MoreCooler.com: It's more cooler with the thing

Anybody else getting like 100+ emails (or bounces) a day with viruses attached? This latest batch of worms is driving me nuts (yarrr).

I'm doing some contract work for a cellphone store, and after two days, I finally figured out why the dump of the query string keeps showing the character ∏... one of the variables being passed it 'prod' and it's always listed at &prod in the string... so when I print it out, the browser is nice enough to convert it to ∏ for me. Seeing "mode=update&cart=0∏=145" was VERY confusing. Just thought I'd share.

http://zcat.wired.net.nz/upgrade/

Do NOT click on this link with any browser other than Internet Explorer.

Well, I guess the subject says it all... We (Sean, Andrea, Jeff, and I) are having a little party for Juanita tomorrow for those of you not in the uber-cool bay area. (how do I do umlauts in html anyway?)

I am at work and I do not have admin access. I found a nice preview of Splinter Cell 2 from penny-arcade, but it is in quicktime format. As you know, one can't view that without the install. Even other programs, like irfan viewer, will only play them if it is installed. Do any of you know of a way for me to see this without having to install anything or... you know.... wait till I go home, because this is really "important" for me to see.....

Anyway, I was thinking of maybe another wonderful MoreCooler plugin which allows the viewing of drag and drop quicktime files. Sound like a fun diversion for any of you out there?

Yeah, you know somebody had to do it. The game is in poor taste but funny none the less.

http://www.zooass.com/games/neverland/neverland.swf

I was looking through Andrea's face wash and noticed this.
Thats right not Virgin Olive Oil but Olive Virgin Oil. The olive flavored oil of virgins.

Everybody, just comment with the first thing that comes to mind. Post early, post often. Let's see what crazy things happen. That, and it should be entertaining to read....

Well, the new year officially begins tomorrow for me. Have a great year of the monkey everyone!

CBC Archives: "A Network Called 'Internet'"

1993 news broadcast (streaming video) about this newfangled "Internet" thingy.

Chris tells me you got a big one. Care to put up a snapshot and tell me which one it is =).

After being reminded of it by Penny Arcade, I've been playing around with a pretty cool new online-only collectible card game called Star Chamber. It's a neat combination of 4x turn-based strategy (think Master of Orion - the old one, not the crappy new one) and collectible card gaming (think Magic: The Gathering). And I don't mean that it has a strategy game with a card game sort of tacked on - i.e. Etherlords - the cards actually affect the overall game; you don't just enter into little side card-battles to settle skirmishes encountered on the overworld map. The client is a free download, and once you sign up (also free) you can play around with sample decks in solo play.

The client and UI seem pretty solid and well designed, and I'm having a blast in the solo demo games, so I think I'm going to get their $20 starter deck deal soon (14 packs, 210 cards). The game has been very well reviewed, especially for an independent company, with the primary complaint being "not enough players online yet." Hopefully, with me and other Penny Arcade readers (c'mon, Chris, you know you want to ^_^ ) playing, we can remedy that.

Anyway, I highly recommend trying the tutorials and solo mode, even if you don't intend to spend any money. It's a unique and enjoyable experience.

I don’t know how many of you read GameSpot, but they can be interesting at times, if not just a little biased.... But anyway, I have always found the bad reviews to be more fun than the good ones for two reasons. (1) they are entertaining and (2) they don’t make me buy anything.

So today I look at it and there is a review for a game called "Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing" which has a whopping score of 1, the lowest possible. I suggest you read it, it is really funny. It turns out that the "racing" is supposed to be you in a big rig with cargo trying to outrun the cops. But the trucks are only cabs, so they don’t have cargo. There also aren’t any cops, or anything around. Well, there is the other truck, the one you are supposed to race against. But it doesn’t move, or do anything really, so it doesn’t exactly count. None of the terrain actually acts like terrain, you go right over hills as if they were flat. Trees, bushes, buildings and bridges are intangible, not that it matters because you can go down and through whatever the bridge was going over. There are no level boundaries so you can go off to limbo freely.

But the best part is when I went to go look at the company who made it. First, the publisher is a company called GameMill, which doesn’t have a website, press release or anything actually to have Google tell it. The developer is called Stellar Stone, and they are much more interesting. They offer "from scratch development of video games" and other such services for a fraction of the cost because they do everything in Russia. Only half of their website has content, and most of it is repetitive. But the kicker is the support page, where they have a patch for Big Rigs. It is called "Big rigs: Over the road racing Patch 1.0". Think about that for a second. When have you ever seen an "upgrade" for a game that was marked 1.0? (and Martin, don’t mention ADOM, ok?) Makes you wonder what the retail version is.

There is also a pretty funny reader review at GameSpot, I also suggest reading it. And as you can probably tell, I do not have any work yet, so I can write a really long post about almost nothing. This is fun....

I've seen cartoons and movies where a bunch of rich guys sit around and bet on, well, anything. However, looks like it has spilled over into television =).

I find the show amusing, but it just seems to be a "We, Fox, bet 500K that you cannot get maried to this idiot (who's actually an actor) over here. What do you say?" I'm going to watch a couple more episodes, but it does remind me alot of Joe Schmoe...

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10118

One terabyte of storage capacity, $1200. Or, as the article puts it:

With this unsurpassed storage capacity, the LaCie Bigger Disk allows users to store nearly two years of continuous music and up to one month of non-stop MPEG-2 video.

Al Franken has signed on with Progress Media to host a radio show. I'm looking forward to an alternative to Rush Limbaugh on daytime talk radio. The show's three-hour format will be a mixture of interviews, listener calls, and scripted comedy. No launch date has been announced.

There have been so many posts "about something" that I felt we needed one that didn't have anything to do with anything. Unfortunately, this post is about just that, so I guess I failed. Any way, feel free to respond however you want to this post, it should be fun. Just don't use that "C" word, I have been informed that those security people don't have much of a sense of humor.... So Bryce, could you edit those posts to "bleep" them out so I don't feel bad visiting this site? Sean will agree :)

http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/

Fascinating, even for you computer types. ^_^

Yay, I have a job. And I am in my office right now. Very happy.... 8 hours of orientation, but no essays, *phew*

Yaaaaaaay! Snowball fights!

Anybody seen this new Fox show? My Aunt is a huge fan, and she's got me and my brother hooked. Really funny; it's on after Malcolm in the Middle, I believe.

I believe my favorite character is the one played by David Cross (of "Mr Show with Bob and David" fame; also the "you're small" guy).

Just a quick note for those of you who, like me, love Suprnova. Make sure you're using Shad0w's 3rd-party Client so you can properly diagnose connection problems (a yellow light means port forwarding needs to be configured).

DSLReports Google results
Found this while troubleshooting my POS motorola cable modem, which apparently likes to crash under extremely high traffic (i.e. bitTorrent). Click one of the links for DSLReports.com on google and the site detects you've come from google, extracts your search terms from the referrer URL, and suggests you use THEIR local forum search to find what you're looking for. Very useful.

Of course, this works better when site:DSLReports.com isn't in your search string.

Well, someone has to do it. =)

Hope everyone has a safe and happy year!