Month: March 2008

Categories
Glot

Laptop Challenge ’08!

Quite unexpectedly, there is a laptop in lap. First, a short story; after that, a short mission.

Unintentional DecorationMy girlfriend’s laptop sucks. For many months, a sticker that reads UR STUPID has presided just above the little embossed HP logo on the front. It has performed to expectations admirably. It’s noisy, it runs too hot and then freezes up, and it’s got some unidentified white material melded in places (no, not the Nik’l Nips you see pictured to the right, a different odd white material). All this until a few weeks ago, when I disassembled the dern thing and managed to clean out the hairball of dust-clog lodged in the gills of the heatsink. If that made no sense to you, don’t worry—suffice to say that I fixed the noise and overheating. Of course, I hadn’t counted on somehow creating a worrisome problem whereby the computer runs normally for minutes or hours or days, but then without warning shuts off entirely. No warning. Entirely. Needless to say this was distressing for the female involved and she decided that she’d spent enough years trying to get it to run properly. That’s why she’s got a brand-new Lenovo. Yup, brand-new. That’s why that particular “girlfriend’s laptop” I was just talking about—it no longer exists.

Instead, it is now boyfriend’s laptop. Yes, after a thorough disassembly, and soldering some suspicious components, including an motherboard battery knocked loose from its moorings, the computing P.O.S. seems to be much less “S.” So yeah. Laptop. I have it. Wow, what an interesting story. Mainly I just wanted to tell it so that everyone understands that this was totally not my plan, I take no responsibility for my good fortune, and I am an oft-resourceful compu-person.

Part two, fun part: the challenge for you. The laptop has doodles all over it, girly colored sharpie squares that have worn away and make it look like the laptop of an indulgent Lisa Frank fan. This is unacceptable. I’ve decided to use my my own means to cover the thing in words. I’ve always liked words. I would like some things to say. Inspired by #2, “crowdsource the name of your new unicycle” on this list of 5ives…

Guidelines:

  • the stickers will be ALLCAPS, hand-typed on an ancient “hobbyist” Dymo labelmaker
  • keep phrases short; there’s only room on one “line” for 56 characters (including spaces)
  • speaking of characters, I got 0-9, A-Z, period (.) and slash (/) and that is it
  • don’ try an’ make me put anything that I wouldn’t want my mother to see, yokay?
  • they’ll be printed in any color you want, as long as it’s black (mayyybe blue)
  • Twitter responses ok, GLOT comments ok
  • 56 * 29 lines = 1624 characters, average English word length is 5.1, +1 space per word, that’s only 266 words, people! Not a lot!

Orin’s new computer: now accepting submissions.

Categories
Glot

The Death of a Website

Like I told the bagpipe bandleader, none of us are really sure how to commemorate the life of a website. Part of that is because, hey, a website isn’t really alive. So it’s a difficult question. How do you remember?

I remember when I wrote about it. There was such beautiful harmony in this clever system of giving people thumbs-up and earning points for photo contests and answering ridiculous yet thought-provoking questions. I’ve long had an affinity for non-binding imaginary point systems, that fact is known to many.

It was sad when I heard that it would be going offline. Unsolemn VigilI had a spree-day contacting people I’d met on there once or twice, people I liked but never really kept in touch with. Does anyone reading this remember when Flickr used to be mostly just bloggers with cool pictures they wanted to host? Every photo had an interesting reason to be there; you had to portion out which photos you uploaded cause you only had 20mbs a month to work with. So you only only put up the best ones. Either that, or you shilled out the $60 to become… pro. Lots of websites go through that high-quality early-adopter content-building phase. Consumating never had a chance to outgrow that magical period, and I’m bittersweetly thankful. I sound silly enough waxing about Flickr.

So I’ll just remember it how it always was: silly; playful; packed with interesting people, far too interesting; a perfectly crafted time-waster; the spirit of an age. Not bad for a site that started life as joke personals ads.

Categories
Stuff-n-Glot

Peep Peep Peep Uh-Oh

Only took me only two days, which I’m pretty proud of. Turns out that I already know how to do all this stuff. I already had all the audio editing and video encoding software, music mixing experience, radio editing experience, and know-how from encoding movies for torrents, even back to originally making StarCraft vocal effects (Mom and Dad, my life in middle school was not wasted). I had the camera and tripod although the relatively recent addition of a wireless trigger certainly helped. I did have to download a new stop-motion editor, but honestly it’s just a glorified slideshow viewer with powers of copy & paste. Had the skills to do it all along.

And I did it. Just came up with the idea and did it. Took me 40 hours from the first shot to uploading it to YouTube — did that because it gets a lot more viewers than Vimeo, even though Vimeo is far more awesome. That time includes sleeping, too. It’s only a little over a minute but that minute took an hour and change to shoot. It took more than eight hours to record and position and add effects to all the vocals — the peep and the Pteranodon. There was the small matter of finding appropriate music, and then finding a decently clean copy of said music. Many more spent figuring out why my encoder was spitting out error messages like “Virtualdub program failure — out-of-bounds memory access (access violation) occurred in module [anyoldthing.dll] while encoding [some random frame that’s never consistent].” Opened up the computer, blew away a bunch of dust, and now she’s never run better. Lesson learned.

How I made it is sort of interesting to me, but I’m sort of done with it now. Set it aside, Orin. What I’m now more interested in is what you all think of it. Questions I want answered: what amused you? Should I make more of them? Most importantly, I need more ideas for how to get rid of the five boxes of Peeps I got for a discount after Easter — last Easter. Seriously. I shouldn’t eat them. I should kill them.