Showing posts with label Computer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Computer. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Dad Memories: One Blind Mouse

One Blind Mouse

A lot of the computer knowledge that most members of our generation take for granted is probably as foreign to members of the previous generation as planes are to cod. And my dad was not the sharpest cod in the drawer. I’ll excuse him the time that he accidentally deleted a document and instinctively reached toward the monitor to catch it like Coach did in Poltergeist. However, he called me in Maryland to tell me of an internet connection problem caused by the lack of a mouse pad. I thought this to be another one of his pranks and played along. But this was a joke that he wasn’t in on.

I drove the two hours north and handed him a Scarface mouse pad. It didn’t help, which was of course no surprise to me. “Well no shit it doesn’t work now. The thing hasn’t had a thing since you brought it here.” Loosely interpreted through his body language, he still blamed the mouse pad. And by now, it was of course too late as the mouse had already been contaminated from prolonged unprotected mousing and I “didn’t know shit about shit.” He bought a new mouse on his own this time.

After I rewired the motherboard in front of him to fix his internet connection issue, he was still proud of his diagnosis and problem-solving ability and convinced it was the new mouse that made all the difference. Now he could get back to his internet poker and hotornot.com.

Saturday, July 8, 2006

Protection Is For Winners

Protection Is For Winners

Well, I just had my first funny laptop experience and I think you all will appreciate this. Unfortunately it isn’t about me being an idiot, but quite the opposite. It’s nice to have one of those stories once in a while.

So I was playing internet poker tonight. And this afternoon. And all yesterday. And it’s not really that I’m addicted to gambling so much that I’m addicted to winning and losing money. Anyway, I was about halfway into a tournament and had a decent chip stack when my internet cut out. I suppose that’s what I deserve for stealing my internet signal to begin with. And if you’re the kind of person who has a problem with that, replace the phrase “stealing my internet signal” to “get off your moral high horse and join the rest of the capitalist world, Mr. Holier-Than Thou.”

So yeah, my signal cut out and I had $5 on the line here. I tried reconnecting to a few other signals around the area with no luck. So I figured what the hell? I unplugged my computer, grabbed my keys and jumped in the jeep driving around town looking for an unprotected wireless signal. It didn’t take too long. And so I pulled over and parked and started playing again. Top off the jeep, sitting in my pajamas on the side of the road at about 1am on a Saturday night playing internet poker. No, I’m not addicted at all. These two girls walked by, obviously trashed, and I started to panic. For some reason, I thought I needed an excuse so they didn’t think I was weird (good luck). Nothing came to mind, so I just sat as still as possible and pretended they couldn’t see me. Like a tree. An invisible tree. In a car. With a computer screen illuminating my bark. I know they could and I know they did because they stopped talking and laughing when they walked by. And their heads turned. And then they proceeded to run. And I didn’t recognize them, but I’m sure they recognized my jeep because they probably lived on my block. So when I find out who they were, I’ll be sure to add them to the list of chicks I’ve completely lost my chances with. I’m going to need more paper.

So then I lost my stupid tournament. I’d like to blame the surroundings, but I lose a lot worse than that in the confines of my own frequently stolen frequency. I was talking to Bill last week about our internet situation and how even after Mark moved out from next door, we still had a signal that we could pick up, but I just wanted to make sure that borrowing someone else’s signal was ok with his ethics…


Quote of the Day 7/8/06



“The way I see it, it’s their fault for letting their radio waves go through our house.”

-Indiana Wilcox

If you think about it, it would be rude not to let us use those signals that are pervading their way into my bedroom. Intrusive damn radio waves!


Tryin to break even,

Busted Nuts.


Still Standing Right Here…

Monday, May 1, 2006

Nerds Untie!

Nerds Untie!

Let's just call a spade a spade. And I'm even late for the month too. Sorry to my loyal fan base and thanks for holding up your end of the bargain, being just annoying enough with the "what happened to the quote?" "why did you take me off the list, you prick?" and "you realize nobody likes you anymore since you stopped typing to us" to get me to try to remember what my life's purpose is again.

Now this message is going to be two things at once. I have a lot of computer nerd friends on here (I mean that in the best way possible for people I'm asking favors from) and I need one of them to recommend a good computer. Here are the specs: I need it to be able to play Worms and online poker but nothing stupid like Everquest or Doom (I mean stupid in the most loving way possible). I need it to run Photoshop and iTunes and obviously stuff like Wordpad and Calculator if possible. I do NOT need it to download porn anymore. I think I got it all and I'm not too impressed with the new stuff anyway. And I need a CD burner and an internet connection of some kind.

I still have my old Frankenstein computer and it was worth the $200 I got it for from Powdered Toast Man, but if you don't reformat it twice a year, it won't let you be connected to the internet and use the mouse at the same time (he's not kidding). And that's just the beginning. And since my neighbors moved out, we can't steal their internet anymore anyway. And in case there are any cops or people seriously ethically opposed to that out there, you can replace the word "steal" with "get off your moral high horse, you aren't any better than anybody else." So that's why you haven't heard from me. After slaving away all day on the kickball field (and the bars), I just can't hang out in this damn place for another freakin second. Not when Deal Or No Deal is on 19 days a week. Anybody sick of them slamming down the little glass thing and saying "No deal!" yet? How long can that possibly be interesting?

Oops. Off track there a bit. Anyway, if somebody out there can hook me up with that computer for somewhere in the neighborhood of $500, I'll give you a cut of whatever I can sell the ole POC PC for. Thanks. NERDS UNITE! Ha. When I originally wrote that, I wrote "Nerds untie!" That's funny.

OK, I want to write this one about the Indy 500 before we get to far away from it. I was talking with Mikey Con-Man who recently moved to Indy and got to meet Mario Andretti because of his line of work (serving fish to old rich people). We were talking about the sunburn that people got from going to that race for 7 hours or however long those silly things (I mean that in the most fun type of silly possible) last. I told him that the blacktop basically functions as the focal point of the sun on days like that, but he brought up the point that nobody he knows was really on the blacktop, which was an excellent point.

Quote of the Month 5/06



"If you were on the blacktop, you'd be red alright. But it wouldn't be from sunburn."

-Mikey Conover


It's a good starter quote to get me back on track (pretend that wasn't an intentional pun - actually two - and you may still respect him).


Computerless in Southwest Ohio,

Dutty.


Still Standing Right Here...

Monday, February 7, 2005

Outkicked

Outkicked

OK, we're gonna take a break from the Alanis Morisette dating life I've been leading for a while (and we won't speak of that sporting event that may or may not have happened a few days ago), and we'll concentrate on my newest addiction, poker. Thankfully, I have a computer that can only support my habit about three hours at a time. This is why I still sleep at night. Once I get a new computer, I will need to find an alternative to sleeping. Anyway, I was recently playing hold em online with my dad and got an ace-four. I told him I didn't want to call because I had an ace with a poor kicker...


Quote of the Day 2/7/05


"That's not a kicker. That's not even a punter."

-The dad.


And that's not the only poker/football joke I got lined up for this week!


Bettin on a loser,

Busted Nuts.


Still Standing Right Here...

Tuesday, May 4, 1999

The Disadvantages of Being Human

The Disadvantages of Being Human

I have absolutely nothing to write about today. I just got done running around the loop, I'm alone in the office, I instinctively logged into my account, hit the "compose" feature and typed in the word "quote" which brings up the addresses of all you out there, and sat in front of this screen listening to my country MP3s for ten minutes, half thinking of something to say, and half staring catatonically at my own hand resting on the keyboard that hasn't yet started typing for me by itself. (That was a long sentence.) I didn't really do anything of any interest today. I lost a volleyball game, reffed 2 close-ass softball games, and watched Stryker and Derrick both play different versions of solitaire on two different computers. And you know what? It reminded me of the days when I used to play solitaire with actual cards, which I don't think I could do anymore. It would take too damn long to set the cards up and the piles get all messy and sometimes I can't pick them up off the carpet easily and stuff. I'm spoiled, made soft and listless by Freecell and other computer solitaire games which shuffle, deal, and tell you when you've completely blown it. I think it says something about our society that we've managed to make killing time incredibly efficient, allowing us to kill an hour of spare time in only fifteen minutes...


Quote of the Day 5/4/99


Stryker: "I think the computer cheats at this chess game."
Me: "What do you mean it cheats?"
Stryker: "Well, it waits until it's come up with it's BEST move, and then it goes."


The disadvantages of being human are increasing by the second.

Nothing to really say here either,

Me.


Still Standing Right Here...

Sunday, April 11, 1999

User Error

User Error

You guys want to know what just happened? This got me REALLY pissed off. I was already finished a quote of the day about my new apartment and I had postponed it so I could send another message to somebody on the list first. When I opened it back up to send it, I missed the [ctrl]-x command to send it and accidentally hit the [ctrl]-c key to cancel the message. So all the work I did with the quote about my new apartment went down the figurative electronic drain. Now everybody look down at your keyboard. How #@$!~*@ stupid is that? Putting the cancel command and the send command right next to each other?!? I can't believe I haven't done this yet in my 6 years of using this program. You're all lucky you're not here, because I'd give whoever it was a swift kick in the preverbal nuts.

That reminds me of a funny story from years back. I was typing a 15 page paper my freshman year and I had gotten to about 11 pages at 4 in the morning. I was becoming tired, cranky, and very sick of this paper. So I took the mouse, highlighted the entire document, and started playing with the margins, the fonts, the font sizes, the line spacing, and whatever I could think of to make an 11 page paper into a 15 page paper. Well, I don't know if it was an attack of morality or a bowl of Smack Ramen noodles, but I got a second wind. I decided to try to sit down and finish the paper legitimately. So I wanted things to go back to the way they were. In my delirious awakenness, I somehow thought that the backspace key would do that. (Keep in mind again that the entire document is currently highlighted.) So the entire document disappeared. I reached out to grab it as it disappeared, like I was going to pull it back out of the monitor like Coach did in Poltergeist. Only with a kid, not a UNIX document. Hey, no problem, right? There's an undo function in Word Perfect, even in the 3.1 version (this was back in 93). Anybody know what the keyboard command was for undo? Well, it was also [ctrl]-x. I'm a keyboard kind of guy, I don't need to use the mouse to go all the way up there and hit "Edit" and go to "Undo." So I went to undo it and accidentally hit the key right above the x (Look down)... Anybody know what [ctrl]-s is on WP for 3.1? It's save, just like it is on every other word processing program ever. So, in case you've gotten lost in the last paragraph, I've now saved a blank document overtop of an 11 page paper trying to masquerade as a 15 page paper. There is absolutely nothing I can do from here, trust me. Game Over!! Dustin Loses!! On top of having just lost my entire paper, I was out $250 to replace Doug's monitor. My knuckles healed on their own.

Conversation overheard at volleyball practice last week:


Quote of the Day 4/11/99


After a hard hit...

Michelle: "Mielke! Did you just hit that with your tongue out? That's so Michel Jordan!"
Me: "Well Bart hits it with his pants down."
Clint: "That's more like Michael Jackson."

Tony hits like Michael Stipes. He complains about the lack of government action to stop the environmental decay of the universe while he's up in the air.

Hitting like George Michael,

Wussy Cricket.


Still Standing Right Here...