Author Archives: brad

Quiz: How well do you know these world-famous products? My final score: 60 out of 100.

Gruber on Dvorak’s article: This really isn’t worth debunking point-by-point. Just remember that Dvorak is pulling all of this out of his… [expletive deleted].

You know, whenever someone mentions Verizon, I think of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Why, you ask?

Remember the scene where T-1000 (wonderfully played by Robert Patrick), who was previously invincible, was frozen with (I believe) liquid nitrogen and shattered into a billion little pieces? That’s Bell. Then, when things warmed up, all the little pieces melted back into liquid and reassembled into T-1000 again. That’s Verizon. Think about it.

And if you haven’t seen T2, go rent it. Very good movie.

MSNBC: …they said it was highly likely that he [Saddam] and his sons were dead if they were still there when the bombs hit.

“…whenever a word with a precise meaning loses it, nurse I lose a tool.” – Neil Gaiman

Gruber analyzes Quark’s recent statements. Please excuse the profanity.

Linux on the desktop? Karlin Lillington: But it’s not easy enough yet for most computer users. And most do not need many of Linux’s most powerful features — not even its stability, not when the sacrifice is the ability to use a computer at all. My dad could not use this. My non-geek friends could not use this. Yet. Yet. Tried it. Several times. It’s just not there yet. I want my computer to work for me, not the other way around. Come to think of it, that’s also why I’m not a big fan of Windows. My Mac just works, and pretty much does what it’s told to do.

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.