By phlll, on July 2nd, 2010
I have an account at DeviantART. It’s a growing community of artists who post stuff online. Some specialize in random pictures, or paintings, or even ceramics. All in all, it’s a fun place with a lot of support.
Most of the artists are also happy to have their works incorporated into your works, provided you don’t sell it. It’s part of the whole Creative Commons movement you may have heard of in the past couple years. It works nicely, and it’s really all kind of on the honor system anyway.
So I’m looking for some images to make a picture for my wife. She’d been telling me a story about an opposum, and it put me in the mind of (roughly) this:
 Taste the whimsy!
I thought it was funny. So did people in the office. But one person didn’t find it very funny.
The girl who made this:
 Yeah Dana, I went there. It's your cupcake. She sent me several nastygrams about how she didn’t give me permission to use the cupcake, and how it was HERS and repeated rebukes about how it wasn’t the DeviantArt way. I took the picture down and she STILL bitched about it.
Finally I told her we were done, and I was ready to let it go. Until I went through her Etsy store.
It turns out she’s a raging hypocrite. While she’s worried that everyone will think I made a cupcake, she’s been making (and selling) this:
 Yummy TradeMark of Not Dana. It’s kind of galling that she’d whine about me “stealing” her stuff, when she has no qualms whatsoever about stealing profit from the great Pocky. If there’s one thing I despise, it’s hypocracy.
So the original image is presented here in ALL it’s glory. And it will be FOREVER!!! HA!
Or, unless she apologizes. 
By phlll, on June 14th, 2010
Today was “Bring your Velociraptor to Work Day”, according to Facebook. Naturally my wife and I decided we both needed to participate.
We found it’s actually kind of hard to locate and purchase velociraptors if you wait until the last minute. My contingency plan was to make a cool wallpaper if we couldn’t find any.
Luckily, we did (at 7PM on a Sunday night), but I decided to use my time for bad, and continue to teach myself how to use GIMP for a wallpaper.
Woo!
By phlll, on May 26th, 2010
For the past several days we’ve been stomping around some unfamiliar territory. Looking around, taking lots of pictures and going to stores that are unfamiliar.
The pictures part is the most difficult. I’m trying to get a nice selection representative of the area, both with and without us in them. Without is easier, because I can always add us (or dragons) in later. But it seems like more often than not this happens:
 I have no idea who this guy is. It looks like I took a picture of this random hipster. Even though it looks like he was standing still, I’m sure he was probably on his way to a coffee shop or book store.
Still, now I’m going to have to make him into a phone booth or giant horned fish.
And all I wanted was a picture of the building. You know, so it can be “attacked” later.
By waffles.
By phlll, on April 14th, 2010
Yeah, I said it.
I got to spend a little bit of time playing with an iPad that someone had purchased. Not only does this person own one iPad, they actually bought two of them.
 A happy purchaser of iPads. And also a tool.
Now this picture isn’t actually the guy I know, but he expresses a similar delight. And I have to begrudgingly admit that the iPad is actually pretty cool.
Sure, it isn’t really nice to type on, but that isn’t what it’s for. And it doesn’t multitask on release, but it isn’t for that either.
What the iPad is for is the ability to surf the internet and check your email. All from the comfort of your couch or toilet. With no keyboard, you’re unlikely to spill milk into the device (and yes, I know someone who did this.)
You can also take the iPad to coffee shops, and have the babes envy you. You can leave it in your car overnight and see if the screen cracks in the fluctuating temperatures. You can try to read stuff outside as the sunlight washes the screen out- take that, Kindle!
And porn. Let’s not forget Apple’s long-running campaign that you can safely surf for even the most bizarre fetish porn with a Mac (or iPhone/Pod/Pad) safely. So yeah, I’ll bet the guy above has already checked out his favorite “nurses” site.
All of this starts at only $500! Which means I’ll probably be trying to con the wife into letting me get one. Because gadgets are cool.
After she gets a new laptop, of course.
By phlll, on March 18th, 2010
On my way to work today I stopped behind this at a red light…
…and the first thought to honestly enter my head was “What a tool.”
Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe someone who spends $95,000 on a Porsche isn’t a tool. Maybe they just have more cash than brains. I mean, this is Pennsylvania. The roads are crap and will beat the car to death.
At least if you’re going to be a tool, get a Hummer or something. You’re still going to get laughed at (and yes, people are laughing at you much more often than envying you,) but at least you can take a pothole.
By phlll, on March 12th, 2010
In kindergarten we went on field trips. An especially vivid memory of that time was visiting an airport, and being asked if anyone was carrying magnets (since they’d set off the metal detectors.) While field trips are still an important part of education, apparently teachers now ramp down expectations where you go.
Looking at the Community Board in Target, I noticed that some kids came to visit for Dr. Seuss day. At the end, they all signed a poster that was also a birthday card for the late Doctor.
It was all kind of cute, until you notice that someone included Death on the card. Kids are twisted.
By phlll, on February 24th, 2010
Somehow, I’m not sure a cartoon propane tank holding fire is quite the image this company would want to portray.
Or maybe I’m wrong.
By phlll, on February 11th, 2010
So we had a couple UPSes die back in the summer. No big deal, we just migrated the servers off of the affected UPSes onto others. We looked at the batteries, but didn’t have anything in stock to replace them.
Saddened but unbroken, we shoved the old batteries back into the UPSes so we wouldn’t trip over them. Then we finally ordered some new battery units after a couple incidents of really nasty weather (although a new power generator is due to be installed soon.)
Today they finally came in. But for some reason, I couldn’t get the old tray out of our 1400XL.
Not being one to allow a UPS to tell me who the boss is, I yanked until it came out, placing my feet on the rack and tugging. I’m sure it would have looked great to anyone wandering down the hall.
And soon I saw why it was so hard to remove… because we all could have died.
And maybe if we didn’t all tragically die in a fire due to overheating batteries and electrical fires, they still could have exploded and sprayed acid all over the place. It would have eaten through the walls of the server room (or our flesh) and smelled really bad. Like rotten egg bad, or burn-victim bad.
Remember all those warnings about not overcharging batteries? It looks like the battery people aren’t just blowing smoke with this one. They actually will swell up.
In fact, one of the batteries may actually be a little weepy. Of course, that could be from the nasty gouge the lower-right battery got from the UPS frame.
By phlll, on September 25th, 2009
A few months ago we decided to have some fun with our intern Scooter.
He’d been mocking us with a “Max Headroom” wallpaper. He’s too young to remember “Max Headroom: Twenty Minutes Into The Future”. And by “too young”, I mean “he wasn’t born yet.” He just didn’t realize how good that show was, at least to a teenaged geek.
So I decided to teach him a gentle lesson by changing his wallpaper. While I could have done something like copying all the files on his computer to his desktop, I wanted to be nice. Nice is just changing his wallpaper so that he isn’t looking at Max Headroom anymore.
A few simple changes to the WindowsXP graphic (to make it WinpwndXP) and a simple registry edit and we were all ready to go. Scooter came into work and fired up his PC. We watched anxiously, and….
Max Headroom showed up.
Puzzled, I dug into the registry. Everything looked fine. I changed it on mine, and the wallpaper changed, but it wasn’t working on his! Puzzled, my coworker and I decided to just berate Scooter instead. He has no relevant work experience and badly needed a haircut. That was enough to entertain us. The wallpaper change prank was forgotten.
Until today.
Another coworker mentioned someone with the same name as Scooter had issues with a wallpaper he couldn’t change. One that says “Winpwnd”, coincidentally enough. He thought another computer geek was pranking him, and was waiting for months for the other geek to say something.
At least now I know it worked. And that Max Headroom still rules.
By phlll, on September 10th, 2009
Our dog Hoot has needed an e-collar (those lampshade things) for a while now. Like me, he has a problem with gnawing on his fingernails. Or claws. You know what I mean. We take it off, and he goes back to the chewing. The vet isn’t sure what’s going on, but none of the drugs are as effective as not letting him get to his feet.
Hoot also has a fascination with eating dirt, or at least smearing it all over his lampshade. Then he comes inside and bumps into stuff, leaving black marks on walls, furniture, and the fiancee. This drives her insane, because she feels I’m not checking the ridge of the e-collar for mud. I wipe the collar off with a paper towel, but the dog is very tricky and (probably) hides mud under his toungue until he gets past me. Then he spits it onto the collar and smears it everywhere.
It isn’t out of the question that Hoot would be this clever. Our other dogs are actually able to hold grass and mud in between their toes and sneak it into the house. I’ve seen it happen, even after I carefully clean their paws.
However much I try to convince Mags of this, she just says I’m being inattentive to details. That isn’t true though. I seldom forget a dog when I let them go outside to pee. Maybe it helps that they bark at the neighbors, but I still get them back inside. I tell her that should count for something. She disagrees. She thinks that if you sometimes forget that a dog is afraid of thunder and you leave him outside during a storm, somehow this proves that you will forget to make sure a child is wearing shoes before you send them to school.
Since I’ve only ever watched nieces and nephews, I think it’s way too early to be assuming that level of dereliction from me. Give me a chance to prove my neglect!
I promise I won’t disappoint.
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