Category: Useless knowledge

Information you have no need for. Ever. Usually about me, but possibly about other trivial crap in the world.

On making time estimates in the techie world

I read Shark Tank every day. Plenty of the posts aren’t worth the time they take to read. But occasionally, something really good comes through. The latest post is a good example of this.

Pilot fish at this retail chain gets an assignment to add some functionality to four reporting applications. One change request is to add passwords to one of the four applications — but just one.”Just doing one sounded suspicious to me,” says fish. “So I decided to code the password logic in a separate module for easy reuse. I only had to add one line of code to the existing executable.”

Read on for the punch line.

[tags]Shark Tank, time estimates, Techie humor[/tags]

You’re better off drinking the toilet water

This is rather disturbing, especially as I rarely order anything other than water when eating out. The title of the article is “Student finds toilet water cleaner than ice at fast food restaurants.”

Jasmine Roberts, 7th-grade student:
“My hypothesis was that the fast food restaurants’ ice would contain more bacteria that the fast food restaurants’ toilet water.”

I’ll jump to the punch line for you. Roberts was right. Ow.

EDIT: The Consumerist has a brief write-up showing what a moron I was for posting this story and commenting the way I did.  Humor included.

[tags]Fast food, water, bacteria[/tags]

Ubisoft signs Shaun White for snowboarding game

I’ve been watching snowboarding in the Olympics.  I enjoy it more than most other events.  Otherwise, I wouldn’t post this, because I’m probably the only person reading this site who cares about this.

In order to accurately recreate Shaun White’s world-famous snowboarding style and differentiate from rival titles such as EA’s SSX series and Microsoft’s Amp’d games, Ubisoft’s forthcoming snowboarding game will focus heavily on the half-pipe, as opposed to the traditional downhill slopestyle.

[tags]Shaun White, snowboarding, Ubisoft[/tags]

Over the top reaction to auto dealer fraud?

Even if this man’s story is true, I still think he reacted just a bit too harshly.

Police say Georgettis believes he was scammed. “When he talks with the investigators, he told then that he was told one price for the vehicle, but when he got home and looked at the paperwork, it was something else,” said Miami-Dade detective Robert Williams. “it was considerably more.”

Witnesses watched Georgettis drive the SUV into the building and start the fire. Denise Cruz was in line at the body shop, and was standing near Georgettis when he lit the match. “And the next thing you heard was BOOM, and you saw flames all over the place,” said Cruz. “And I said to him, and I said sir, why would you want to do that?”

[tags]Consumer dissatisfaction, auto dealer fraud, anger management[/tags]

Medical tips learned from ER patients

How can you even argue with these?  Read and learn how to live a better life.  Some of the more important ones are:

  • If you’re on the street corner selling coke and you see the cops coming to bust you don’t eat all your coke.
  • Never, ever leave flashlights, shampoo bottles, beer bottles or any long, circular object on the floor because someday you will fall on it and it will somehow, work its way up your rectum.
  • No matter how annoyed you are at being incarcerated dont slash open your scrotum and shove razor blades up your urethra.

[tags]Medical advice, How to live[/tags]

The NVIDIA advertising fiasco – link dump

It’s all over the web. I don’t even care about it, but lots of people do. NVIDIA has paid an advertising firm to pay people to go in to techie forums and praise NVIDIA products. Big deal? Well, some people are bothered by the fact that these praises are coming from people paid to do so who are not advertising their relationship with the graphics card manufacturer in their post.

Rather than write a lot about it, here’s a link dump of some of the sites covering the incident.

The Consumerist

Dubious Quality Pt. 1

Dubious Quality Pt. 2

Shacknews

Penny Arcade

Hard OCP
I think Bill’s write-ups at Dubious Quality are very well done.

[tags]NVidia, AEG, marketing[/tags]

Nintendo DS wifi details

This is realllllllly techie, and probably not of interest to either of my regular readers.  However, just in case someone out there was wondering this morning “How, exactly, can I learn more about the wireless capabilities of my Nintendo DS?” I post this link.  Read at akkit.org more of the details behind the wireless functions on your DS.

[tags]Nintendo DS, Nintendo, DS, wifi, wireless[/tags]