri, had them until 1987. On the other hand, since my neighbors were probably listening in on my phone calls for the latest intelligence about my household (and were always available to offer their unwanted commentary on it–kinda like blogs), I learned to speak in code on the phone which helped me when I became a technical writer–and wrote in technospeak to confuse the person who was catching an unwanted glimpse of how the software worked through my documentation!

• Television tube testers in drug stores.
  Back in the early 1980s, they still had these. I remember seeing them when my mother would send me to the store with a buck and a note for the clerk to sell the nice ten year old boy a pack of cigarettes. Undoubtedly, only the government’s belated intervention that made such errands punishable by the drug store’s death have kept me from smoking even though my mother persists in shortening her lifespan.

  But kids today won’t remember a time when the man of the house would pull out a screwdriver when the television went on the fritz (things never go on the fritz nowadays, either; they gon in the trash) and would hunt for a suspect tube. When he found one, he could take it to the 7-11 to check to see if it was working or not and could buy another tube to fix his own television. Kinda like we geeks persist in doing with our computers. But our children won’t be able to operate on the miniaturized bucky-ball spinning computers of tomorrow. So enjoy the pre-retro chic that we have now, I guess.

• Snow on televisions.
  Speaking of televisions, you remember what snow looked like? Remember how you would adjust the antenna to fix it? Remember the first television you could put on an interior wall of your home because the antenna was strong enough? The television was 19″, and it seemed huge.

• Television dinners with aluminum foil trays.
  Not that I eat many television dinners these days, but I know they’re designed for microwaves now because more people probably have microwaves than ovens. You could take the trays, rinsed out of course, to the recycling facility with your aluminum cans.

• Yugos.
  Cheap little cars from an Eastern Bloc country. A country that no longer exists, in a bloc that no longer exists. Kinda like a communist Gremlin or Pinto, but at least the American punchline cars had longevity.

• PCjr
  Okay, I don’t remember much since my rich uncle got one and wouldn’t let me touch it, but it was a home computer, and it had a color screen.

• Rotary phones.
  When I was in college in 1990, I needed a touchtone phone to handle the interactive voice response for class registration. I had to buy the first touchtone phone in my father’s house and I had to pay a monthly surcharge on the phone bill for the privilege. Come to think of it, I am probably still paying for it somewhere.

• Ghetto blasters.
  Remember dudes with Afros walking through the projects with large radios on their shoulders? You damn kid, never realizing that the iPod was not the first personal musical device. Although, come to think of it, the iPod is personal, whereas the ghettoblaster was not.

Well, it’s not the Beloit College Mindset List for Incoming Freshmen, but it’s enough to make me want to swizzle the Geritol given to me as a joke–I think–for my last *0 birthday.

Perhaps I shall swizzle more beer instead.

Checklist of things to do when Heather leaves:

1. Turn on lights in all rooms in house.
2. Turn on all radios, softly, so I don’t have to walk into an achingly silent room.
3. Practice Unreal Tournament 2003 to catch up with her 733t skillz at it while she’s off away from the Arena.
4. Order pizza.
5. Drink beer.
6. Watch DVDs.

Same as last time.

For those of you who are paranoid enough to want a secret door but are trusting enough to buy one off the shelf, on your credit card, there’s Hidden Doors.com.

This will come in handy in some future trivia game:

Mantacore.

You’re welcome.

A San Francisco magazine offers Dorkstorm: The Annihilation: The ten geekiest hobbies.

Although I score pretty highly, I cannot imagine mixing Collectible Card Games and Dungeons and Dragons in a single person, but then again I am one of the role players throwing four-sided dice in the bloody CCG vs RPG wars that used to take place at GenCon. I mean, for crying out loud, Collectible Card Games take the worst aspect of role playing games–rules lawyers magic users who thought the point of the game was their demonstration of arcane computations and recombinations of magic which invloved spending a lot of a gaming session flipping through supplemental spell books and outwitting the game master–and made that worst aspect a game into itself.

Oops. I guess that little screed probably detracted from my utter sexability more than my creepy Peace Gallery picture.

Ech, it’s like washing your mouth out with some cheap malternative beverage watered down by a club down on Washington that won’t let you in with tennis shoes, and my bathroom has fewer hot chicks with tattoos.

Also, it doesn’t burn as much as the regular Listerine, which leads one to wonder if it’s as effective. As with an actual dentist visit, one equates sheer pain with success.

You know, an olive is really nothing more than a salty little grape, no matter what Athena told the Greeks.

The Book of Ratings grades Dungeons and Dragons monsters. For example, the blink dog:

These intelligent, teleporting, other-dimensional fox terriers are the natural enemies of displacer beasts. I love that Gygax had this whole magic-spewing ecosystem going on. Of course blink dogs are the natural enemies of displacer beasts! And esophagus monsters feed on the tender leaves of the rare-but-majestic elf ficus! It all fits together! Anyhow, blink dogs are chaotic good, which means that they’re one of the few creatures in the Monster Manual that don’t exist solely to guard treasure and draw blood. Instead they can aid the party, provide information, and look really surprised when you kill them to search their spleen for emeralds. C-

(Link courtesy Brock Sides at Signifying Nothing.)

As a reminder, Chuck Norris becomes eligible for Social Security next year.

Now, to quote the eminently quotable Eliza, “How do you feel about that?”

One of these things is not like the others; one of these things does not belong.

Can you spot it?

Click for full size

Beer for Soldiers

Books for Soldiers

The combination, of course, would be Late Night Philsophical Rambling Discussions for Soldiers, but leave that to them.