Yesterday Rod Trent linked to an article on Robert Hensing’s blog about a less than well researched article in USA Today about Firefox 3. When I went to the site, I saw Robert’s blog’s tag line…”Home of the ‘Fail Open Goat’ Award”. That got me curious, so I searched his blog to find out what it was about. That brought me to this page on Robert’s blog.
There is a breed of goats called myotonic goats. They have a genetic abnormality that causes their muscles to lock up when they are frightened, startled, or excited. The effect it has is that their legs get stiff, and they typically fall over on their sides. They recover after a few seconds and everything is normal…until they are startled or excited again. It’s actually pretty funny to watch.
To quote Robert on his blog, “I call them “fail open goats” because, well, that’s what it reminds me of whenever I see one . . . a goat . . . failing . .. open.” He created the “Fail Open Goat” award to acknowledge instances of product security failure.
All last night and after waking up this morning, I am walking around chuckling at the phrase, “a goat…failing…open.” I just can’t stop laughing about it. So…watch the video below, and think about that phrase every time one falls over…especially when the entire herd falls over after having an umbrella waved at them. You just might start walking around muttering “a goat…failing…open”.
Heard this on the radio driving in this morning and thought it was funny.
If you really want to determine who man’s best friend is…lock your dog and your significant other in the trunk. Open it up in an hour and see which one is happy to see you.
Not recommended unless you really want to spend the night in either jail or the hospital!
Julie saw a shirt recently that read “When the belly button pops, you’re done!” I was highly amused.
Anyway, last night as we were going to bed, I reached over and had my hand on Julie’s belly…she has a little “bump” which is how I’ve been referring to the baby…”bump”. It just so happened that the way my hand was positioned, the tip of my middle finger was on her belly button. Then she coughed…and I felt the belly button pop out. She coughed again, and it popped out again. I started laughing, but she had no idea why. Once I told her, we both were dying laughing. We laughed so hard that we both ended up going into coughing fits after a few minutes.
It was so nice being able to laugh with her. That is the first time we have laughed together in the last couple of months because of the morning sickness. It was fun seeing her laughing and enjoying something related to this pregnancy!
This is the video that I posted about yesterday that was shown during the “State of the Nation” session at MMS this morning. It features me talking about how we are using SCCM OSD, and concludes with my five year old daughter using SCCM to deploy seven computers. Enjoy!
When Julie was pregnant with our first child, the food that she most often requested was egg sandwiches. Laurel “gestated” on egg sandwiches.
With Marybeth, the gestational fuel of choice was Jr. Bacon Cheeseburgers from Wendy’s. I couldn’t even begin to tell you the number of times that I jumped in the car at odd hours to run to Wendy’s to come back with the golden food of that pregnancy.
This time around we are back to gestating on egg sandwiches. I’ve gotten pretty good at whipping one up in just a couple of minutes.
We have some friends whose teenage sons are swimmers. They have only started swimming in the last year, but they are apparently really really good. The oldest placed third in his first swim meet…before he learned how to do a flip turn. He literally had to swim to the wall, stop, turn around and start swimming again. And he placed third.
Anyway, he was in a fairly big swim meet today. He doesn’t normally do the whole body shave thing, but this was a big enough meet that he did. One of the events that he was entered in was the 100 Meter Butterfly. Before the event, he didn’t make sure that his speedo was adequately tied/fastened/whatever…having never worn a speedo, I don’t know what he didn’t do right. But I know you can see where this is headed…
He dove in. The water ripped the speedo off. And he proceeded to finish the event naked…and mooned the spectators with every stroke.
His mom told us that there was professional level cheering going on. She also later told her son that it could have been worse…he could have been swimming the backstroke. He said he would have stopped if that had been the case! He also made sure everything was properly fastened before every other event.
I realize the picture below is pretty bad…it was taken with my phone in less than optimal lighting. At first glance it doesn’t appear to be anything exceptionally unusual. It’s just a computer where someone is setting up an ODBC connection to a database.
What made this one comical to me is that the monitor that this ODBC setup was taking place on was a giant flat panel monitor hanging above the baggage claim carousel in the Wichita airport.
Dude…next time you might want to turn off that screen before you go advertising your database server’s name and other info to everyone waiting on their luggage!
And yes…I blacked out the server name…just in case. I really don’t want a visit from Homeland Security! Although honestly, the picture was such low resolution that you couldn’t make it out anyway.
If you have worked with Windows systems for long, at some point you have seen the infamous 80004005 error code. It seems to pop up everywhere. Problem is that it is a bit infuriating to try to figure out what it means.
Last year I was at the Microsoft Management Summit, and Johan Arwidmark was giving a presentation on Operating System Deployment. During the presentation, he mentions that error code. He then asked the audience if we would like to know what it meant. Since all of us had seen it and been frustrated by it, all of our ears perked up. What does that crazy code mean?
Johan then let us know. In his characteristic deadpan delivery he informed us that it means:
“That thing you were trying to do…it didn’t work.”
No this post isn’t going to have much in the way of anything technical about the Blackberry outage that covered North America today. This is a tribute to a great piece of writing.
On the FoxNews website, there was an article about the outage. It included the opening quote, ““CrackBerry” addicts were looking for thumbthing to do late Monday …”
It may be dumb, but I was laughing hysterically…looking for thumbthing to do…excellent!
I had a dentist appointment this morning. My dentist has flat panel TVs mounted to the ceiling directly above the chair so that while you are getting your teeth cleaned/drilled/pulled/etc you can watch TV. All of them are muted with the closed captioning showing at the bottom.
So while I’m in the chair this morning, I’m watching the news. Every time they would reach the end of a segment and head to commercial, the closed captioning would read:
“adlib teaser. [a bunch of gobbledy-gook] fade to black”
Essentially, what they were pushing to the CC feed was what was going to the teleprompter for the newscasters to see. It was amusing to watch them adlibing a teaser for the next segment and then the screen fading to black right after reading those instructions on the screen.
Last night I had Chinese take-out for supper. When I called to place the order, I had a menu in front of me, so I told them the number on the menu, in this case is was something like C13…combo meal 13. The lady sounded a little confused, so I said the number again. At that point she told me that their restaurant didn’t order by the number.
Hmmmm. A Chinese take-out restaurant that doesn’t order by the number? This may be completely groundless, but my trust factor for that restaurant immediately went down. But I went through with the order and requested the General Tso’s chicken meal.
My logic for why my trust factor went down may be flawed, but in this case it was accurate. The food simply was not as good as the “order by the number” Chinese restaurants that I’ve been to.
A year or so ago a co-worker of mine had his DellLatitude laptop at home. He had a webcam hooked up to it and was attempting to get his infant son to smile/laugh/something into the camera so that his grandmother on the other end could see it. So he is bouncing the kid attempting to get the smile/laugh, and the kid throws up on the laptop…just puked all over it. He quickly puts the kid down, unplugs the computer, takes it apart, cleans it out, but it was too late…it was toast. The next day he calls Dell’s tech support and told them exactly what happened…didn’t even try to fudge it…”my kid puked on the computer.” The response? “Let’s see…you have CompleteCare. No problem. We’ll send the parts to the technician, and he’ll come to your house to fix it tomorrow.” No questions asked…simply “we’ll fix it.” Very nice!
A couple of weeks later my co-worker was in a meeting with our corporate Apple rep. I’m pretty sure that it was our Apple rep along with the regional sales manager also, but I’m not totally sure about that aspect. Anyway, my co-worker told them about what happened with his computer and how Dell responded. He then asked them, “What would Apple do in this situation?” Apple’s response?
“We would sell you a new computer.”
Let me repeat that in case it went by too fast for you…
“We would sell you a new computer.” No apologies. No qualifications. What awesome customer (no) service!
I like the fact that the computer that I am writing this on (Latitude D830) has complete warranty. If something flips out, I will have someone coming to my location the next day to fix it, and I’ll be back up and working. I depend on my computer too much to risk being unable to do my job while I ship the computer off for repair service. For that matter, I had another co-worker who was on his way out of the country one time and had the following experience. This next quote is a correction from my original post. He saw my original post and replied with the correct story via e-mail. I copied in his email with his permission…and left his name out per his request.
“I was flying to Japan. The night before, in Orlando, certain keys would no longer work - to the point where I couldn’t even log in to the machine. I did what I could that night but couldn’t fix it. The entire keyboard was hosed. I called Dell during my layover in Dallas and a tech came to the residence I was staying at in Portland. He replaced the keyboard before I flew out of the country the next day.
“Obviously I don’t believe Dell is perfect b/c, as a veteran tech, I have had my share of frustrating experiences with them. Still, this is one of my favorite stories about excellent customer service.”
Oh…and before someone replies with the tired old comment of “Macs don’t break.” Just stop. We all know that’s not true. Don’t even think about throwing that garbage around. I work around entirely too many of them to believe that.
Now…I know this story is likely to annoy a few Mac fanatics. I am not trying to flame bait the Mac community. This post is simply relaying actual events and actual conversations that my company has had with Dell and Apple. But based on the response to my previous posts that highlighted a security issue with Leopard and the attitude of certain Mac users, I know that a bit of flame response is a possibility. If you feel you must…go ahead…I have thick skin; I can handle it.
Got a link to this over email this morning. It is an acappella group from Indiana University named Straight No Chaser singing a version of “Twelve Days of Christmas“. I’m amazed at how they keep their parts straight in this. It includes a bit of “12 Days”, “Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer”, “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel”, ”Santa Claus is coming to Town”, “Deck the Halls”, “Carol of the Bells”, “The Boar’s Head Carol”, and wraps up with “12 Days” sung to the tune of “Africa” by the band Toto.
It’s hard for me to believe that people aren’t aware that pork products are forbiden by Judaism. But apparently so…how about a nice spiral cut ham for Chanukah?
Just saw this and laughed hysterically. The special effects are pretty good. Having been frustrated at times with the people racing down my street endangering my kids, I have to admit that there is a certain part of me that wishes for more effective ways to slow them down… Hmmm…
Note: It’s in German…I have no idea what the guy is saying.
The first time I saw the Priceless Pep Talks from Peyton Manning Commercials I cracked up laughing. They are Peyton Manning giving a “pep talk” on some of the stuff that comes up in life. My favorites are the haircut and “I’ve got a gut” ones…although the “I can’t stop eating” is really good also. You can even personalize them and send to a friend.
Probably only your guy friends…unless you really don’t want the girl to call you back.
