The Rissington Podcast is one of the nerd podcasts I listen to regularly. It’s hosted by Jon Oxton and John Hicks, two well-respected and talented designers from the UK. Their show primarily relies on questions sent in from listeners, and they often plead with their audience to send in questions. Until this last episode (12), I hadn’t heard them specify that they wanted good questions that related to design or technology. So I wrote the following email to see how desperate they truly were.
Greetings gents,
I am considering picking up a British accent because they have become quite popula’ here in the states. Are there any books you have read that have helped you refine your own accents, or did you take private lessons? Also, why is it that in sci-fi films, people from other planets always speak with British accents? Also are there any differences in the written languages of American English and Englandish English? For example, when you folks across the pond say, “Darling, would care for more sugar and mustard in your tea?” would you spell everything as I just did, or would it be more like “Dahling, would you caiah foh moh sugah and mustahd in yoh tea?”
Thank you for your helpful insights and have a lovely day.
Nate Sees
P.S. My father lived in England for a couple years when he was about 5 years old. His is called Larry. Do you perhaps know anyone who knew him? He doesn’t have a British accent.
I was very pleased to have my question(s) answered in detail by the Jo(h)ns in Episode 12. (Mom, if you don’t want to wade through the vulgarity that sometimes crops up, fast forward to about 9:13 and you’ll hear my name broadcast on the Internet in a grand British accent).
I’ve never been good about consistently backing up my hard drive. Hence, I have lost a fair amount of files due to crashes. Now that I work at home on my own equipment, I’ve been searching for a reliable backup solution. My first thought was to get a massive external hard drive, specifically a gigabit network attached drive that I could plug into my wireless router and access it from multiple computers. But those proved to be pretty expensive, and external hard drives (in my experience) have proved to be less reliable than internal drives.
I’m really glad I never bought anything because I recently purchased JungleDisk, a utility powered by Amazon S3. First of all, S3 is a fairly new service for storing and serving static content. JungleDisk is a simple tool that lets you access your S3 bucket from your local file system, and shows up as a network drive on your computer. Since all the files are stored on S3, the reliability factor is a googilian times better than an external hard drive. Cost is another plus. Jungle disk costs $20, one time. They also offer an upgraded service for $1/month with some added functionality. S3 has it’s own separate pricing, based on file usage and bandwidth, but it’s dirt cheap, too. I think my bill last month was like $0.44.
So, even if I ended up spending upwards of $3/month, it would still take years to equal the amount I would pay upfront for an external hard drive…which would probably fail in a couple years anyway.
My wife and I were skimming through tonight’s episode of American Idol which we recorded. We really only cared about who got voted off, so we just started skipping past the Idol Gives Back recap, but we were soon caught completely off guard when we saw the contestants start to sing “Shout to the Lord”. (As a sidenote, we discovered that they sang this song last night as well.) As the song was sung, we were left babbling quick utterances such as “wha–?”, “y–!”, “bu–…ahh!” and the like. I’m still trying to figure out why it was so odd to watch them sing the song. Do any or all of them know Jesus to the extent that they would call Him “Savior”? Although we didn’t watch last night’s perfomance, I understand that the opening lyrics were changed from “My Jesus” to “My Shepherd”, but tonight the original lyrics were sung.
It also makes me wonder who made the decision to sing the song in the first place, let alone a second time with Jesus’ name blatantly proclaimed as Savior. Did they take some flack for leaving it out the first time? Or did the producers receive some positive feedback from Dolly Parton’s “Jesus and Gravity”…enough so that the most contraversial name on earth would be safe to put on the most-watched show on television? Very intriguing, to say the least. So much so that I couldn’t go to sleep without writing about it…and I typed all this on my iPhone.
P.S. I’m bummed that the Australian chap was voted off.
I just found this video on waxy.org. If your a nerd, I guarantee you’ll enjoy this. (If you don’t enjoy it, rejoice in the fact that you’re not a nerd).
Based on the lingo and production quality, I would have guessed that this video was from the ’80s. But it’s actually from ‘95, which doesn’t seem that long ago. Maybe that’s a sign of age.
Owning a home is a great privilege and blessing. But most good things tend to come with some less-than-desirable baggage. All worldly possessions require some degree of cleaning, fixing, maintaining, or preserving (which sometimes makes me wonder why we always want more).
Anyways, today I changed one of the air intake filters to our heating/air conditioning ducting. Here’s what the new filter looks like:
Here’s a picture of the one I removed:
Nasty. It’s no wonder that we’ve all been caughing and sneezing so much.
The packaging suggested that these filters should be replaced every 3 months, but I was pretty sure this one was over due by a few days. Whoever installed this old one did fill in the date when it was installed, but it left me a bit confused:
After a bit of thinking I concluded that this old filter was installed way back when dates were still in the single digits. Definitely over 3 months ago.
On the 8th, Erin and I celebrated our 5th anniversary. We’re staying in a fancy hotel in Seattle, and it’s been a good relaxing time to get away. The hotel was actually so fancy that we had to eat at MacDonald’s for our anniversary dinner. I know you’re all thinking that I’m a cheap tightwad, but let me assure you that I let Erin supersize her meal.
One of the goals Erin had for our trip was to see someone famous. Well, today while we were at P.F. Chang’s for lunch, my wife’s keen eye spotted Lord Saruman from across the dining room. At first, I was skeptical, particularly because he wasn’t wearing a robe. But after a quick IMDB search, we realized that the actor Christopher Lee portrayed Lord Saruman (a fictional character) in Lord of the Rings (a fictional movie). We are 98.6% sure that Mr. Lee was eating Chinese/American food in the same room as us today. Coincidentally, our waiter looked just like Andy Serkis.
I just found a letter from a few years back that I wrote to Capital One. Back when I was in college, they kept sending me notices of pre-approval for a credit card. However, when I tried to accept the pre-approval, they denied me. Here was my retort, dated April 6, 2000.
Dear Ms. Kauffman:
I recently received a denial of request for credit privileges from Capital One. Please note the reference number: **********202. The primary reason for your decision was stated as follows:
YOU WERE NOT THE PERSON SOLICITED
The person solicited (and who was pre-approved for credit) was one Nate Sees. I assumed this was meant for me: Nathan Sees. Nate is the name I am referred to by my friends and family; a nickname, if you will. On the application that I sent in, there was a word of instruction that gave orders to correct any wrong information with regards to my name and address. This I did to the best of my ability. I circled “Nate” and wrote “Nathan” on the application because that is the name printed on my driver’s license. I am curious as to why I (Nathan) was not considered the same person as Nate. If you believe there is someone other than myself named Nate Sees who lives at the same address as me and also shares my driver’s license and social security numbers, then I suppose you have proper grounds to deny me (Nathan) credit. However, if I may attempt to persuade you differently, let it be known that there is no Nate Sees, other than myself, who resides at 982 E. Quincy, let alone in the great state of California, as far as I know. If you still disagree, I would challenge you to search for him and let me know when you find him because I have been receiving his mail, phone calls, and e-mails for the past 21 years.
I do not mean to sound facetious or rude, but this is the second time I have been denied credit by your company for the exact same reason. If I have not persuaded you that I am Nate Sees (the person you pre-approved for credit,) then I will ask you to please stop sending pre-approved credit notices to Nate Sees, because apparently he does not live here.
With utter sincerity,
Nathan “Nate” Sees
Now that i look back on it, I think I was lying about the utterness of my sincerity. Please forgive me, Ms. Kauffman.
Well, one week into my initial test, none of the search engines have indexed my secret word. Maybe I need to be more patient. But if my patience is in fact sufficient, I would venture to say that the first two test pages I built are unsatisfactory to Google, Yahoo, and MSN. So I added 2 more pages with some altered code. I’ll give it another week and see if the big 3 will be nicer to me. Speaking of being nice, maybe I was not being cordial enough to their spiders in my first post. Here’s another go:
The Rissington Podcast is one of the nerd podcasts I listen to regularly. It’s hosted by Jon Oxton and John Hicks, two well-respected and talented designers from the UK. Their show primarily relies on questions sent in from listeners, and they often plead with their audience to send in questions. Until this last episode (12), I hadn’t heard them specify that they wanted good questions that related to design or technology. So I wrote the following email to see how desperate they truly were.
