Stray Hawkeye

Being a computer geek, I have a few computers at home.  The one that I use the most, which I built a couple of years ago, was acting up recently.  Not booting up, making funny (but not hard drive crashing style) noises, freezing at random intervals during start up, etc.  This led to me dissecting the whole thing, stripping it down to the most basic pieces, and swapping those out with ones from my other machines and spare parts.  At one point in this process I decided to take a spare hard drive, use my old Windows machine to format it, and then try that one.  So I booted up my Windows machine, spent an hour or two going through all the security patches, virus updates, required Windows updates, etc (have I mentioned lately how much I love Linux?) and hooked up the spare drive to format.  I opened up the old Computer Management window, and started formatting the drive:

Who says Windows isn't friendly?

And was reminded of one of my favorite instances of an unfortunate default column width pared with an ellipse:

The drooling frowny face of formatting

Doesn’t exactly instil confidence that this process is going to end well.

Fair warning – the volume is pretty loud on this one, so start low and work your way up.

Via Make

I’m not sure if it’s awesome or terrible that I get pretty much all of these:

14, 24, and 27 made me laugh hard enough I had to pause the video for about 10 seconds to go back and hear the rest.

Via a friend who sent it to me on Facebook

Over the weekend I participated in the 48 Hour Film Project.  Basically, it’s a competition where teams get a genre, a character name / occupation, a line of dialogue, and a prop, and 48 hours later have to come back with a 4 to 7 minute film (plus 60 seconds for credits).  A couple of my friends have a production company, so I auditioned to be on their team and ended up with a part with a couple of lines (which in a 7 minute film I’m claiming is major role :) ).  Plus I made a website as a prop that also gets some screen time.  So, what I’m really saying here is you should come to the premier screening, because I’m going to be totally famous and on the big screen and stuff.  Also there’s about a 5 second shot of me and two other guys just shaking our butts in a musical number. Did I it’s a musical? And a Western? Because for genre we got “Musical or Western”, and decided that “and” is far better than “or”, so we did both. Confused yet? Good, more reason to come see the finished product.

Due to the number of teams, they break up the screening into groups.  We’re in Group D, which shows Wednesday, June 15th, 9:00 – 11:00pm at the Riverview Theater. Admission is $10, and you get to see about 10-15 movies made as part of this chaos.  If you have a large amount of faith in us, there’s a best of show a week later on the 23rd. I’ve seen our film and I think it’s pretty good, but having not seen others from this year, I have no idea where we’ll fall in the pack, or, for that matter, what categories / criteria they use to pick the best of, so, you may want to come to the premier screening just in case. Besides, the best of is $15, and you’ll have no idea what people are talking about for the week in between when everyone is saying how awesome ours is.

I was out at the bar over the weekend with some of my geekier friends.  In conversation it came up that one of them has a motorcycle, which he has named “Frogger”.  (See, I told you they were on the geekier side.)  One of my other friends recently got an air brush kit, and is planning to help paint said motorcycle with, as they put it, “bad ass frogs”.  So, being geeks, we not only had our laptops with us, but were at a bar with wifi – so we busted out the internet and went to work finding bad ass frogs to use as models for said motorcycle air brush mural.  Some of the highlights were:

• Kinda scary looking frog with teeth
• Ninja frog on a rope
• Real life hypno-toad
• Ready frog
• A variety of mini-fig frogs with weapons
• Mr Burns frog (about half way down the page in the comments)
• And finally, a little too fittingly, a frog on a motorcycle

But eventually, we came to thinking, why not use the actual Frogger frog?  So, we found an image of the original cover, and realized how lame and entirely not bad ass the original Frogger frog was:

A tie? A watch? A vest? A freaking brief case?!? Maybe there was a reason all those cars had it in for him.

Pretty wimpy, but we have computers, and GIMP – we can fix this.

So, over the next hour or two, I drunkenly photoshoped (okay, so I don’t actually have the program, but “GIMP’ed” just sounds wrong) up our video game hero to toughen him up a bit, while carrying on a few other conversations.  There were plenty of inputs from my other drunken, laptop toting, geek companions (“give him some tattoos”, ” put some blood on his mouth”, “make his butt less pointy”, “he should have a sword, no, an anime sword”, “give him angry eyelids, no, not like that, angle them, no, this way”) to help with the process.  Until we eventually came up with:

Not bad for a few beers in (though looking at it sober, it does have some rough edges here and there).

And then, of course, we realized he must vanquish the lesser version of himself, who has apparently been sweating in fear for decades now (click for bigger):

There can be only one.

It’s my desktop background image now.

Further proof that given enough time, even possible geek fascination and meme will be combined with every other one, in every possible combination – Lego Star Wars Space Invaders.

I give it 6 months until someone find a way to throw pong, Super Mario, and a red Star Trek shirt into that.

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages is the funniest thing I’ve read in months.  I actually fell out of my chair laughing.  That said, I’m pretty sure you have to be a huge, enormous, mega-nerd computer geek with a decent understanding of the history of programming languages to really get much of any of the humor of it.  But if you are a huge, enormous, mega-nerd computer geek with a decent understanding of the history of programming languages, it doesn’t get much better than this.  Snip:

1964 – John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.

1965 – Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

Via Boing Boing.

Because:

1. I’m that much of a dork
2. It’s sort of fun to see how much you actually remember from geography class (see point 1)

Globetrotter XL has you try to pin point the location of cities around the world.  For each level you have to be a little more accurate to keep going.

Statetris is like Tetris, but instead of colored blocks, you drop states (up arrow to rotate).

Both are good reminders that I have no idea where anything is in Africa, and that Eastern Europe is pretty fuzzy in my mind.

Sort of like an internet party, but with chemicals.  Dorky and a bit nsfw:

Random Fact: Linus Torvalds (the guy who started Linux) and the state of Iowa share a birthday – today, Dec 28th.  Linus is 40, Iowa is 163.  Happy Birthday to both!!!  In other news, I’m pretty sure noticing that makes me a huge dork, but I’m pretty okay with that.