Jayne Cobb (Firefly)/Luke Duke
Hiro Protagonist (Snow Crash)/Gabriel (Constantine)
Cassandra of Troy/Jack the Ripper
Alex P. Keaton (Family Ties)/Wyatt Frame (Josie and the Pussycats)
Dr. Stephen Maturin (Master and Commander)/Doc Brown (Back to the Future)
Loki (Norse Mythology)/Lancelot (King Arthur)
Governor Swann (PotC)/Prince Humperdinck (Princess Bride)
Mal Reynolds (Firefly)/The Conduit (Angel)
Count Olaf (A Series of Unfortunate Events)/Garibaldi (Babylon 5)
R.Buckminster Fuller/Pee-Wee Herman
Loki (Norse Mythology)/Squidward (Spongebob Squarepants)
Jesus/Elizabeth Bennet (Pride and Prejudice)
Showing posts with label TMI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TMI. Show all posts
Friday, April 4, 2008
brain...splode!
Selected results from a slash fic pairing generator:
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Friday, August 3, 2007
Random bits, bytes, nybbles, etc
1. " . . . that [his] name not be lost to the knowledge of men . . . " -- One of the very best folksingers who ever lived has not had his tunage for sale on the iTunes Store . . . until now. When I started buying music via iTunes, I looked in vain for Canadian folk muisc legend Stan Rogers. I was first introduced to Stan's music in, of all places, the SCA (yes, his songs are almost as "period" as an iPod). I first heard Barrett's Privateers at a Society bardic circle. I asked for the lyrics from the bard and learned the song by heart by the time I got home from the event (a 5 hour drive to An Tir for a war). I ran into more Stan Rogers goodness a few years later in the context of what was then the most compelling science fiction RPG background of the 1990s: Traveller: The New Era. Apparently, one of the developers was a Canadian, because one of the adventures for that game involved a starship called the Mary Ellen Carter. In many ways, that song pretty much sums up TNE. One trip through teh google later, I made the connection between these two experinces and Stan Rogers. Once other, more pressing, needs are met, I'll be downloading teh good stuff again. I currently have recordings of both songs -- the rather good 3 Pints Gone cover of Mary Ellen Carter and, in two of the greatest offenses ever recorded against the memory of a great artist, that fools-gold voiced tenor frank emerson's "covers" of MEC and Barrett's Privateers. If you're going to pay tribute to a legend AT LEAST GET THE LYRICS RIGHT AND DON'T DROP VERSES! Biggest waste of two bucks ever. And don't get me started on the waste of iTunes Library space that is his version of The Minstrel Boy! To paraphrase PeeJee from Something Positive, were I female, I could menstrate better music! I can only hope his name is lost to the knowledge of men!
2. ID10T: It's not just for computer novices anymore!
Customer calls in, issue is that his Mac is booting to a blank gray screen on its LCD display. This is not an especially common issue. There are notes from prior contacts where the previous "tech" documented that he did "everything" -- reset SMC, booted to CD, advised trying an external monitor and calling back with the result. He did everything, all right . . . everything but what was to me the blindingly obvious: resetting the fscking PRAM. I had Mister Customer reset the system's PRAM, and lo and behold, built-in video returned.
/rant=ON
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls: I simply could not believe this. Resetting PRAM fixes a lot of stuff: USB / Firewire / ethernet / modem port issues, mis-recognition of the hard drive and most especially video issues. Usually PRAM resets are an overused troubleshooting step for issues where they are singularly ineffective, typically startup issues that arise after the OS starts loading. This is stuff any noob fresh out of training knows.
And this guy was NOT a newbie. Nor was he from an outsourced contact center. He sat two isles over from me. He made a customer troubleshoot ineffectually and even left him with the expectation that his system would need service, for an issue that should have been resolved with the very first troubleshooting step tried. He made someone call in a second time, wait on hold to music that may not quite be to taste, for an issue that should have been fixed in less than 5 minutes.
People like him are why I sometimes get angry enough to explode. Why? Because call center tech support reps like me are ranked for perks like desirable schedules, promotions, awards and such by two things: sales and call statistics . . . especially call duration. I got the distinct feeling from the customer that he felt rushed by the rep (something we are NOT supposed to do) because after we did the quick fix on the one system he had two other issues with other computers for me to look at! Fscking stats whores like him do this all the time. So you piss off a customer and leave me to clean up the mess. Not to mention hosing my call stats, which makes getting awards, promotions, and a decent schedule harder.
/rant=OFF
I feel a bit better now....
2. ID10T: It's not just for computer novices anymore!
Customer calls in, issue is that his Mac is booting to a blank gray screen on its LCD display. This is not an especially common issue. There are notes from prior contacts where the previous "tech" documented that he did "everything" -- reset SMC, booted to CD, advised trying an external monitor and calling back with the result. He did everything, all right . . . everything but what was to me the blindingly obvious: resetting the fscking PRAM. I had Mister Customer reset the system's PRAM, and lo and behold, built-in video returned.
/rant=ON
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls: I simply could not believe this. Resetting PRAM fixes a lot of stuff: USB / Firewire / ethernet / modem port issues, mis-recognition of the hard drive and most especially video issues. Usually PRAM resets are an overused troubleshooting step for issues where they are singularly ineffective, typically startup issues that arise after the OS starts loading. This is stuff any noob fresh out of training knows.
And this guy was NOT a newbie. Nor was he from an outsourced contact center. He sat two isles over from me. He made a customer troubleshoot ineffectually and even left him with the expectation that his system would need service, for an issue that should have been resolved with the very first troubleshooting step tried. He made someone call in a second time, wait on hold to music that may not quite be to taste, for an issue that should have been fixed in less than 5 minutes.
People like him are why I sometimes get angry enough to explode. Why? Because call center tech support reps like me are ranked for perks like desirable schedules, promotions, awards and such by two things: sales and call statistics . . . especially call duration. I got the distinct feeling from the customer that he felt rushed by the rep (something we are NOT supposed to do) because after we did the quick fix on the one system he had two other issues with other computers for me to look at! Fscking stats whores like him do this all the time. So you piss off a customer and leave me to clean up the mess. Not to mention hosing my call stats, which makes getting awards, promotions, and a decent schedule harder.
/rant=OFF
I feel a bit better now....
Friday, July 20, 2007
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Friday, June 8, 2007
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Crudity = psychic pollution; Don't spare the brain bleach!
Has anyone else noticed just how more coarse and crude our culture has become the last fifteen years or so?
Item: I was at my doctor's office recently, and there was a young man sitting in the waiting room there who wore a an incredibly crude, obscene shirt. How bad? Bad enough that I do not even want to link to the design, much less look at it. Suffice it to say it depicted people engaged in sex acts and alluded to others.
Now, I'm no prude. Far from it. I consider sexuality to be sacred, something to share with one's partner(s) and with nobody else. Things like this step waaaaay over the line. I needed brain bleach to rid my psyche of the grungy residue.
Item: The very large number of chat conversations in World of Warcraft punctuated by (%$#@&,
&$#! and *%#@)*&%*)!@ (yes, folks can mask obscenities in the WoW GUI, thank the gods . . .). Fortunately, I'm playing in a wonderful guild where this kind of thing is simply.not.tolerated . . . and all I need to deal with the at-large f-bombers and other jerks is to use my old friend, "/ignore (jerk's name)" -- and stay out ofthe Barrens Stranglethorn Vale.
Of course, some of you might say to me: "He doth protest too much." After all, this blog is "Operation: Mindfsck." Yes, the "fsck" as I useit here is a replacement for the infamous "f-bomb" word. However, there is a deeper meaning: "fsck" is a *nix command that checks the consistiency of a computer's file system. As one does the fsck command to validate the filesystem integrity of the filesystem on a computer HD, a mindfsck validates the integrity of one's mind.
Sheer, undiluted crudity and psychic pollution: yet another reason to fight to preserve my splendid isolation.
Item: I was at my doctor's office recently, and there was a young man sitting in the waiting room there who wore a an incredibly crude, obscene shirt. How bad? Bad enough that I do not even want to link to the design, much less look at it. Suffice it to say it depicted people engaged in sex acts and alluded to others.
Now, I'm no prude. Far from it. I consider sexuality to be sacred, something to share with one's partner(s) and with nobody else. Things like this step waaaaay over the line. I needed brain bleach to rid my psyche of the grungy residue.
Item: The very large number of chat conversations in World of Warcraft punctuated by (%$#@&,
&$#! and *%#@)*&%*)!@ (yes, folks can mask obscenities in the WoW GUI, thank the gods . . .). Fortunately, I'm playing in a wonderful guild where this kind of thing is simply.not.tolerated . . . and all I need to deal with the at-large f-bombers and other jerks is to use my old friend, "/ignore (jerk's name)" -- and stay out of
Of course, some of you might say to me: "He doth protest too much." After all, this blog is "Operation: Mindfsck." Yes, the "fsck" as I useit here is a replacement for the infamous "f-bomb" word. However, there is a deeper meaning: "fsck" is a *nix command that checks the consistiency of a computer's file system. As one does the fsck command to validate the filesystem integrity of the filesystem on a computer HD, a mindfsck validates the integrity of one's mind.
Sheer, undiluted crudity and psychic pollution: yet another reason to fight to preserve my splendid isolation.
Thursday, April 5, 2007
They said it . . .
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Sunday, April 1, 2007
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
You know when you've played too much World of Warcraft when...
... the phrase "Artisan Riding" does NOT cause you to shudder.
Monday, March 12, 2007
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Robot's Rules of Order
Amiov's 3 Laws of Robotics may become law in South Korea:
For the Asimov-impaired, the Three Laws appear here.
The most interesating excerpts here:
How about robotic celebs? They cannot be any more obnoxious that BenKat, Tommifer, K-Fed and the evil that is Brittney. Oops, Hollywood's already done that one
For the Asimov-impaired, the Three Laws appear here.
The most interesating excerpts here:
... The South Koreans are not the only people working on such a code, but others are independent efforts by scientists themselves uneasy at the implications of their work....
This I like; scientists concerned over the social and political dimentions of science. We need more of that....The initial findings of one such group, the European Robotics Research Network (Euron) were unveiled last summer, and went as far as raising the question of the ethics of robot sexuality, and whether sex-toy robots should be developed....
And there you have it, straight from the Too-Much-Information Superhighway. Glad to see someone's thinking about the ethics of robot sex toys. This meme adds a whole new meaning to the phrase "hardware upgrade," doesn't it?How about robotic celebs? They cannot be any more obnoxious that BenKat, Tommifer, K-Fed and the evil that is Brittney. Oops, Hollywood's already done that one
I could go on, but why?
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