Preserve the Ratio!

Not long ago, in brew pub in Salt Lake City, some work buddies and I noticed that the widescreen TVs showing the game (don't ask which game, or even what sport; I don't know) were actually set up correctly. As it turns out, all of us share a pet peeve, namely the practice of buying a fancy widescreen TV, pumping a 4:3 picture into it, and setting it to the wrong display mode, distorting and fattening everything shown.

An iPhone (is that the proper capitalization?) was present, and we determined that "preservetheratio.com" was indeed available, a vacant soapbox from which we could complain about the vile practice that distorts the images so many see every day, a home base upon which we could collect written and photographic accounts of these public displays of stupidity, a domain name which, though basically useless, we could indeed secure and have for our own.

Unlike most bar talk, this actually led to one of us going ahead and registering preservetheratio.com. He hadn't actually been drinking, even. But apparently it was obtained for next to nothing. Upon hearing this, I snapped a few quick pictures in my office and threw together my own personal rant on the topic. It's not the multitude of articles and arguments and pictorials we imagined when beer was present, but for now it's the only content on the site. And it's a little creepy 'cause my picture is sitting right there on the front of a something-dot-com.

Anyway it's pretty silly, and contains more complaining than humor, but here's a link anyhow:
http://www.preservetheratio.com

 

[Edit: many years later, I have no memory of who owned or ran that domain, but it's long gone.  However, it seems I still have a copy of that page available: http://penduin.mine.nu/preservetheratio/ ]

More Shmoe

The Shmoe has his own website now. Not much there yet, and it'll never be pretty.
http://shmoe.mine.nu

...that is all.

Have fun with your internets

This is a dumb story. But I'm overworked, sleep-deprived, and need a break. Some coworkers and I have been writing a new web-based setup for M+ Guardian. (As in, you buy a Guardian appliance from Messaging Architects, plug it in, hit it with a browser the way you configure your router, and set up the system.) Its implementation is quite slick, and we've spent some really long nights on it. Once everything is set up, the appliance will start up its services and begin dutifully making your corporate email safe and unspammy.

But that last screen, nobody gave me any text for what should be said there. The current placeholder is something like "M+ Guardian is set up, you may now do XYZ". Not great. And in our quickie meeting today, nobody gave me anything better, except Thane who jokingly suggested "Have fun with your internets". After the meeting, I scribbled our new internal M+ slogan and an accompanying drawing on the whiteboard.


...And now, on the other side of the picture, the other side of the story. The dude in the scribble is the Shmoe, who apparently doesn't even deserve a "c" in his name. He first appeared in some high school notebooks, in French class. He was meant to be the guy on the hissy, stretched-out cassette tape telling us to listen and repeat... In any case, he's surfaced around the office lately in various situations. This time he's using his beer belly as a table, and looking up what appear to be either boobies or eyeballs on his super-modern computer.