Good lord, this is amazing. Like Iron Man, with water.
I saw this on Metafilter and now want to swim like a dolphin. A robotic one.
I WANT ONE
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Category Archives: Tech
WordPress 3.2
Good lord, but WordPress is fantastic. The latest release is absolutely awesome, it’s hard to believe that this is free software.
Anyway, this is nothing but a placeholder to test out the new theme, which is actually included with the latest WordPress, which is also pretty awesome. Lloyd is gazing balefully at you right now in the header image, but that’s because that’s the only image I had handy. I will have to find something more appropriate. Anyway, nice work on the WordPress. I likes it.
Minecraft
I don’t really play video games much, for reasons I blog about a lot here, the main problem being available time. But being a nerd that at least USED to play some video games, I still keep at least a half of an ear open for interesting games from time to time. So I did in fact hear about Minecraft when it was becoming a major indy hit (over a million sales of the BETA version is a pretty good indicator that at least some folks think it’s fun). I decided to give it a try the other night to see what the fuss was about. Needless to say, it took very little time for me to introduce it to the boys and now we are all three pretty much hooked. Then, Jordy’s boyfriend happened to see us playing and mentioned that he just started playing too. There’s something about it, clearly. It’s not for everyone, however.
I showed it to Nikki and she was a little put off by the (apparent) pointlessness of the game. There’s no winning. There are very few clear goals, except surviving. Which I didn’t do all that well at first. And I haven’t managed to actually eat anything yet, so the whole thing is still a bit touch and go. However, there’s still something about the incredible sense of utter freedom in the game. You want to build an enormous castle for no real reason? Go ahead. Want to dig to the bottom of the earth? Go for it. That’s kind of cool, but then I’m a huge nerd.
The whole reason I even mention this is I was catching up on XKCD and saw this one:
I can relate perfectly to both the truly fantastic wisdom teeth drugs, and the whole “organize the entire world” aspect of the game. For the record, I grew my first tree underground the other day, so I am feeling pretty fricking good about myself right about now. That will wear off quickly if Nikki catches me playing and starts making fun of me again.
Mushmouth, and the power of the mighty Internet
Permit me to get a little geeky here for a minute, but for reasons known only to Google it seems that this blog, nay THIS VERY POST on this blog, has become THE go-to location for information on the Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids character known as Mushmouth. I made a reference to this guy in a post about Nikki being cold all the time, and then went on a diversion about how the character that I always thought was Mushmouth was actually Dumb Donald (being the dude in the excellent toque with ocular orifices cut out).
Anyway, through the magic of page rank and the fact that there just aren’t many other blogs that have the electrons to spare where it comes to discussing these weighty matters, it seems that when you search for the rather recognizable word “Mushmouth” on Google, two of the first images that comes up are hosted right on this very blog. I would love to say that this is the result of clever search engine geekery on my part, but actually it’s dumb (Donald) luck.
So what happens with this favourable ranking? Well, people click on those pictures a lot, is what happens. But how often do humans of the Earth (that are connected to the Internet) actually wonder enough about Mushmouth to Google for that word? I can tell you: a startling amount of times per day. And some weeks, for whatever freakish reason, it goes absolutely bananas. Here’s a little chart of the blog traffic from the first week in December. Let’s see if you can tell when Mushmouth became a topic of interest for a short period…
Yes, Dec 4 was the most recent peak in Mushmouth’s popularity. The VAST majority of the traffic around that day was Mushmouth traffic. To give you an idea of the power of this one topic, if I ran ads on the blog, I might have earned ALMOST $1 that day. Yer darn right, wow. Still, that’s an incredible amount of traffic for this blog, and might I add quite likely the brightest that Mushmouth’s star has ever shone. There’s no reason for me to share this with you, and you have likely gone off to some other shiny Internet thing by now, but one thing I have accomplished with this post? Ever so slightly bumped my Google page rank for the word “Mushmouth”….
xkcd’s Tech Support
Oh, man does this comic from xkcd ever nail the frustration of calling a help desk PERFECTLY. As a geek there are few things more teeth-gnashingly horrible than having to call a help desk for a problem you know you can’t fix yourself, but you also know IN YOUR BONES that the poor guy that first picks up the phone definitely can’t fix it either. A code word would be really really awesome, and of course immediately unusable because the knowledge of such a word would leak immediately and render it powerless because everyone would just start babbling “shibboleet” as soon as the phone got answered, even if they know nothing.
Still, it’s fun to dream about.
Thank you, xkcd.
Mobile Ramblin’s
Time to get your geek on.
We here at Mundane Ramblings know that sometimes you just have to know what Lloyd ate next, or just what hilarious thing <insert child’s name here> said today, or even just how geeky Courtney is today. These Ramblings are critical and many, many of you have asked for an enhanced mobile experience. After an extensive R&D period, and untold efforts (I actually took about five minutes to find a WordPress plugin that does this), we are pleased to announce the new mobile Ramblings! Just hit the blog with your phone and gaze in wonder at the mobile-ey goodness. Because sometimes you just need your Ramblin’s wherever the heck you are at.
We aim to please, so let us know how close we got.
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