December « 2006 « doylez.com

last work day of the year linkparty

in honor of my last day of work for the year, i’ve done the hard work of searching for quality links so you don’t have to:

the paper instruction books for every lego set ever. ever. [hccamsterdam]

secret discovery channel video shows the real north korea [google video]

the aclu makes headway against george’s needless war [seattlepi]

interesting analysis on if going to college is worth it [michaelrobertson.com]

and

this reminds of me running wild in the rice bowl. kidding. [youtube]

so the dodgers have signed a bunch of free agents this winter like schmidt, nomar, juan pierre, and luis gonzalez, while the giants got poorer and older re-signing bonds to his 37th season in san francisco where he’ll play maybe 50 games and be our dh when we’re in american league parks. great. i have to hear a whole season of steve cackling loudly and needling me, more so now that he’s moving up from la to about 0.1 miles away.

i can take solace in the fact that no matter how the dodgers do year-after-year, my personal friends will still hate them. even mozilla thunderbird, my email program, caught this sarcastic dodgers email sent by the aforementioned steve and rightfully flagged it as a SCAM:

ready to shed my holiday weight

i think for the last 6 months of the year, i’ve packed on an extra 5 pounds of flubber. once the new year hits, i’ll be excited to head back to the gym and get some good basketball and weights in. i have to do this before i look like this:

top chuck norris facts

brizzle asked about the chuck norris facts today and so i thought it would be good to revisit my favorite ones:

1. Guns don’t kill people. Chuck Norris kills people.

2. Chuck Norris does not sleep, he waits.

3. There is no chin under Chuck Norris’ beard. There is only another fist.

4. Chuck Norris’ hand is the only hand that can beat a Royal Flush.

5. Chuck Norris is not hung like a horse. Horses are hung like Chuck Norris.

6. Chuck Norris’ calendar goes straight from March 31st to April 2nd; no one fools Chuck Norris.

7. Chuck Norris’ tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.

[and my favorite]

8. Chuck Norris puts the “laughter” in “manslaughter”.

how not to be a good IT department

Being an IT manager, I always try hard to balance the needs of the employees vs the requirements of the business. My sister sent me this email from her IT department trying to clamp down on excessive bandwidth consumption:

From: Message from the CIO
Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2006 3:52 PM
To: The Work Peepz
Subject: Desktop Performance

[...]

DO NOT Play Video Games – Games create excessive screen changes which negatively impact network bandwidth

DO NOT Play Non-Work Related Movies (and/or Video Streams) – Your workstations do not have sound cards installed but sound is still transmitted across the network. The combination of Video and Audio created by movies is just as bad (if not worse) than video games

DO NOT Install Flashing Lights on Desktop – The holidays are upon us and many websites offer festive screen savers and applets for download. The animation generated by these seemingly innocuous programs consumes inordinate amounts of network bandwidth

Limit visits to Internet Sites with Heavy Animation – Animation generates excessive screen changes which negatively impact network bandwidth

Avoid Online Shopping During Primetime Hours – Many Online stores generate excessive animation (such as pop-ups), which generates excessive screen changes and network bandwidth consumption (even if buried underneath another screen)

[...and my favorite one]

Refrain From Moving Your Mouse For No Apparent Reason – All changes on your screen generate network traffic. While this action is certainly not as severe, it does generate unnecessary traffic and underscores the fact that any screen change or mouse movement does translate directly into network bandwidth consumption.

I’d like to challenge that last statement, but I won’t waste my time arguing with a company that is so cheap that they are fooling people into not moving their mouse excessively. Are they that hard up for bandwidth, that they have to push out this email?

What about the pictures people put in their signature files, like this holiday one:

I think they should crack down on stuff like that first!

new samsung blackjack phone

the wife replaced her treo 650 with the new samsung blackjack phone today. it’s a neat package with the phone/organizer/camera thing going on in that slim form factor. i didn’t like how the buttons were crammed pretty close together and the screen is not touch-sensitive so you have to navigate with a thumbwheel (nice) or the smallish nav button pad on the front (not as nice). i’ll post more about it after i’ve had a chance to use it in a couple days.

another nomination for man of the year

i like how he’s got his bike in the tent with him while his lady sleeps outside.

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merry christmas