Auðun Bonesmasher

Your Viking Personality: You’re a fearsome Viking, but you aren’t completely uncivilized. The other Vikings make fun of you for that. You have a thirst for battle — unfortunately, you’re not terribly good at it. You probably know which end of a sword to hold, but you’re not a fearsome fighter by any stretch of the imagination.

You might grumble a bit at the lack of amenities on board a Viking longboat, but you can handle it. Other Vikings tolerate your presence, though they’re not quite sure if they can trust you to fight dirty.

You have a fairly pragmatic attitude towards life, and tend not to expend effort in areas where it would be wasted. Other people tend to think of you as manipulative and conniving.

What is your Viking Name?

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
Then the socket packet has an error to report.

If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash,
And the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash,
And your data is corrupted because the index doesn’t hash,
The your situation’s hopeless and your system’s gonna crash!

If the label on the cable on the table at your house,
Says the network is connected to the button on your mouse,
But your packet wants to tunnel onto another protocol,
That’s repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall,
And your screen is all distorted by the side effect of gauss,
So your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse,
Then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang,
Cause as sure as I’m a poet, the program’s gonna hang!

When the copy of your floppy’s getting sloppy on the disk,
And the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risk,
Then you’ll have to flash your memory, and you’ll want to RAM your ROM,
Quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your mom!

(Sent to me via email)

Someone on irc showed me this fun little game. Gridlock is a modern day version of the board game Rush Hour. Drag blocks up, down, left, or right, so that you can move the blue block through the opening on the right side of the board. It’s a fun way to waste some time.

The folks over at PopCap Games have made some really neat browser-based games. Dena and I can’t get enough of Bookworm. Feed the bookworm by linking letters into words, but watch out for the burning letters. If they reach the bottom of the board, they’ll burn it down.

Be warned. It can be an addictive game. It’s very easy to find yourself wondering how you spent hours playing this little game.

One of my favorite holiday games, Snowcraft.

Trey sent this link out to the group the other day. Which Science Fiction Writer Are You?

I am:

Philip José Farmer

This prolific author brings surprising depths to he-man adventure tales, and broke science fiction’s prudery barrier.

I had never heard of Philip José Farmer before, so I did a little research and found his official website. He won his first Hugo award in 1953. Since then, he has been nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards several times, and won a fair share of them. I’ll be keeping an eye out for his work next time I go to the bookstore.

Googlism.com will find out what Google thinks about things. While Google doesn’t seem to know much about me, it does know about the Stone Table.

stone table is cracked
stone table is broken in two
stone table is now awaiting repair
stone table is a table which has special inscriptions on it saying that if someone is killed on the stone table
stone table is marked by its particular somber nature
stone table is obviously not so similar to the stone in jesus’ tomb as it is to the curtain of the temple being torn
stone table is a representation in other terms of the crucifixion of christ

So what does Google think of you?

Today is the North American release of the new Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. I’m not afraid to admit that I’m a fan of the series. It’s well-written and moves at a good pace (making for an easy read).

We’ve got tickets for the 10:15pm showing at our local AMC Theatre, and we’re getting together [with my cousin, who’s going to the movie with us] and watching the first movie beforehand. I suspect the later showing will have less kids and more adults like us there, but I’ll probably be wrong. Some parents took their young children to see the 12:01AM showing this morning (the early news showed a child who couldn’t have been more than four waiting in line with his mother). I guess it shouldn’t surprise me. We saw at least one infant in the audience when we saw the 12:01 AM showing of Fellowship of the Rings last year. I’ll never understand it, though.

This site has gone through many revisions and like the clichéd phoenix, it continues to rise from the ashes of its previous incarnation.

Popularity struck big in March 2002 with “What’s wrong with this picture?”. My cousin sent me this “picture”, and I wanted to share it with some friends and family. I abhor sending unsolicited file attachments, so I put it on my website and emailed the link, with a carefully crafted blurb to entice them to click, to a select few. Within days my server overloaded from the traffic it was receiving. I worked fast and adjusted a few things performance-wise, and watched the hits come in.

Stats for March 2002:
811,449 unique visitors
1,144,262 visits
2,694,724 pages served
8,489,856 hits
122.60 GB bandwidth used

While doing some random googling I stumbled across an interesting article:

“What’s wrong with this pic? – The product of a daggy programmer from Illinois, this simple email based gag has all the key ingredients of a classic viral email – surprise, simplicity and originality.” — icon.inc

Of course, they don’t have their facts quite right. First, I didn’t create the gag (although I am a programmer). Second, while the number of unique viewers was impressive, it was no where near 3.6 million. Lastly, I discovered that ‘daggy’ is Australian slang for stupid or unpleasant. I definitely disagree with that assessment.

If you want to see What’s wrong with this picture, you can find it here on the author’s website.