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Saw this on the “vanity card” after yesterday’s Big Bang Theory, thought it was kind of interesting… copied from Chuck Lorre Productions.

CHUCK LORRE PRODUCTIONS, #277

Belarus is a small, land-locked country next door to Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. According to Wikipedia, one of its major exports is cattle by-products. Which begs the question, what horrible shape are the cattle in, if all they’re good for is felt hats and wallpaper paste? But Belarus does have a bustling TV production industry. One of their most recent hits is a sitcom about four nerdy scientists who live next door to a beautiful blonde waitress. The characters are named Sheldon, Leo, Hovard, Raj and Natasha, and the show is entitled, The Theorists. Each episode begins with a rapid-fire montage of images which takes us from the dawn of time to the present moment. Keeping with that theme, the montage is scored with what is probably the worst piece of recorded pop music since the dawn of time. And finally, each episode appears to be a Russian translation of a Big Bang Theory episode. When we brought this to the attention of the Warner Brothers legal department, we were told that it’s next to impossible to sue for copyright infringement in Belarus because the TV production company that is ripping us off is owned and operated by the government of Belarus. Having no other recourse, I’m hoping that this vanity card will be read by the fine folks making The Theorists, and, wracked with guilt, they break down and send us some felt hats. The Kyrgyzstan version of Dharma & Greg already sent me some wallpaper paste.

EDIT: courtesy of sadd3j, you can watch Belarusian Big Bang clips here.

Saw this whilst browsing lifehacker.com and decided to try the design. Geektool is a pretty simple program, but rather inefficient because you cannot group items together and move them as a group. Individual items must be moved and aligned independently. For instance, code for hour and minutes are separate, and ram free and ram used are also separate and you have to manually align them. Props to YFA for pointing out that I could use the X&Y coordinates built into the program for easier alignment. Although its a neat setup, I’m not sure how often I actually see my desktop as there are typically tons of windows stacked on it.

This christmas marks the first time (in many years) that I’ve come home for the christmas holidays without a desktop. Due to lack of transport, I was limited to no more than my MEC backpack and my camera bag (which I had to bring). After attempting to play TF with sadd3j the first night, at a whopping 6-7fps (the only class I could play was engineer), and trying my brother’s desktop that had no dedicated video card, I decided, it was time to make things happen. And that meant, going to look for a video card. Because the computer is new (and not so old) I couldn’t use JasonC’s old card that Jon had as it was AGP. So I landed on this 2600XT, it’s the card sadd3j is currently using for in his macpro. Coming in at just under $70, it will be my christmas gift to my brother as he’s bored out of his mind without much to do.

(You’ll have to excuse the crappy iphone quality of the photo)

Anyway, first impression of it, it was definitely a bit step up from having no card. Comparing the performance to my imac is a better comparison. Not having the imac with me, I can only review based on memory. The card is smooth, but only when details are set to around medium, video looks noticeably better in Left4Dead than TF2. There were a few instances last night when TF2 frames dropped to 15, and began to slug down. But I’m not sure if that’s the card’s performance as it maybe more attributed to the 1gig ram in the computer. Perhaps I’ll be able to get better performance if I throw in 2 more gigs. We’ll have to see…

BREAKING NEWS – Steve Jobs won’t take the stage at the upcoming Macworld Conference & Expo in January. Phil Schiller will be delivering the keynote instead – and it will be the last Macworld keynote address delivered by Apple. Apple also announced it will no longer participate in Macworld Conference and Expo after the upcoming conference in January, moving away from a forum it has used to showcase new products.