Rancid_Pickle's New Writeups

December 25, 2009 (personal)

2009-12-25T22:35:50Z

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a sack full of chings, upvotes, witty catbox sayings and general wonderfulness impacting you and yours.

You folks are the best.

NORAD Tracks Santa! (idea)

2009-12-25T22:21:18Z

Every Christmas Eve, my kids would wander around the house looking like they just slammed a case of Jolt Cola. Trying to get them to bed was an exercise in futility, until I came across a local TV News meteorologist using NORADs tracking feed on his weather map. It was the best tool to get the little greedy rugrats to go to bed so Mom and Dad could wrap, assemble, curse at poorly-writen instructions, and curse at forgetting D-sized batteries.

"Look, Kiddies, Santa is on his way here. He won't stop by if you're not asleep!"

Whoever wrote the Omaha article with the wrong phone number, I thank you. This line works better than a mallet to the mullet.

One interesting thing about this year's NORAD feed is they dropped support of Linux/Unix. They used to stream a file with Santa's info, but now you have to have a Windows/Mac computer to track him online. Slashdot has an article with the dubious title of "Santa Hates Linux".

December 9, 2009 (personal)

2009-12-09T16:44:55Z

It was cold this morning. Not Iceowl cold, but a nice balmy -22 degrees Fahrenheit. The wind chill was -46 degrees. My house, which certainly needs more insulation, was stuck at 55 degrees as the furnace struggled to get the house warmed up.

Luckily, I woke up at 4am for some reason, so I bundled up and plugged my diesel truck in. She started right up, but didn't seem too happy about it. I was almost at work (30 min drive) before I couldn't see my breath any more. Brrrr!

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (how-to)

2009-12-08T07:15:49Z

I keep having to dredge this info up, so I thought I might as well node it here.

In the 2-disc Special Edition of HP&tSS, you get one DVD with the movie and one disc with extras. There's a lot of fun stuff to explore, but the one thing I wanted was to just go right to the deleted scenes. Yes, Virginia, there are deleted scenes on the second DVD. It is, however, a pain in the butt to get to them. Here's how to get to them:

When the DVD loads in your player, go to the Diagon Alley link. When the game loads (you have to select the right bricks to enter, and it's not the same ones that Hagrid taps), do the following with your remote:

Left, Up, Up, ENTER, Up, ENTER, Up, ENTER, Right, Down, Down, ENTER, Down, ENTER

Once in Diagon Alley, go to the Gringott's sign, then go down and select the key. Then go up and actually go to the goblin bank.
After the voiceover is over, go to the coins on the poster and

…

money tree (poetry)

2009-11-29T19:07:08Z

It's obvious to see, I'm a money tree
My kids flock by to pick on me
They don't care, until I'm quite bare
Kids grab my leaves and flee

I sit and stare, in my Lay-z-boy lair
The kids won't approach on a dare
Now that I'm free of all my money
I can get some rest, which is rare.

Lie on surveys (idea)

2009-11-22T19:00:02Z

At least twice per day, I hop on over to the news sites and check on what's happening in the world. I also stop by CNN's Money section to check on the few stocks I own.

While I'm reading an interesting story, I get a big blue box that appears over the paragraph I'm reading. If I scroll down, it continues to block the middle of the article. If you ignore it for a while, it goes away. I tend to avoid clicking on any box that says "close", since there are quite a few bits of malware floating around. It pisses me off that I have to wait to take some survey to finish reading. It's the equivalent of someone standing in front of you just before you enter your favorite coffee shop, asking you to take a survey and blocking you from your destination. Eventually they go away, but I hate them wasting my time. I'm already good at wasting my time, thank you very much.

Now, when those boxes pop up, I take the surveys. Yes, I looked at the page code to check if it was the…