A Collection of Mostly Sane Engineering Rants

This ones for you Machiaveli!

2008-04-02T12:26:00.001-07:00

Hehehe, yup that's right. Its super formal and good to almost 2000 deg
f!

Christina's big story

2007-12-09T19:51:00.001-08:00

As our readerbase may or may not be aware, one devoted fan had a bit
of an automobile related mishap over the weekend... Read all about it:
exuberatingfantasticisms.blogspot.com

-David

An entertaining weekend...

2007-12-02T11:59:00.000-08:00

Hey for those viewers out there that enjoy sandwiches, and cats, and have a cold, you should check out machiavelli's blog. we just made a team post that you might find interesting :)

These people are sick!

2007-11-23T23:08:00.000-08:00

It wasnt just an isolated incident! This is a clear pattern of
encouraging children to snack on cancer sticks. Try them with peanut
butter!

And the award for worst UI ever goes to....

2007-11-13T11:00:00.000-08:00

MS Vista!!!!

Does that really apply?

2007-11-09T01:35:00.000-08:00

Found at last...

2007-10-12T11:07:00.000-07:00

The elusive transormer "Holdem." Transforms from an indusrial vice,
into an industrial vice with a thing in it. Now you've read it! You
can't unread it!

2007-10-09T01:06:00.000-07:00

From some lame idiot's Family Newsletter...

I really can't stand Unicorns. Personally, Im not sure why everyone likes them so much. They are such an over-rated animal. If I put a single horn on my head, would people adore me? I don't think so. Lets take a step back further, shall we? Think of a Rhino. Why do people tend to respect Rhinos? Because they dont live very long if they don't. You're looking at the business end of an emotionally unstable school bus... but not a nice normal school bus, This bus has a spike on it (unfortunately for the sake of clarity, I had to change "horn" to "spike" here. It is unfortunate that nearly every bus I have encountered also has a horn :-\). Not only does it have a horn, but that horn is located atop its nose. none of this pansy above the ears business, oh no. When this guy impales ya, he wants to smell the encounter close up. Rhinos are intense. Now, lets take the Unicorn. Being nearly, if not completely extinct, it decides that its going to have a horn. That will give me the respect I need to differentiate me from a horse. That just the ticket. Then I'll grow a little goat goatee to complete the image. Its perfect. Except that a little white pony just doesn't have the intimidation factor to pull off the horn / facial hair combo. Its kind of like giving a kitten a spike collar. He's just doing it to attract the women. According to wikipedia: "The gentle and pensive maiden has the power to tame the unicorn" Yeah right! Oh I can change him! He will be different for me. They're not "lost in thought", they're just stupid. Its all a show ladies! He isn't really a trouble soul! Its just a stinking pony with a thing strapped to his head! Notice me! I just rubberbanded this stapler to my head! (for the record, very little romantic success with that one to date, but the years still young right?) Now a woman that could tame a rhino? That is something I could be interested in. (Also probably why grandma isn't likely to see any offspring from this branch of the family any time soon... Sorry! ;-)

Pizzas and their sizes

2007-10-06T19:01:00.001-07:00

Rant to follow...

Yeah, that should work...

2007-10-02T16:22:00.001-07:00

No one get this!

2007-09-28T00:01:00.000-07:00

Please, please, please let this pass way over your heads. If you do get it at least have the common courtesy not to tell me...

Credit again to, xkcd.com

Gentlemen!!!

2007-09-27T02:13:00.000-07:00

This might work!

Curse You Machiavelli!

2007-09-25T13:08:00.000-07:00

Teeheehee...

Due Credit:

xkcd.com for the work itself,

and Thomas Edison for introducing me to the site. Good find Thomas!

Also:

2007-09-21T14:40:00.000-07:00

Sony finally unveils its own Memory Standard (about friggin time we all sat down with Sony, and came to their agreement!)

They've had this coming for Years.

2007-09-21T14:39:00.000-07:00

Ok, so after much exhaustive research, I'm ready to go public with this. I had to be sure... there can be no mistake on this one, but now its time. The man behind the curtain, pulling the Gas Station User Interface strings is really:

At least thats my working theory, and as my friends well know, My working theories are always clean. So what is the deal with this huge conspiracy that everyone must be intimately familiar with anyway? How Ironic that you should ask sir, because I was just getting ready to cram it down your collective throat ("The new BK 1/4 lb-er... 'POUND ONE'").

Now its a well known fact that the american farmers, are the real men responsible for the events of 9/11, but what is the tie in with Big (local) Gas? For nearly 2 centuries, America's farmers had a stranglehold on the transportation industry. You want to go from Pittsburgh to Lexington? Well thats going to cost ya mister. Yeah sure, you have your own horse, but do you have any oats for that fine looking animal? Well these oats don't just grow on a tree you know. It takes effort to grow these here oats. They're not going to be cheap mister (this is the part where you wish you had gone for that smaller carriage, with the narrower wood wheels... yeah it wasn't sporty, but you get a heck of a lot more miles per bushel in one of those).

It was great when it lasted. They had everything. Power, wealth, fame, special straw polls, and caucuses and even really long work days with little assurance of financial stability. Yep, things were going pretty well. Then along came the big one. The Internal Combustion engine.

"What do you mean 'you can't feed it oats??'" Exhaustive research yielded few options. Oats-oline really didn't have the mass market appeal it needed to compete with the heavy hitters like Crude Oil (with a name like that, how could they lose?), and CORN WAS JUST PLAIN STUPID!!! (sorry, my pinky got stuck on the shift key there, it has a mind of its own sometimes...)

Red with rage, the farmers were not about to take this sitting down. Big Oats infiltrated the user interface design labs for the new auto infrastructure. They sabatoged all rational designs, and replaced the researchers with radioactive crack-addict monkeys (incidentally, the same crack {different usage} squad of monkeys Designed the U.C. Berkeley psychology building) The result is the horrific display you will see laid out before you over the next few postings.

(Some loose ends, beyond the obvious lack of supporting data: The "Farming for America's Growers" organization is obviously responsible for our terrorist problem. What does Osama Bin Laden have to gain financially by wanting our lazy, glutenous butts dead? How would that help him at all? The truth is always in the money trail. The arab nations are all in this case nothing more than pawns. A war is going to prevent them from selling gas to us for our cars large enough for our lazy, glutenous butts, thereby limiting the potential sales for this cursed black goop. In a worst case scenario, the US Government (Haliburton) forces a trade: all this gross black goop, for this handful of Beautiful Beads! The only ones that stand to gain from all this is the farmers. When the world comes crying back for oats for their horses, they're going to be ready. Clearly the plan is working, just look at the political popularity of Corn Fuel. Ethanol is a gateway fuel. Oats-oline is just around the corner, clad in a dingy trench-coat, waiting to leap out of obscurity. Also, Al Sharpton is a robot apparently: intent on pissing me off every time I go to use a credit card at a gas station.

On Blogger's Interface:

2007-09-21T12:57:00.001-07:00

I have to give due credit to Blogger for hooking me up with some pretty sweet source material. Having posted at least one posting in earnest now, I think I am justified to complain at least a little about the UI used to post these blogs we have all come to know and love. Here goes:

First off, they disabled my spell checking. but not right and proper, oh no... they got it a little tipsy and then slipped something in its drink on the sly. Macs have a beautiful built in spell checker (yes, I use a Macintosh and no I'm not gay: I had 13 children thereby affirming my masculinity beyond a shadow of a doubt {also, a whopping 38% of my children survived childhood, which should tell you something about my parenting abilities as an excessively straight male}) This spell checker is one of the reasons I have never bothered to learn to spell. I had to many important equations to bring to life, and if I can get system wide

spell checking in my AIM client, why should I waste time learning which words realy have 2 consonants? Well blogger decided that the world would be better if they went ahead and invented their own "text window" for their blog publishing. Not only is the window sized to fit the minimum allowed resolution on windows 2000, but its also not a "standard" text window apparently. My powerbook does its best to continue to spell check as I type, convienently and subtly underlining words that I mispell, but when I go to click on the words that are wrong, the window pops up with suggestions, and then nothing happens. Somehow blogger managed to block the editing of the words themselves. Thats quite a feat!

Much to my relief, at least initially, there is a built in spell checker in the entirly too small blogger composition window. Fine, that will work. So you click on spell check (of course convieniently displayed as "oh yeah, we got the ABC's Babay!") and the program goes through and highlights all the words I have mispelled in highlighter yellow. Perfect. Click on a word, and it gives you suggestions, click on a suggestion, and it fixes the word. Perfect. Except for the fact, that once you have clicked on all the words, and have no remaining mispellings, it keeps the friggin thing on??? I have to go back and find a new button that was added just for the sake of spell checking in an entirly different location, and remember to turn it back off.

Despite the fact that it is so easy to leave on, it actually no longer checks spelling when left on. I can edit text (in fact most of this very posting was done in spell check on mode) but the yellow highlighter no longer shows me I have problems. Why on earth would I want to leave that on then????? What was wrong with using the same button to enable and disable the spell check, or better yet, why not continue spell checking while you've gone out of your way to inform me that I am not "Done spellchecking" yet?? Thank heavens for OSX for watching my back on this one. Even if it is slightly inebriated by blogger, its still a little trooper, always watching my back (exept for friggin mouse-keys thank you T. Pate >:-| )

So then I want to upload an image for posting. I will say it is very convenient not to have to host your own images. I thank you for that boon blogger. However, when I select the text area into which I want to insert the images, it lets me add them, and then places them at the top of the post. I can decide through a dialog box whether I want the images to have left right, or center alignment, or several other options, but apparently it is too much to ask that the images go where the text cursor is. from there I have to drag the images to the part of the post I want them to appear (I have been informed that on windows you can at least copy and paste, which makes this process easier, but still stupid) Lastly, apparently you need to be out of spellchecking mode to bring up the images submenu. Everything else seems to work under spellchecking mode (except of course spellchecking itself) but I need to find the link that says "Done spellchecking" before I could ever imagine being able to add an image (hyperlinks work just fine the whole time by the way)

Of course the windows-esque control shortcuts fail to work on my mac as well (but by now, that's expected :-)

Can we pick a better name?

2007-09-19T23:26:00.001-07:00

So during the research phase for my next article (which involved driving around in a car that was entirely too small for its own good, taking pictures of businesses late at night) I came across this little gem:

And people accuse the tobacco companies of pandering to children? I guess in this case at least most kids these days don't refer to themselves as minors, but on the other hand, (like me) they probably also would have missed the misspelling if they did, and for that matter, likely the whole pun at large. Either way I, was able to pass about 3 minutes of my time enjoyably thanks to the help of this local business (this is of course quite rare for St. Petersburg in the late 1700's)

Also, of note, but may not be visible in the picture... The inside of the store was decorated as a luau with lots of bright colors, and parrots. General mills: take note.

A Word of Explanation

2007-09-19T22:56:00.000-07:00

So I've decided to start a blog. I imagine this first sentence has been repeated more than a few times since the inception of the blog, but none the less, it is in this case true. My motivations for such unexpected action are complicated but not out of reach for the majority of the readers I expect to enthrall. Lets just say those "time phone" bills are racking up due to my efforts to keep myself intellectually stimulated by prank calling Robert Hooke. What a friggin looser. Also, I hope to give my dear friend Machiavelli some time off, lightening his blogging load so to speak, as he is clearly at his limit (judging by the quality of his more recent posts). Our hearts reach out to him in his senility.

This page will be mostly dedicated to the fine quality rants you have come to expect from such historical sources such as myself: as far as ranting goes, I do not intend to disappoint. Watch out world, you're in for some real humdingers!

That will do for my post today, I've got to wash this stylin' head rag.

P.S. Robert "Socks!"

Testing Testing 123

2007-09-19T22:48:00.001-07:00

Hello World?