My Google-Fu is failing me. Possibly about two years ago I ran across a quiz that was supposed to decide whether you were worthy to be allowed on the internet. I recall one of the questions had to do with proper use of the apostrophe. I think another may have involved whether or not to replay to a chain/virus-warning email. If you passed the test it welcomed you to the internet and if you failed informed you that you were not yet smart enough for the internet. Now I want to show it to someone, but I can't figure out where the heck it is...

Spaceballs this evening. I'm planning on going, anyone else? I was going to ask people over IM, but I haven't been online away from work much this past week. If others are going, would you rather hit the 6:30 or 8:35? Should we eat somewhere before the movie or will it be the full theater experience with pricey hotdogs and pop corn?

Here is the original Spaceballs post on the THEM Community.

So it seems that Adam and Jamie were invited to NVISION to promote NVidia. So they decided to demonstrate what a GPU is. Using three of their favorite things. Blowing stuff up. Shooting stuff. And robots.

Mythbusters GPU vs CPU, part 2,

"Leonardo. He may look like a skid steered battlebots platform with paintball gun mounted on his head. But in fact, at heart, he's a painter."

"It's just like this on the show. Only they edit it to make it faster."

"It's kinda like a parallel processor. Or GPU. If it works." "If it doesn't, we are screwed."

"These aren't prizes. These are sheets to cover you guys up."

Now this is nifty. I trust everyone is familiar with the typography animation set to the dialog from Pulp Fiction, "English, do you speak it?" Well, here is a similar one set to dialog from the Firefly episode, Out of Gas.

And here is my results for the twelve character meme. Caught this one by way of chaypeta and jeriendhal. I picked twelve current and past RP characters of mine.

1. Pithani Uro: Mars Academy's resident reformed juvenile delinquent


2. Kaleth 'LilFluff' Lilandren: Who lucked into roaming the multiverse at his government's request


3. Verdi: Rescued servant and Mars Academy student


4. Talyeth Riverbend: Remember, if the guy comes from a well-to-do family you call him accentric, not weird.


5. Simon 'Fifteen Griffon years old' Pepelu: Crazy underage pulp space pirate/mad scientist


6. Tomasso: Secret agent and cyborg wrangler. Slowly admitting to caring about the girl put in his care


7. Ricardo Nuncio: expat from the Southern Confederation's perfectly safe and pacifist city of Innsmouth


8. Takahashi Tomi: Catboy? Who? Me? Um, stay there while I remember the amnesia spell?


9. Veronica: The 'slightly' paranoid cyborg (slightly, like Trinity was a 'small' boom)


10. Monty: the innocent cyborg assassin boy


11. Liou Siete-Vosom: Genius by birth and genetic engineering, orphan by choice


12. Edward Françoise Li: Exo Engineer, Technician, and Tinkerer

( And now the answers )

Consider, if we aren't going to give any immigrants a break, not even spouses of people serving in the military in combat zones... Has it occurred to them that this means having to deport Superman as well. After all, where are his papers?

As reported on Groklaw and The Register SCO has just lost the SCO vs. Novell case. Which stands to have a devastating effect on them in SCO vs. IBM since it was ruled that Novell and not SCO owns Unix and Unixware.

Really at this point I suspect the only question isn't will SCO lose the IBM case but just how much damage will they take in losing.

One of the nifty things I've started playing with is a program called pcal. It takes a text file listing events and spits out by default a postscript file with a calendar of the current month. But the interesting thing is the flexibility of the event listing.

For instance here are simple entries:
All odd Fridays Payday!
All Thursdays T.H.E.M.

And here are some more interesting examples:
Weekday on_or_after Apr 15 Taxes Due!
Tue after first Mon in Nov Election today

And let's say THEM decides the third meeting of each month will be replaced by DDR night? That's simple enough to handle:
delete third Thursday in all T.H.E.M.
third Thursday in all Dance Dance Revolution Night

So it looks like I might actually start having and using a calendar. Which means I ought to put things on it. Sure I've got a few weekly and monthly meetings already in my calendar file, and it comes with a holiday file and moon phases files, but I'm sure there are things I ought to have in it.

So if there are any dates you think I should track just hit reply. Birthdays, upcoming events (I think I might start a calendar file for book release dates), anniversaries of important events, or anything of interest.

After removing the crowded hard drive on my laptop and putting in a nice roomy one, I set the laptop up to dual boot Windows and Linux. I was running Linux on one of my desktop machines before the motherboard on it died without warning. I liked it then, but I'm liking this new distribution even better. It helps that I'd already changed over to FireFox as my default browser, so all I had to do was copy over and import my bookmarks for that. But I can really see myself spending much of my time booted into Linux. The only thing I *have* to switch over to Windows for currently is viewing DVDs.

I'll have to take another look in a week and a month and see how I feel then, but I'm feeling good about having installed it now. It's got this over a year old $500 special laptop running pretty smoothly.

While reading a comment to an entry on Tim Bray's blog a ran across a link to a product called Quantrix Modeler and it struck me just how old fashioned Excel is. I'm old enough to have actually tinkered with VisiCalc on an Apple //e. VisiCalc, as in The First Spreadsheet Software. Until tonight I would have said that Excel, OO.org Calc, and Quattro Pro were much more advanced products than VisiCalc was. However, if you went back to the early 80's in your time traveling phone booth and grabbed someone who worked with VisiCalc and put a computer in front of them running one of today's spreadsheets, they wouldn't need much retraining.

The spreadsheet software you find in current office suites is still pretty much a series of numbered rows and letter labeled columns. In fact the only thing I can recall ever stumbling over during the years was switching between how to signify a range (A1..B2 vs. A1:B2). What impressed me when I viewed the product tour on the Quantrix web site was that they did away with this. The initial blank worksheet was a one column, one row, one cell sheet. Only instead of fixating on rows and columns they were referred to as categories. They start as A and B, but you start by giving them meaningful names. So in the tour they name one Quarter and the other Type and label the first Quarter column Q1 and the first Type row Sedan. So that one single cell isn't A1 or B2, but Quarter 1 Sedan. That was only the first of two things that impressed me. The other is probably easier to see in the video than explain in words. It was kind of like Excel's pivot table feature, but built in as a core feature rather than bolted on.

If you do much of any work at all with spreadsheets I suggest going to the site and viewing the tour. I suspect like me you'll find yourself thinking that Excel, Calc, and Quatro Pro may be complex, but it's hard to say they are much more advanced that the old spreadsheets. Okay, so they've got built in software for drawing charts, and a good many more built in mathematical functions, but can you put together a sales projection for four types of cars in three regions quarterly across three years using only four formulas?

The downside is that even the cheap version of Quantrix is over $300. I predict two things. First, assuming there isn't one that I just haven't heard of yet, at some point an open source version is going to show up and get the kind of attention Open Office is getting now. Second, at some point Microsoft will either replace Excel with something that is similar (probably keeping the Excel name) or introduce something like it without replacing Excel. Funny thing is, the Quantrix people pretty much brag about aiming for the professional financial analyst market. Even making a comment about how it doesn't make sense to try to have a one size fits all solution for balancing family budgets and guiding multinational corporations. Yet if Microsoft introduces something similar I suspect they'll target it at small businesses and the 'homeowner' market. "Big huge spreadsheets are for accountants and mathematicians. You don't have time for that. Use new MS UberSheet it works with you not against you." Probably complete with cute little illustrations of paper worksheets with household budgets pointing out how, "You don't use A1 and B5 here, why should you have to do so on the computer?"

Ah, UML, that of the stick figures for use-case diagrams. Unless of course you are in desperate need of procrastination. Then you might do like a guy going by 'Trapper Zoid' and create a set of cartoon peg person UML diagrams. I expect people could find these fun to look at without knowing one bit of programming.

Procrastination... Why am I thinking of that. D'oh! Java homework...