Bowch's Blog

Top 20 List of the Best Geek Quotes, Sayings and Phrases

1. Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF. All my base Are belong to you -- someone on SlashDot
2. There is no place like 127.0.0.1
3. Girls are like Internet Domain names, the ones I like are already taken
4. Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning
5. Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination. -- Albert Einstein
6. There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't.
7. If at first you don't succeed, call it version 1.0
8. 1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
9. I'm not anti-social; I'm just not user friendly
10. I would love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code
11. My Software never has bugs. It just develops random features.
12. The speed of sound is defined by the distance from door to computer divided by the time interval needed to close the media player and pull up your pants when your mom shouts "OH MY GOD WHAT ARE YOU DOING!!!
13. The glass is neither half-full nor half-empty: it's twice as big as it needs to be.
14. Passwords are like underwear. You shouldn't leave them out where people can see them. You should change them regularly. And you shouldn't loan them out to strangers
15. Enter any 11-digit prime number to continue...
16. A Life? Cool! Where can I download one of those?
17. I spent a minute looking at my own code by accident. I was thinking "What the hell is this guy doing?"
18. Concept: On the keyboard of life, always keep one finger on the escape button.
19. Alert! User Error. Please replace user and press any key to continue
20. If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization. -- Weinberg's Second Law

*If you can read this you're over-educated.

This Christmas sees the first new Wallace & Gromitt TV adventure for a number of years. A Matter Of Loaf And Death sees our duo running a bakery. It's due to be screened by the BBC over Christmas but was aired recently in Australia. I watched it this morning and it's really quite funny. Very reminiscent of the previous short-form animations for Aardman.

I handed Debra's PC back to her last night; installing the last few bits and pieces for her that I couldn't do while it was here. Even though it must be the oldest PC that I've had to reinstall for quite a while it was pretty much trouble-free. And talking of trouble-free; the return of Debra's PC means I don't have a problematic PC to look out. First time in a while. Although, about a month ago Kevin mentioned that his PC was playing up. I still haven't had a chance to have a look at that for him. Every time I arranged to pop up something else cropped up. I will need to reschedule that again.

I think the video pretty much speaks for itself...

I went shopping in Whitehaven this morning; and even though it was still bitterly cold, it was a lot busier than I expected. Anyway, I've spent most of this evening reinstalling Debra's PC. It's not a particularly powerful system and could really do with some more RAM. However, the installation has gone very smoothly and after I copy her documents back on tomorrow she can have it back tomorrow. I'm now gonna go and watch the Carling Cup tie between Manchester United and Blackburn Rovers.

I've been out all day today and it's been cold. I got all the way to Egremont and filled up the car before realising I had left my wallet at home. Luckily, the garage attendant was kind enough to accept my mobile phone as collateral until I returned from popping back home to collect it. I had a small panic when I got home because it wasn't where I normally keep it. I found it eventually. Popped into Whitehaven around lunchtime before returning to Egremont. I've spent the evening at Geoff and Chrissy's. We had a rather nice Ham and Pumpkin Soup for tea.

I having been feeling all that well for the last couple of days. It's nothing I can lay my finger on; just a general feeling of illness. I've had a sore throat since yesterday and a dull headache. I had to virtually drag myself out of bed aty Noon today. I really didn't want to get up but thought I had better do so. Kind of wish I hadn't bothered. So, rather than going roleplaying this evening I am instead going to curl up and have an early night. Michael will have to take Dad and Catherine shopping if they need to go. I am definitely not up to it.

It's been cold all day today; although, with it being November 30th, that's not such a surprise. I spent this afternoon watching the Manchester derby before watching the Chelsea-Arsenal game. I'm now going to try and catch up on some of the American TV that I've slipped behind with. Later, the Chicago Bears visit the Minnesota Vikings in the Sunday Night NFL game. Oh, and apparently, my cousin's PC is starting to play up. Another PC I'll need to look at sometime this coming week. Joy!

I'm off roleplaying in a couple of minutes, so here's a quick link for today. Enjoy!

After spending all day yesterday reinstalling my sister's PC I thought that I was almost done when I posted yesterday's entry. However, AVG's Firewall fell over and wouldn't restart. I spent a further 3 hours trying to sort it last night and a further 2 hours this morning. I tried everything I could think of and read a lot of the AVG forums, with no success, before biting the bullet and wiping the PC to begin again. I've reinstalled everything again today and it's behaving fine. It's in the spare room defragging the drives before I hand it back tomorrow.

I've spent all day today sat in front of my sister's PC, reinstalling it. So far I have reinstalled XP and all of the applications and utilities that she usually uses. If I've missed anything she'll be able to install the extras easily enough herself. I'm currently sat reinstalling games. I'm about 80% done with them and only have 3 or 4 more to go.

I'm about as bored as usual when reinstalling Windows.

I've spent most of today in Egremont; doing very little as it happens. We had a nice pumpkin & beef stew with brown rice for tea before I had to leave. Prior to coming home I had to pop to Whitehaven to drop some milk off for my sister and to pick up her PC, which I am reinstalling for him tomorrow. On the way home I popped into Scoot's to partition the hard drive in his new PC for him and to try and solve the lack of sound problem he was having with DVDs. It would appear that the version of Cyberlink PowerDVD that he got with the new PC doesn't have the Dolby Codec bundled with it. As a result, he was getting no sound on DVDs. I've changed his system setup so that it defaults to using Windows Media Player for now.

There's a new Prince Of Persia game due out this Christmas. It looks good.

I turned 39 today.

However, as Mondrak pointed out I'm only a day older than I was yesterday. Whilst his comments are factually accurate, we tend to consider ourselves as gaining an extra year in age on our birthdays. If somebody had asked me how old I was a couple of weeks ago I would have replied that I was 38, and maybe would've mentioned that I would be 39 in a couple of weeks. But, if somebody had asked me in the summer I would have responded with just the 38 answer, and wouldn't have mentioned that I would be 39 in November unless specifically asked.

However, ask the same question of one of my nephews and they would've said 7½, 9¾ or whatever their actual age was. The extra ½, ¾ or whatever seems to become less important as one gets older.

Also, as a youngster I tended to look forward to my birthday with excitement and whilst I never really received extravagent gifts, I was always fairly happy with what I did receive. As I've gotten older I tend to just look forward to the day as a means of recognising my slow passage into and eventually beyond middle-aged. I still enjoy receiving messages of congratulations, well wishes and birthday cards. However, I am now well past the age at which I expect and look forward to receiving presents. As a family we have all moved away from buying presents for the adult members and instead tend to put a lottery ticket or two into each card. It's not much, but you never know. None of us have ever won anything substantial as a result but there have been a few small wins.

Looking back on the last year of my life I have come to recognise that making stupid decisions result in consequences. I made a stupid decision in October 2007 that cost me my job. I was fired just 3 days before my 38th birthday. Now, here we are, a little over a year later, and I am still lokking to get back into employment. It's not been through a lack of trying. I have made a significant number of applications and have had, what I considered at the time, to be a number of fairly good interviews. I have even had one or two exceptionally good interviews. However, none have resulted in a job offer. The best I managed was to be included in a final shortlist of 3. Looking back, the decision I made at the end of October last year was probably not my finest hour and I suppose if I had to make the decision again I would probably think hard about it. However, after considering everything, the problem is that I would probably still have made the same decision that I did last year.

As I said, older, not wiser!

Monday marks the 20th anniversary of the first broadcast of one of the best, cult sci-fi shows of all time; Mystery Science Theater 3000. MST3K ran for 198 epsiodes over 11 seasons and also spawned a movie, based on This Island Earth, in 1996. The premise of the show was that a man and his robot sidekicks are trapped on a satellite in space by an evil scientist and forced to watch a selection of terrible movies. The man and his robots provide a running commentary to the film, making fun of its flaws and wisecracking their way through the film.

The initial run of the show, referred to as Season 0, ran on KTMA-TV Channel 23 Minneapolis from November 24th 1988 to May 28th 1989 after which the show was picked up by Comedy Central and ran for 7 seasons. When Comedy Central dropped the show, MST3K's Internet fan-base staged a write-in campaign to keep the show alive which resulted in the Sci Fi Channel picking up the series, where it ran for another 3 seasons. The final episode aired on Sci-Fi on 8th August 1999.

Unfortunately, problems with movie rights have led to problems releasing the series on DVD. There are some available and there is a list on Wikipedia. However, these are all Region 1, NTSC releases. We can only hope that something good happens in the future and Region 2 PAL releases finally see the light of day.