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April 1, 2008

The lucky folks back home in Cincinnati appear to be having a snow day in April, according to my self-aware program that automatically updates Planet Xavier to reflect the latest school closings. (pX is a blog aggregator for my high school.)

For Tuesday and Wednesday, St. Xavier is closed. See the school website for more details.

Normally, I’d be quite skeptical, but it snowed a ton there last month, and plus, this program is seriously smart. It even deduced (from the school’s event calendar) that some events would have to be postponed or canceled, so it added a helpful link to the school website for details on schedule changes.

(By the way, you should see what my alma mater’s doing for the 1st of April!)

So pX is back to normal now, though I’ve archived the prank in case you feel like getting a catchy song stuck in your head today. As for me, this little experiment in inane Internet memes is definitely over. Ah, sanity.

Entry №1176, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 1:42 PM | Edit |
Categories: Humor, Planet Xavier | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

February 11, 2008

Today’s update to Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) features a new menu that lets you know when your hard drive is being backed up to Time Machine. The menu naturally comes with a command to back up your pirated movie collection, lest the MPAA comes by and runs a big magnet over your computer. (See, backing up is cool!)

The command is accessible via a convenient keyboard “shortcut”: ⌃⌥⇧⌘B. (Hover over each symbol to see which key it stands for.) That’s a whopping four keys to hold down and one to press! Sure, you don’t want to accidentally start backing up your computer while Norton’s running in the background and you’re playing a scintillating game of… Chess. But you need the skills of a virtuoso to trigger a backup that way – you might as well just use a mouse.

At least you can take as long as you want to master that key combination: in Windows 95, there was an Easter egg that would display Bill Gates’s horse, Nugget, on your desktop. Unfortunately, you had to press Ctrl+F6+RtShift+Del and the right mouse button, simultaneously, before your wallpaper loaded.

Sounds like a job for Mavis Beacon.

Thanks to John Gruber for linking to the Macworld review.

Entry №1170, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 7:35 PM | Edit |
Categories: Humor, Macintosh | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

January 31, 2008

Time to slim down my “need to blog about but can’t find the time for” folder. Since there’s currently a whopping 171 bookmarks in it, I’ll start with some of the stuff since October:

  • Finally, there’s a solution to the troubling trend of small logos: Make My Logo Bigger Cream.
  • Wired Magazine details the pains Apple went through to make the iPhone happen, and the lasting effect it had on the phone industry.
  • For the last three years, one man, Alexander Clauss, has pretty much single-handedly competed against Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple. Although his Web browser, iCab, looked horrendous for the longest time and never gained even the market share that Opera had, it until this month supported decade-old Macs and modern Web standards at the same time. In case you’re wondering: yes, my computer has a copy installed.
  • Those fortune cookies you get from any of the hundreds of Chinese buffets in Cincinnati? They’re Japanese.
  • My first quarter out here at Stanford, I joined a few hundred freshmen descending on downtown San Francisco for the school’s annual Scavenger Hunt, essentially a denial of service attack on the city’s mass transit infrastructure. Caltrain, the regional commuter railroad, was resilient enough to stuff everyone onboard successfully (albeit unconfortably), but once we got downtown, the Muni bus system was a different story altogether. Apparently Muni’s semi-subway system isn’t any better.
  • Today’s big corporations would be ashamed of what their Web presence amounted to back in 1996. My favorite is Nickelodeon’s site, where a pre–Web 2.0 vlogger is stuck in the back seat of the family car “with only her goldfish, Rover.” Yeah.

Thanks to John Gruber and Steve Baldwin.

Entry №1166, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 6:15 PM | Edit |
Categories: College, Computing, Humor, Summary, Web Archaeology | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

  1. Snow?
  2. Keyboarding for pianists
  3. October through January
  4. Homophone
  5. Glass half full (minus a smidgin)
  6. Random acts of capitalization
  7. Squawk!
  8. Driving through cornfields
  9. 1.) Fall off seat. 2.) Laugh.
  10. When I was five
  11. Mom, I canceled class today
  12. Know thy sources
  13. For the disoriented
  14. In an orderly fashion
  15. Never gets old
  16. Đại Hội Thánh Mẫu 2006
  17. Artist’s conception
  18. What goes around
  19. Going somewhere?
  20. Shut down
  21. Dead as a doorknob
  22. π≈
  23. End of line
  24. Priorities
  25. A thousand songs, in the seat behind you
  26. Ten things that irk me
  27. Old habits
  28. Link fest!
  29. Catching up on everything else
  30. Misplaced zeal
  31. Indeterminate Vector
  32. Going Out: Breaking the rules
  33. Sign of progress
  34. Thirteenth
  35. Going out
  36. Limit of major weekly publication as logic approaches zero
  37. Last Blueprint critique of my high school career
  38. School approves budget for 2005-06 school year
  39. Back to mundanity, part 1
  40. Resistance is futile
  41. … shame on me
  42. Fool me once…
  43. Sports update
  44. Blueprint delivers timely issue
  45. SMILEing
  46. Word of mouth
  47. Picking nits with the Blueprint
  48. Top this: Weber 2005
  49. More waste of space
  50. Behind enemy lines
  51. Negative five
  52. Vending some trouble
  53. Turning point
  54. Inspector General (or current resident)
  55. Godwin’s law
  56. Discrepancy
  57. Serving others
  58. Not yet
  59. Lastest news
  60. What an honor
  61. Grammatical fallacy
  62. Stay tuned…
  63. Hail to the Chief
  64. In the third person
  65. A new religion
  66. Steak and Hummers
  67. What I want
  68. Between the lines
  69. Coded
  70. GLAT you asked
  71. Worth 117 words
  72. Saying something
  73. Preferencial treatment
  74. Political hack
  75. Devalued
  76. Last-minute changes
  77. The best flavor you’ve ever tasted!
  78. We accomodate
  79. For those too familiar with e
  80. No fair!
  81. Está abierta… en cierto modo
  82. Management class
  83. Synergy (or the lack thereof)
  84. The computer ate my homework
  85. International Webloggers’ Day
  86. Your other left
  87. Three-finger salute
  88. Parasitism?
  89. Slowing down (to look at all the signs)
  90. Weber 2004
  91. Spam going cosmic
  92. Inside the Onion
  93. BioFest 2004
  94. Emperor Norton
  95. Were you fooled?
  96. Analyzationism
  97. Orange with three white stripes
  98. Why read over contracts?
  99. Let’s Jive!
  100. I’m a Latin scholar!
  101. Albert
  102. Thank you
  103. Squawk!
  104. Answers
  105. How Convenient
  106. Parting Gift
  107. Chief Prisoner
  108. ♪Smile, you’re on my phone’s camera!♪
  109. Any key
  110. Spam
  111. Back… again
  112. Here’s a cupholder
  113. For immediate release
  114. Mental Note
  115. Oh, those French!
  116. Clippy, Attorney-at-Law
  117. I am…
  118. Plans
  119. Dinner at McDonald’s
  120. Pronunciation
  121. Better than who?!
  122. Today’s Date
  123. Phony
  124. Bushism of the Day
  125. Impending Doom
  126. Detention
  127. Getting Down to Earth
  128. beWregniM
  129. Coming down to Earth…
  130. Arrrrrrgh!
  131. Impersonation
  132. Overstating the Obvious... Obviously
  133. Say what?
  134. The Hat
  135. Um, yeah right
  136. Sesquipedalia