Posted on 22 July 2011 12:55pm
A baker is just getting ready lock his front door when a man rushes up. "I need to have a cake made right now!" he exclaims.
"I'm sorry," replies the baker. "But I was just closing up. I've dismissed my staff; I've shut down my machines; I'm afraid you'll have to come back tomorrow."
"I can't wait until tomorrow!" insists the man. "It's absolutely imperative that this cake be made right now!"
The baker always liked to think of himself as a nice guy, so he says, "All right, I'll see what I can do." He goes inside and turns all his appliances back on. He then approaches the counter and ties on his apron. "Okay, what is it you need?"
The man whips out a sketch from his pocket. It's a very well drawn depiction of a cake. "It has to look just like this," says the man. "Exactly one foot wide, one foot long, and six inches tall. White frosting, blue icing, and a red cursive "S" in the middle. Just like this."
Somewhat startled, the baker ponders the sketch for a few moments and replies. "I think I can do that. It will be ready in about half an hour."
"Half an hour!?" exclaims the man. "That won't do. I need this in fifteen minutes."
"Fifteen minutes?" responds the baker. "I'm not sure I can do that. I suppose I might be able to get it done that fast if I used some pre-made dough. It wouldn't taste as good but..."
"I don't care. Just get to it, please," blurts the man, while checking his watch frantically.
So the baker goes back and makes the cake. He works faster than he ever has before, and somehow produces the cake in just under fifteen minutes. He presents it to the man fresh out of the oven. "Will this be sufficient?" he asks.
The man takes a measuring tape from his pocket. He checks the length, width, and height very carefully. He then compares it to the sketch. Suddenly, a look of horror comes across his face. "No no!" he exclaims. "The 's' is the wrong shade of red! It has to be the same shade as the sketch. Oh, what will I do now??"
"Calm down," says the baker. "If the shade really is a problem I think I can re-ice it. It may take a few more minutes..."
"You can?" asks the man anxiously. "Well please, get going!"
So the baker quickly takes the cake back and puts on a new "S". A few minutes later he brings it back to the visibly distraught man. "There you go. Is this what you were looking for?" he asks.
Once again the man scrutinizes the cake, checking every detail. He compares the shades of red, and this time decides they're all right. "Okay" says the man quickly, "this is good. Can I pay you now."
"Of course," says the baker, hastily readying the cash register. "Now, the boxes we have available are over here. Do you want to pick one out?"
"Oh no, that won't be necessary," answers the man. "I'll eat it here."
Posted on 15 June 2011 10:36am
There's an instructional poster on how to belay safely at my climbing gym. Part of it looks like this:
Note the awesome kissy face with the "no flirting while belaying" warning. Using my terrible photoshop skills, I edited it for a poster more appropriate for my workplace:
Posted on 02 June 2011 12:55am
I wear the same pair of shoes every day. My date requested that I wear a different pair tonight because he wants to see me in something different. I pointed out that this is probably the first time he's ever had to say this to a girl.
Posted on 08 May 2011 11:03am
Being on the bleeding edge means you get cut sometimes. I did an Arch system upgrade (upgraded kernel to 2.6.38) last night, which naturally borked my computer. I had to do a few things to get it running again.
The first most alarming problem was that X refused to start, throwing errors about XKB being unable to load a keymap. This was solved by downgrading xorg-xkb-utils to the previous version.
Then wireless broke, as is usual for a big kernel upgrade on my computer. Strangely enough, the wired connection refused to work as well. I had to manually download and reinstall the broadcom-wl package. Remind me to get a laptop with a wireless card supported by open source drivers next time I get a new computer.
Once I had done that, my system recognized the wireless and would actually connect both wired and wireless. However, wireless kept getting randomly disconnected. Furthermore, Firefox segfaulted on random pages (I suspected pages that contained flash). Chromium segfaulted immediately on opening. These problems made it practically impossible to google for a solution. But that's why I keep a spare laptop around (and never upgrade it at the same time as my main laptop - this avoids the 10 hour scenario depicted here and hopefully protects against the ensuing shark attacks).
Thanks to the ever helpful Arch forums, a thread by someone with the exact same problem contained the solution: downgrade dconf. And now things are running (mostly) smoothly again. Even PCManFM is actually recognizing external USB drives again.
So I ran sudo pacman -Syu last night and was able to get it back to normal by lunch the next day. Not too shabby. In summary:
- keep a spare laptop around for googling and sneakernet purposes
- downgrade xorg-xkb-utils
- reinstall broadcom-wl
- downgrade dconf
Posted on 07 May 2011 10:51am
3-3-3-2-3
Did this last night and was a bit tired for the last set. This morning I managed 6 in a row. Progress!
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