Terminally Incoherent

Ok, it’s time for a silly little game/competition once again! How do you participate?

1. Figure out your external IP address (ie. the routable one you get from your ISP, not the NAT address you get from the router).
2. Your IP address is composed of 4 octets divided by dots. Take the octets and add them together. This is your sum.
3. Take the sum, and divide it by 4. This is your average.

Post your sum and average in the comments below. Person with the highest average and/or sum wins the intenet.

If you are lazy, I implemented a tiny script that will do this for you. Simply peek into the iframe below:

For privacy reasons, please don’t post your actual IP. No need to anouce it to the whole world. Also note that I can see your IP when you post your comment so no cheating. I will be checking it! Oh, and if you roam between various IP addresses during the day, you can post once for each of them - maybe your work IP is better than your home one.

Let me start. My average is 109.75 and my sum is 439. What is yours?

I used to be a happy subscriber to the good old analog cable from Comcast. I would simply plug my TV into the coax cable coming out of the wall and that would give me a bit under a hundred channels. I was getting pretty much everything I wanted to watch: HBO, Comedy Central, History Channel, SciFi Channel and Cartoon Network (for Adult Swim). And I was happy. Then Comcast decided not to carry HBO over the analog connection because it was to easy to unscramble or some shit like that.

So I reluctantly bought their cable box to get the digital service. I figured that having more channels probably won’t hurt, and they even thrown in few months of free Showtime a few other premium movie channels along with the deal. And there was their On Demand service which pretty much clinched the deal. For example, you could use the service to watch most of the original HBO shows and specials the next day after they aired for free.

So I was pretty happy with the switch. One thing has always bothered me though - entering a single or two digit channel number on the remote did absolutely nothing. Most normal cable boxes, and TV remotes will usually give you a short time window to enter the number so if you for example just enter 72, and then skip a beat it will automatically tune into channel 72. Not the Comcast cable box though. If you wanted to go to channel 72 you had two choices:

1. Enter it as a full 3 digit number: 072
2. Enter 72, then press OK

WTF? Why would they do this? What is this shit? Initially I was annoyed, and I wanted to hate Comcast more, but I quickly realized that I have no more hate. It’s true, I’m not a hateful person, and I don’t hold grudges. I can only intensely hate few things at the time. And there is oh, so much things I hate these days. I mean, I’m already pretty committed to hating Microsoft, MPAA, RIAA, the Jack Thompson, Senator Stevens and bunch of other politicians that piss me off, lolcats, whoever owns the 2girls1cup domain and of course Comcast for their shitty ISP service. It’s like, I already hate them with a passion so it’s not like I could hate them more.

So I got used to it. I mean, what are you going to do. I could switch to another cable service, but that’s a lot of work and I figured that funky channel switching was one thing I could live with. Many moons have passed, and I completely forgot about the issue, habitually pressing OK after 2 digit channel numbers.

Few weeks ago I was sitting in some waiting room. I don’t remember what it was, but it was one of those places that has a magazine rack so you can read stupid shit while you are waiting. Since I had no interest in celebrity gossip, cars, body building secrets or restaurant reviews and fine dining tips, I grabbed some old crumpled up computer magazine that was sitting lonely in the corner. In fact, I’m guessing that this particular magazine was probably abandoned there by one of the patrons because it was like a 2 year old issue and there was no other tech-related magazines on the rack. I flipped around it, and flipped to the editorial section where some guy was ranting about Comcast switching their digital service software from a Microsoft box top set, to the shitty software they are using right now overnight.

Now, I never saw that old system (which just tells you how old that magazine was) but from what this guy said it was pretty sweet, at least compared to the current setup. More intuitive, with many more features and with a non retarded channel switching. The guy actually mentioned that this issue could be fixed by switching on the “auto tune” feature in the box top setup menu. No wai, I thought. I made a mental note to check it out when I get home.

Unfortunately the way my brain works is that as soon as things leave my short term memory, they go through a rigorous sorting process. Stuff like internet memes, geeky news, video game related stuff, programming tips, hax and stupid crap get placed on the high priority, fast access long therm memory sections. All the unimportant stuff like remembering to buy toilet paper, picking up clothes from the cleaners and other mundane real life shit gets filed under “Misc & Sundry” section which is conveniently located in my brain’s equivalent of the /tmp folder.

Translation for normal people: I immediately forgot about it. Geez, how do you people read this blog if you can’t follow my analogies.

Anyway, I was watching TV the other day and this random memory just popped into my mind. So I pulled up the clunky on screen menu, and found the Main Menu and went into Setup. Now you would think that the “Auto Tune” feature would be in some logical place like “Cable Box Setup” but no. It’s hidden under “Program Guide Setup” but whatever. The entry itself is very non descriptive to - it looks something like this:

Channel entry behavior: No Auto Tune

Now, unless I read about it in that old magazine I would probably not know what this thing meant. But that is not the weirdest part. What really disturbs me is why is this feature set to off by default? Initially I thought that this was just a silly quirk of this cable box - that some weekend programmer or engineer just did a half assed job and decided that adding that timeout and auto tune logic was not worth the effort. But no. The feature is there. The problem is that someone decided that it is a good idea to have the box behave differently than EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TV RECEIVER EVER MADE by default.

I know, I know - I’m complaining about a single key stroke here but come on guys. This is like basic design stuff you want to release a product that behaves in a way that your customers expect, and are used to. Most usability experts will tell you that you should strive to reduce required number of key strokes and button presses, not increase it.

I mean, the only reason why I didn’t go hunting for this feature in the menu when I got the cable box was that I did not think that someone would actually implement this feature and then leave it off by default. But I guess you just have to leave it to Comcast to do the unthinkable.

Hopefully this might be one of my last Half Life themed posts. If you are bored or annoyed by these, I apologize, but in the last few weeks I played Portal, Episode One and Episode Two straight through, back to back and now I’m impatiently waiting for Episode Three. So bear with me for a bit while I get this stuff out of my system.

Anyways, every single Half Life game involves a fair amount crawling through air ducts, or some other tight places. In fact, Valve even decided to make fun of their love for air-duct sequences, by having Alyx make references to Gordon’s formidable crawling skills in Episode One. At one point, when I was doing all the crawling it hit me. How the hell do you fit in these tight ducts with the HEV suit and all your weapons? I mean, let’s think about it - on your average day, Gordon can be seen carrying:

1. standard crowbar
2. USP Match Pistol, with around 8 spare magazines
3. .357 Magnum revolver with 12 spare rounds
4. MP7 Submachine gun with 5 spare ammo clips, and 3 grenades for the built in launcher
5. SPAS-12 pump action shotgun with around 30 spare cartridges
6. Overwatch Standard Issue Pulse Rifle with 60 spare rounds
7. mechanical crossbow with 10 bolts
8. AT4 Rocket Propelled Grenade Launcher (RPG) with 3 rockets
9. three fragmentation grenades
10. Zero Point Energy Field Manipulator (aka the Gravity Gun)

That’s two machine guns, a crossbow, a rocket launcher tube, a unwieldy crowbar and a very bulky and heavy gravity gun. Seriously, check out the scenes when it used by Alyx or Dr. Breen. It’s so heavy that they can hardly lift it into the upright firing position without the HEV suit. Actually, Alyx seems to be barely able to lift the damn thing at all.

Note that I’m not even mentioning the HEV suit itself here. Ok, so I just mentioned it. Look at it though. From the way it looks on concept art sketches, and that brief moment you see it in the game, it looks big and bulky. I think that it actually has rigid plate components that protect you from “blunt trauma”, a hardened collar and chest plate and etc. It’s not really a good outfit for ventilation duct crawling to begin with.

So next time you are crawling through an air duct in Half Life think about this: you are actually have a dozen bulky weapons strapped to your suit. How is it possible? Gordon Freeman is just that awesome. This is why Vortigaunts are always so nice to him! Cause, dude - if you can fit into a tiny duct in a big suit, with weapons strapped all over your body, you must be fucking unconsciously using vortesence to bend reality or something.

My brother Ark owns bunch of Nerf guns that we occasionally use for an all out nerf war. His arsenal includes several Mavericks, a Longshot and a funky crossbow that I can’t find anywhere online. Since we are both Warhammer 40k nuts we always joke around how the Mavericks look a bit like Bolt Pistols. I mean look at them:

The longshot in its short retracted state looks a little bit like a regular bolter. We even talked about painting them up to make them look like the authentic things. All you would really need to give it a nice paint job and then attach the distinctive curved magazine clips to them. Ark actually wanted to use them as part of some elaborate Halloween costume but that never happened. Imagine my surprise when I found that we were not the first people to come up with this idea. Apparently, there is some guy who paints Nerf guns and sells them on ebay and his work seems to be heavily influenced by 40k artwork. Just check out his Maverick:

It really does look like a bolt pistol. It’s just missing the magazine. Also check out the Longshot:

I’d be afraid to use these as it would probably ruin the paint job real quick. But this just shows that this sort of thing is possible given enough time and patience. Ark will probably be furious that someone has beat him to the punch and made these.

Anyway, if you don’t know what Warhammer 40k is, and you don’t find Nerf guns fun, just ignore this post. We will resume posting the regular content that you came to expect from this place tomorrow.

This really cracked me up. Apparently someone got fed up with asshole neighbors leaching off their wireless connection. So they did the only thing they could possibly do:

I really find it incredible that this person had enough know-how to actually go in and change their SSID, but not enough to actually click on the security tab and set up some sort of encryption. Seriously, how does that happen? This is so monumentally stupid that I’m actually suspecting it might be a honeypot.

I mean, if I decided to set a trap to pwn Wi-Fi leachers I would probably call it something like that. Either way, it’s amusing. Credit for finding this gem goes to passiveagressivenotes.com.