And that wraps up a whole month of blog posts. Well, I missed a few days here and there. :|

I had a hella weird dream last night

It was quite a long dream ... I spent weeks in my rural hometown. In the house where I was staying there was a wasps' nest. I told someone about a childhood experience with wasps and it occurred to me that, in a sense, they were only harmful because I'd stumbled into them.

My grandparents took out a massive loan to convert their farm into a spaceport. We had engineers inspecting everything. Later I was in another spaceport where we were trespassing (for no particularly good reason) and watching little bullets whiz around, and the thought crossed my mind that the action in Star Wars Ep IV was far less intense than in Ep III, which didn't make sense. Note to Lucas: if you remake the second trilogy to add more action, I shall be very sad ;-)

One of our teammates had uploaded a major chunk of code into an old robot that nobody used or thought was working, and when the others went looking for the code I kept trying to tell them the data they were missing was stored in that robot, but they kept digging around anyway.

Then we were setting up engineer workstations at the spaceport, in an office that had been built around an old tree, and asked for the workers' feedback on the setup. Some people thought they were too close to their neighbors, but others in identical arrangements thought they were too far away. We reached a compromise. The dude next to the tree wasn't happy. :D

---

At some point we transitioned to another dream entirely. My relative had convinced me to follow her and her friend to a church in another town. They stopped at a restaurant and ordered these big hamburgers with massive amounts of toppings. In the local economy these cost only five dollars.

I think I ordered the same thing but I didn't like it, too much ketchup and generally sloppy but it cost $12 for some reason. Digging through my wallet all I had was a $5 and a $7 and a $25, and a handful of ones; and as soon as I spent the $7 I knew they were going to want to know where i got it from — or rather, they'd assume I was trying to pass counterfeits. I knew they must be legit, because they were really authentic-looking and worn, and obviously I'd gotten them from somewhere myself. Oh darn.

Labels: hella

Needed admin rights for something on the IE6 VirtualPC image and couldn't find the password on the web. Someone somewhere will have the same question, so according to the readme for the current image, The Administrator and IETest passwords are P2ssw0rd . Natch.

p.s. Happy National Blog Posting Month. Out of a misplaced sense of journalistic integrity I am not back-dating posts to fill in the days I missed already. :P

Google Maps street level views are the greatest thing since sliced bread. All I have to do is drop the little dude icon in the middle of the freeway and it shows exactly what the visual landmarks are.

Argh!! I just missed the offramp! This is like the 3rd time!!

You can contact me at erictrue@spazquest.org. Junk mail is accepted if the subject line is absurd enough to make me laugh.

Apparently, someone read this and took me up on the offer, because my spam has been improving of late --

• Two Geeks are making $100,000 per year with a ROBOT


• We congratulate! You our client!


• If only we could vote for Ronald again


• Work it out I did, making my little calculator run for several days from its wall charger, while it calculated some of those coefficients.


• To: erictrue You're a moron (Yes, I checked, it was spam :)


• You better not call me an IDIOT or a jerk


• To: erictrue Switzerland To Be Devoured By Black Hole


• {spamit_subject}


• Dear erictrue@spazquest.org June 00% 0FF

I was ready to jump at that 00% OFF promotion, but they neglected to provide a link or other contact info. Sadness.

Labels: humor

Labels: games

(One of many thought-provoking text adventures by Spatch.)

And so you were taken from this place to another place, where you had absolutely no damn idea what it is you're supposed to be doing. It's OK, you'll be all right. Just don't pick up the phone
booth, or else you'll die.

PICK UP THE PHONE BOOTH AND DIE
a NyQuil nightmare by R. Noyes
Release 619 / Serial number 960409 / Inform v1502 Library 5/12
Standard interpreter 1.0

The Town Square
You are standing in the middle of a pretty town square in the center of a nondescript New England town. Like most any other nondescript New England towns, there's not much to see or do here, but
maybe you'll find something amusing and enjoyable to do.

A shiny metal phone booth sits in the center of the square.

>get booth
You grunt with all your might and heave the phone booth onto your shoulders. For a moment or two it looks as if you're not going to be able to lift it, but heroically you finally lift it high in
the air! Seconds later, however, you topple underneath the weight, and the booth crushes you fatally. Geez! Didn't I tell you not to pick up the phone booth?! Isn't the name of this very game
"Pick Up The Phone Booth and Die"?! Man, you're dense. No big loss to humanity, I tell ya.


*** You have died ***


In that game you scored 0 out of a possible 100, in 1 turn, giving you the rank of total and utter loser, squished to death by a damn phone booth.

Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, give the FULL score for that game or QUIT?
>

(Note: this post was written in February 2007 -- which shows how far behind I am...)

Labels: games, humor

This book is an honest-to-goodness worthy sequel to Alice in Wonderland. And it even has a plot!!!

"These vehicles are horseless carriages."
"How do you know that the carriages are horseless?" asked Alice.
"Because they haven't got any real horses drawing them."
"I didn't know that real horses could draw. Can they also paint?"
"Alice! You must know what I mean!" Celia cried. "A horseless carriage is what the people of the future call a carriage that isn't being pulled by a horse."
"Is that similar to a pianoless lampshade?" asked Alice.
"Whatever's a pianoless lampshade?" asked Celia.
"Why, it's a lampshade that isn't being played by a piano, of course."
"Alice! I'm getting rather tired of your loopiness!" Celia replied.

(Not to be confused with The Annotated Alice by Martin Gardner.)

Labels: books