random stuff

HP to aliens: Be careful with our keyboards

If you happen to buy an HP PC you may find a slip of paper inside the keyboard box with a warning about the keyboard. You may think it’s the usual warning about carpal tunnel or something but no, it’s a warning about breaking the keyboard.

HP keyboard warning
Keep your dirty alien hands off our keyboards

The two handy tips, summarized:

  1. To prevent breakage, don’t bend the stand legs back until they break. Also, to avoid car accidents, don’t crash your car.
  2. Apply light pressure when using the keyboard. This implies that it’s possible to type with enough force to break the keyboard. Either these are very flimsy keyboards or HP imagines anyone using them will pound the keys like an angry villain with super strength*.

The best part, though, is the hands. Those splayed out appendages are like a Rorschach test. One glance and they look like pine air fresheners you’d hang on the rearview mirror, another glance and maybe they are tree trunks or deformed octopi or alien claws.

Since it is impossible to type without putting some kind of downward pressure on the keys, the illustration can be interpreted as telling you to not use the keyboard for typing. This would certainly keep it the legs from breaking. A good warning, then.

* based on my experience using keyboards in public–with many a broken leg, missing, stuck or wobbly keys–I think there may in fact be a lot of villains with super strength out there typing away

The multiverse me

If the multiverse exists, I wonder if another version of me in some parallel dimension is also fumbling to come up with something to post to his blog. I hope so, because I hate to suffer alone.

And now, a haiku dedicated to all the possible universes:

I am here and there
Across the universes
Me, myself and I

Brain freezes, Mars facilities and planes a-fallin’

Again I find myself unable to think of anything witty, relevant or interesting to post and the more I try to think of something the greater the blank space where that something would be becomes.

But I’m not going to post another cat image. I’m tempted. Oh, so tempted.

Instead, I will recall that I had dimly remember two dreams last night. One was being part of a crew setting up some kind of Mars research facility. This was a space station/habitat sort of thing that was going to either be on Mars or in orbit around the red planet. I remember the facility being large, clean and very empty. I don’t remember what I actually did but I like to imagine it was very important. Perhaps I met Matt Damon. I’m pretty sure publicity for The Martian is what prompted the dream.

The other dream involved me watching a passenger jet coming in for a landing at YVR, as passenger jets will do at the airport. I was watching from near 41st Avenue and Cambie and the plane was coming in north to south rather than east to west, which is silly, but that’s dreams for you. I marveled at how close to the ground the planes get when coming in, except this one actually started scraping its tail along Cambie Street. The pilot wisely pulled up, presumably to try again with less scraping. Instead of just looping around he did this strange series of climbs and descents, which I interpreted as him trying to gain momentum or height or something. I don’t know, I’m not an airplanist. The jet moved off to the west, somewhere further down 41st Avenue and did another climb but this time when it came back down it started twirling and then disappeared out of my sight, presumably crashing as out of my sight would be where the ground was. I woke up and was bummed out until I remembered the earlier Mars dream. The airplane crash dream was inspired by me watching a YouTube video of plane crashes that was a “related” video to something I watched that had nothing to do with planes, crashes or plane crashes. Probably a Boston video. Watching it was not one of my better ideas.

Tonight I’m going to watch kitten videos before going to bed. If I dream of being chased and eaten by lions I am going to be very cross with my brain.

A mind is a terrible thing to force into writing blog posts

I am having brain freeze tonight, unable to decide what to write. I’ve done all the easy stuff on the blog lately:

  • written a haiku
  • made up dumb writing prompts
  • scanned in random photos from way back
  • made multiple lists

It’s time to wing it.

Today is Labour Day, one of those self-ironic holidays (“Celebrate labour with a day off”) and I’m tending to a mild cold, feeling a bit down about things beyond my control, lamenting the sudden demise of summer after the big windstorm (seriously, it’s like someone flipped a switch. We’ve had nice days since, including today, but it feels all different, like fall jumped in a month ahead of schedule the same way summer did. It’s all this new-fangled climate change, I’m sure, but that doesn’t make me feel any better about it) and generally feeling blah and writing run-on sentences as a result.

My neck is itchy. I shaved my head today (I do this every two to three weeks, not because I’ve suddenly joined a cult) and touched up my neck, to keep the neckbeard thing at bay, but I apparently did it all wrong because the neck, as I said, is itchy. I can’t blame this on climate change but at least I started a new paragraph to whine about it.

Here’s a picture from either 1974 or 1975 of mom and a goat at Knott’s Berry Farm, I think. Farms often have goats so that seems right. Mom is clearly not impressed by the goat’s attempt at self-emasculation. This is really one of those “Write your own caption” things, so go ahead, write your own!

Mom and goat, circa 1974
Mom and goat, circa 1974

 

Comfortable dorm living

I am looking at a Canadian Tire email flyer titled “Find everything you need for comfortable dorm living.” The items highlighted include:

  • Mastercraft Metal Sawhorse
  • MAXIMUM Impact Wrench
  • Cuisinart Forged Knife Set
  • Mastercraft 8 Gallon Compressor

This sounds like Saw Goes to College. Or maybe that fresh-faced college student is really into renovating his tiny dorm room. And then knives, somewhere.

I’m just kidding, Canadian Tire. I love your store and your fake money, too. I still have a giant stack of it somewhere I’m saving to cash in on a ratchet set or something.

You vs. a black bear: the infographic

The CBC News website ran a story on how to survive a black bear encounter (not to be confused with an encounter with Bear) due to a number of unusual bear goings-on of late. They included an infographic that I find strangely adorable and am reproducing here:

Bear Survival Guide

I like the idea of singing, clapping and whistling while hiking, to both ward off bears and convince other hikers that you are a lunatic. Also, the last image suggests using karate on the bear, which would be pretty cool.

[spoiler title=”And now the absolute best cover of Bear: The Novel” icon=”plus-square-1″]Bear[/spoiler]

A pithy comment on the look of Office 2013

From Ars Technica reader jandrese:

For what it is worth, 2013 is also the ugliest version of Office ever. It looks like a web page where the style sheet failed to load.

This is an amusing and clever way of describing the whiteout approach Microsoft has used in the user interface for Office 2013. Rumour has it that we may see changes in the next version (for PC this will probably not be out for another year or more, though). I’m going to offer some of my own thoughts on UI design in iOS 7, Mac OS X, Windows 8 and a few miscellaneous others soon. In the meantime, have a look at the Ars Technica feature The software design trends that we love to hate. And you thought faux leather stitching was bad.

An April apology

I’d like to apologize to the spambots and others who accidentally visit the site and found the April posts to be almost exclusively about jogging, a subject which is not the easiest to make entertaining without the inclusion of runaway trains, circus animals or other fictional inventions. Note that I am not saying runaway trains and circus animals are fictitious, just that they remain make-believe during my jogs, which is really for the best. A pair of train tracks parallels part of the trail at Burnaby Lake, so a runaway train could be a real nuisance on a run.

For May I promise one non-running post for every running post. If I stick to my jogging schedule this means there will be at least twelve tantalizing, non-running updates.

The excitement starts…tomorrow!

Note: excitement not guaranteed.

Cost of renting Close Encounters of the Third Kind: $97.96

A short time ago I lamented that in the bounty of our digital age where there’s no need to keep pesky physical inventory sitting on store shelves or in a dusty warehouse I could not find anywhere online to rent Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the only place selling it was iTunes for $17.99. At that price you’d think it was an ebook, ho ho.

In the end I found a Blu-ray version for purchase at Best Buy for a mere $9.99, not much more than a rental.

I just needed a Blu-ray player, an HDMI cable and an HDTV to watch it. Luckily I already had the TV.

The rest, once taxes and the you’re-killing-the-earth fees were added brought the total to $97.96. A little more than a rental.

But it looked very nice and the Sony Blu-ray player adds to the growing list of devices we can use to watch Netflix on. I’d make a joke about how you’ll be able to watch Netflix on your toaster soon except some company is probably prototyping that as I write this.

Oh, and the movie holds up nicely, too. I’ll write more on it later but I love the way Spielberg portrays kids as insane, monsters or insane monsters.

The ties, though. You could have picnics on those things.

Book review + Twitter generation = bubble wrap

Here is a review of a hardcover book from a user on amazon.com:

The cover is pretty scratched up and it was late arriving. However, the packaging was geat, lots of bubble wrap to keep it safe.

I think “geat” might be Scottish for “pretty all right”. I shouldn’t blame Twitter and its billions of users for this sort of review as it could have just as easily appeared forty years ago as today. I’m also not sure if this is a troll or something from a very literal-minded person, but I kind of like that this is a succinct review of the actual physical object and not the words contained within.

And hey, if you need lots of bubble wrap, this could be the perfect gift for you or someone you love.