Eric Bergen

While wandering around on yahoo I stumbled onto the Yahoo! Ask section. On this section there was a very creative answer for why cats and buttered bread always land the same way. The odd thing is that they found the answer on Altavista. I would think Yahoo! having one of the best search engines around would use their own stuff or maybe they are checking out the competition or maybe that employee has been an Altavista user since back in the day. No big deal really, it just struck me as odd.

One more thing.

On the Ask homepage there is a link under ‘Bookmarks’ for ” Emily Post Institute” which when read quickly looks a lot like “Emily Prostitute”. It made me double take. It’s funny how the dyslexic mind twists things around.

During random conversation on IRC the question “How many ounces are in a shot?” was brought up. I guessed 1 then 1.5 and decided to goto Google for the answer. Much to my surprise Google Calculator knows how how many ounces are in a shot.

I heard a basic form of this from somebody back when I was doing pc tech work. It’s a way to explain what each component in a computer does in a way that your grandmother will understand.

Your kitchen is the computer, you are the processor, your counter is ram, and your cupboards are the hard drive. Running a program is much the same as cooking a meal. To start with you go to the cupboard, grab some bowls and place these on the counter. This is much like loading a program into ram. The more you plan to cook the more ram you need so you don’t have keep moving things back and forth from the cupboard to the counter. A faster CPU can help but most of it’s time will be wasted moving things from the cupboard to the counter if your counter isn’t big enough. The more cooking tools you want to store the more cupboard space you need. Thus everything needs to grow in relation to everything else.

More things can be added in such as using a cutting board to explain cpu cache.

If you want to do some good people watching without waiting until 4:00AM to goto Denny’s. Try going to a bowling alley any night of the week. Even though the stereotypical bowler is either on a date in high school or a 40 year old auto mechanic I have observed that it’s one of the finest places to see one of the most diverse crowds of people anywhere. In the lane next to me was a group that seemed to consist of a stoner and a few gangster wannabes, next to them high school jocks and next to them was a group of older guys one of which were wearing a super man shirt with his gray chest hair showing.

I shot 135, 179, and 157 last night. When was the last time you went bowling?

As I’m writing this Jeremy is in his kitchen pounding out chicken. Juice and ice projectiles are flying about the kitchen. He came up with an idea to solve it called a Chicken Shield. I started to think about how many ideas are brought up in random conversation and dismissed as the talk continues. The Chicken Shield will now be forever documented here. In my blog.

About 30% of my e-mail spam is related to mortgage applications. They go something like this, “We got your mortgage application and would like to follow up on it.” Recently I have been getting the same kind of spam on my answering machine at home. I get the feeling it’s sneaky companies harvesting whois information. Both my email and phone number are listed on a few domains. Is this happening to anybody else?

As most guys, I have never really been a big fan of Valentines Day. Instead of a rant I decided to do a bit of research to see just where this holiday came from and how it got turned into the big competition it is today. There has to be a dark secret somewhere, right?

Yes.

Well not entirely dark but it is creepy none the less. It seems there are a few different legends about St. Valentine. One involves him being a martyr because he performed forbidden marriages for young couples. Young men were supposed to be single so they could fight in the army. Think draft dodger. The first Valentine was sent by him, from his prison cell, to a young woman that he loved.

Other legends involve spring ceremonies of fertility where young men would cut goat hide into strips dip them in sacrificial blood. They would then run around gently slapping women and crops with the goat hide. The women didn’t mind because it was supposed to make them more fertile for the year.

This starts to be replaced by exchanging hand written notes around the 18th century. Which is fine until the corporations get involved. Who would want to hand write a personal note when they can be cranked off a press for you? Not me. The jewelery companies became involved and we now have the spectacle that exists today. The longer you are in a relationship the more extravigent the gifts are supposed to become. We have to keep outdoing ourselves every year.

I would prefer to chase chicks around with a blood soaked goat hide strip than pay $50 for a dozen stale roses or some hip widening chocolate. How about you?

Don’t worry this isn’t a rant. It’s more a description of the campus coffee machines that kept me alive through my college years. During the colder months of my time of higher learning I spent the first few minutes on campus shivering in front of the coffee machine. After putting in the same quarters multiple times the machine would prompt me for my selection; cappuccinos, coffee, hot chocolate. Then comes the full cup of half cup. Since I always like to think my cup is full and I can’t see paying $.10 less for half the coffee I always choose the full cup picture. At this point the machine spools up like a jet. It closes the blast shield as if one malfunction could cause me to lose my manhood. After some grunts groans and spits it goes silent. The blast door waits an exorbitant amount of time before raising the blast shield. I then proceed to grab the cup out and burn my fingers while unfolding the little paper handle. After sitting down I take the first sip, the paper handles flex just enough to spill coffee on my pants while the first sip enters my mouth and proceeds to burn the top layer of skin off my tongue.

The campus coffee machine. One of the few things that has tried to both save and kill me at the same time.

For those of you that don’t know isnoop.net has a program setup to distribute Gmail invites. I received a thank you note today from somebody that got one of my donated invites. It seems isnoop has more invites than they can give out since Gmail recently gave out 50 invites per user but I’m sure these will eventually be used up. If you have any donate them!

For four years I have been leaving work through the same door. A few years ago I noticed a brown box mounted at the top of the door. Every once in a while I see it again and wonder what it’s for. Today I came into a work and heard “ding dong”. It turned out that brown box is the door dinger. It’s been dead for over 4 years because nobody bothered to change the battery.