Looks more like E.T. reaching out his finger to “phone home” than what you linked to.
In response to A Somewhat Omnious Cloud Shape Today of All Days by John Scalzi.
Tag: history
Sorry, but I don’t have any links for PLotW. Instead, please enjoy these various quizzes.
| You fit in with: HumanismYour ideals mostly resemble that of a Humanist. Although you do not have a lot of faith, you are devoted to making this world better, in the short time that you have to live. Humanists do not generally believe in an afterlife, and therefore, are committed to making the world a better place for themselves and future generations.0% scientific. 60% reason-oriented. |
| Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com |
| Office Master 64% Tastefulness, 41% Originality, 45% Deliberateness, 29% Sexiness |
| [Tasteful Conventional Deliberate Prissy]Your style is professional. Your clothes always fit the situation and you probably never offend people by, say, wearing pink to a funeral. You just know what becomes. You don’t like extravagance too much and you’re not accidental. Your well chosen, stylish outfits communicate that you’re a serious person. Following classic rules about dressing, you make sure that no one would call you flashy and many people admire your calm, composed look.
The opposite style from yours is Fashion Rebel [Flamboyant Original Random Sexy]. All the categories: Fashion Enemy Bar Cruiser Kid Next Door Sex Bomb Hippie Kid Fashion Rebel Fashion Artist Catwalk God(ess) Librarian Sporty Hottie Office Master Uptown Girl/ Boy Brainy Student Movie Star Fashionista Glamorous Soul |
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My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
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| Link: The Fashion Style Test written by mari-e on Ok Cupid. |
| The Deviant Geek You answered 81% of the questions as a geek truly would. |
| You’re a geek and you know it. You’ve got all sorts of fringe hobbies and socially unacceptable tendencies. Chances are, whenever possible, you hate to be grouped with other people and sometimes go out of your way just to be different.
You’re smart too. You’re more willing to depend on your own brainpower to solve problems, instead of relying on others to pull you through life. You probably read a lot, and generally enjoy learning new things. So what’s it all mean? You may be considered by some to be uncool, but you probably don’t care either. In social situations you may be either slightly passive or slightly loud (geeks always fall into the extremes). In a nutshell, you answered enough questions correctly supporting a geek philosophy to be considered a more potent geek than 60% of the population. |
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My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender:
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| Link: The True Geek Test written by ambientred on Ok Cupid. |
Not even 8Gs? Shucks, there goes my get-rick-quick scheme. 😉
My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
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| Link: The Which Historic General Are You Test written by dasnyds on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test |
| You Passed 8th Grade Math |
 Congratulations, you got 9/10 correct! |
Have you been using Firefox for several months? And during that time noticed that it’s taking longer & longer for the Save File dialog box to come up? Then likely, you’ve got the same problem that I’ve had. Fortunately, there’s an easy (but slow) fix for this.
Instructions:
- Open Firefox.
- Go into Tools -> Options (or Edit -> Preferences).
- Click on the Privacy icon in the left-hand pane.
- In the right-hand pane, click on Download Manager History.
- Click the Clear button. At this point, Firefox may appear to have crashed but in reality it should be going through and clearing out all of the items from your download history. On my home machine, this took several minutes to complete but I’ve been running Firefox since v0.9 and have never cleared the download history before.
- Optionally, you may wish to change the “Remove files from the Download Manager:” from “Manually” to “When Firefox exits”. To help prevent this slow down from happening again.
This fix works on both the Linux & Windows versions of Firefox. I would presume it also works for the OS X version, but I (sadly enough) do not have a Mac to try it out on.
Been feeling a bit burned out lately, too many weeks of running around doing stuff and not enough down time, I suspect (hence the lack of posts and lack of Ant-Boy).
Anyway, while taking a break I ran across this article over at CSM. I’ve felt that frustration as well when I was younger. Back in a high school painting class I took; I was working on painting a lighthouse on an icy shore. The teacher came over and said my waves were wrong, took the brush from my hand and painted the waves the way she thought they should be. After all these years1, I still feel somewhat annoyed/bitter that she did that. Ah well, not much I can do about it.
Our assignment was to paint watercolor landscapes. I painted trees with round tops, modeled after the pruned trees I saw as I walked to school each morning. I liked my painting; my teacher did not. She said my trees looked like lollipop trees; that they didn’t look like real trees, although they looked like the trees I knew.
Mrs. E picked up a paintbrush and painted over my trees to make them look the way she thought trees should look.
For the rest of my school years, I never voluntarily took an art class.
Anyway to Mrs. Kennar I say, though I’m not a teacher and I did continue taking art classes2 in high school and into college; I’ll never paint over your lollipop trees.
1 While I’ve been told that I look much older than my actual age (28); I’ve been through enough other experiences that thinking high school feels like I’m trudging through ancient history.
2 Though perhaps not surprisingly, I haven’t done any painting since I took that class.
Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to go and see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Wow was that ever a mistake!
I went in knowing that most of the reviewers out there had said it was bad and about half of the geeks were saying the same1. However the trailers for the movie looked just gorgeous with an impressive style that felt very much like one would expect a 1940’s pulp sci-fi movie to look2, from the giant robots to the cars down to the ray pistol. The one interesting thing about the movie that one should remember is that the entire thing was shot in front of a green screen and there were no locations. All the background stuff was computer-rendered. Then it appears that they pushed the film of the actors through some filters to add a bit of noise & distortion into the film, giving a feeling of being from the 40’s. These computerized specials effects were unfortunately the only good thing about the movie. The writing of the movie was wretched. The acting was sub-par at best. If you wish to know more details, following the (more) link but be warned that there are some spoilers mixed in there.
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