I was at grandma's house last weekend, and there was a power outage.Turns out, it was a squirrel chewing on the power lines, and got electrocuted.We found out when my Uncle Brian came in saying,"There's a dead squirrel that was chewing on the power lines."When I heard that I fell on the floor laughing!That squirrel is nuts!Or at least was nuts...

I used to work near a little restaurant called "Rasta Grill". It was this weird fusion of Italian and Jamaican food, and everything was absolutely delicious. We'd walk down to Rasta at least once a week or so and have giant plates of spaghetti with jerk chicken in the wonderfully bizarre atmosphere.

Well, we always suspected that some of the employees perhaps took the Rasta theme a little far, and occasionally partook of Jamaica's other famous export. Our suspicions grew one day:

Us, ordering: ...and an order of garlic bread.
Cashier: [writes "GBR" on the ticket, but draws the "G" almost like a "6"]
Cook, taking ticket: OK.... hey, what's "6 B R"?
Cashier: That's a "G". It's garlic bread.
Cook: [long, confused pause] And they want 6 of 'em?

From the manual of an Asus Eee PC:

The solid-state disk drive's head retracts when the power is turned OFF to prevent scratching of the solid-state disk drive surface during transport.

I think someone got a little zealous with the find-and-replace.

Funny geek stories

Let a robot do your dirty work.

I love the little iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaners, but something about their new tagline bothered me until I identified it. If I am certain of anything, it's that in 50 years the National Association for the Advancement of Digital People (NAADP) will use that quote as proof of our society's discrimination against Mechanical Americans.

Dad is funny.He played a trick on my sister.He says somthing like "Guess
what?"Ari would say"what?"Dad would say"Chickenbut!"

I was walking through our house when I saw Jake. He was watching me stone-faced with eyes open wide and bugged out. In our house, that means one thing - staring contest. I returned the stare as I walked nearer and bent closer to his level.

Closer.

Closer.

Until he reached up and poked me in the eyeball and yelled, "you blinked! I win!"

Yeah, he got me: I definitely blinked. I think I can still see his fingerprint on my cornea.

So, I forgot my root password. For non-technical types, that's pretty much the key to the kingdom when you need to get full access to a computer, or install new software, or to make backups, or to fix something in an emergency. I use this little program called "sudo" all the time that lets you do most of the same things except with your own password. I guess it'd been so long since I'd actually needed that root password that it just slipped my mind. Still, I felt pretty dumb and resigned myself to coming up with a new one and resetting it on all the computers I use.

So, this morning something came up where I really needed that password, and without thinking I picked up a keyboard and mashed it out. It worked. "Oh joy," I though. "I'll just do it again and pay attention to what I'm typing." Except that try as I might, I just can't type that password if I'm consciously thinking about it.

This has not improved my outlook on an upcoming birthday in the slightest.

I hate those ads for the headache medicine - you know the ones. The thing is, the stuff's just menthol in a wax base (plus trivial amounts of homeopathic quackery).

For a cheaper alternative, use bottled water instead. "Evian: apply it directly to the gullible!"

In our household, a baby just ain't a baby without an appropriately geeky birth announcement. And since Nick is mostly functional - I mean, he can't exactly type yet - this one is in Lisp. Share and enjoy!

The Daily WTF

News for nerds, stuff that matters.

On Tuesday evening, August 24, I left my wife and three young children (ages four, three, and sixteen months) at home for a couple of hours to go to a Lodge meeting. About an hour after I left, Jen put the kids to bed and sat down at the kitchen table to eat a bowl of ice cream and work a crossword puzzle.

After a few minutes, she heard a sound coming from the general direction of the utility room, which is adjacent to our dining room, but she guessed that our Boston Terrier might have been sleeping in there and making dog sounds. When she heard the noise again, she got up to check it out. Just as she stepped into the utility room and looked at the sleeping dog, she heard a voice coming up from the basement stairs that open into that room:

"Don't mind me - I'm just hanging around."