Monthly Archives: September 2007

Bought teh Haloz

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So, I cracked, sunk into peer pressure (of a sort), and gave in and purchased Halo 3. I’ve yet to actually play it yet, as I purchased it during my lunch hour with my friend James, who bought a copy as well (the limited Collector’s edition for both of us), although he also bought an Xbox 360 Elite as well.

As such, I suspect I’ll be online a lot over the next couple of weeks, at least, playing some Haloz. In the event that someone somehow doesn’t have my Xbox Live information, here you go! Have a gamertag box.

Feel free to friend me via Xbox Live if you haven’t already, and maybe we can have some fun shooting each other in the face.

Suggestion fun

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So, I tend to run Firefox as a web browser, and it has a lovely little Firefox search toolbar that I use often. I never bother going to Google directly, since I can just search there. On occasion, I’ll do a more verbal search — rather than searching for just key terms, it seems like searching for a phrase helps. So, I was typing out a phrase, and I paused for a moment, when the suggestion system kicked in.

If you haven’t seen this before, try it. Type in a keyword or two, and a list will pop down, suggesting what it thinks you may be looking for. Often with just a couple of keywords, this suggestion system can speed up searching, or possibly help find better keywords. However, when I’m typing a phrase, it’ll go for the phrases people use most often, which can be very amusing. I had started by typing out “How do I get” when the suggestions kicked in. Here’s the top set, as I found the amusing.

  • How do I get a passport That seems like a reasonable query, especially since they’re needed for Canadian travel and such.
  • How do I get pregnant — I thought they taught that in school.
  • How do I get there — Ah, precision.
  • How do I get rid of fruit flies — Sorry, got no commentary on this one — they use some sticky yellow stuff here at work.
  • How do I get a new social security card — Again, reasonable.
  • How do I get you alone — Creepy.
  • How do I get on myspace at school — How cute, burgeoning security hackers.
  • How do I get a copy of my birth certificate — Not much to say on this one either.
  • How do I get you alone lyrics — okay, I guess, maybe the earlier query wasn’t so creepy, but I was very amused by it until I saw this suggestion.

Not the most amusing list ever, I suppose, but I got a kick out of it. Unfortunately, in the process of looking through the suggestions, I also completely forgot what I was actually searching to get. Oops.

Edit: Nearly two hours later, I randomly recalled what I was looking for. I wanted to know how I could get an SMS short code for a particular purpose. They’re way too expensive for anything outside of commercial use, and even then, you’d really have to need one for it to be worth what they’re asking.

Powerhouse

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While I can’t really vouch for the accuracy here, I find it to be quite an amusing idea. According to the Body Battery Calculator, I’m producing a lot.

Your Body is Producing 357 Watts!
This is 79% MORE wattage than the average person

  • You could light up 4 light bulbs
  • You could power 89 iPods
  • You could power 2 Xbox 360s
  • 3 of you would be needed to keep a refrigerator running

Like most online tests, they gave me a nice little badge that’s also a link.

(via MacUser)

New job, old friends

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My last post was all about summarizing smaller events. These two events deserve more than a bullet point, but maybe not necessarily their own post.

First off, I started a new job! I mentioned in my last post that Lisa had participated in a program with high school students, working on spatial literacy. One of the things that the kids did was to take a tour of a couple of companies in the area that utilize the technologies they were learning about. One of those companies was Bohannan Huston, Inc. She was looking at the careers portion of the website, to see what sorts of potential jobs there were for her, and happened to find something right up my alley. I just started my fifth week with the company, and I have to say that it’s absolutely wonderful. Not that I didn’t enjoy my last job, especially a couple of the people that I worked with, but this move really is a step in the right direction. I can honestly say that I could see myself turning this position into a long-lasting career, which is great.

I’m not sure what else to say about the new job. I’m doing a mix of desktop and web-based software development, working in a pure Microsoft environment. I love my Mac and F/OSS development, but hey, VB.NET and ASP.NET aren’t too bad, and since it’s a pure MS environment, things all work well together.

My 10-year high school reunion was held on Friday and Saturday. Friday night was at a bar, and Saturday afternoon was at a park. I had intended on attending on Saturday, but Lisa wasn’t feeling too well at the time of the event. She felt better that evening and we went to a dinner club thing we had on our plate, but we wound up missing the Saturday portion of the reunion. I was there for all of Friday night, though.

Back in late 2003, I wrote up a post entitled Juxtaposition. I wouldn’t be surprised if none of my current readers have ever read the post or even remember it; most people checking on this thing are friends I’ve made in more recent years. I link to this post as a bit of background. The five-cent summary is that two of my best friends from that period of life are no longer friends, and it was a rather painful falling out. Well, being as I went to high school with one of those friends, they were both in attendance. It was kind of awkward to run into them. We talked a little bit, and did some very basic catching up, but I really felt like she was asking very pointed questions, as though somehow seven years with Lisa isn’t enough to truly prove any sort of love between us or anything.

That being said, the night was still wonderful. It was great to reconnect with so many people, and even if these connections are as fleeting as the night was, it was still a great experience and I’m very glad to have been there. I’d imagine I’ll have pictures online at some point. I do hope that I manage to stay in better communication with a couple of the people there.

I’d helped (in part) with setting things up for the reunion, and we’d picked out the bar without seeing what it’d be like at night. The facilities were really nice, but they had the music absolutely blasting, and didn’t give us proper information to have pictures on-hand in the right format to use their projector, so while some of the events surrounding things weren’t ideal, it still turned out really well on the whole.

I still need to write up something about something that happened back near the beginning of the year, and now that I have a proper scanner, I may have some accompanying pictures for it. Once I have that out, and manage to get the rest of my posts from Europe online, I’ll feel good about things.