Quick Takes

A-yup

It would have just been embarrassing if Microsoft couldn't provide better results for help searches on their own programming language.

 I for one blah blah Google Overlords blah blah....

This bit at the bottom was extra funny, though.

Bing: so bad they have to pay you to use it!

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Speaking of the Overlords:

Psalm 22

Why, Google? Why? How else am I supposed to find out when my favorite web sites have updated?

The funny thing is Google's reason for killing it. They say usage of it has been dwindling, so it no longer warrants the support and maintenance. But use has been dwindling because they removed the social features that made it so popular. So the rip out the popular functionality... then kill it because it's not popular.

Well, duh.

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We had a visitor today:

Don't see too many of those around these parts.

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Okay, okay, I had an idea and I just totally had to share it. It would be funnier if someone actually did it, but since I don't have the means, I'll just have to describe it.

So, this requires identical twins to pull off. The scenario is one of the twins is posing as someone giving a talk or something. It'd be best if he was pretending to be a politician at a rally, or maybe a corporate CEO at a shareholder meeting. Someone giving a seminar or sales presentation would also work.

The twin goes into his talk. Except, periodically, he'd stutter or pause for a few seconds at a time. Nothing too out of the ordinary. But about five minutes into it, he just shudders and stops, completely motionless, mid-sentence. For best effect, there should be some way of rigging smoke to come from his collar.

Enter someone dressed as a mechanic or technician. Y'know, blue jump suit and tool bet. He comes in, apologizes profusely for the delay, and asks everyone to sit tight for a minute. He inspects the frozen guy. Again, for best effect, the frozen twin should have a special shirt or something that could be opened like a panel to reveal circuits and actuators underneath. So the technician takes a look, mutters something about it not looking good, then gets on his walkie talkie and asks the person at the other end to bring out the backup unit.

Enter another technician, hauling out the other identical twin—dressed identically—on a dolly. The two technicians unload him, then load the broken one onto the dolly and wheel him off. Before leaving, the main technician apologizes again, flips a switch on the backup, and asks the folks in the audience to wait another minute while the unit boots up.

After a few seconds, the second twin goes through a Wall-E-like boot up process, pauses, then continues the presentation from exactly the same point where the first one left off, like nothing happened.


Improv Everywhere could totally pull something like this off. They've pulled off things at big conferences, like TED and such. Too bad I don't live in New York. Or have a twin. (Although, since I wear a black hat and have a goatee, if I did have a twin, at least we'd know who the evil one was.)

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Okay, how about a twofer?

Damien and Anthony have a wooden letter puzzle. It's kinda cool in that there are magnets on the letters and on the spaces in the board where they fit, and a microchip and batteries somewhere in the innards, so when you put a letter on the board, it says the letter and a word that starts with that letter. Kinda cool.

It's kinda hilarious, in that it's somehow gotten completely messed up and will now randomly say letters regardless of whether or not you put a letter on the board. If you walk by it or sneeze on it, or just sit and watch TV, it will randomly, out of the blue, say something like "M is for map!" or "U is for umbrella".

That got me thinking. It's gotta have a microchip in it, if for no other reason than to hold the audio, so it should have rudimentary programming and instructions. It would be awesome if some disgruntled programmer, at his wits end from programming children's toys all day, snuck some malicious code into it. It oughtta be subtle, nothing that revealed itself right away. Not while the toy was still new. Maybe after three to five year—the toy would have to have a built-in clock—it would start randomly spelling out words. It should be long enough that many of the toys are broken, or no longer being played with. But eventually, the toy would start spelling... things. Like "H-E-L-P" or "T-H-E-Y-A-R-E-C-O-M-I-N-G" or "R-U-N" or "T-O-O-L-A-T-E" or "R-I-V-E-R-S-O-F-B-L-O-O-D". Just randomly, periodically. Maybe once every few days. If the programmer is particularly bold, he could sneak in separate audio files to have it say some of these things.


Because I like you so much, I'm gonna give you those two for free. The next one will cost you.

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Well, that's it for now. Not every Quick Takes can be overloaded, y'know.