June 18, 2009
Your mother knows very little about Macintosh products and related services
This is a list of Macintosh your mom jokes that I made eight years ago and never put anywhere. I think the world is ready now.
- Your mother thinks that slot loading iMacs have Mezzanine ports.
- I have noted on numerous occasions that your mother doesn't use
option L when writing long lines of AppleScript. - Your mother once confided in me that she has tried to install OS
9 on a 68k Macintosh. - Many people of reputable stature have told me that your mother bought
more than seventy-two megs of ram for her 61xx Performa. - I have serious doubts as to whether your mother knows the difference
between Sawtooth and Yosemite motherboard designs. - When porting a major game to OS X, your mother was caught making
calls to Game Sprockets. - Your mother bought O'Reilly's Missing Manual for iMovie.
- I couldn't help but notice that your mother has her Help balloons
turned on. - I feel it's important that you know that your mother insists that
Sherlock was part of OS 7.6. - Your mother thinks that the Newton is a new unit of measurement
for weight!
Posted by Will at 1:19 PM | Comments (1) digg delicious reddit
June 12, 2009
If something is worth saying, it's worth saying with more than 140 characters. And yes, I realize that this is less than 140 characters.
Posted by Will at 4:47 PM | Comments (0) digg delicious reddit
June 8, 2009
Metal Gear: Gamesaver
This is the first in a series of five unrelated shorts that I'm doing for atom.com. If you've ever played Metal Gear, I think you will find this funny. If you haven't, you will find it less funny, but still relatively funny, hopefully.
Posted by Will at 11:56 AM | Comments (0) digg delicious reddit
June 2, 2009
I am an internet hundredaire
I got a check from google the other day for a hundred dollars. You remember Double Feature Finder? Well, there are ads on it. Google doesn't bother cutting a check for anything less than a Benjamin, so this is the first time I've seen any money in DFF's three and a half year history. I'm going to go buck wild tomorrow and put it towards a new hard drive.
Posted by Will at 1:13 AM | Comments (3) digg delicious reddit
May 18, 2009
Probably the only time I'll be compared to The Beatles
Last month's issue of Blender magazine devoted two pages to a showdown between the worst band names of all time, including The Beatles, Limp Bizkit, and my college band, Skabba the Hut. We seemed to be representing every terrible ska band that took a common term and figured out a way to put ska in it somewhere, although if it were me, I would have nominated The Ska Skank Redemption, which shockingly enough is not defunct.
Here are the scans to prove it:
(click through for the whole thing)
Sadly, we were beaten out by The Cherry Poppin' Daddies and the title eventually went, deservedly so, to Hoobastank.
In other Skabba related news, our former guitarist Brian Grosz, now of Dogs of Winter, has released a free album called From Soil To Shale and you can download it here.
Posted by Will at 11:00 PM | Comments (1) digg delicious reddit
April 23, 2009
Do you like parties? And tea?
Well then have I got the thing for you. My friend Kramer, who edited Casted and Falseface among other things went to the tea party demonstrations in New York and got some great photos. You can watch a montage of them here:
Tea Party New York City, April 15, 2009
He has a book of photos that you should buy too.
Posted by Will at 2:34 AM | Comments (0) digg delicious reddit
April 13, 2009
I am not a snuggie model
A few months ago, The New York Times ran a piece on snuggies and whether or not they were practical for outdoor use. They also made a slideshow that included this image:
Some friends of mine pointed this image out to me and wondered if I had been living a double life as a snuggie model. It's actually of the article's author, Allen Salkin, who looks like this:
To tell you the truth, if I wasn't absolutely positive that I've never even seen a snuggie in real life, I would assume that picture was of me too. It's creepy. But I assure you, it's not me. Not that I would turn down any snuggie modeling work if it was offered to me.
Posted by Will at 10:46 PM | Comments (3) digg delicious reddit
April 4, 2009
Monday night: more penis
My Best Friend Is My Penis returns to Atom TV this Monday at 2:30 AM on Comedy Central. I don't have cable, so I never know how these turn out, but I'm sure it'll be awesome.
You can check out what else is on the episode here:
Posted by Will at 1:37 PM | Comments (0) digg delicious reddit
April 1, 2009
I uploaded some really old videos to youtube
The first is Lameosaur in Dick Sandwich.
Boy, that movie's old.
The second is National Environmental Inaction League (NEIL)
A company hired me to make that, but they never paid me, so screw it, I uploaded it to youtube. So there.
Posted by Will at 2:53 AM | Comments (1) digg delicious reddit
March 12, 2009
GROUP_CONCAT is the most awesome MySQL function ever
It's been a while since I've filed a post under the 'boring tech stuff' category, and I discovered something today that I found very exciting. For those of you who don't know what MySQL is, you can stop reading now. This will be very boring and won't make any sense.
Now, let's say you have an online store. You have a tabled called user and one called purchase that holds the data for every purchase a user makes (including stuff about the item they purchased, which would usually be in a different table, but for the sake of simplicity, we'll say it's in purchase). Now let's say you want to get a list of all your users and all the purchases they've made. Until I found out about GROUP_CONCAT, I would have done something like this:
SELECT user.user_name, purchase.item_name FROM user, purchase WHERE purchase.user_id=user.user_id
which would return something like this:
| user_name | item_name |
|---|---|
| Will | comic book |
| Will | video game |
| Carl | hair gel |
And then I'd have to go through that data programatically to group my comic book and video game together.
But with GROUP_CONCAT, I can do this:
SELECT user.user_name, GROUP_CONCAT(purchase.item_name) FROM user, purchase WHERE purchase.user_id=user.user_id GROUP BY user.user_id
Which gives me:
| user_name | item_name |
|---|---|
| Will | comic book,video game |
| Carl | hair gel |
Now let's say you want to get a list of all your users and the most expensive thing they've ever bought. You'd think this would work:
SELECT user.user_name, MAX(purchase.price), purchase.item_name FROM user, purchase WHERE purchase.user_id=user.user_id GROUP BY user.user_id ORDER by purchase.price DESC
But it doesn't. It'll give you the maximum price, but the item_name will be whatever MySQL feels like giving from the purchase list, not necessarily the one that goes along with the MAX(price), even with that ORDER BY at the end. Here's where GROUP_CONCAT comes in, using its optional ORDER BY clause.
SELECT user.user_name, MAX(purchase.price), SUBSTRING_INDEX(GROUP_CONCAT(purchase.item_name ORDER BY purchase.price DESC), ',', 1) FROM user, purchase WHERE purchase.user_id=user.user_id GROUP BY user.user_id
That's a bit of a mess, so let's look at the important part:
GROUP_CONCAT(purchase.item_name ORDER BY purchase.price DESC)
That gives the list of purchases for the user, ordered by price descending, and since we're only interested in the first entry in that list, the most expensive one, we slap around it:
SUBSTRING_INDEX(GROUP_CONCAT..., ',', 1)
The two arguments after the GROUP_CONCAT are to tell it to look for the first comma it sees and return whatever's before it. So you end up with:
| user_name | MAX(price) | item_name |
|---|---|---|
| Will | 50.00 | video game |
| Carl | 30.00 | hair gel |
Like I said before, you can do all this stuff programatically, but if you hate leaving your SQL prompt, this comes in handy.
Apologies to my non-techie readership. I'll come up with some other way to bore you next time.
Posted by Will at 11:22 PM | Comments (3) digg delicious reddit
