Thursday 21 June 2007

Leetle White Box of Nerd Cooties

As I type there is a little white box sitting on the desk of my room. As the title suggests, I am sure said little white box is jam-packed with nerd cooties, just waiting to be released so they can get me. Now one might think that because it is small there can't be that many cooties in there and conclude it is not so dangerous. Don't be fooled, for the strength of the nerd cooties in this box are particularly virulent and there is a thousand dollars worth of them in there. I'm also sure that, unlike their human hosts, they replicate like mad too. In fact the little white box is likely a nerd-cootie factory, one which I wouldn't be surprised to know runs on role playing games and science fiction films.


Behold The Cootie Machine:




EEeeeeeEeEEeeEeeeWWwwWWWwwWww!!!!!! Why did I pay money for this??!

Oh yeah because mama the buying enabler told me I had to.

I think she wants to poison me with nerdyness. What a slow and painful death that is, sadistic mama. She'll definitely never get grandchildren out of me now (not that she ever was mind you).

I also secondarily blame Grandma, as it is because of her that I must move the computer out of the back room and into my room where there is no room for the large tower I have now. I was looking at laptops but I didn't want to get rid of the lurvely wide-screen monitor I got for Christmas, and well, to me laptops kind of suck. I thought I might as well get a smaller computer that was wireless so we could keep the modem and router where they are-and I'd get to keep the Most Beloved Monitor.

Thirdly I blame my other Grandma, because mama had an ulterior motive in convincing me to buy the Leetle White Box of Nerd Cooties; she wants Grandma B. to have my old computer so they can all chat on the computer together (mama, aunts-who never visit my blog after I carefully erased all the evil things I said about them!!-and grandma). So she has a hand in it as well!

but you know it is so leetle and kind of cute-in a completely nerdtacular way...

BTW, "Leetle White Box of Nerd Cooties" has already become this computer's official name.

ETA and my keyboard doesn't work with it! Damn damn DAMN. Now I've unhooked everything from my other computer and I can't even work on the cootie machine.

Let's talk no more of the virus that has invaded my house.

Here is some consolation: about four years ago I bought six iris bulbs (or rhizomes or whatever the heck they're called) to plant in the crop circle because irises are one of my favorite flowers. When I got them, three were bad and the company replaced them, but I thought I might plant those away from the others. So I looked up how they were meant to be planted and cared for and carefully followed all instructions as I planted the nine bulbs I had. I waited and got...nothing.
It took a year or two before one lone little leaf appeared. I have been watching it with interest since, and finally this year, it got a flower. Yesterday the flower bloomed. So of those nine bulbs this is all I ended up with, but it is pretty so I think it was worth it. Maybe it's beautifulness is even powerful enough to cancel out the nerd cooties...

14 comments:

Sarah said...

I was thinking about getting one of those white boxes next year. Let me know how cootified it turns out to be.

Iris are the loveliest of flowers and that one is enough to cancel out anything.

mem said...

For some reason, I can't post comments the way I wanted to anymore. :(

Oh well. So I think the nerd box is cute, and that you will enjoy it after you get used to some of the differences. I was worried that you didn't have Photoshop for the Mac at all. You would probably utterly hate the Gimp, which is what I use for most of my picture touchups. The interface on that is TERRIBLE TERRIBLE TERRIBLE.

Personal pet peeve there.

No, really.

It is definitely a nerd machine, though; it has a UNIX-based core. I run Linux at home (and now at work, woo hoo), and I can do so much more so much more efficiently than I can under Windows it's not even funny.


My mom plants flowers so that we more or less have color throughout spring and summer. We have some day lilies that I have been jonesing to shoot, but they haven't bloomed sufficiently to get a good picture.

I like irises. We don't have them. I'll have to fix that sometime.

The verification word is nupshj, which is some kind of prenuptial quietness.

mem said...

Weapons? Well, I guess I do use smell as a weapon sometimes. It is most effective.

If you wanted the long version, I would've included the pictures and more indepth commentary about what it's like sleeping in my car.

I am not much of a fan of tacos. Indian or otherwise. And I am a bad dancer. I guess I would not be very good at any sort of powwow.

You know, sometime I will buy a tablet, and then I will fix my avatar to be something other than orange slime. But I doubt I will be able to use Photoshop, unless I actually pay for a program again (all of my software is free-as-in-beer, not free-as-in-speech, though the zealots are trying for the latter).

mem said...

Are you sure I should ignore your manaical laughter? It hasn't done me any good in the past to ignore such things.

What kind of an avatar would you make? I like my slime, but I think it is probably because I made it and have sentimental attachments to it.

And as for weapons, of course those are all a part of my arsenal. And the smell. You have to have the smell.

mem said...

You know, it's funny, but my validation word is smenita, which has to be the Spanish version of yours. Hmm.

If people are too stubborn to accept apologies, I figure that they deserve what's coming to them. Namely, a roundhouse kick to the FACE. Or more bad formatting.

I like your ideas, but you seriously needn't take that upon you, especially if you have other things to work on. Of the two, I think I probably like the clinja better, though I also laugh at the grammar joke. I laugh at many grammar jokes.

Hey, here's a not-grammar joke:

Q: Who laughs at lawyer jokes?

A: No one. Lawyers don't think they're funny, and no one else thinks they're jokes.


Sorry about that. And yes, I really do like the Arnold's Pizza Shop thing. If you have a problem with that, you'll receive one anyhow.

mem said...

Ha, no, the caps are mostly the result of laziness, not you wearing off on me (is that what you mean? Is "wearing off" the Canadian version of "rubbing off" in the States? You guys are so confusing sometimes).

My rants are usually about religious things, so it would be a little odd to have swear words cropping up in the text. Just a little. I haven't any real problems with rough language, but I think the real danger is that it would make me look Emergent or something crazy like that. I would probably use swears if I were talking about Emergents, but plenty of other people already do, so I don't have to.

We will have to start a virtual campaign to eradicate the clinja menace.

mem said...

If you go off on enough religious rants, I'll have to add you as a contributer to my other blog. That way, we can achieve our quote of authentic swearing and maybe also propagate good doctrine simultaneously.

I'm not sure if the folks at Pyro would find that as amusing as I would, but I guess that's okay.

Are you visiting the salon today? I am terrible at keeping other people's schedules. In any case, another fun-wishing. I am going to be having strawberry soup this evening. I'll let you know how it goes. I am not super fond of fruit, but it's usually the texture—so perhaps this will go the right way.


OOooh, I also totally dropped a Run DMC reference yesterday in the car on the way to lunch. People were asking me what kind of music I listen to, and I specified that I kind of enjoyed Aerosmith, and then I laughed at the "Walk this Way" video.

mem said...

Oooooh, again. I had a dream about you last night, I think, and you had children. I am not sure if that should be frightening or not. I don't recall being too bothered in the dream. I do not think one of them was called Athanasius, but I don't really remember. I'm not good with my dreams.

mem said...

The soup was actually VERY good. If you're a fan of smoothies or water ice (in New Crappy they call it "wooder ice", but the accent changes the inflection a little), this is fairly similar, but there's no ice. It was really good.

I teach K for free, so she cooks for me on occasion. This time was mostly for my folks, who have graciously donated some space for us to use. We also had sub-like sandwiches (a peculiarity of our area, I think, is that we call subs "hoagies"), a grilled salad with figs, and pears basted with honey and a little white wine. I am not too adventurous when it comes to food, but this was good.


I was never very good with kids, and I'm still learning. I've been dealing with them on and off for seven years now, and I have generally done okay after the first five.

You know, I read some of Ireneaus' Heretics the other day. I would still probably leave his name for a cat instead of the kids, regardless of your marital status. Not because the name is bad, but because the children are likely to rebel later on in life from being beaten about in school. (I suppose I could teach them to beat the snot out of anyone if you'd like.)


Speaking of salons, my sister's friends are here from all over, and it looks like a salon exploded in my bathroom. ... Oh, I guess that's not the same kind of salon.

Did you visit the tidal bore when you were in the Maritimes? I remember thinking how cool it was (I like strong wind, and I like rain, too, sorry), but when I got back in the car, my hair had been driven back from my head.

Plough winds aren't fun, though. I'm glad it's just yard cleanup too, but if you're working early that kind of sucks.


My dad was talking about getting a mac. I told him you called yours a little white box of nerd cooties. He thought that was funny. Pretty soon you're going to be making my family laugh more than I do.


Oh, and the verification word is "vhlukyln" which is some kind of weird nether-universe version of Brooklyn.

mem said...

Tangentially, I found this some time ago and our brief discussion of names reminded me of it. I'm pretty sure this is a Bad Thing, but one line in there made me laugh. I'll let you guess.

mem said...

I'm sure that your kids would fight a lot. And that's not entirely a bad thing, really—kids don't fight enough these days. They grow up thinking rocket launchers are good fighting tools instead. And they have cultural pugilism advantage also.

K probably would hate the appellation "girl" as much as you would "Ms." She refers to her boyfriend as her "friend" and yelled at me for calling her "woman" once. (She was trying to make me eat guacamole when I was sick; I'm not sure what else I could do!)

In any case, she is also a questioning Catholic, so I will have to be wary of socks full of rocks. I will advise her of your fighting tactics and see if she wants to cook for you in Canada sometime. She is not much of a Petra fan (I tried, awhile ago), but maybe we could all jam in Winnipeg with John and Bob in October (I refuse to call them by the name they chose).


I hesitate to ask, but why are you trying to predict people's homicidal tendencies? Is it some sort of effort to predict the outcome of the knife-stick match of DOOM or something?

Dashboard is pretty cool—Vista attempts to mimic some of it, and does an okay job, I think, but Vista has always felt more cluttered to me when I've seen it and tinkered in stores. Dunno, the people at Apple really do think about interface design and cut through a lot of red tape to get it done. People might not all like it, but at least it's thoughtful and generally tasteful. And polished.

Hopefully Dashboard will make up for your future predicting programs. Haha.

mem said...

I bet you can find the font again and install it on the machine. It should be fairly easy, esp if it's a public domain font.

Is your birthday in August? Your attempts at getting me to wikipedia mayan calendering have only been partially successful, due to my somewhat unexpectedly busy schedule (going to visit the bro and SIL in B'more tomorrow) and less interest in dating systems than, say, grammar.

My birthday is in August. In fact, it falls in the middle of my trip to Kenya. Which I think is frankly rockin.


Speaking of dates, you would know about Winnipeg if you kept up on the john schlitt web site. It has a list of dates, and I think that one is 9 October.

Speaking of people who probably won't go, I usually call her by her name. I am not terribly tolerant of political correctness, but I don't go out of my way to insult people if I can help it. I think she would be annoyed by being called "my girl" on two counts—first being "girl" and second "my." If you desire, though, I will be happy to refer to you variously as "girl," "woman," "honey," or "hun." I will avoid Ms so as to avoid being pummeled by you or your future pugilistic children.


Did you know that Joe Louis once got in a car accident, and he was being abused by the other guy. Asked why he didn't respond by punching his lights out, he said, "Does Caruso sing an aria when they insult him?" I was impressed.

My verification word is 'xmazm'. It sounds like some pseudo-Christmas celebration involving highly suspect rites. And perhaps a little like my initials.

mem said...

I did do some reading on the Mayan language, but it has been a really long time since I did, and it was mostly related to how it was cracked, not to the language itself. It may actually have been in conjunction with the Mayan mathematic system.

I can already tell you what kind of psycho I am. In fact, you can probably tell what kind of psycho I am.

I don't use names to protect the guilty. And sometimes the innocent. But mostly the guilty. I picked up the initials habit from CS Lewis, I think. In some ways it's kind of nice, because that way I don't have to remember names, and rereading my own entries becomes somewhat adventurous on occasion. One of the reasons I kind of dislike having a diary, actually, is that it reminds me of things I should sometimes just forget.


I am glad you saved your mother some embarrassment. And the terror of holding on to you longer than necessary. (Yet you still live at home... hmmm..... Oh, wait. So do I.)

I was the smallest of us three, I think. When I was born, my body rejected itself and tried to strangle me with my own umbilical cord. I blame that, and not my genes, for my relatively diminished stature (my brother exceeds six feet; in Canadian I guess that's 1.8 meters or so).


I think the idea of calling a woman "honey" is that she is sweet. I guess for you I would have to call you, "Not-crap," which doesn't exactly roll right off the tongue. I'm saying this more as a reflection on your ancestry than your BO.


Oh, and my validation word is rqueekz. There's got to be something you can do with that.

mem said...

How am I supposed to have a good week when it's all my fault?

See, when you said, "What do you call this person who does not happen to be a male," I took that to really mean, "What do you call her?" in a personal way, like what do I call her. Not what you would call her. I think she is not opposed to the gender term "woman" as much as she would dislike being called "Woman" as a form of address, kind of like me calling you "Ms Moore" or something.

Well, regardless, I know you'll be having a good enough week for the both of us, so I'm not too worried about my own. I'm actually in Baltimore, where it is raining and I destroyed my whole family in a game of Boggle. All those years of Text Twist instead of homework in graduate school paid off!