Goatse

There's nothing quite like discovering that your wife is, in some respects, still a web illiterate. I guess it's just that goatse doesn't come up in general connubial conversation...at least not at my house, thank you. So as a public service announcement to all my kith and kin who might find themselves ashamed at their lack of web knowledge when confronted with a knowledgeable geek, I offer this very overdue pair of links from Wikipedia and Snopes to a description of goatse. Those are generally safe for work, although I make no guarantees about your safety should you start clicking associated links. Not only is the general tenor not safe for work, it's not safe for your mental health if you find yourself confronted with a picture of the real goatse.

And speaking of life and art sort of syncing up, this last weekend Pooteewheet and I went to see Ironman. Very enjoyable. Very funny. Just a very good superhero movie. Far better than that Daredevil crap that made as much at the box office over its lifespan as Ironman did in one weekend. However, there are several portions of Ironman where they're showing off deadly weapons systems, and every time they did, the only thing I could think about was the Minnesota High Tech Association Innovation Conference where an exec from Boeing explained Boeing innovation by giving us a slide show with faux Top Gun music and dozens of shiny pictures of missiles, bombs, and airplanes, many of the last category unmanned military drones, or renderings of future planes dropping bombs on some unvisualized target, like a bunny farm. Military plane porn. It made the Tony Stark at the beginning of Ironman seem much more lifelike.

Netflix Green Screen of Death

I decided to ride my stationary bike last night and watch some streaming Netflix. Seemed like a good coupling. But then I went to kick up the first season of Heroes (how fortuitous!) and it green screened and told me I had a problem with my video driver. So I checked the video drivers, and they were pretty much up to date except for an update to the new Samsung driver. Tried again...failure. So I biked and watched Dawn of the Dead via the DVD player on the machine instead. That worked just fine.

Today I went looking around the net and found three methods to fix the issue. This first fix involves disabling your hardware acceleration on the system. That would suck. That affects all your video. Why would you do that, particularly if DVDs and non-Netflix things run just fine. The second fix is installing a full codecs package that updates everything. One site I looked at had half a dozen people on their comment board alternating between (I paraphrase a bit so they don't find me) "this sucks, I can't uninstall it and it doesn't work" with "you're a loser, this is the best" followed by "eat crap and die, nothing works anymore" then the repsonse "you're a hater" punctuated with "it takes an extra ten seconds to start every video, but I guess that's ok" then "why do you losers come here - you know it works, you're not trying" ending with "why don't you try our total codec pack, it's better!" No thanks.

This seemed to be the obvious solution. Potentially recommended by Netflix (although that's second hand, like all good urban legends), only affects Windows Media Player, which is what Netflix uses under the covers, and is easily undone. So here is the green screen of death in Netflix streaming player fix that worked for me:

Open Windows Media Player, (right click) go to tools, then options, click on the performance tab, drag the video acceleratoin bar to none, click on advanced, uncheck the enable full-screen mode box, apply all settings (you may get a warning that it will reset where you are if you currently have a video on the screen...oh well).

Viola! Heroes: Season I and stationary biking.


Pathetic second option:
DO THIS TO FIX GREEN VIDEO SCREEN ON PC Click Start Choose Control Panel Click Display Icon Click on Settings Click on Advanced Click on Trouble Shoot Reduce the Hardware acceleration slider from Full to half way or one quarter. Thats it.....


Third difficult method:
All in one codec pack

More Recent?

A more recent version of IE...to work with your own tools/formats? Really...? How much more recent do I have to be? And how the hell am I supposed to run it if it's optimized for future versions?

Agnes Moorehead

Reading a post at Out of the Jungle convinced me that I should finally go look at this wikiscanner thing the nets have been discussing. I input my employer (who has many associated affiliates) and found out that they're not scrubbing their own entries, so much as someone at one affiliate is spending a lot of time updating things like the personal life of Agnes Moorehead. And people sometimes suspect that I have a lot of free time at work - ha! I did learn that Agnes died of uterine cancer in my state (down in Rochester - presumably at Mayo), and that she was a conservative kook in her later days, giving most of her stuff to Bob Jones University. And she lived on Moorehead Manor - doesn't Bob Jones University have to decline Moorehead? You know, for Biblical reasons.