Most common passwords
According to the movie “Hackers“, the most common passwords are God, Sex, Love, and Secret. Of course, the real list is much more interesting. “Monkey”, for instance. Or “123″, which is one number short of being the password that an idiot would put on his luggage.
Zaphod Beeblebrox born
It appears that Zaphod Beeblebrox was recently born in Shanghai, China under the name of “Jie-jie.” Doctors said they were going to “play it safe” with the child, as he could have some health risks. When reached for comment, the mother was quoted as saying, “Well, Jie-jie’s just this kid, you know?”
Alex Toth, 1928-2006
Alex Toth is dead at age 78. You might recognize the name from Space Ghost and Birdman.
Alex Toth did a number of other animation related projects, and also contributed to Adventures Into Digital Comics.
Breakable and unbreakable records
What records in baseball will never be broken?
Fox has a round-up of records that will fall soon, will fall eventually, and will never fall.
What I agree with:
Barry Bonds’s single season record of 73 home runs
Not only is this very, very likely, it’s even conceivable that it could happen this season. Albert Pujols is already up to 23. If he stays at that rate, he could beat Barry Bonds. By a lot.
Adam Dunn’s single season record of 195 strikeouts
Adam Dunn could beat this record this season, and he could conceivably break the record ever season for the rest of his career unless he learns how to STOP STARING AT THE THIRD STRIKE YOU BUM!
DiMaggio’s 56 game hitting streak.
Consider that it took 65 years for DiMaggio to challenge the previous record. Probably the greatest hitter in baseball history (Pete Rose), only managed a 44 game streak. This record isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
What I don’t agree with:
Derek Jeter could break Pete Rose’s hit record.
If Jeter played 12 more years and batted .300, he could break Pete’s record. He could come close, but Biggio is the only one to recently come close to even breaking 3000, so I don’t think this is going to happen. If Ichiro played his whole career in the US, he might have a fighting chance.
What I’m not sure about:
Hank Aaron’s record of 755 home runs.
Barry Bonds is obviously a candidate for this, if he can stretch his career for another year or two. But even if he gets the record, young sluggers like Dunn, Pujols, and A-Rod are certainly on pace to reach the 600-700 club. If parks keep shrinking and pitching keeps gettin diluted, the 700 club could easily double in size in the next 10 years. On the other hand, Bonds could very well call it quits before reaching the record, and maybe pitching/park size will improve.
Ribbon Cake
From what I understand, this cake is a prototype for a cake that Ali is going to make for the monthly office birthday party here at work. It has a pretty thick layer of fondant on it, and the giant yellow ribbon is made of fondant as well. The actual cake itself is a rainbow swirl of colors.
Smoke!
Andrea Cambern has taken it to the streets! She has uncovered some shocking results! Apparently, air in smoking establishments is dirtier than air in non-smoking establishments. And even more shocking, if one were to breathe this air in all day, it could be bad for you!
If secondhand smoke is so bad, surely firsthand smoke is even worse. Why is it that we are banning the use of a product, but keeping the sale and taxation of that product legal? Shouldn’t it be one or the other?
Terry Williams is absolutely right:
“When you walk in and apply for a job in a bar, you know exactly what you’re walking into,”
“But let’s not mandate across board no smoking. Let’s make it, let’s address the health issue and say, we can do that and accomplish that goal, then what’s the problem?”
If people are really that adverse to second-hand smoke, why are they going into establishments that allow smoking? Why are they applying for jobs there? There are plenty of places that have chosen to not allow smoking, even before the ban. And if the ban has widespread public support, then why do we even need a ban? Wouldn’t the lack of customers drive these types of establishments out of business or into a voluntary ban anyway?
Jones in the Fast Lane
One of my favorite Sierra games of all time is actually not a typical point-and-click adventure game. It’s more a board game, actually. It’s called “Jones in the Fast Lane“. It was released in 1991 and again in 1992 with better graphics and sound on a CD.
The object of the game is to get your character from being uneducated and unemployed to having a high paying job and a full education. You can actually set your goals (like a handicap) to be as high or as low as you want, and you can even compete against other players (taking turns), or against the computer’s namesake character of “Jones”.
I have attached a playable copy of Jones to this blog. Jones was actually intended for DOS/Windows 3.11 computers back in the day, and does not run correctly by itself. However, I’ve packaged it with the DOSBox emulator so that you can play it in Windows 2000/XP without any problems. Just download the zip file, extract it to your hard drive, and double-click the “runjones” file. I also have the manual available for download. If you have any problems, please email me or post a comment below.
Disclaimer: It is probably not legal to download Jones (or put it on my site for download in the first place), but the game is over 13 years old, and I don’t think Sierra ever plans to re-release an updated version. I couldn’t even find a copy of it on eBay. If Sierra tells me to take it down, I will take it down, but I wouldn’t feel too guilty about downloading it if I were you.
Teen Buzz
Have you heard about the Mosquito from Compound Security? It’s a speaker that emits a high pitched noise that (apparently) people over the age of 20 can’t hear. It’s used mainly to disperse teenage loitering.
It turns out that some clever kids have recorded the sound and are using it as a cell phone ring tone. It’s being referred to as the “teen buzz”. So if a student’s phone rings during class, all the other students will be able to hear it, but the teacher will not.
Armed with this knowledge, I knew that someone out there had it in MP3 form for me to download. I forget where I found it, but I did find it, and played it. I didn’t hear a thing. I figured, it must be a goof. Someone just recorded silence for 30 seconds. So, I opened it up in Audacity, my favorite audio editor and this is what I found:
Wow, there’s definitely something there. So, using Audacity to reduce the pitch, I found that, yes, I could certainly hear a high pitched, very annoying noise.
So, try listening to the first MP3, and see if you can hear it. If you aren’t a teenager, then you are one of the lucky few who can still hear those high-pitched sounds even in your old age. If not, listen to the second MP3 to hear what you are missing. Try playing this at your next gathering where there is a mixture of kids/teens and adults. Watch the young people howl in pain while the adults wonder what in God’s name is happening.
Some more good economic news
The economy is still moving along nicely.
- Fastest GDP growth in 2 1/2 years
- Companies built up inventories at a $32.3-billion annual rate (not sure how/why that is a good thing)
- Exports rose at a 14.7% annual rate
- Housing spending rose by 3.1%
- Personal consumption spending increased at a 5.2% annual rate
- Unemployment is still mightly low at 4.7% as of April 2006 (BLS)
Towel Day
May 25th is Towel Day. RIP, DNA.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels. A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value–you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you–daft as a brush, but very, very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag [non-hitch hiker] discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have ‘lost’. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
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