BlueEyedZoo.com » Geek Talk

Take this Awareness test

George — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 20:03:10 +0000

You gotta check out this video awareness test. It’s only about 60 seconds or so.

If you can’t see the video above, try going to this link here.

Definitely NERDY!

Shannon — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 04:34:09 +0000

I took the test twice, so we’ll take the average and say I’m a mid-level nerd:

I made George take the quiz also. His score:

What are you?

DIY: Billion Second Birthday

Shannon — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 04:09:37 +0000

Want to know when your billion second birthday is (or was)? Want to say you’ve written a bit of Ruby code? Well, here’s your chance. Head over to this Interactive Ruby site and type this line (substituting your own birthday year, month, and day):

Time.mktime(1980,8,13) + 1000000000

You will have to type it out. Copy and paste does not work, sorry! If you know the hour and minute of your birth you can add those inside the parentheses after the day. (You’ll need to use 24-hour time for the hours.) Your line would instead look like this:

Time.mktime(1980,8,13,15,16) + 1000000000

If you want to play around some more, hit your up arrow key to bring up your last line of code. Take of 3 of the zeros and see when your millionth second birthday was.

So, what do you think? Did you try it? Did it work? (Did you get an error?) Let me know.

NOTES: The birthday listed above is not MY birthday. Though I do know someone with that birthday. I don’t know the hour and minute of her birth so I made that part up. The tutorial on the interactive ruby page is not one I’ve been all the way through. But if you want to try it out for a bit, be my guest. And tell me what you think of Ruby!

Ruby Says Hello

Shannon — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 03:40:36 +0000

I’m shaking the dust off of my coding brain cells and learning Ruby on Rails. I played with Ruby a few weeks ago, read my Rails book during Thanksgiving travels, and today created my first official Ruby on Rails application. I present to you my Hello World:

You shouldn’t be too impressed because I copied the code straight from the book. But it is working on my computer and I do understand (almost) everything I copied. Not small tasks for my brain cells.

Who’s your anti-virus?

George — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 05:06:31 +0000

I recently found out that the free anti-virus software we have been using for years is no longer going to be free. Ouch.

As a result, I’m now on the hunt for a new solution. We have been using a hardware firewall and the free anti-virus software with occasional scans from an online virus scan. I want to find a good anti-virus software and a good Internet filter software. So, I thought I’d launch an informal survey here of our readers and/or friends. What do you use for your Internet security solution?

for all my mac friends…

George — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 21:18:41 +0000

Ran across this quote the other day on one of the geek sites I found myself on:

“They say that when you play a Microsoft CD backwards you can hear demonic voices… But that’s nothing – When you play it forwards it installs Windows.”

Take a Test Drive…

Shannon — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 21:10:55 +0000

Microsoft is allowing users to download a test drive of Office 2007. (But of course you can’t keep it forever.) OpenOffice.org wants to get the word out that you can take their test drive AND keep the car. Forever. Just like always. Completely free. No strings attached.

We’ve been trying OpenOffice for a few months now, although MS Office is still installed on our machines. I did have to go back to Microsoft’s product once to print some labels that OpenOffice didn’t seem to be handling correctly. For everything else we’ve needed, OpenOffice seems to be doing the job just fine. So give it a try if you want. And while you’re at it, download Firefox too. Tabbed browsing is just simply THE way to go.

All Gone

Shannon — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 02:47:27 +0000

Well, George informed me today that our former place of employment has now removed the “Remember PIN” option from their website for security reasons. Yours truly wrote the code that made that functionality work. Okay, so it only took 4 lines of code to make it work. And technically it wasn’t my code anymore since everything had to be rewritten when they changed from a Microsoft platform to IBM. But I was still the one to originally write it!

The only other real programming project I worked on was gone several years ago when they decided to no longer offer the product. SO that means that everything I ever did for the company is now officially gone. Oh well, they still paid me quite a lot of money for the amount of work they actually gave me. (Not many employees beg their managers weekly for SOMETHING to do. Please, ANYTHING!)

I do still enjoy programming and have a desire to use those skills again some day, but it just doesn’t make any sense to do so right now. I don’t think there will be much “spare time” for me around our house when Baby #3 makes his/her appearance in 6 more weeks or so. (Wow, is it really only 6 weeks away? Yikes!)

SQL, SmeshQL

Shannon — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 05:12:28 +0000

In helping George with his current coding project I have had to write lots of several simple SQL queries. There’s a piece of the project that will eventually be available for the client to manage themselves. But in the meantime, it is only accessible through the database. So anytime they find a mistake in the data they gave us, I get to go change it in the database. It was fun for a time, but now it’s getting old. Things would be easier if I’d just take the time to re-figure out how to use JOINS instead of going back and forth between querying table a and table b. But it’s not all bad. I still get to feel geeky – and get to write geeky posts like this one.

By the way, someone needs to start calling me at 10:30pm and demanding that I go to bed right away. I am up way too late…again.

Unbelievable Yo-Yo Videos

George — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 15:57:09 +0000

For my yo-yo buddy Devin (and anyone else interested in super cool yo-yo videos),

Well, I guess it’s time I come out and admit that I’m a wannabe yo-yo geek. You may think it’s lame or you may recognize the sheer coolness of the yo and those who wield it. No matter where you stand though, you gotta be impressed with the kids in these videos.

The world of yo-yo competitions are divided up into 5 major categories. That’s right, there really are yo-yo competitions. Here are some basic descriptions of the categories and some sample videos of each.

1A – what most people envision when they think of yo-yoing. This style lends itself to a single yo-yo that sleeps well and is good for string tricks.
2005 World Yo-yo Champion 1a Takayasu Tanaka

2A – A two handed yo-yo style with one yo-yo tied to each hand. The yo-yos are then used to do looping tricks.
2005 World Yo-yo Contest 2a 1st Place Shinji Saito

3A – A two handed yo-yoing (one yo-yo tied to each hand) where the yo-yos do not loop, instead they do two handed string tricks.
2005 World Yo-yo Competition 3a 1st Place

4A – also known as off string play. A style where the string is tied to the finger but not to the yo-yo. Special rubber edged yo-yos are used for 4A. Yes, the yo-yo really is NOT tied on to the string at all.
2005 Asia Pacific Yoyo championships 4a

5A – also known as freehand play. A style where the yo-yo is connected to the string, but the yo-yo is tied to a weight instead of your finger.
I couldn’t easily find a video for this category that was of reasonable download size. I may have to take one that I’ve downloaded and resize it myself. I’ll update this post when I get one. You gotta see this category as well. Very impressive.