Author Archives: brad

My top ten pranks were solicited by Bill, who, while I’m on the subject of weddings, was my best man.

Here are my top pranks, maybe not ten, and in no particular order.

The screenshot on Dave’s machine. On my boss’s PowerBook, we opened the control strip (a Mac OS 9 doohicky that runs along the bottom of the screen) and took a screenshot. Then we set that screenshot to be his desktop picture. If this doesn’t seem like a prank, think about it for a while. He re-installed his operating system while Mike and I snickered.

When I still worked with Joe, I installed a little trick on his computer that reduced the vertical and horizontal screen resolutions by one pixel every time the computer restarted. One pixel a day isn’t all that noticable. He finally figured it out when his screen size was reported by some installer as 784 by 584, or something along those lines. He was pretty pissed.

I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of NetDino. That was always good for kicks in the pre-OS X days. You could remotely trigger a dinosaur running across the bottom of someone’s computer screen. I once set it off on my friend Steve’s computer in another school district (this was back in the pre-security days). Apparently he was in a meeting with his supervisor at the time. I later discovered that it didn’t play well with more modern Macs. But that’s a long story for another day.

Another one I pulled on Joe was after he got his original iMac. He was so in love with that machine, but the lettering on the front was smeared, and this upset him to no end. One day while he was out, I installed a program that causes the screen to dim to ten percent of it’s brightness within ten minutes. He played with for days before he figured it out.

And then there’s Sniff, my all-time favorite. Sniff causes your Mac to randomly cough and sneeze. I installed on several computers at Etown. One secretary thought it was so funny that she asked me not to remove it. As far as I know, she still has it, five years later.

It didn’t take me long to verify that Sniff had only three distinct sounds, each stored in the executable file as an SND resource. Hmmm. I’d been playing with SND resources since 1991. I quickly opened up QuickMail Pro, our district standard for email, in ResEdit, Apple’s trusty and crusty resource editor. I grabbed the two sounds for email (standard and urgent) and placed them into Sniff at the proper addresses (I had to duplicate the standard sound). Then I replaced Sniff’s icon, which usually looks like a nose, with an ATI graphics icon and renamed the file “ATI Graphics Accelerator”, or something equally devious. Then I sat back and watched everyone in my office suffer through total confusion, wondering why QuickMail was chiming if they had no mail. It was wonderful.

Joe then tried to duplicate my success, but somehow corrupted his copy of Sniff in the process. As a result, every time one of his victims’ computers was supposed to make a noise, it froze up instead. Unfortunately, Joe was out of the district the day after he deployed his trickery, so I had to deal with the fallout across the district office on that one.

Just the other day, I re-arranged the settings on my boss’s WindowsXP laptop. It was fun, but not especially satisfying. It didn’t affect the external mouse he was using, so it took him awhile to figure it out. But Mike and I did have some success at telnetting into his computer and randomly restarting it. That was satisfying.

For more dirty Mac tricks, I whole-heartedly recommend The Macintosh Joker.

I think we’ve finally convinced Mike to start a weblog. This could be very interesting. Watch this space, but only if you’re not easily offended.

Today Jen and I attended her cousin’s wedding. So I thought that this entry might be a good time to reflect on some of my more enjoyable wedding memories.

Let’s start with my sister’s friend Lori. Her wedding was, bar none, the weirdest I’ve ever attended. They rented out the Fulton Opera House in Lancaster and were married there. After the ceremony, the curtain opened and we had the reception on the stage. The highlight, however, was the groom’s vows. The pastor told him to repeat after her (it was also the only wedding I ever attended that was officiated by a female, but that’s a discussion for another day), and recited his vows for him to repeat. After a moment of silence, he looked at her and said, “I’m sorry – what?”

Let’s see, then there was the wedding of my friends Steve and Donna. Steve was the pastor’s son at my old church. He was a real character. Probably still it, I guess. He rewrote the lyrics to Depeche Mode’s “Somebody” (to make them nice) nand had me sing that during the ceremony. His grandmother (I think) accompanied me on piano. Except, she had no idea how the song actually sounded and just plunked away from the sheet music he had picked up at the record store. It was way too fast. Sounded like a show tune.

Then at the end of Steve and Donna’s wedding, as the wedding guests were being dismissed, he asked me to get up with my guitar and sing “500 Miles” (the “I’m Gonna Be” song). As soon as I started playing the intro to the song, my friends in the congregation looked up at me in horror, with this “You’re not…” look on their faces.

And my favorite wedding memory: my sister’s wedding. At the reception, the pastor presented my sister, Becky, and her husband, Dave, with their Marriage Certificate, or whatever the official document is called. Dave said to the pastor, “Does this mean I get to keep her now?” The pastor looked at him, slightly disgusted, and replied, “Yes, this means that you can sleep with her now.” I wonder if the pastor ever thought of Dave in the same way again.

Yes! John saved an archive of Painfully Serious Dell Rumors!

John Siracusa still doesn’t like Mac OS X’s Finder.

Apparantely not an April Fool’s Joke: U.S. Navy Captain Mike Tillotson told reporters that three or four dolphins would work from Umm Qasr, using their natural sonar abilities to seek out mines or other explosive devices which Iraqi forces may have planted on the seabed.

The mysterious case of the 500-mile email. This haunts my dreams.

Other good April Fool’s Jokes from yesterday that I missed: Skynet CPU Back On Track (this one’s hilarious), Microsoft Word 5.1 for Mac OS X, IPv4 Security Flag (also hilarious, but only if you’re a true nerd), Microsoft Buys Open Source, and NewCode.

Bare Bones Software comes through. They always have the best April Fool’s jokes.

Crazy Apple Rumors has become Painfully Serious Dell Rumors for the day. I hope John keeps an archive of that around somewhere.

Hmmm. I was looking at last year’s April Fool’s recap and noticed this one: AOL buys Blogs. Of course, less than a year later, Google actually does.

Hyatt sez: The next release of Safari will be fully embracing Web standards by dropping all support for tables. From now on, any pages that use tables will cause Safari to play a very loud raspberry sound and refuse to display the page.

The jokes continue: Movable Bloggerland. Spokesmen for Google confirmed the acquisitions of Seven Together (makers of the popular weblog application Movable Type) and Userland (creator of Radio Userland). Plans are to combine the operations of the two companies into the existing Blogger operation. The combined entity will be known as Movable Bloggerland.

This one about nude volleyball? Not a joke. Still funny, but not a joke.

Bill has asked for a list of top ten pranks. I’ll have to think about that one for a while.

Someone wrote a thesis on Weezer. Rather than dissipate when Weezer went on hiatus, these internet communities expanded. The internet message boards became an important forum for fans to exchange opinions on Weezer and to seek out whatever updates they could muster about prospective Weezer activity.

I had a copy of the blue album back when it first came out, and I remember hearing “The Good Life” on the radio shortly thereafter, but I didn’t really start listening to the band again for a few years. I found my copy of the blue album in my car in late 1998, early 1999, and started listening again. Holy crap, I thought. Why didn’t I realize how good this is the first time?

I picked up Pinkterton shortly after that and spent a good, long time warming up to it. It’s a very different album, but I think it shows how much diversity Weezer really has. I also got The Rentals’ first album. Also cool, in a new wave kinda way.

Thanks to Dave (who fell in love with the song “Hash Pipe” before realizing what it was about) for the link.

Brent Simmons: So he writes me a check for a billion dollars, signs his name and all, and I shut up.

Hackers Condemn Arab Site Hack:“On the off chance that the persons responsible are politically aware and are Americans, then I can only assume they haven’t read the Bill of Rights, or don’t remember what the First Amendment said,” Ferrell added.

More duck and cover safety humor.

Mac OS X April Fools’ Jokes from MacOSXHints.com. Hee hee. Tomorrow is one of my favorite days of the year. I love being a sysadmin, or whatever you want to call me, on April 1.

Bill and Susan were over last night. We had a great time, and some very good conversation.

Frequency 1.0b2 is now in the hands of my beta testers. I’m thinking this will be the final beta before the April 15 release.

I’m now using Mail, iCal, and Address Book instead of Entourage. And I’m pretty happy the combination. Mail is not as glitzy as Entourage, and certainly not as full-featured, but after a week and a hald, I realize that I don’t need most of Entourage’s features. Address Book is quite a capable little app. Very nice. iCal still has some kinks. Notifications could be better, but I like the option to be sent an email reminder. That’s pretty cool.

The application “Safari” has unexpectedly quit. That probably means it’s time to go to bed now.