Month: March 2008

Smells Like Brownies

“Dear Residents,

“… We are notifying all residents on your floor of a series of complaints we have received regarding an unusual odor. At this time we are unable to identify which apartment the odor is coming from and, as a result, feel it is important to heighten everyone’s awareness to bring about improvement.

“A smoke odor has been detected that is not related to cigarette, cigar, or cooking smoke. The odor is creating concern that perhaps an illegal substance is being smoked in an apartment.”

Bring Back the Porn

Reuters reports that after Indonesia’s parliament passed a law criminalizing the transmission of pornography, hackers defaced the information ministry’s website in protest.

Which brings us back to Perry’s Perspective:

“Let me go ahead and share a little something special with you that I like to call Perry’s Perspective:

“One, if someone’s standing in front of me in line at the coffee shop and they can’t decide what they want in the half-hour it took to get to the register I should be allowed to kill them.

“Two, I’m fairly sure if they took porn off the Internet there’d only be one website left and it’d be called ‘Bring Back the Porn.’ …”

It’s not often we get to scientifically prove something said in a sitcom, but it’s oh so sweet. “This moment is so great I’d cheat on that other moment from before, marry this one, and raise a family of tiny little moments.” (from My Unicorn)

Whereas I Only Comprehend It

Teacher: “You are supposed to be doing a packet, not dismantling your pen.”

Student: “But I’m not dismantling it – I’m taking it apart!”

Teacher: “‘Dismantling’ and ‘taking apart’ are synonyms – they mean the same thing.”

Student: “Yes, but I understand ‘taking apart.'”

– Sixth Grade Interaction

The Cookies! We’ve Lost the Cookies!

“There was an error verifying your session. Please make sure you have enabled the cookies!”

Somehow the combination of the definite article, the exclamation point, and the fact that I’m pretty tired right now have made that a very funny error message.

You Had Me at “Adult Video Chat”

“Video Girls BiZ is a website software suite, containing all software required for powering a pay-per-view online videochat business.  This can be used for various paid video chat businesses including adult video chat, online video advice, internet school tutoring…”

Wait, adult video chat and “internet school tutoring” aren’t really just the same thing?

I’ve been duped!

Free at Last

It’s fixed! It’s fixed! Thank God almighty, it’s fixed at last!

Sorry, I may have gotten carried away there. Leopard’s Spaces (about which you’ve heard me gripe ad nauseam) is finally fixed in 10.5.2 after changing a setting in a .plist file. This is done by:

defaults write com.apple.Dock workspaces-auto-swoosh -bool NO
killall Dock

My world is complete. I can now upgrade to Leopard. I’m the only Mac-user one in my office who hasn’t already.

Thanks to Lifehacker, Secrets (a new application to tweak many settings in Leopard), and ultimately Mac OS X Hints.

The Bunny, Sir! He’s Stopped Going, Sir!

Dear Apple,

For days now you have been warning me with persistent popup messages, “The batteries in your Apple Wireless Keyboard are critically low, and the device may turn itself off at any time. Please replace the batteries as soon as possible.”

I’m hereby informing you that I have already taken standard precautionary measures against this possibility. I have an academy trained emergency battery replacement team on sixty-second standby and an independent crisis management squad ready to supervise battery replacement operations from a dedicated battery replacement command center established in a secured bunker at a geographically separate (and undisclosed) location. These precautions will be sufficient to cope with potential battery death.

I appreciated your early warning of this potential catastrophe, but since no emergency situation has arisen in the week since you first brought the possibility to my attention, I see no need for the hourly reminders. In fact, they’re extremely distracting, since I cannot continue my critical typing work until I dismiss each of them. Since the keyboard continues to be working at full keyboarding capacity, they seem superfluous.

In conclusion, kindly shut up about my keyboard batteries. You made a shoddy wireless keyboard that’s missing the entire number pad, that rearranges the function keys for absolutely no reason at all, and that eats batteries like it’s 1982. The least you can do is let me keep typing in peace. Dying batteries really don’t constitute quite the crisis situation you make them out to be.

Sincerely,

An Appl