Watch out, he's balding and he's got a sword!

A couple weeks ago my mom and I went to go pick up my sister for Christmas break. Near her school lives my dad's sister. A while back my uncle had bought a replica of the movie version of Andúril, a major sword from the Lord of the Rings. With my hands gloved I got to wield it for a short time. The result is these photos:


Oooo, sharp and shiny!


It's because of dorky poses like this that people don't allow me to handle weapons often.

Computer Fun

I have come across several interesting computer-related items on the Web. (gee, imagine that, computer stuff on the Web) First up is case mods. These are custom built cases for computer and they can get pretty creative. First we have a top ten list of the weirdest case mods of 2005. Some of those are truly bizarre, but I will let you see them for yourself. Apple has given the Mac Mini, the little Macintosh that could, a whole page dedicated to the variety of creative alterations one can do to the diminutive desktop.

Switching gears a bit, here's a group of Apple tech support calls from over the years. Some of them are quite funny, "What's a paperclip?" and some of them are just sad. A word of warning, some of the callers get rather mouthy when they don't like the answer they get. On another note, yes that was bad, someone created a piano solo inspired by the sounds of Windows XP. Anyone who is remotely familiar to the beeps and chirps of this popular operating system will get get a smile.

(Update: Here's a version of "Let it Snow" as it would sound on an old 8-bit video game system. Neat!)

Thank A Soldier Week

Apparently this week (Dec. 19-25) is thank a soldier week. I urge you to take a few minutes out of the Christmas weekend and head on over to ThankASoldierWeek.com to send a note to one of our boys who fight to keep us save and to bring freedom, peace and stability to those who do not have these things that we hold dear.

3... 2.... 1... Opps

Last weekend I was at a bar with a friend and I caught a news story on TV about a botched demolition. With the sound off I wasn't able to get any details. So I emailed the station for some details. Turns out it was the Zip Feed Mill in Sioux Falls, SD. I did a Google search and found an article that had videos of the event. Sorry about the videos being in Window Media format, I couldn't find it in a better format. Enjoy!

Christmas fun

Paul McCain has, at his temporary blog, a neat little poem that meditates on shopping for a Christmas tree. It draws many parallels between Christmas trees and the stump of Jessie.

In other news, while I was poking around Wikipedia the other day a came across an article about a movie that's probably best left forgotten. If you clicked on the link, yes you read that right, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. The 1964 movie consistently scores amongst the 100 worst movies ever. If you are feeling sadistic, the Internet Archive has the movie available for download.

GS301 is out of my life

Yesterday I turned in the GS301 portfolio and my poster. I am more than glad to be done with that silly class. Taking a lead from past students of this class I have considered ritual cremation of all documents involving the class. I also printed off a poster to sell my books last week. However, I am also considering getting a group of people together to put together a review of the class. So perhaps GS301 isn't out of my life, yet.

Some more words

Here I now finally post the new MS Word autoreply for those who are interested.

Greetings,

You have recieved this automatic response because you sent the attachment in Microsoft Word format, a secret format, so it is awkward to use. If you send me plain text or HTML, then I will be able to read it. In the future, please avoid sending me Word attachments.

Distributing documents in Word format can be harmful for you and for others. You can't be sure what they will look like if someone views them with a different version of Word; they may not work at all. They may also contain viruses or private infomation.

If you have previously arranged to send a Word document, you may disregaurd this notice.

Thank you for your understanding.

Daniel Bergquist
Rev. 2:10

For more information see the following:

http://www.georgedillon.com/web/netiquette.shtml
http://www.goldmark.org/netrants/no-word/attach.html
http://www.ece.uci.edu/~chou/nodoc.html
http://aroundcny.com/technofile/texts/bit110602.html

More on Word attachments

I just emailed the following to someone who responded to my autoreply. I thought it would be good to share it here.

Thank you for your concern on this matter. I had feared that the autoreply message might come off as somewhat cross. I plan on revising it when I have more time and I am open to any suggestions.

However, you must understand that exceptions will not be made for any one. Sending me email is ok, sending me Word attachments is not, aside from very rare cases. This is an important distinction. People who choose not to respect my wishes are sending one of two messages. Either that their message is not important, or that I am not important to them.

Thanks again and God bless.