You people SO get extra points if you can tell me where the dialog in this animated GIF is from:

(Dorman: You’re disqualified.)

Check out the Random Harlot Encounter subtable over at BoingBoing.

From woot.com, we get “16 Gary Gygax Jokes We Better Not Catch You Making.” Our faves:

• “Now who will lead our young people to Satan?”
• “At least he didn’t live to see Disney’s Greyhawk on Ice.”
• “When I heard, I cried 2d10 tears.”

and

• “Heart condition? Wow, I always thought it would be owlbears that got him.”

(via JZ.)

E. Gary Gygax, Geek icon and creator of Dungeons and Dragons, is dead at 69. More at Wired.

Go check this out. (SFW, via Rob.)

In junior high, we were tested on the proper way to calculate leap years. The popular assumption is that it’s every 4 years, but that’s not quite right. Actually, that’s just the starting point.

It’s a leap year if:

• The year is divisible by 4, and it’s not a century year
• The year is divisible by 4, and it’s a century year also divisible by 400.

In other words, 1900, while divisible by 4, is not divisible by 400, and so was not a leap year — nor will 2100 be one, either. However, 2000 was.

What’s sort of funny about this is that, to a first approximation, everyone in the sound of my voice could spend their whole life living on the simpler “every 4 years” rule and not miss a single one. From 1901 through 2099, it’s every 4 years, but only because we happen to be living through a once-every-400-years exception to the exception.

Mythbusters’ Kari takes a minigun to some unruly arboreal life.

There are now official Heathen channels at Tumblr and Twitter wherein I will make occasional short comment. Both are very amenable to mobile posts, which is a good idea given my travel schedule of late.

The latter can be followed on your mobile, if you like; in fact, I encourage it. Twitter is mostly about the text-message conversation, so it seems the value of Twitter grows dramatically as more people participate in the same mob. It’s necessarily a short-form kind of deal, though.

Tumblr (note Web 2.0 de rigueur lack of penultimate vowel) is a more pure web thing, and will be present in some form here (see sidebar for first experiment), or seen on its own at the site linked above. It’s likely to get more traffic first, since I just signed up for it — also, it supports longer posts, pictures, etc., which I can’t do with Twitter.

Check out how much system-wide search sucks in Vista, and apparently by design.

From here, we find perhaps the only bluster-free, 100% accurate advice ever issued by PC and technology pundit John C. Dvorak:

I called John C. Dvorak, a prominent columnist for PC Magazine and a podcaster on the Podshow network. “I advise everybody to buy a Macintosh because Apple products are the easiest to use,” he said. “If you own a PC, you have to find a local nerd, a kid, maybe a relative. Every family has one unless they’ve just moved here from a foreign country. That’s the only solution.”

Go and do likewise.

MS is deliberately preventing the new version of its Hotmail property from working on Linux.

Firefox 2 works on Windows, OSX and the Mac. Firefox 2 on Linux is blocked — but gets through just fine as soon as you adjust the user agent.

Nice. I imagine we can expect similar fuckery with Yahoo, Flickr, etc., should their buyout attempt succeed.

Mark Pilgrim has his version of the perennial “Incoming Freshmen’s Worldview” list up, but focussed mostly on computing. Some picks:

An “Apple computer” has always meant a “Macintosh computer.”

Apple computers have always had USB ports and never had floppy drives.

Windows has always supported long filenames and pre-emptive multitasking.

This longish discussion of retcons in comics is quite a read.

A retcon, for those of you too lazy to follow the link, is a device used in long-form narratives to RETroactively change the CONtinuity of the story. Because comics are among the longest narratives we have, it comes up a lot in that world.

For nongeeks, perhaps the most widely known retcon came at the end of Dallas‘s 1985-86 season, when Pam found Bobby in the shower — which rendered the entire season a terrible, terrible dream. A more drastic retcon just happened to James Bond, as Casino Royale is the story of an operative only just promoted to 00-status; for Daniel Craig’s Bond, there has been no SMERSH or SPECTRE, no Cold War, no undersea madmen, no Goldfinger, no marriage to Diana Rigg, and, sadly, no Octopussy. (Bond’s retcon is a drastic enough example to warrant being called a reboot, but that’s just a special type of retcon.) Comic retcons are typically (but not always) less ham-handed, but it’s this sort of shift.

Comics, unlike soaps, are faced with an undeniable need for retcons, precisely because they’re long-running but also, at least to a point, at least somewhat frozen in amber [1]. If they didn’t keep shifting or handwaving about some aspects of Superman’s backstory, for example, we’d be dealing with a decidedly geriatric Man of Steel; at his introduction in 1938, he was supposedly in his late 20s, which puts his birth at about 1910[2]. I’m pretty sure the current comic incarnation isn’t supposed to be 98 years old. Even Spiderman would be at least middle aged if his story moved in real time; he was a student in 1962.

To add to the complexity, comic publishers are forever having crossover events where Batman and Superman team up to fight Evil Dude X, which means their continuities are blended; a retcon for one will necessarily affect the other. In the persistent world of the DC (or Marvel) universe, this gets very complicated very quickly.

Anyway, that’s a retcon. Check out the first link for discussions of them done well (Frank Miller’s work on Daredevil; they actually skip my favorite) and badly (pretty much the last 20 years of the Legion of Super Heros), all through the lens of the gawdawful bullshit they’re pulling with Spiderman these days. (There’s a literal deal with the Devil that undoes pretty much the last 2 or 3 decades. I shit you not.).

(Via Wil.)

Notes:

1. An amusing example of retconning is ongoing with the Simpsons, who have taken being frozen in time very seriously. The show’s nearly twenty, so flashbacks to teen/early 20s time periods for Marge and Homer have ratcheted from the 70s through the 80s and into the 90s.

2. The cinematic Supes has also been retconned, and recently: Superman Returns is itself a bit of a retcon in that it branches off the film continuity after Superman II, and renders moot all subsequent Reeve films.)

These will warm her heart, though we prefer this special Heathenized version.

Microsoft has the answer in this brilliant parody of childrens’ books produced as a marketing bit for their “Windows Home Server” product. Enjoy.

Of course, it wouldn’t be Heathen if we didn’t notice you can do all the things they mention with a Linux or Mac box just as easily, and without Windows snooping on you.

Warren Ellis provides his take on the venerable “Three Laws of Robotics.” Enjoy.

The Falkirk Wheel in Scotland may be most excellent thing I’ve ever seen. Seriously. Click through for the videos.

For years, we’ve accumulated change in a big-ass jar on our dresser. About once a year, we take it down to the grocery store and use the automated machine to turn it into useful money. As part of that process, I’ve often wondered to what degree one could use the weight of the change to estimate the value; it shouldn’t be as crazy as it sounds, since it’s easy to know the average weight of each type of coin, and presumably someone knows the average distribution of coins in circulation. I just never got around to figuring it out.

Now, via BoingBoing, I’ve found that someone did, though this implementation doesn’t use a known distribution of coins; instead, it asks the user to grab a random handful and enter that as the ratio to use. I still think the ratio in circulation has to be knowable, but I’ve yet to find it anywhere. The Heathen jar is getting pretty full, though, so maybe it’s time to finish my method and create estimates using it and CoinCalc before taking the jar down to Kroger.

Why have none of you given me any of this?

The geeky among you would do well to heed the tale of ITAPPMONROBOT.

On December 20, 1996, Carl Sagan died. As the linked story puts it, calling Sagan a scientist is kind of like calling the Beatles a rock band.

In gaming, people complain about release delays a LOT. Nothing ever ships on time. Sometimes, the delays produce hype and impossible expectations, especially when the game is released and turns out to suck.

One game in particular has managed to avoid the “released and turned out to suck” pitfall, of course, and that game is Duke Nukem Forever, which was announced on 28 April 1997, and has yet to see the light of day.

DNF — n.b. that its initials can also stand for “did not finish” — is to be the groundbreaking next edition in a popular series; Duke Nukem 3D was the last iteration, in 1996, and was one of the first real truly immersive first-person shooters. (It was a peer to Quake at the time, which has itself had several successful sequels since its release.)

In light of this truly amazing feat of procrastination and schedule-busting, some enterprising souls have produced a fine, fine list of amusing things that have happened since the DNF announcement early in Clinton’s second term. It includes:

• The entire Grand Theft Auto series
• The entire run of the Sims game franchise
• The creation, implementation, and explosion of an entire game genre, the Massively Multiplayer Onling Role Playing Game
• 58 different Mario games
• The previous winner of “most delayed game,” Daikatana, started development 10 days before DNF, and was released in May of 2000
• The whole of Half Life
• Every Thief game
• The entire Halo trilogy
• The creation and release of the XBox, XBox 360, PS2, PS3, PSP, GameCube, Gameboy, and DS

Outside of gaming, they make the following observations:

• In 1997, a “fast” Internet connection involved a 33.6kilobit per second modem.
• Back then, a hotrod home gaming rig ran at 233Mhz.
• There was no such thing as a commercially successful MP3 player in 1997, and wouldn’t be for another 4 years. Since its intro in 2001, though, Apple has sold more than 50 million iPods.
• Napster did not exist in 1997
• There was no Google, eBay, or Blogger
• Stephen King has written 16 novels
• “The concept of Bullet Time has been developed, pioneered, and completely run into the ground.”
• There was no Britney or Harry Potter in 1997.
• “The U.S.S. Ronald Reagan (the largest nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in the world) was in contract, built, launched, commissioned, and began active duty.“

Finally, they note a few historical events of importance that took less time than DNF has so far:

• The Beatles formed, released all their records, and broke up.
• The entire U.S. program to put a man on the moon, from JFK’s speech until Armstrong’s landing.
• The Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the entire Manhattan Project, and Vietnam.

We’re sure, though, that when DNF is finally released, it’ll be awesome. Probably.

Earlier, we said our Mac folks should upgrade to Leopard “if and only if [they] have good backup.”

We do not mean by this that you can expect to NEED said backup if you try to update. Our upgrade went swimmingly well. We just mean you should NEVER EVER EVER do something like that to your computer (and kind, be it Mac or PC or Linux or VMS or whatever else you freaks are running) without having a complete, solid, and up-to-date backup on hand.

Go buy an outboard drive as big as your computer’s internal drive. Actually, get two. They’re cheap. Shut up. As JWZ said a while back, listen to me. I know things.

Then go get some kind of smart hard drive cloning tool. On the Mac, I like SuperDuper (which is presently broken under Leopard, but works fine for 10.4 and below; also, its “brokenness” doesn’t keep you from reading your backup, just updating it). CarbonCopyCloner is also a fine choice. On the PC, I’ve no personal knowledge, but LifeHacker liked DriveImage XML despite its cheesy name.

These tools will create, on your backup drives, a complete (and potentially bootable) copy of your machine’s hard drive. Typically, your first backup will take many hours, but subsequent ones will copy only the new or changed material; expect those to run for maybe an hour. Why two drives? Because that way you can alternate. Do a complete system backup like this every week, and swap the drives every month. Put the drive you’re not backing up to someplace else. Your spouse’s office is a good choice, or a friend’s house.

Sound like overkill? It’s not. Imagine the tax records, the digital pictures, the emails, the documents and God knows what else that were lost in New Orleans or the Mississippi coast. Imagine how smart you’ll feel if, God forbid, something like that happens where you live, but you’ve got a month-old backup at your mother-in-law’s place, safe and sound. Imagine how little effort this takes.

Of course, this is just system backup. Your critical files should ideally be backed up every day using another mechanism, like one of myriad online backup tools now available. People seem to like Mozy, for example. No reason not to join them. It’s cheap, and it works. What more do you want?

Now, go forth. Backup. Always.

(“Hey Chet, what about Leopard’s Time Machine?” Glad you asked. It’s a great idea. Buy a third drive to use for TM. It doesn’t replace the need, in my opinion, for full-disk bootable backups, or for frequent offsite saves of critical stuff (i.e., your Documents folder).)

On my bill for my Sprint mobile broadband modem, the “amount enclosed” portion of the form is rendered in the one-box-per-digit mode common to standardized forms. Observe, if you will, their presentation:

Under what circumstances, I wonder, would any of the places beyond the thousands get used? I can imagine an actual bill getting sent, to be remitted by check, that extends to a few thousand — I even know people who’ve done this with international roaming, knocking on the door of five figures. Bills greater than ten large, though, are almost certainly all handled by some sort of corporate billing and remittance mechanism. How often does Sprint really get some human filling out this form with 6 or 7 digits?

A Federal judge has ruled that a defendent cannot be compelled to give up his encryption keys on the grounds that such information amounts to self-incrimination.

A number of legal and Net.law analysts have been anticipating such a conflict for years, but this appears to be the first actual on-point ruling, and it’s gone 180 degrees from what folks expected.

I agree with this intuitively, but since I believe a suspect can be made to (for example) produce keys to a safety deposit box, I’m not sure what the legal rationale for a difference is. Any Heathen lawyers wish to weigh in here?

Heathen Systems are now running on Leopard. We encourage you to do likewise if and only if you have a good backup.

Here’s a fine review of one user’s experience upgrading from Vista to XP. Heh.

There’s a new Get A Mac commercial done in the Rankin-Bass style. Awesome.

Kristen Bell in a Slave Leia outfit. That is all.

It appears there were some Star Wars figures that didn’t quite make the cut all those years ago. (Via Gizmodo.)

Today’s net.coolness: a guy in the Phillipines managed to get Neil Gaiman to assist in his wedding proposal. There’s also video, but read the post first.

After the fact, both Neil and the bride-to-be had comment.

(Via MeFi.)

So I added RAM to my laptop last week by removing one of the 1-gigabyte DIMMs and replacing it with a 2-gig DIMM, producing a total of 3. This is sort of unusual, because heretofore most RAM has been set up with homogenous slots — all 1-gig, or all 2-gig, or whatever.

I have taken to referring to my mixed setup as “The Welk Configuration,” since it consists of a one and a two.

I am nowhere nearly as sorry about that as I probably ought to be.

“Please don’t steal my focus.” You know the drill; you’re typing along and BAMMO some other application decides to grab the focus and hijack your attention. It’s rude. It’s wrong. It MUST BE STOPPED.

Geeks all over the Net have been adopting David Allen‘s Getting Things Done productivity methodology; perhaps the most famous is Merlin Mann and his 43Folders site. Chief Heathen is an imperfect devotee, sort of.

Comes now a counterpoint, based on a far simpler worldview: Writing Shit Down.

Jonathan Coulton is a musical god. For example: “Code Monkey think maybe manager want to write god damned login page himself.”

In finding Code Monkey, we also encountered “Skullcrusher Mountain,” which includes this lyrical brilliance:

I made this half-pony half-monkey monster to please you
But I get the feeling that you don’t like it
What’s with all the screaming?
You like monkeys, you like ponies
Maybe you don’t like monsters so much
Maybe I used too many monkeys
Isn’t it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?

Yes.

Dell’s released a special edition World of Warcraft gaming laptop for a cool $4450.

Now’s probably a good time to point out that I’ve been having a great time in Azeroth since it launched 3 years ago on bone-stock Apple laptops that go for half that: first a then-aged Titanium G4 Powerbook, then, starting 2 years ago, an Aluminum G4, and since August on a Macbook Pro. Sure, a hot-shit laptop is often a lovely thing if you’re playing brand-new very high-end games — but World of Warcraft was released in November of 2004. Machines costing $1,000 will play it fine.

Still, I’m sure Dell is giving you something very, very special for that extra two large. Or something. But the fancy extra hardware will really get you no better WoW experience; buying one of these machines more or less brands the user as clueless dork.

Good luck with that.

We’ve updated the Heathen Macbook Pro to 3 gigabytes of RAM, which means that we never, ever go to swaptown anymore, even with a gigabyte instance of VMWare running.

Yummy. Highly recommended.

Combine long exposures and light sources and you get painting with light. Cool.

World of Warcraft is still cool:

Teller’s house is cooler than yours.

(Via.)

You like?

We love this more than we can say.

Slashdot: 90% of IT Pros don’t want Vista. Major customers have been pushing back for a while; Dell and the other majors will still sell you an XP box if you’re a business customer, and we don’t blame them. The only Vista boxes in our small firm are nothing but trouble (and don’t get us started on the new Office interface).

It’s followed all of us, essentially without change, since the first time man looked upwards at night and wondered what the multitude of pinprick lights in the darkness were.

Go take a closer look; this short web tutorial will show you how to find your way around the night sky in 10 minutes ore less, and as such is the coolest link you’ll see today. Very, very well done. Those of you with kids may want to bookmark this for later stargazing with amazed young’uns.

Understanding as we do the nature of computing, and having as we do a 20+ year history with said devices, we are occasionally briefly astounded that, say, the our thumbdrive has more storage capacity than all the computers we owned prior to 1999 combined.

This does not, however, make it ok that we curse and become frustrated with our current platform if it slows down even a little bit when doing all of the following:

• Playing music over the stereo via wifi;
• Running a virtualized Windows XP machine containing Outlook, IE, and PowerPoint;
• Periodically checking email from 4 servers;
• Periodically polling some 200+ rss feeds;
• all while having an editor, a personal Wiki, a note/document repository app, Word, an outliner, and a dozen Firefox windows open.

We see enough of ourselves in The Nerd Handbook that it’s almost scary.

It’s a shame that Accordian Hero isn’t real.

GoogleDoc spreadsheets can use something called GoogleLookup, which looks like this:

=GoogleLookup("Roger Clemens";"earned run average")

Holy cow, that’s cool.

Longtime Heathen know that we’re crazy about Macs here at Heathen Central, but it wasn’t always so. Up until about 1998 or 1999, we were Wintel people, but trying to live on a Windows laptop on the road was absolutely miserable. Sleep never worked right. It crashed constantly. Finally, realizing we did Office docs for a living, and that MS Office is the same on Macs and PCs, we took the plunge on a 500Mhz G3 Powerbook, and haven’t looked back.

Back then, Macs still ran the great-great-great-grandson of the original Mac OS — all greys and lines with that Chicago font everywhere — and they weren’t all that much stabler than PCs for most things; however, the mobile platform was one place where they had the advantage, and it was huge. Done? Just close it. Need it back? Just open. And, unlike Win98, OS 9 didn’t eat itself every few months. We were happier, but not genuinely happy.

Or, rather, we weren’t until Apple made the jump to OS X. In one of the bravest moves in the history of consumer computing platforms, they more or less scrapped the long-in-the-tooth operating system and started over with a kernel based on the FreeBSD open source platform. For the first time, Macs were, essentially, running Unix. And for the first time, a Unix-like OS was a completely reasonable choice for you, your brother, your mother, or even your grandmother, so well had Apple hidden the complexities. Unlike in OS 9, though, those complexities were available for the savvy user, and consequently that’s when we became true Mac partisans. This new OS was capable of running old-style Mac programs using an emulation layer called Classic, but Apple made it pretty clear this was a temporary state, and that all new work should be done for OS X.

If Apple hadn’t made this move, we’d have long since gone to full-time Linux — and, we suspect, Apple wouldn’t be the roaring success they are today (they’ve now got a market cap larger than IBM).

Because of our unconventional Mac history, then, we’re not really invested in the old style Mac paradigm; we don’t miss any Classic programs, and haven’t even bothered to enable it on our last several machines. It’s a dead issue for us.

Well, now it’s really a dead issue for everyone, or at least everyone who runs Leopard. New Macs haven’t been able to run Classic at all for a while (PowerPCs can; Intel machines can’t), but the Leopard upgrade is the final nail. Leopard has the Classic hooks removed. Mac Luddites, it’s time to join the future.

Apparently, the Storm worm has started fighting back against the security researchers trying to get a handle on the multi-millon-bot network.

Maybe it’s not Skynet. Maybe it’s just Colossus.