A couple of weeks ago, we (the external user provisioning team) needed a projector for our meeting, which we borrowed from PC Service here at work. Along with the projector came three or four different video cables -- VGA to VGA, s-video to VGA, and so on.
Later in the day, one of our friends (Paula) came over and said, "what the heck is this cable?" I am usually pretty good at this game. I've been around computers for so long that I can usually recognize even the most obscure cable ... but
One (of many) skill(s) I am apparently lacking is the ability to correctly judge how much food others can or will eat. Every time I buy or prepare food for others, things go horribly wrong. And, due to my own issues with food, I consistantly buy too much food instead of too little.
Scenario #1: This year was our year to bring doughnuts to garage sale day. A quick head count revealed 10 people: Dad, Mom, Jack, Doug, Linda, Griffin, Susan, Griffin, Mason, Morgan, and myself. That's 3 kids (Gri
Another year, another Sun Valley Garage Sale Day gone by.
As a youngster, my mom and grandma hauled my sister and I to our fair share of garage sales, but Sun Valley's Garage Sale Day was the first "neighborhood" garage sale I can personally remember attending. On every Garage Sale Day, dozens of our neighbors would open their garage doors, exchanging both greetings and piles of junk with one another. Garage Sale Day wasn't just about the garage sales -- it was a neighborhood-wide block part
I spent most (all) of my evening working on my PC software archiving project. As I mentioned yesterday, this project began after noticing that many of my older CDs have started to disintegrate. If I'm reburning everything, I might as well organize it all while I'm at it. To kick off the project I copied every CD-R I've ever burned back to my laptop's hard drive. Now, I'm relabelling and reorganizing things before eventually committing them back to some sort of media, be it DVD, hard drive, or mo
Bitrot
Bitrot, according to Wikipedia, refers to "the decay of physical storage media." Back in the early days of computing, losing data was a way of life. I've seen people in tears more than once after discovering the floppy disk that once held their homework was no longer readable. Floppy disks are magnetic storage media; as such, directly applying a magnet to a disk is a very quick and efficient way to scramble the contects of a disk. In fact, throughout the years many people have learned th
Work has continued on the End User Provisioning Team here at work. You can tell the weeks we meet; I rarely update the blog those weeks, just because we're so busy here at work and when I get home I don't feel like getting on the computer. We had planning on meeting the week of April 25th as well, but moments ago I heard that week has been split into two week-long meetings, one the week of the 14th and another the week of the 28th. Crazy times around these here parts.
Last week I released ep
Shortly after the premiere of 2004's "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story," real dodgeball centers began to pop up across the country. One such center is Maximum Dodgeball, where Mason and I attended his friend Dominic's birthday party on Saturday.
Those of you who attended school in the 70s and 80s like I did (before school districs began banning the game) probably remember playing dodgeball. Teachers saw it as a way for kids to burn off energy and aggression, and we saw it as a way to pu
Over the past week I’ve had two different friends ask me details about my Lapband surgery – how the surgery went, how things are going, and would I recommend it. When I mentioned this coincidence to Susan, she pointed out that I haven’t blogged much about my surgery at all (which is unlike me). So, for my friends, and for you, here is my “three-month Lapband update.”
I had Lapband surgery on December 3rd, 2007. It’s an easy date to remember; it was nine years (to the day) that I got hit by a
"Cool Dad, now we can DS Download," Mason exclaimed as I fired up my new Nintendo DS last night for the first time. I didn't want to admit that I didn't know what "DS downloading" was, so I simply nodded. "Sure, Mase," I said. DS Downloading, apparently, is a way in which two people with Nintendo DSes can play games together.
Around bedtime, Mason asked again if we could DS Download. "Well Mase, I don't have a cable for that," I said. "You don't need a cable, let me show you," he said. He f
Those of you who have raised kids may not be surprised by this, but I find it amazing how quickly kids, even really young ones, can memorize a book. After two or three reads, Morgan can recite every word in most of the books we read to her each night. For example, one book that Susan reads to Morgan almost every night is a book about sharks. The first sentence of the book is, "Sharks are amazing animals." After a couple of times through the book, Susan would say, "Sharks are ..." and Morgan woul
Episode #2 of You Don't Know Flack has been posted. Episode 102 is all about Dungeons and Dragons so if you want to hear me tell old Dungeons and Dragons stories for 30 minutes, follow the above link. If that sounds terriby boring then, well, wait until April 1st when Episode 103 is posted.
Here are a couple of jokes that took me over 20 years to finally get the punch line.
Joke #1: In the 1936 Three Stooges classic film Disorder in the Court, through a comedy of errors (which pretty much describes every situation the Stooges ever found themselves in) a man's toupee ends up attached to Larry's violin bow (at the 8:30 mark). After Larry mistakes the hair piece for a tarantula, Moe grabs the bailiff's gun and shoots the toupee multiple times. When Larry picks the toupee up from t
After several years of being a loyal Palm customer, I had to let them go.
As electronic organizers go, I was kind of a late adopter. I bought my first one, a Palm III, right around 2000. Instantly, I was hooked. Compared to modern PDAs and phones, the Palm III is pretty simplistic -- there's no camera, no memory slot, and no color screen -- but the ability to carry around my contacts, my calendar, and my notes was pretty exciting. A couple of years later I upgraded to a Palm Zire 72, a pret
Last weekend was Mason's first game as a member of the Yukon Hotshots. The game took place in El Reno at 1pm. It was 29 degrees, but the brisk north wind made it feel colder than that.
The Hotshots formed approximately two weeks before the team's first game. That gave the team's five six-year-olds four practice sessions -- unfortunately, two of the them were cancelled, due to weather. That meant prior to our first games, the kid had spent exactly two hours learning how to play soccer.
Susan has this thing she does called "the Rule of Fives." The Rule of Fives isn't implemented all the time -- it's more like martial law, something that's declared only in times of need. When the living room gets so full of kid toys, dirty clothes and who knows what else, Susan declares the Rule of Fives. When the Rule of Fives is declared, Susan refuses to walk through the living room without picking up five items and putting them where they go. It doesn't matter if it's five pieces of clothing
This week, Nine Inch Nails released four new albums -- Ghosts I-IV. The albums contain 36 tracks of new music. And although I never plan on listening to all 36 tracks in their entirety, I bought the album today.
Nine Inch Nail's Ghosts I-IV is the third major digital album release, the first two being Radiohead's In Rainbows and Saul Williams' The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust, both released in 2007. Unfortunately, due to the relative unpopularity of those two bands, it's b
The biggest thing that worries me about being in charge of the kids is dealing with the surprises. For example, before Susan left she laid out two big piles of clothes for the kids. Each kid has one shirt, one pair of pants, one pair of underwear, and one pair of socks for each day of the week. Each morning we pull a complete set off the pile for each kid and the kids get dressed. I like this system because neither I nor the kids have to think about what they're going to wear each morning. Yeste
You Don't Know Flack is my new podcast, in which I tell stories related to retro computers, videogames, arcade games, and technology. If you enjoy my stories and/or my blogs, you'll enjoy this podcast. Episodes will be released on the 1st and 15th of each month, and will be approximately 30 minutes in length. Feedback is greatly appreciated. Let me know what you think, and what you want to hear!
In the first episode of You Don't Know Flack I discuss three firsts in my life: my first videogam
Back in first, second, and maybe third grade, I played soccer on a local soccer team. While out team consisted of a vagabond group of kids (I imagine us as soccer's version of the Bad News Bears), we had one outstanding player: Brian Olea.
Brian Olea hit puberty sometime around the age of seven. In our team soccer photo, he could easily be mistaken for a coaching assistant. Brian was the only kid in sixth grade with a moustache. During soccer practice, I can remember Brian hanging from the t
The Cult of the Dead Cow has officially released GoolagScan -- but what exactly does it do?
Google is a very powerful search engine. Google indexes billions of websites, and lots and lots of little bits of information about each of those websites -- lots of information, in fact, that website owners may not even realize is being archived. Through crafty and sometimes complex Google searches, that information can be retrieved.
Everybody who's used Google for any length of time has learned
If I take the back way home from work, there's one intersection that scares me to death. It's a two way stop where the crossroad is a four-lane highway. Cars speed by at 60mph as people behind you honk impatiently for you to zip across. It's a wonder no one's been killed at that intersection yet. Yesterday, I almost was.
To make a long story short, a small, gray Honda was hidden behind a large red truck. I saw the truck coming and gunned it, only to notice the gray car hidden behind it secon
One feature of my new LCD television I hadn't given much thought to was the VGA input. Downstairs I already run a PVR system, so when I saw the VGA port on my new television I decided I would build another computer and hook it up upstairs, so I could watch divx and other downloaded video files easily. But then it hit me -- can't new consoles such as the PS3 and Xbox 360 stream media? I've heard about people using the original Xbox for multimedia streaming, but had never personally tried it. This
With the swipe of a credit card, I have officially joined the high definition era. Wednesday, UPS delivered my mail-order 46" 1080p LCD flat screen television. And by "delivered," I mean "left me a note for me on my front door telling me to come pick it up." Oh sure, they'll attempt to deliver it two more times -- during the middle of the day, when obviously I'm at work. Someone should invent a shipping company that delivers packages between 6pm and 10pm. I'll probably detail my experience with
Shampoo! At least, when you're trying to get gum out of a kid's hair.
Mason fell asleep with gum in his mouth and woke up with it in his hair. He's lucky; when I was around the same age as Mason it happened to me, only the gum ended up sticking my head to a pillow.
Susan and I don't know everything, but we do have Google. A few minutes later I was rubbing peanut butter through the boy's head, breaking up the gum. It worked, but would have worked better if I'd had a comb to brush ev
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