Category: Asides

Geoffrey Pullum has become annoyed with a couple of common comments:

… Unable to bear any longer the tedious work of seeking out all the instances of these two comment types so I can delete them, I have decided that from now on I will hunt down the relevant commenters and kill them. …

From now on, if you are going to post either of the two sorts of comments I have just described, please supply your actual name and residential address so I or Language Log security staffpersons Luca and Enzo can track you down.

I appreciate that there may be some legal issues with this policy, and some believe that death is too harsh a punishment for Language Log writers to be handing out… But the “let-everyone-have-their-say” softies who criticize my policy have no idea just how many boring self-satisfied twits have posted almost exactly the same thing over and over again down the years. Yes, death is a severe sanction. But I think people should look at things from my point of view. It is really irritating.

Keep in mind also that both kinds of commenter think that they are being enormously clever and witty and original. This is frightening: remember, these morons are out there somewhere, ready to get seated next to you at a dinner party or on a plane and bore you senseless. …

I just received an e-mail announcing the hiring a customer service representative. She brought cookies to the interview. That was the entire content of the press release.

: Zubon

If this needs comment beyond “WTF,” I leave it to you.

An online distribution network recently announced that release of a new game was only days away, so this was my last chance to pre-order. They were not offering a pre-order discount. It was just my last chance to pay for the game before it came out.

: Zubon

It has been a couple of years, and this computer has seen more abuse than most of my PCs, including physical damage to the motherboard. It still runs mostly fine, but the loading times are getting to me, so I am moving to 64-bit and gorging myself on RAM this time.

I would like to get a new system sometime in the next five months. Sadly, I know jack about current hardware and price points, since I need that information once every few years. Conveniently, some of you know a lot about hardware and good deals on it. So I turn to you. Any recommendations? (“Let’s see what’s available on Black Friday” is a fair recommendation.)

My goal is a system that will be able to play the next holiday season’s games on high (not necessarily ultra-high) without issues, although the most demanding games on my list right now are StarCraft 2 and Guild wars 2. I suppose that is mostly a graphics card question, an area where I know even less than usual, since meeting their recommended specs is not too hard. I do not take my PC on the road enough to justify the higher costs of moving to a laptop, although maybe I would start doing so if I could (plus a docking station for full monitor and keyboard at home).

My previous rig came from CyberPowerPC, which was a good mid-high end PC at a sane price. The only downsides were the huge Coolermaster case and problems resulting from the failure of the liquid cooling system; I am pretty sure that I caused most of the damage troubleshooting it and poking around afterwards. That is a separate story.

: Zubon

Did you know that resetting your Paypal password isn’t bad these days, if you have a good recovery method set up? I went long periods of time without access before getting mine together. Since my bank information was there, I was very careful about following the ideal password guidelines, not using a shared password, and not writing it down. I would even give it some clever relationship to other passwords I use so that I could keep remember it. Then I forgot it. Every. Time.

The e-mail service I had for my primary address seemed to auto-spam or -delete anything claiming to be from Paypal. Really, what could Paypal send you that you would not think was spoofed? I do not know if they did not have the current recovery system set up or I just was not using it well, but it was too annoying for me to bother for months or years. I apparently did not use it that much.

One day, I sat down to try the password variations I thought I would have used the last time I recovered it. I failed. After getting my account locked, I called and talked to someone there. When she apologized for the inconvenience, I thanked them for locking it down. I mean, I would have wanted them to block it if anyone other than me was trying a series of variations on the actual password. She had never heard that response before.

: Zuon

Our friends at Stardock would like us to mention that they just added Master of Orion II to their online store, $6 and it comes with the original MOO. [Update: Good Old Games has had the same deal for a while.] I am not sure what a steal that is, because 14- and 17-year-old games are pretty solidly bargain bin fodder, but I would still put their gameplay against most games made today. The graphics are a bit dated.

I think I am passing this along mostly so that I can contemplate how overpowered Creative was at almost any cost. Mmmm, peaceful customized Psilons, quietly completing the tech tree while other races waste their resources on squabbling.

: Zubon

I have too many packs of older games to try. I also have all three MOOs already.

Has any “rebuttal” opening with that phrase ever been accurate?

There are many variations on that phrase, usually amounting to “I don’t think you are taking X into account,” but the ones starting with “obviously” rarely seem to take the explanation much further than that unless it is to stack ad hominems.

: Zubon

I now have in my possession a pocket-sized computer which, when I speak a question to it (“Who is the author of Kraken?” “Who was the fourteenth president of the Unites States?” “What is the name of John Scalzi’s cat?”) provides me an answer in just a few seconds. If I take a picture of something, the same pocket computer will analyze the photo and tell me what I’m looking at. Oh, and it makes phone calls, too. Among other things.

None of that is the cool part. The cool part is, when I speak a question to my pocket computer and it gives me a bad answer, I get annoyed. Because here in the future, when I talk to my pocket computer, I expect it to get the answer right the first time.
– John Scalzi

: Zubon