The Laughing DM

Today Is The End of The World (Or So I’ve Heard)

DungeonMaster — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 07:00:19 +0000

According to an article read in The Daily News on January 1, 2011, the end of the world is schedule for today, Friday, October 21, 2011. The Rapture of the true believers was already scheduled to have happened on Saturday, May 21, 2011. Of course, the ancient Mayans also have scheduled the end of the world for December 21, 2012. I wonder which one is right ….

Evil Film Processor

DungeonMaster — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 21:15:20 +0000

While working through a project to scan a quarter century of 35mm film negatives, I found some that had annoying paper strips stuck to the side of the negative. These seem to have been added to facilitate reprints. Unfortunately, these make scanning the negatives difficult as the holders don’t expect anything stuck to the 35mm film negatives. Removing them is a pain because while most pull of gently some leave a stick residue behind. That’s not very good for continued storage of the negatives.

Reprint Guide Stuck to Film Negative

Tomato Snowman

DungeonMaster — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 19:08:46 +0000

While Darcie was harvesting some cherry tomatos from this year’s crop, she found this interesting little creation.

Tomato Snowman

Google Chrome Cupcakes Are Evil

DungeonMaster — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 14:12:37 +0000

Google Chrome let me know that it needed to be restarted to load an update this morning. I was a little surprised when it restarted as there was an unexpected icon in the upper left corner. There was this little cupcake. Clicking the icon brought up the “profile” menu.

Bad Cupcake

I’m not a big fan of cupcakes. None of the other optional icons are all that interesting either. Why clutter up the interface with this stuff? One of the big selling points for me with the Chrome browser has been the distinct lack of extraneous stuff in the browser. There has been just the tabs and the address bar and nothing to get in the way of using the browser as efficiently as possible.

More disturbingly, there appears to be no way to make the annoying cupcake icon go away permanently. The best that can be done is switch to one of the other icons.

The burning question is, of course, why the profile related settings couldn’t have been placed on the regular menu accessible through the small, unobtrusive wrench icon.

“Bing” And Be Grossed-out

DungeonMaster — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 16:46:48 +0000

I was doing some research for work today. Google hadn’t yielded any reasonable results for the for which I was searching. I was looking for z4DpvGetCodeSTD. z4DpvGetCodeSTD is a function in a USPS API.

Bing’s attempt to help me “decide” is appreciated. But I’m not looking for an STD. Sure, sexually transmitted diseases are an important issue. Just don’t pull the “STD” letters out of context and assume that’s what I was looking for when the original term couldn’t be found. Adding the “STD” suffix to function names is common when importing certain kinds of APIs into an application.

Bing Gross-out

See for yourself. Click the link below.

http://www.bing.com/search?q=z4DpvGetCodeSTD&go=&qs=n&sk=&form=QBLH

Today Is The Rapture (Or So I’ve Heard)

DungeonMaster — Sat, 21 May 2011 07:00:46 +0000

According to an article read in The Daily News on January 1, 2011, the end of the world is schedule for today, Saturday, May 21, 2011. Well, more technically, some people have calculated based on Biblical dates that Jesus Christ will return today and Rapture the true believers. The actual end of the world is scheduled for October 21, 2011.

IKEA – Big Ass Fan

DungeonMaster — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 18:29:36 +0000

While we were walking though the Portland, Oregon IKEA store self-service furniture section recently, we overheard a couple of small boys say, “Look at the big fan.” They pointed up at the ceiling. Naturally, we looked up as well.

IKEA Big Ass Fan

The iPhone picture doesn’t quite do it justice. This fan is huge.

And it really is called “Big Ass Fan.” It’s nice when product manufacturers are willing to have a sense of humor. And it is refreshing when giant corporations pass that sense of humor on.

Cute Mac Weather Graphic

DungeonMaster — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 01:31:46 +0000

This particular little Mac weather graphic caught my attention today. Frozen raindrops falling on top of the weather gadget.

Mac Weather Freezing Rain Graphic

FUD at Fox News

DungeonMaster — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 20:44:04 +0000

Fox News is running a story referring to a proposed “accident tax” in New York City. The only problem is that what the story refers to is actually a user fee and not a tax. Only those people involved in an accident and require the use of City fire services would have to pay the fee. Taxes are levied on everyone in jurisdiction while user fees are charged to persons requiring services.

http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2010/12/10/nyc-proposes-accident-tax/?test=latestnews

At least Fox News could get the terminology correct. But the Fear created by the alarmist headline must be better for ratings and Fox’s political agenda.

WinZip Attempts to Install Unwanted Software

DungeonMaster — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 23:17:31 +0000

Imagine my surprise when the WinZip installer displayed the dialog below.

WinZip Foul

I suppose I should be grateful that WinZip cares enough to offer to install some extra software to make sure that my system is secure. However, I’m already using security software that I’m happy with. When I’m installing software that I’ve paid for, like WinZip, I don’t see the need to install extra third-party software from “carefully selected partners.”

Seriously WinZip, if the license fees that I pay to you aren’t enough to cover a single license to WinZip then please raise my license fees so that I don’t have to deal with this crap. Among many problems with this approach: Your preferred partners may NOT be MINE.