Why Do I Work So Hard?

Because my boss could kick my ass:



Related:

Boss:  Don't start being mean to me.  You're going to make me cry and then you'll feel bad.
Me:  You don't get to play the girl card with me.
Boss:  Fair enough.

Someone Was Filming Me...?

Okay, this video is pretty gross, and not at all safe for work but...holy crap.
My stomach still hurts from laughing.  It's just all too familiar...



Edit:  Now with the actual video.

Boom And Bust

It's true; after the "Saving the world from Solomon Grundy" bubble burst, there was very little money to be made in that particular niche. But man, in those heady early days the cash flowed just like water. And the women...

Don't Talk To Me - Addendum

I'm unlikely to ever try this, but maybe I should. (Some NSFW language, and the way the girl talks is pretty irritating, but it's still pretty funny)



I should also point out that, more than just because of my inherent unfriendliness, the reason I don't want random people to talk to me is that I'm usually completely unprepared to have them do so, which means I end up looking confused and disoriented as I struggle to get a grasp on what the hell is actually going on.
Which, I suppose, probably works to my advantage, ultimately, but still.

Baltimore Comic-Con

Here are the pictures I took - the ones that turned out, at least - at the Con. I'll write more about my experiences later.

I Don’t Understand Anything

As I mentioned, I reinstalled Windows on my laptop last weekend. It went okay, for the most part, though it naturally took a while to reinstall all of the programs I wanted back on it – plus some new ones – and to get back all of my customizations (even after doing the Windows Easy Transfer thing, which lets you transfer over your OS and application preferences).

One area where I had some trouble, though, was in reinstalling some of the applications from HP. My laptop is a Tablet PC, with a dual-mode touch-screen that lets you use either a stylus or your fingers, and HP pre-loaded it with some applications designed to take advantage of the touch capabilities.

I didn’t use them often, but I figured I should have them anyway. However, with the exception of the Wireless Assistant and the DVD software, I couldn’t get anything to install. It would act like it was installing, but after finishing, the programs weren’t actually there. Basically, the installer would create a folder with nothing but icons in it. And I mean that literally – actual icons, as in .ico files, the little pieces of artwork that the actual icons themselves consist of. No executables, no .dll files. Just icons.

As I said, I don’t use those apps often, but I wanted them installed, especially since one of them is necessary for accessing the webcam. Which, again, I don’t use often, but…I have it, therefore I want it to work. I’ve since learned that other programs – Windows Live Movie Maker, OneNote, Skype – are able to access the webcam and use it, but I don’t have the handy little program that would let me quickly take pictures and videos and apply different effects to them.

Oh well.

One problem I had before the reinstall, which I’d hoped would go away, involved the touch screen. If I left “touch” – as in, using your finger – turned on, it would engage in “ghost clicks.” Just randomly clicking on the desktop as if it were being touched. This could be a problem, as it frequently would launch things like the control panel, and a series of ghost clicks could start uninstalling important programs and OS components. In the past, I dealt with that by simply turning off touch, and simply using the stylus as my input device.

But, as with my webcam, if I have it, I want it to work. So, having reinstalled Windows and installed a new driver, I’d hoped the problem had gone away. Alas, it hadn’t. I decided to try downloading the driver directly from the touch-screen manufacturer. While there, I noticed that they’d apparently added all sorts of multi-touch enhancements, letting you do all kinds of interesting things by pressing one, two, three, or four fingers on the screen at a time.

Neat.

So I downloaded their driver, and, per the instructions, uninstalled the HP driver. This necessitated a reboot. Once that was done, I launched the setup for the N-Trig driver…which promptly failed, saying it couldn’t detect any N-Trig hardware.

Annoyed, I checked Device Manager, and, sure enough, there was an exclamation point on something called “Unknown Device.”

Several reboots, a System Restore, another System Restore, and a lot of Googling later, I completely powered down the computer, took out the battery, let it sit for a while, then started back up.

This time Device Manager showed “DuoSense HID” under the “Digitizers” category. Yay! So I launched the driver setup, which actually started to install without saying it couldn’t detect the hardware, which looked promising. So I wandered off and let it do its thing, only to come back some time later to find that the installation had failed.

Multiple power cycles later I tried again, and this time it came up and complained that the old software was still installed and that if I clicked “Yes” it would remove the old software and shut down the computer, and that it would resume setup once I turned the computer back on.

Daring to hope once more, I proceeded.

Success!

Except…

I don’t have all of that multi-touch coolness that I’m supposed to have. Putting multiple fingers on the screen – except when doing the standard “pinching” to zoom out/in thing – doesn’t do jack.

I found another driver on HP’s site that says that it adds the multi-touch capability, but I’m wary of trying this again. I even downloaded and installed some “wintab” API that’s supposed to make the “N-act Hands-On Gestures Vocabulary” work, but no dice.

So I don’t understand. Is there something I’m missing? Presumably the drivers I (finally) installed were what was given to HP, who customized them in some fashion, but I’m pretty sure those were the drivers I had installed back when this whole mess started.

I don’t understand anything.

In any case, despite wanting to be able to do cool stuff like what you see below, I’m going to leave well enough alone for now. After all, it was bad enough when I thought that maybe I’d somehow fried the actual hardware. Most of my Googling on the subject had talked about the only resolution being to return it to HP and have them put on an entirely new screen. Which is fine, if, unlike me, your warranty didn’t expire a month and a half ago…

Edit: Ahhh...okay, maybe I understand something. Looked at the N-Trig page again and found something that says that a trial download of N-act Hands-On Gestures Vocabulary will be available in the “summer months of 2010.”

You're So F***ing Special

If you've seen the trailer for the movie The Social Network, you've most likely heard this choral version of Radiohead's song Creep:



The people behind this version have given a similar treatment to a bunch of popular songs, but I think the one below is my favorite:

NSFL

This video clip of an animated version of the Garth Ennis and Amanda Conner comic The Pro - a comic I just recently learned about and bought - is really, really not safe for work, and, depending on your perspective, is probably also NSFL (Not Safe For Life).
However, like the comic it's based on, it's really funny.
(Note for Scott: It was done by the same company that does Metalocalypse)
Among the NSFW/L elements:

Really, really naughty language (consider that it was written by someone from the UK, where words that are a little more taboo here get flung about rather freely)
A depiction of oral sex
Extreme acts of violence
Peeing
More oral sex
Did I mention the language?

Embedding is disabled, but you can, if you so choose, watch it here.

Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer

(Via Mark Evanier's blog)

A Commercial Worth Watching

In general, I hate commercials. Also, Bing search kind of sucks (though the Bing mobile app is excellent).
However, this commercial for Bing cracks me up.



(In general, the Bing commercials have been pretty entertaining, particularly the one with the woman saying, "Moms who wear jeans to match their teens' jeans.")

Facing The New Year

Normally I would post a New Year-related picture (for example), but I didn't get around to getting one done. Or even starting on one.
(I still may do so before the first day of 2010 is over, though)
The reason I didn't get around to drawing anything is that for the past two days I've done little more than obsessively engage in face-tagging.
As you can imagine, I have a lot of pictures on my hard drive(s), and (pointlessly) acquiring even more pictures is what I normally spend a good deal of my time doing.
Ostensibly the purpoose of acquiring all of these pictures is to use them as references for drawing, but if I lived to be a thousand years old and spent all of the time in my remaining years drawing I'd never even come close to using all of them for that purpose.
Still, it gives me something to do, and the point is that, as mentioned, I have a lot of pictures. Gigabytes worth, and that's not counting the ones I've moved off to CD and DVDs over the years.
To try to keep them all organized and searchable, I use a free program from Google called Picasa.
It has a lot of features I like, such as thumbnail views and batch renaming, and I've been using it for years.
The most recent version has a new feature that allows you to tag photos based on face-recognition. Essentially it scans through all of your photos and then tries to identify unique faces and group them together. Once that's accomplished, you can tag the photos with a name.
Up until the other day I hadn't really messed with it, just letting it quietly do its thing in the background , but when I noticed that it was about 55% of the way through scanning, I decided to check it out.
...
For whatever reason, the process of tagging faces - and trying to force the somewhat mediocre recognition software to do a better job of recognizing specific people ("How many times do I have to tell you that Scarlett Johansson and Jessica Simpson aren't the same person?!!!") - is utterly addictive.
I spent pretty much the entire day tagging faces yesterday, and probably would have spent the entire night doing so as well if I hadn't had to take a break from it to head down to Scott and Stacy's.
And I'm still nowhwere near finished.
It doesn't help that the recognition and tagging process totally chokes Picasa and that it will lock up if you try to do anything else with it(like renaming a photo), leading to having to force it to shut down, which in turn makes it lose any work it did after a certain point.
I'm going to try very hard to do something other than tag faces today, but I can't say much for my chances for success.
Back in the summer of 1995, shortly after my wife and I splt up, I spent a lot of time playing the game Doom. For those of you not in the know, Doom was what was called a "first person shooter," which is to say that it's a game in which the action takes place from your perspective - all you see of the character you're playing as is his gun and/or fists - and you basically just walk along shooting everything that moves.
I found it to be kind of therapeutic at the time, but in the game you spend a lot of time walking through maze-like corridors, seeing nothing but the walls around you, but I played the game so much that whenever I closed my eyes I was seeing long, dark, winding hallways.
Similarly, when I close my eyes now all I see is an endless parade of faces.
So maybe I should take a little break from the tagging.
In any case, as mentioned, yesterday evening found me headed down to Scott and Stacy's for dinner and a (terrible) movie. I'd brought along several Riff Trax and MST3K options - all of them horrible - but the consensus was that we (Jamie and Casey were also there) should watch The Star Wars Holiday Special.
Ugh.
It was my third time watching it, and even with the great Riffs, it's still painful. I think it almost broke Jamie.
If you want to know our pain , the entire thing has been posted on YouTube. It doesn't feature the Riff Trax crew, however, so I'm not sure I can recommed watching it - actually, I know I can't recommend it - or at least not the entire thing, as it's possible that doing so could be fatal. Still, it's worth checking out a few random minutes just to see how truly awful it is.
In any case, Happy New Year.

"I Missed That Hunchbacked Dwarves Thing"

This is pretty awesome - a sort of Biblical Literalist version of Jay Leno's "Jay Walking." You even get some Dispensationalism out of it:



(Found via Pharyngula)

PORK CHOP SANDWICHES!

In the category of "Things That Amuse Me More Than They Probably Should" I give you these reimaginings of classic PSAs from the 1980s GI Joe cartoon (language is often NSFW):









There are many more to be found on YouTube - including a compilation of some of the best - but the ones above are my favorites. The Reggae one amuses me just for the sheer randomness, the demonic alien robot sounds made by Barbeque as he climbs in through the kids' window just cracks me up, and if Roadblock decides he wants to give you a body massage, how are you going to argue with him?
And beyond that...PORK CHOP SANDWICHES!

(Thanks to that video it's pretty likely that for the foreseeable future whenever I cook something I'll say to myself "Yu nuha cooking! Yehidoo.")

Oh. My. God.

Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you, if you're young at heart...

From sometime around 1987 into the early 90s, I couldn't have imagined anything greater than what happens at the end of this video clip:




Even today, when the white-hot intensity of my hatred of hair metal bands has cooled considerably, and morphed into something like "amused pity," I can't help but smile at least a little.
(Though the question of why Poison was performing at the Tony Awards in the first place does puzzle me.)
Found via What Would Tyler Durden Do?)

Lack Of Posts

I haven't been posting much of late, as I've been messing around with getting the whole computer situation straightened out. After getting everything up and running, I was left to figure out a plan for organizing data across my 3+ terabytes worth of drives, and spending hours and hours transferring said data around.
I thought that, having finally finished that, I'd be free to, you know, actually do stuff on my computers (like blogging, for example), but then I realized that I still have a bunch of apps and utilities to get installed...
So, in the meantime, and for no particular reason, here's Liz Phair:
...
...
...or not. Every worthwhile video - and in particular the one I was going to post - has embedding disabled.
Thanks for sucking, Internet.
Well, here's a - *sigh* - link to the video I wanted to post (A link? What is this, the time of Charlemagne?): Everything To Me
Two things of note about the video:

1. I happen to think that Liz looks especially good in it. Must be getting plenty of H.W.C.
2. In the HD version of this video Liz provides a lot of random upskirt shots.

oh, and...
3. I've probably made the same comments about this video in some post in the past.
4. Yes, I know that's actually three things of note about the video, but I decided on calling it two, and I'm sticking with it.
5. Shut up. Even with four things, and now five things, I'm still sticking with two.

Old Sureshot's Here To Help Ya

Too tired/lazy for a proper post, but this old Porky Pig cartoon popped into my head earlier, so I thought I'd share it.




For some reason the image of Porky eating the desk always cracks me up. That and the shot of him going to Termite Heaven.

A Battle For The Ages

I am, quite frankly, too lazy to post anything significant.
In lieu of a pointless breakdown of the minutiae of my day, please accept the following video featuring a dramatic battle between Jon Mikl Thor - Legendary Rock Warrior - and the Prince of Darkness himself, Ozzy Osbourne Satan!



(This bit of cinematic artistry comes to us from the 1987 classic film Rock -n- Roll Nightmare, a movie that was inexplicably overlooked by the Academy)

Funny As Hell(boy)

If I'm Going To Hell, I'm Taking You With Me

I've gone back in forth in my mind as to whether I should post these videos (found via Reddit), and have finally decided to go ahead and condemn you all as I have been condemned.
Prior to seeing the first video, I'd never heard of Lazytown, but obviously it's some sort of kid show (on Nick, from the looks of it).
Whether or not you find it funny is probably a good indication of where you're going to end up in the afterlife. It's totally NSFW, and possibly Not Safe For Life. Certainly it's Not Safe For Your Immortal Soul.
Still, you do have to admire the technical proficiency of the person who did the editing.
Anyway, you've been warned:





This second video, which is more of a straight-up parody, of sorts, is considerably more subdued and subtle, and I actually find it a lot funnier than the first, but maybe that's just me.

Home Of Challenge Pissing

I'm not sure of the origin of this - NSFW - commercial, but it's pretty damn funny.