Geek Drivel

I’ve long suspected that the Earth must have some kind of system to keep it’s temperatures stable. This may be it.

If the claims of this particular company are true, the last technical hurdle to the true electric vehicle may be on it’s way out.

I don’t know whether this is a good thing or not, since we’re having problems generating cost-effective electricity already. But it might at least help further with the smog problems in some cities.

I’ve hired you to help me start a war. It’s an prestigious line of work, with a long and glorious tradition.
– Vizzini, from The Princess Bride

VMware is a great program, and I like it a lot. But there are some things you just can’t do in it… full 3D graphics in Linux, for instance. I was curious about the advanced desktop features, the ability to run a real Windows version under Xen (with my notebook computer’s hardware virtualization features), and various other interesting things. After examining the stuff on my hard drive, I realized that there were at least 30GB of stuff that I could offload to an external drive, or do without until I get one of the new (and much more capacious) perpendicular-recording hard drives for it. The time had come, at last, to reformat the drive and reinstall everything from scratch.
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I just saw this on Groklaw (from commenter “PSaltyDS”) and had to grab it:

Geek’s Corollary to Clarke’s Law
“Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.”

Perfect.

This is the kind of science-fiction-like technology that I love hearing about! I don’t suffer from allergies much, but GoddessJ does, several times a year. This should make her very happy.

The latest roundup of accidentally-humorous spam messages.

There’s one here with the subject line of “Aniston Likes the Sound of Singing Inmates”. If “Aniston” is the name of the spammer, he (?) had better like it a lot, because this stuff is good for a long stay behind bars. Maybe he can start a chorus… or at least a duet.

There are two with only “Re:” in their subject lines. The contents are funny though: “Your penis will be big enough to hang your clothes to dry.” (Thanks, but it already is.) And “With Penis Enlarge Patch you will be able to scratch your back with your dick.” (How the heck would something that long be enjoyable, for either you or your partner?)

Then there are the two gems. Both have identical text, barring the URLs and the random garbage at the end:

Subject: Big your piano, be a real man

Chicks always laugh at me and even guys did in the WC toilets!
Well now I smile at them because I took megadlk for 6 months
and now my disk is much bigger than NATION average piano size . :p

“WC toilets”? What kind of toilet is that? “…my disk is much bigger…”? I’d see a doctor about that, bud. And although I’ve (rarely) heard it referred to as a skin-flute, I have to admit that “piano” is a new one on me. But what’s even funnier is the sender names… the first was “Danial” (he can’t spell his own name?), the second was “Kathy”… if “Kathy” is telling me that she’s a real man now, I don’t think she’s my type.

I love it… two would-be carjackers who tried to steal a manual-transmission car, but had no idea even how to start one, and a pair of would-be bank robbers who planned to float away down a river in innertubes — one of which had a hole in it.

As described earlier, I’ve been trying to come up with a way to make the automatically-mounted TrueCrypt-encrypted home directory, on my Ubuntu Linux machine, also automatically unmount when I log off. I’ve finally done so, and I’ve learned some fascinating things about Linux in the process.
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This is rather sick. Very amusing, but sick nonetheless.

I’ve always enjoyed creating my own elaborate Hallowe’en costumes, the more high-tech-looking the better. But this guy has me beat by a mile.