Posts tagged Geeky Goodness
How Tech Support People Make Me Feel. (Pic)
Jun 8th
I hate level one tech support with a passion…These old Dilberts seem to be the only way to make me crack a smile while dealing with morons over at Dell. There has to be some magic words to escalate me to level 3 technical support or @ least to someone who knows what they are talking about!!
Anyone know what those magic words are? I think I can safely say that every four letter word I used… Didn’t work!
Did I mention I was on the phone for 3 hours – Can I send someone a shock through the phone??
Amazon is Down! – No redundancy while the shopping giant suffers a major outage
Jun 6th
That’s right kiddies!
Ask The Admin brought it to you first. Don’t go knocking on Amazon‘s door today. Nobody will answer.
Could it be that the Shopping GIANT of the net doesn’t even have server redundancy worked out right for itself?
Anybody out there know anything about this? Doesn’t Amazon offer hosting services as well?
Hit us in the comments people. Any speculations? DOS Attack?
You tell us…
Hit the comments, aaaaaaand begin!
(Edit they are back up at 3:05pm… Maybe all the Admin’s were out to lunch? Almost an hour down that has to cost some serious moolah!)
(Double Edit: 3:14 back down again…)
3:32 When you can get to the site we have a pretty little note posted…
And now Rumors are flying that it is PS3 related here and here… Anyone?
C64 (the one you used to play Bruce Lee on)
(POLL) Should we keep or dump Intense Debate for our comments?
May 29th
It has been a while since I wrote about Intense Debate (ID). We used ID for a short while and LOVED it. We loved it so much we wanted our existing comments imported into the system. I was informed by Josh that we could help beta test the process. You know we jumped on board!
It has now been about 4 months since we did our import from blogger to ID and replaced ALL of our comments with ID’s. There were issues immediately. The names of the commenter’s DID NOT come over. So all the comments look like they are from the same person… I was told by the good people over at ID that they would find a solution and get back to me. Their solution was to replace their importer and create one that actually imports the commenter’s names and stats.
So I figured GREAT! Let’s do this!
Then I was told very politely that the new process won’t work for me because I was already imported. Even though I specifically requested a DB backup at several points. WAIT THERE IS MORE! They WERE able to go into my DB and MANUALLY fix the comments for 3 posts while I waited patiently. I have not had any update on this in months. Now that our impending migration to WordPress is being held up by…
Drum roll please.
You guessed it Intense Flucking Debate. Don’t get me wrong I love what they want to do and how their service works but me losing ALL my ID comments when moving to WP is UNACCEPTABLE! I have spoken to the Jon, Josh and their new addition Michael to no avail. They are very polite but, polite ain’t getting me my comments back.
Granted we have A LOT of comments and know that for them to do this manually would take a LONG ASS time. But we offered to help script it. See the problem is post id’s. WordPress does not import post ids and starts from scratch. If we can replace the postid’s in ID’s database with the newly created WP one’s (Via SQL Script) that should fix the problem. But they don’t want to exert themselves. Shouldn’t a company that is trying to win over the public be a little more apt to help us out?
So what do you think I should do? Be heard in the comments and the poll below:
Maybe we should have went with Disqus!
_ThePissedOffAdmiN_
Own The Keenest Water Faucet…On the cheap!
May 25th
So we don’t usually gush over retail household products but this is really cool and can be bought with the notion of safety in mind. You attach this doo-hickey that is battery operated and it changes the color of your water with LED’s depending on the temperature of the water. Its also only $20 so we might just give it a try! Here this is from the ThinkGeek website that sells it.
Tired of that same old monotonous water? Bored with water that doesn’t look like futuristic alien mouthwash? Need to make your midnight bathroom appointments more exhilarating?
Then you need to get the LED faucet light attachment from ThinkGeek. You can turn any faucet in your home into a streaming fantasia of techie-bliss in just minutes. How does it work? Just attach to the end of your faucet (universal adapters included), and when the water flows through the magic chamber, it simply turns on the LED array and illuminates the stream with soothingly powerful hues.
But wait, there’s more! You get to choose between two different Faucets.
Blue LED – Always streams BLUE LED’s
Blue/Red LED – Normally streams BLUE LED’s until the water temperature hits 89 degrees after which the LEDs turn RED!
Here’s what you get with either version:
Chamber with LEDs
Batteries pre-installed plus a set of spare batteries (uses G13-A style watch batteries)
Instruction Sheet
Two universal adaptors included. (fits most standard faucets in USA. Not recommended for faucets outside of the USA.)
Dimensions: 2.25″ tall, 1.25″ diameter.
Now available in a temperature sensitive display version!
If anyone has already splurged let us know how it worked out. The link to the product page is here. Oh and ThinkGeek Guys if you wanna send us a few we will be more then happy to find some other creative uses for them over @ AtA headquaters :).
Buy some support our effort – we get a little kick back towards our upcoming upgrades!
Caffeinated soap? Are you serious?
May 16th
(NOW BACK IN STOCK!)
Hey there??? Hi!!!??
How’s it going?????
Nothings wrong! Why do you ask????
Oh no. We always shake lIkE thAt!
DoEsN’t EveRyOnE???
Alright we got the pleasantries out of the way now – Holy crap it has happened. This is something straight out of Futurama. (Sorry for the re-run!)
That’s right you shower and lather up this “Shower Shock” and get a heaping dose of caffeine.
Just don’t stay in there for hours and come out shaking. Unless of course you are into that kind of thing. Don’t worry we don’t judge…
Aw who are we kidding – of course we judge and snicker.
Check out this item from our favorite online shop ThinkGeek – Starting at $7 a bar. It’s cheaper than Starbucks – Kind of…
Mornings Have Never Been So Invigorating!
- Tired of waking up and having to wait for your morning java to brew?
- Are you one of those groggy early morning types that just needs that extra kick?
- Know any programmers who don’t regularly bathe and need some special motivation?
Introducing Shower Shock, the original and world’s first caffeinated soap from ThinkGeek. When you think about it, ShowerShock is the ultimate clean buzz.
It Works! Featured On…
- TechTV
- NBC
- MSNBC
- CNN
- Good Morning America
- Washington Post
- Ripley’s Believe It Or Not
- Your Bathroom!
Shower Shock is an all vegetable based glycerine soap which does *not* contain any harsh ingredients like ethanol, diethanolamine, polyethylene glycol or cocyl isethionate. So it’s a gently invigorating soap ;) Scented with peppermint oil and infused with caffeine anhydrous, each bar of Shower shock contains approximately 12 servings/showers per 4 ounce bar with 200 milligrams of caffeine per serving. No, we’re not kidding and no you don’t eat it. The caffeine is absorbed through the skin. For maximum effect, ThinkGeek recommends that you build up a good Shower Shock lather across your entire body before rinsing!
Have smelly co-workers that sleep in too much? Give them the gift of Shower Shock… Plus AtA gets a few pennies on the dollar for your purchase via any of these links! Help us help you by buying us a new server and getting some stuff in the process… Who doesn’t need stuff!
Or for that smelly geek you can’t bring yourself to get any where near even when you need their help!
_TheShakEyAdmiN_ sEnD MorE samPlEs PlEaSe :)
Can I add random quotes to my blog or website for FREE?
Apr 26th
The title of this question here is a little misleading because you can use this little web app to serve lots of stuff besides quotes, like random ads or words of wisdom.
Get your geek on and swap out scripts and images galore!
Originally we used the free RandomQuote ASP generator to feed our geeky quotes in our sub header above. Have you seen it before?Pretty cool stuff huh? Now what if I told you the Busted Tee Shirt Ads on the right bar were also served up by this generator?
Result: Different ad and quote ,out of our database, on every refresh!
After tweaking, pushing, prodding (our coder not the program) this proved to work very well and we have been very happy with the results. But after a while we realized that this handy little random generator, complete with a very aesthetically pleasing back-end editing system, (pictured to the bottom) would be perfect to randomly feed out anything our geeky little hearts desired.
You’ll see a different quote, different ad on every page load, and all the same geeky love in front and behind it. You’ll need an .ASP compatible web hosting plan at the very least to get started. Don’t get scared – all this means is that you need a web hosting plan on the side but it doesn’t necessarily have to point to your site. Just a server that supports ASP. This is because the files need to live somewhere on a server with Microsoft extensions. It also needs to give you a few MySQL Databases to make this easier but you can also pull it off with a connection to an Access Database, and with some basic ASP knowledge you can probably modify it to work with an Excel file as a data source as well.
The first thing you need to do is go to here and snatch this free package called RandomQ from Expirion.Net:
The directions are fairly simple. Here’s the skinny:
- First copy the files/folders to your (ASP Compatible) web server.
- Then modify the config.asp file to point to your database and give it the correct credentials to do so. Refer to your web hosting control panel to see various details about your DB – you’ll need that info to put into the config.asp file.
- The package comes with a convenient little script that creates all the necessary tables/columns when run against your database. Your DB will need this structure to properly communicate with the application.
- Now open the index.asp file in the /admin folder in your RandomQ directory to see if any errors arise. If they do arise, the problem is most likely with your config.asp file. Be sure it points to the correct place and that the credentials are correct. Next be sure the tables were created properly by browsing thru the database using the web interface usually provided by your web hosting service. If it’s not provided you’ll need to get into some of the graphical database management proggies, provided at MySQL.com, to connect to and be able to view your DB data.
- Once you get the inc_random.asp file to display properly and you can login successfully to the /admin/index.asp file, your in business. All in all, barring any technical issues, this whole process should take no more than 10 minutes.
- Now you have to get the inc_random.asp file to display on your blog, so the only way to accomplish getting information to be displayed cross-domain is with the use of an html iframe as follows (we’ve removed the html open and close brackets so the code won’t get munched by blogger’s server and you’d still be able to copy and paste the code for your own evil doing):
iframe src=”http://www.YOURWEBHOST.com/RandomQ/inc_random.asp” vspace=”0″ marginheight=”0″ marginwidth=”0″ hspace=”0″ frameborder=”0″ height=”40″scrolling=”no” width=”100%”.
Make sure you close your open Iframe tag with a /iframe
Now the fun part – put in your data by logging into the RandomQ admin console and get to steppin!
Which of our quotes do you like the best? Got any ideas?
Damn son!! Let us know in the comments! Why are you all quiet and shit?
Oh and thanks to Mike aka Commodore64 for his assistance on this article and a great find on the application as well as implementation of it.
