There’s so much fun to be had with this small perl script, which changes the default message on certain HP printers. One listed is “INSERT COIN”, but my favorite suggestion so far has been “CONTAINMENT BREACH”.

For Halloween this year, I’m thinking of making some of these nasty Witch’s Jars.

My co-worker Matt is joining the National Guard, and is going to Basic Training in a few days. We kid him that his training will consist of being handed a gun and getting sand kicked in his face, before they put him on the boat for Iraq.

Today he was complaining about writing a script to test a crash caused by fuser.

Matt: “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to write a virus payload.”
Me: “It’s the same thing as what you’ll be doing in Iraq, except instead of machines you’ll be killin’ filthy terrists.”
Matt: “…”
Me: “You definitely need to name your test system Osama. Then have your system crasher deploy into /bin/laden .”

I just discovered Xming, which is a lightweight, free X11 server for Windows.

In short, it’s about 2MB and sucks an awful lot less than trying to install all 80GB of Cygwin when you just need an X11 session.

It works just fine with Putty, too.

I’m now required to bake these cookies. Luckily, the mixer is inbound and the ingredients are being air-lifted into the drop zone.

On Saturday, when my Blackberry 7100t crashed three times, I was annoyed but not concerned. It crashed a few more times on Sunday, so I wiped and reinstalled it. The phone was ok all Monday, but on Tuesday, mid-conversation, the speaker went out. I rebooted it a few times, and even disassembled it to clean it out. Nothing helped. The trusty Blackberry was toast (or jam?)

This was a big problem, since I’m on-call this week, and have some precariously-balanced systems that I expect to fail very soon.

Roommate from Hell

When I was in college, I had the worst. roommate. ever. We’ll call him C. C was a heavy-metal redneck cowboy. This meant he only wore black, but wore cowboy boots. He was a big Pantera fan, too.

C smoked non-stop, and he drank Coke non-stop. He’d constantly hawk up snot and spit it in half-empty Coke cans that he’d also use for ash trays.

C never cleaned, because cleaning was ‘women’s work’.

MySpace: where good webdesign went to die. When Tripod was still around, I thought we’d seen the worst that amateur “web designers” could inflict on the web. Boy, was I wrong.

Luckily, this Greasemonkey MySpace Style Remover script quietly cleans MySpace pages of their screeching embedded emo music, their 90 hot-linked animated photo albums, their 2MB .bmp background images, and reduces them to the boring, quiet, ugly MySpace default.

Because I am a hopeless slut for Apple, I got the AppleTV a week or so ago. I figured it’d be like most toys that I get — I’d play with it for a few days, then get bored and put it away. Wii. After a few hours, no freakin’ way. This thing rocks.

First, I didn’t realize how nice it was to have something that seamlessly integrated iTunes with my component stereo system. I have my Tivo set up to do this, but the Tivo/iTunes navigation is painful and slow. Now, listening to iTunes via my stereo works great, and it works with my regular Harmony remote for my TV and stereo.

I stumbled across Sagefire’s post of a collection of Classic Mac Sounds.Yay! I now have the original “Wild Eep” sound!