Marc's Musings » Amusing

First World Problems Rap

Marc — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 21:15:10 +0000

Definitely a good laugh. The “problems” of the first world, even contrasted with those faced in the first world even 30 years ago, should make you roll your eyes.

When it’s a personal tragedy that your automatic garage door opener isn’t working, you *really* need to reevaluate your priorities. Hell, I still get a little giddy when I play with my power windows in my SAFE, QUIET, DEPENDABLE car. Which car will probably need a tire change in maybe another couple of years and will require me to manually tinker with its engine um.. never.

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Cats helping their owners have a good night’s sleep…

Marc — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 03:23:53 +0000

When you watch this, if you own a cat you know that this is accurate. If you don’t own a cat and think it’s greatly exaggerated, check out the following time lapse video.

I laughed out loud when I saw this. Watch ’til the end to see the true nature of your furry pals come to the fore.

And here we see what life is really like when sharing your bed with your furry friend.

CautionaryTale, Acer 3680 computer. Good service, not so good reliability. About a year ago (November 2006) I picked up a...

The Pro aka Super Hero Hooker (NSFW)

Marc — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 02:43:53 +0000

In the superhero world, you seem to have the rich geniuses who come up with expensive and cool gadgets (not to mention the free time required to develop those awesome skills) or you have folks who naturally develop their powers at a younger age and grow into them for better (Superman) or worse (um… almost any supervillain out there).

What if a down on their luck stiff happened upon their super-gifts but carried with them all that baggage of their leaner years?

Dark, gritty but pretty damn funny, I laughed out loud a couple of times when I saw this.

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Merry “Cat”-Mas

Marc — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 23:38:41 +0000

Michelle was out shopping last week and, on impulse bought one of those little hats and beards for our cat Phoebe. You know, the ones that you see in the store, look at the person next to you, roll your eyes and say “Who would be weird enough to actually buy something like that. Now you know.

I personally harbor the suspicion that cats mark all of the indignities heaped upon them in daily life and then, when you least expect it, exact payback at a time of their choosing.

If I’m right, our little photo session with Phoebe should result in retribution of Biblical proportions sometime over the holiday season.

For your enjoyment, here is the finished product. The top center picture is the best of the pictures we managed to snap of Santa Phoebe. The one under it is one that I constructed from a simple portrait of her and about 30 seconds of searching for hat and beard images across teh Intertubes.

The surrounding images represent the majority of the shots from that photo session. They *do* make her look worse than she was. They remind me of the Hairless Cat episode on “Friends”.

Welcome Phoebe Welcome Phoebe. We were going to rename her to “Jessica”...
Phoebe’s Birthday Party We had a small party a couple of weeks ago...

Anybody know who this woman is?

Marc — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 01:04:19 +0000

Windows Mobile 7 has a great ad out there (really?)

The highlight of it appears to be this bit here:

But for my money the wife here is easily the reason to keep watching and re-watching the ad

Does anybody know who she is?

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HP’s EDS woes – like Dilbert in real life

Marc — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 12:46:40 +0000

This could also be titled “How does upper management run a company while accepting little or no input from their knowledge workers?”.

I’m not 100% sure if this story as reported in the register is accurate, but it *did* tickle me. When I Googled “EDS Mainframe” to top search result was a page from HP Enterprise Services titled “Managed Mainframe Services Executive Overview” (click here for a screen capture if they’ve removed the page). This was filled with the usual, vapid jargon and hopelessly unrealistic expectations that you’ve come to expect from such an overview.

Having been in IT for the past 22 years I have seen many decisions made that have left me scratching my head. Sometimes I convince myself that I simply do not have all the facts at my disposal and that much larger issues are at stake that must form the context in which these decisions make sense.

But more and more, when I see the distilled (and often distorted) version of the facts that make it to the upper echelons of our management teams, I can’t see how a sensible course of action can be taken based on that information. Even less so when an executive is headstrong on some issue (i.e. his daughter told him it would be a good idea) and he determines what must be the final result regardless of what any experts he’s paying for advice actually advises.

It seems that the single greatest force that keeps our larger companies moving forward successfully is the inertia behind when they were actually forming and growing. Once they hit a certain size, there seems to be no way all but the most gifted executive can make a positive contribution.

And those contributions are in the form of general direction, inspiration and championing of solid ideas. I suspect that, the more they leave the details to the folks who understand them, the more successful leadership will be…

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Scientists create formula for perfect parking

Marc — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:15:55 +0000

While not particularly practical for the average driver at the moment, with the increasing automation of our vehicles, it’s likely this formula will be useful in the near future. Of course it will need to be modified heavily with components such as “Length of your door” and “Width of your behind” so you can figure out if you can actually exit the vehicle once it’s parked!

Scientists create formula for perfect parking

As usual, the VAST majority of folks do a very credible job in parking lots. It seems that there is a subclass of folks (pre-morlocks?) for whom either the world revolves around them or they just don’t give a crap about anybody else. Check out You Parked Like a Jackass for a bit of cringing.

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Christmas Tauntauns (reprise)

Marc — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 01:09:15 +0000

I really can’t say *why* I like this so much but I like to resurrect it each Christmas:

This song is just so infectious that once I hear it I just can’t get it out of my head. I’m also a sucker for the virtual camera angles and the overall quality of the production. This is a really great piece of work.

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The Wedding Cake

Marc — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 00:32:28 +0000

All I can say is that I’m *so* glad I got married before we moved down here.

Unless you’ve been living in your parent’s basement your whole life I don’t know of any guy who hasn’t gone through this.

Confessions of a Waitress: I Hate Your Damn Kids Yep, this pretty much says it all from the waitress’...

Cheesus!

Marc — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 03:54:52 +0000

Man, you *really* need to subscribe to a very, very personal god to see what some of these folks are seeing. I especially like the miracle of the ice machine.

But my all time favorite pareidolia has to be this one.

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