Praeflaips (n): slang Tasteless Icons. Specifically in reference to the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Propduction Premium box set.

( Rant about Adobe's ugly new icons )

No. I mean it. Government contractors are really really dense.

I was watching a program on Gamma Radiation and this just occurred to me. Not only that, we can calculate precisely how dense they are.

Consider the following:
You've heard that in the past certain government construction projects used 3 in place of PI as if they expected the entire world to revolve around them?

Well... What if it did?

Think about it. Circumference = 2*PI*r in planar space, but what if you were the center of an extremely massive body like a star? Because of the compression of spacetime around the center, half the distance of the radius in real space is less than half the distance in planar space and that means that from one model, C/2r could = 4 and in another frame of reference, C/2r could = 3 given appropriate mass for either.

Now. I'll simplify a bit and assume a rather spherical person. Short and fat, maybe 100cm in circumference (just because it's a nice round number) So now you just need to work out the mass required in that circumference to set PI to 3.

You have now accurately calculated the density of an average politician.

A friend posted privately about a group he's in that had a red-panic because a chinese guy wanted to join their RPG group. Some of them work for defense contractors or something and there has to be a sudden and drastic alert because of potential contact with a foreign national! OH NOES!

I swear these are the variety of people with 'security clearance' because they have to go into the offices to empty the waste baskets. Personally... I worked at NASA for several years and much of that time I was only a few yards from soviet scientists who'd worked on the russian ICBM guidance systems. Yes, ITAR had some stupid rules about 'foreign nationals' but they basically boiled down to. "Don't let them into secure areas. Don't trade files with them." but definitely not OMG COMMIES ARE INVADING MY D&D!!!! Seriously. Get a fucking clue. I've noticed an inverse proportional curve on security clearance when working at NASA. The lower your clearance is and the more useless you are, the more important you think your clearance is and the louder you are about it. Still... Seriously. I wonder what goes through these people's heads? Was it like?

I shall cut you down with my +20 Sickle of the People.
ROLL FOR INITIATIVE, YANKEE DOG!

That would actually be pretty awesome. Someone should make a D20 adaption parody of the Cold War.

On the same subject, I should hunt down my old notebooks containing ASCII HERO. It was an expansion to the HERO roleplaying system that was cyberpunk set inside a PDP-10 where basically you operated as strings of code in the system, dealing with daemon processes, hostile users, glitches, virus programs, etc. Blocks of code made up rooms, data streams roads and.... Oh my god... I'm a huge flaming dork.

You stink! You suck at everything! You fail! This website is dedicated to you!

http://www.youfail.org/

Er.... And it might make you feel better somehow or at least makes me grin stupidly. :)

I don't get a lot of spam e-mail and sometimes the sender and topic are close enough to e-mails I might expect that I open them. (Though I use elm so they're not even getting webhit counts for their embedded images or anything)

Anyhow. Today's is apparently a weight loss drug... At least I guess that's what it is. Their advertisement is so bad that I can't really guess its true nature. But here's the line that stood out:

the most enchanting flesh loss product is now readily available

.... Um... Eeew! If I thought it wouldn't bounce, I'd consider writing them back with an advertising slogan:

Zombo-goo! It's good for you!

EDIT: Reading a little further, the ad starts going on about The Hunger and the cravings. I really think this might be a zombie med. Here's a bit more:

I greedily devoured all this garbige

and just could not stop.

This ruinous passion passed away after I started course with *PRODUCT!

Oh, God,

my inclination to eat constantly vanished,


*I hate spammers so much I'm not even going to give them the benefit of name spreading by copying their product name while ridiculing them.

So... A week or so ago, we introduced new stimuli to our office.

A box of Otter Pops.

We have several people in the office today and someone was looking for a drink and I mentioned them.

Ten seconds later, we were in pre-school land with an entire room full of people sucking on otter pops and looking up info about them online.

This turned up a wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otter_Pops

Useful spanish phrases for otters: http://www.otterpops.com/fs_poncho_f.html

AND

an Otter Pops music video: http://www.otterpops.com/musvid.html

I love my job. No one here thinks I'm strange. :)

I swiped this link from azikale just for you!

http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=abe_kroenen

It's a fanfic love story of Abe Sentient and Kroenen.

My computer is held up in Customs and probably will not arrive tomorrow. My APPLE computer. Yes.. Never underestimate the utter incompetence of the masses. My computer is sitting in Indiana awaiting FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION approval... Because the box says

APPLE

on it and someone, somehow, despite Apple being a major brand of computers and despite their shipping THOUSANDS OF COMPUTERS a day decided that MY PACKAGE contained ACTUAL apples. Good grief.

... I watched MTV last night. I saw 'Jackass' and 'WildBoyz'. O_O

Ever have such an uneventful time it wasn't worth making an LJ entry?
Look no further!
Brunching Shuttlecocks presents The Apathetic Online Journal Entry Generator
Use it when your life has no meaning!