TSP On This Day

Published On: June 9, 2013

Many years ago, I saw a commercial on BBC America for a television show called Coupling.  The commercial made it look like a good laugh, so kitanzi and I decided to give it a look, and completely fell in love with it.  It was quirky, it was funny, it was full of highly entertaining characters, and it very quickly became my favourite situation comedy of all time.  We bought the seasons on DVD, and showed them to pretty much anyone who would sit still for them, to the extent that I can still probably recite entire episodes of the first season from having seen them so many times.  (With only a couple of exceptions, everyone we showed it too also loved it too.)

In 2003, NBC announced they were going to launch a US remake of the show, with an all new cast but retaining the show’s creator and principle writer, Stephen Moffatt (who is now much more widely known for his work on Doctor Who).  We greeted this news with a fair bit of trepidation; the show starred absolutely no one anyone had ever heard of, and the track record of remaking quintessentially British shows in America wasn’t very good in recent years1.  Still, it did have the original writers working on it, and they were putting a lot of effort into promoting it.  How bad could it possibly be?

Fifteen minutes into the first episode, we had our verdict.  It could be very, very bad indeed.  The episode was pretty much a complete script-lift of the first episode of the UK show, which made already inevitable comparisons to the original impossible to avoid.  The dialogue was like a poorly fitted suit, and the actors looked physically uncomfortable with the material.  Every single joke fell flat, and the whole exercise was suffused with a general Continue Reading →

Published On: June 9, 2006

For those of you who have never seen it, Woot.Com is a website that traffics in a variety of items, usually selling one item per day at a large discount over normal retail. The stuff they offer tends by and large to be geek-tech oriented (computers, AV equipment, with the occasional oddkin tossed in for variety).

Tonight, while popping through, I saw this, prompting the following conversation:

kitanzi: What is that?
autographedcat: It’s a computer accessory set shaped like frogs. See: keyboard, mouse, and speakers. Frogs.
kitanzi: They keyboard isn’t shaped like a frog. No wait, it is.
autographedcat: Yeah, see – there’s the eyes, and there’s its little hands.
kitanzi: Roadkill frog, more like.
autographedcat: Maybe that’s why the mouse and the speakers look so alarmed. <does South Park voices> “Oh my God, they killed Kenny!” “You BASTARDS!”
Published On: June 9, 2006

Meme vectored from filkerdave and rms_butterfly:

IP logging is off and anonymous posting is allowed.

Please tell me anything you want, anonymously. It can be a secret, a fear, a wish, a hope, a dream, an insult, your great-aunt’s secret recipe for chocolate fudge banana brownies.

Post twice or more if you like, I’m not counting.

And then, if you want, post this in your journal and see what people say there!
Published On: June 9, 2004

I normally eschew this type of meme, but I couldn’t help but admire the sentence:

If there is someone on your friends list you would love to have an epic, sweaty, damn near legendary, 12 hour, nitrous infused, wake up the neighbors, loud, hair-pulling, squirting, soul wrenching, exploratory, tongue up the ass, pile o boobies, pounding, body slappin’, oh My God, explosive, cuddliscious, I’ll even make you breakfast, fuckathon with, post this same exact sentence in your journal.

(In deference to my friends list, I will only post this once, and not once for every person on my list for which this is true. I think the people for whom this applies know who they are.<g> )
Published On: June 9, 2004

Ever since I officially got promoted to a more managerial position at work, it’s has become painfully obvious to me that I needed some sort of external brain to keep track of all the things I need to be tracking. I can keep notes on paper, but its hard to keep everything organized, and my PC is easy to keep organized, but not portable. The solution was obviously to replace my long-abandoned Palm Pilot.

Back in 2001, i got a free Palm m100 when I bought my cell phone. It was a Best Buy promotion, and it was attached the phone I had already researched and wanted to buy anyway, so I regarded it as a curiosity. It was a useful address book and calender, but with only 2mb of memory it really couldn’t do much. It was also large and bulky, and I eventually stopped carrying it around. Eventually, I gave it to telynor, but soon after that it stopped syncing up and became officially useless.

kitanzi and I had decided to get telynor a replacement Palm for her birthday in time for her to take it to London with her, so I had already done a significant amount of research on what was available, and I ended up buying for myself the same one I selected for her: a Tungsten E. The T-E really does have the best price/performance ratio of any of the units out there. (If the Zire 72 had Wi-Fi in addition to it’s 1.3 mp camera, it might have been worth the extra $100. But at $200, the T-E is hard to beat.)

I had everything working beautifully at home, but at work Continue Reading →

Published On: June 9, 2004

Ok, so everyone has probably heard William Shatner’s…..um…..”rendition” of the Lennon/McCartney song “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.

If you thought that it couldn’t possible get more surreal….well, you were wrong:

Some folks produced a video. Available in Quicktime or Windows Media.

Enjoy.