Found on Newegg today. The best 25ft $489 ethernet cable you’ll ever get.
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Monthly Archive for June, 2009
When Alexander Theroux wrote Darconville’s Cat, he wove a story of forbidden love and despair while savoring unusual words, multiple methods of narrative, and interspersed bits of humor in the midst of a spiral into oblivion. It’s a highly under appreciated literary work, and if you’re looking for something that most likely nobody else you know has read, I highly suggest picking up a used copy of this novel somewhere. You won’t regret it.
And there’s a cat in it too.
In my Astronomy outreach class last quarter, one of our quizzes for the class contained a question where we had to make up a constellation, explain what it looked like, and created a back story behind it.
They range from the slightly tasty:
Zeus’ daughter made him his favorite cupcake one day. She wanted to surprise her dad,so she left it on the counter for him to find. When she brought him into the kitchen to show him, they caught Pisces trying to sneak a bite of the dessert. Zeus’ daughter began to cry hysterically and Zeus lost his temper. He grabbed the cupcake and threw out the window into the heavens above. And as punishment to Pisces, he threw the fish into the night sky, where he will always be out of reach of the cupcake as it sits deliciously uneaten for eternity in front of his face.
Continue reading ‘The evil giant octopus Ecthelion’Every year after the dust settles from the insanely boring ASUW elections, “they” publish a document that contains all of the vote. While most students just don’t vote, some ditfully punch their virtual ballots for whoever is running from the Greek system. The rest will take advantage of the write-in system. Here are a few examples:
ASUW President
- Hottie Sarah Chow
- Homer Simpson
- Jake Locker (Two Votes)
- Luke Skywalker
- You don’t deserve my vote
Continue reading ‘ASUW Election Results: Curiosities and Amusements’
From: [redacted] To: Alpine-info <Alpine-info@u.washington.edu> Subject: [Alpine-info] The saga of Sir Crispin vs the UW (maybe) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2009 10:14:58 -0600 (MDT) Sender: alpine-info-bounces@mailman2.u.washington.edu User-Agent: Alpine 2.00 (OSX 1167 2008-08-23) I was reading a Slashdot RSS article entitled "Extracting Meaning From Millions of Pages" which turns out to be about Googles contribution to the UW project called TextRunner. I can just Sir Crispin being accosted by some friggin CS Dean or Head of IS at UW with the assertion that UW will soon be going to bed with Google, and would he and his compadres like to jump into the sack as well? HOWEVER..... it means that you boys will have to give up Pine, cuz we will need all the bodies we can get a hold of, to pull this off. Sir Crispin proceeds to tell him/her/they to fuck their hats --- that he's not interested in playing nice with an assholin', monopolistic outfit like Google --- and anyway what's wrong with a kick-ass project (used world-wide) like our own IMAP? Continue reading 'IMAP Creator vs. UW: The Hidden Tale?'
As seen on the tech-support mailing list:
uw.edu? [redacted] Thu Jun 18 22:18:53 PDT 2009 Once upon a time, there was waged a great battle between Educause and (then) C&C, the result of which was the acquisition of uw.edu. There was much hemming & hawing and mad twinkles in mad eyes. Win this one victory, it was uttered, and the floodgates would be open! Forever would the precious .edu domains flow freely, as ambrosia from Olympus! In our hubris, we thought we would walk as gods on the internet, striking down any who stood in our way with a flurry of Es, Ds, and Us. Continue reading 'Mythological Battle for uw.edu'
A male in his 50’s calls in.
Me: University of Washington. How may I direct your call.
Caller: I’d like to talk to ne of your sasquatch professors.
Me: Sasquatch professor?
Caller: You should have one or two of them. What is their number?
(I ditfully type in sasquatch into the search databases)
Me: I’m not getting any results for Sasquatch or Bigfoot. Do you have someone in mind, or a department?
Caller: No, just a sasquatch professor.
Me: Okay, how about I transfer you to the primate research lab. They might be able to help you.
The Introduction
One of the secondary duties of my job is to handle mainline operator calls for the UW. It’s usually fairly mundane, with calls that are generally worried students asking for admission, or alumni trying to donate more money to athletics. Occasionally a caller might be rude, and yes, a language barrier will sometimes rear its ugly head. But every once in a while a true gem of a call will appear.
It’s around 11:00am on a Friday morning. It’s been fairly quiet and keeping the incoming email queue well handled.
The Situation
Situation: Caller with thick accent called with a callerID of “APL” (Advanced Physics Lab). He said he had recently bought a LAN, and that it was “smelly” and wondered if he could take it to a lab to be “tested” because he thought it might get people sick. I believe he also mentioned something about blinking green lights.
