Atomictumor

Excellent.

Thanks to the link by Exiled to Canada, I was able to find another link here, and set up the theoretical xbox to my laptop.

Its kinda funny, because I just happened to buy a crossover cable like 6 years ago for some reason, and kept it in my little bag o’ junk for all this time, where it survived 4 or so throwaway purges because I figured ONE DAY, it might come in handy.

That day is today.

So, I have a sufficiently geeky hack around spending all that stupid money to M$, and didn’t have to set my router on fire to do it. Hells yes.

Actually, the laptop is a Media Center edition and (ahem) an actual legitimate copy, so I started the process to move all my music and crap to the thing. Problem is, the music and crap will swamp the hard drive on both the lappy and the xbox, so I need to figure out a sufficiently hacky way to watch my episode of Heroes that I’m downloading through the xbox on the bitchin HDMI connection.

I mean the theoretical xbox. Or whatever.

Woot.

Man, I’m riding the coffee buzz from hell.

I’m not even really sure whats up with it.  I don’t think I had more than 3 or so cups this morning.  Granted, I slept well, and had nothing to eat (yet), but damn.  Its right on top of me.  I’m buzzing like a vibra… like a broken ceiling fan.  Or something.

Or maybe like a controller from an xbox 360.  Not that I bought one of those yesterday.  Or that it looks DAMN good on my fancy TV, what with the HDMI connection, and the 1080i picture.  No, because that’d be an egregious waste of money.  Yes, egregious.  I had to look that one up.

However, the theoretical Xbox presents a theoretical problem, one that has been festering in the back end of my mind for some time, but one that demands a quick solution:

Hooking that bastard up to the home network…

Now, those of you in the know know that I had what I like to call the ATivo going on, whereas the computer can push data (usually in the form of TV shows) to either of my TVs.  I actually wrote a piece about it a while back, complete with a nice little picture, but the problem is that the whole things kinda been mothballed, because digital cable prevents the use of the RF modulator that was the key in the whole darn kitenkaboodle.

Not that the theoretical xbox has much to do with that.  I’m getting there.

Now, right now, I gots three computers, the big guy in the living room, the littler guy in MastaG’s room, and the lappy in my room.  They’re all kicking back on the mighty beams of my wifi network here, joined occasionally by my phone and whoever can break the encryption to wardrive on my little network (if they can break the 128 bitness, they’re welcome to it).

Thing is, the wifi connector for this theoretical xbox is like a hundred freakin dollars.  Bugger that.

I mean, I bought two little desktop wifi connectors for like 5 bucks apiece.  Its not like its space age technology, people.  Seriously.  100 bucks, so I can hook the dumb old thing up to the wifi.

Hell with that.

So, looks like I gotta run ethernet.  Thing is, if I’m going to get underneath the house, and run cables and crap, I might as well redo the whole darn works.

But I don’t think the coffee buzz can sustain all that.

These days, I’m just not as into home improvements in that way.  I mean, I recognize the use in doing that sorta stuff, but I can’t be arsed to do it.  Its bad enough keeping the house clean and the boys in fresh underwear, without trying to hop up in crawlspaces with wire in my teeth.  Sure, I can do it, and yes, I fully recognize the fact that I’m a lazy bastard (woot), but the needful just isn’t there as of yet.

So, I’m trying to find another solution.  However, that theoretical xbox just really wants to be able to connect to the other computers, and talk shop, and hang out, and maybe share some files.  Its all lonely in there (theoretically), and I gotta do something about it.

Just without spending a hundred freakin dollars.  Seriously, Microsoft, you suck.

This was in August of 2006. You can see us bopping near the front of the stage (kinda).

Wooo!

Excited…

So, I bought a buncha tickets for the Of Montreal show way back on the day they first went on sale, and I’m plannin on having a good time!

Except, seems like half of the tickets are gonna go unused, because everybody else kinda forgot about it…

The Missus was cracking a hardboiled egg for the kids. Spotz said he couldn’t believe that some dinosaurs ate other dinosaurs eggs. So I told him that weasles and snakes ate egg yolks, too. Then the Missus pointed out the obvious that we’re nest robbers, too. I said yeah these eggs would’ve become little chicks if we hadn’t grabbed them first.

The Missus then raised a very important question. Are those chicken eggs fertilized? I said yeah, sure. I mean how else would they get fertilized if they weren’t before they hit the nest?

Well as it turns out they just may not be. Check this page out for more info, but here’s the gist:

Birds, like mammals, use internal fertilization. Many species of birds lack a penis; instead, the male just has a genital opening (cloaca), which must be positioned against the female’s genital opening (also called a cloaca) for sperm transfer. Male chickens, however, do have a small penis to facilitate mating. In any case, after copulation, which only lasts a few seconds, the sperm quickly swim up the oviduct toward the ovary. The sperm can stay alive in the oviduct for several weeks, ready to fertilize the next egg cell (oocyte) that appears.

Oocytes are produced in the ovary, packaged with yolk within a thin protein membrane, and released one at a time into the funnel-like infundibulum of the oviduct. The oviduct is a tubular passageway leading from the ovary to the outside world. It is also an assembly line in which the various layers of the egg are constructed. After an oocyte-yolk package is released into the infundibulum, it lingers there for about 20 minutes. If sperm are present, then the oocyte is fertilized and becomes an embryo. But if no sperm are around (that is, if the hen has not mated), then the egg still proceeds down the assembly line of the oviduct. In this assembly line, albumen (egg white) is added around the yolk, shell membranes are added, and the shell itself is constructed. Finally, the complete egg is pushed through the vagina and out the cloaca.

If the egg has been fertilized, then the embryo inside has already divided several times but remains a group of unspecialized cells. When the egg is incubated at about 37 to 38 °C, the embryonic cells differentiate to form a chick, which will hatch after 21 days. If the egg has not been fertilized, then the oocyte within will never grow or divide, and the egg will never hatch. The eggs you buy at the supermarket are eggs that have never been fertilized.

Who knew?