Click to enlarge. Found on Twitter, no idea whom to credit – but ten kinds of awesome. If anyone can help me track the author down, please let me know.
I am transcribing this segment from The Hitchhiker’s Guide, Secondary Phase, for posterity.
The Total Perspective Votex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses. To explain, since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation – every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition, and their economic and social histories – from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
Trin Tragula – for that was his name – was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times a day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex, just to show her.
And into one end, he plugged the whole of reality (as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake), and into the other, he plugged his wife, so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain, but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved once and for all that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
judge me by my size, do you? No! And well you should not! For my ally is SATA3, and a powerful ally it is! (Use the code CRUCIAL4455, Luke…)The SSD market is providing a rare opportunity for anyone not intent on building at the bleeding edge. The newest generation of SSDs like Crucial’s RealSSD C400, OCZ Vertex 3, and Intel’s SSD 320 are out and have been reviewed, but offer incremental performance upgrades at best (mainly from refinements of the controllers’ firmware, and also some further power consumption efficiency from moving to a 25 nm die). This means that the prior generation’s performance leaders are a real bargain at reduced prices.
For example, if you use the code CRUCIAL4455 at NewEgg (valid until tomorrow) you can get a C300 for $200, and free 2-day shipping. That’s $40 cheaper than I paid for it just a few weeks ago (and you can see my benchmarks here on PREFECT). I expect that the Vertex 2 and Intel’s SSD 510, also previous generation, will see some major rebates or discounts soon, but the C300 is really the best SSD of the 34nm generation. .
The bottom line is that the upgrade to an SSD packs better punch than upgrading RAM and is a far cheaper alternative to upgrading a mobo and CPU (Sandy Bridge is still not compelling an upgrade IMHO, which I can elucidate on in thread if anyone cares). The advantage of the form factor is that its compatible with any SATA laptop or any desktop (unfortunately, my old T42 is just outside that generation, still using ULTRA-ATA. And it has a broken LCD backlight, but I digress…). These things even come with simple utilities to clone your current drive, OS, apps, etc without a hitch to the SSD. This is the best bang for your buck. I think that the $200 price point for 128 GB is a price floor, however – it won’t go lower, because all the inventory of the old generation drives like the C300 will sell out at that price. Once the old generation drives (which as I mentioned, offer largely comparable performance) sell out, then the only SSD options will be the new generation which are about $100 more expensive. After that, your best window to buy an SSD again will be 6 months to a year from now, when the current “next” generation is again replaced by a new crop and the cycle repeats.
Michael Scott is resigning from Dunder Mifflin, who will replace him? Count me on Team Donna!
Ray Romano, James Spader, and Catherine Tate will join Will Arnett and Ricky Gervais as guest stars on Steve Carell’s last episode of The Office. They’ll appear as candidates to be office manager. So will one of them be Carell’s replacement? You can probably rule out Romano, who is committed to Men of a Certain Age. Arnett also just got an NBC pilot of his own, while Gervais is unlikely to return to the show he created in Britain. TVLine says Spader and Tate are the only two with “ a realistic chance†of taking over.
Catherine Tate played Donna on the new Dr Who and she was easily the best Companion the Doctor ever had. In fact I’ll make the assertion now that she is the best Companion of all 11 Doctors to date, despite my having not actually seen the older series. She was, to borrow a Britishism, brilliant. Tate is amazing and she could really bring an acerbic take to the manager role.
If they pick James Spader over her, I’m not sure there’s any point to even watching the post-Michael era.
The appearance by Gervais should be fun though. I’m hoping he will be in character from UK Office. Maybe he immigrated?
UPDATE: Will Ferrell will play a temp manager while they find Michael’s replacement. I’m not sure if he can pull off ironic humor though. He’s more of a unsubtle freight train.
I renewed my service with Charter last fall, drawn in by the promise of $400 rebate if I renewed the “triple play” service of voice, data, and cable TV. Its been months without my rebate arriving so I sent in a query to the helpful (until now) email contact, having learned the utter futility of having phone conversations with Charter’s customer service.
Here is my email to Charter customer service:
Hello,
I am writing to inquire about the status of my $400 rebate for renewing my Charter service last year. I had signed up for a triple-play package with voice, internet, and television with a two-year contract, and was supposed to have received $400 credit. Kindly advise on the status of my rebate. Thank you.
name on account – XXXX
service address – XXXX
service phone – XXX
Regards
Aziz Poonawalla
Here is the infuriating reply:
Aziz
Thank you for contacting us with your question, we’ll be happy to look into the status of your gift card. For future reference, and for a faster reply please send your inquiry to Umatter2Charter@chartercom.com.
After reviewing the order history on the account we don’t see a qualifying service order placed within the timeframe of the current gift card promotion period.
Unfortunately you do not qualify for the offer and will not receive a gift card.
If you have further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.
Thank you,
Steve Creameans | Social Media Communications Specialist
941 Charter Commons Drive, Town & Country, MO 63017
I am certain there must be some loophole I did not anticipate and which the person I spoke to when ordering mys ervice did not bother to alert me to. This is frustrating beyond measure. Unless Steve misunderstood my question and thought I *just* renewed? But if he looked up my account he will clearly see that I renewed last year. So the response makes no sense.
At this point I am basically resolved to switch to Verizon FIOS as soon as it is available. Unless Charter makes good on this, this is really the last straw, no matter how attentive their social media folk are to blog posts or the twitter feed. Will update the post as I get further responses.
Following a successful one-off special that made its debut on BBC Four last year, the Beeb has confirmed that Dirk Gently, the world’s only holistic detective, will be returning for more adventures next year.
Stephen Mangan starred as the titular detective who may or may not be an utter charlatan, and while the adaptation didn’t please all fans of Douglas Adams’ original novel, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, the special was widely seen as a decent jumping off point for further stories in the future.
Raking in a more than respectable 1.1 million viewers when it screened last December, the show’s success has led the BBC to commission three 60-minute episodes, which will be again written by Howard Overman.
There was a Dirk Gently one-off on BBC 4 last year???? TORRENT TIME
If it’s half as good as Sherlock it will be brilliant. If it’s twice as good as the Hitchhiker’s Guide movie, it will be wretched.
Courtesy of Wikipedia, some history about the fall of Granada:
On January 2, 1492, the last Muslim sultan in Iberia, Emir Muhammad XII, known as Boabdil to the Spanish, surrendered complete control of Emirate of Granada, to Ferdinand II and Isabella I, Los Reyes Católicos (‘The Catholic Monarchs’), after the last battle of the Granada War.
(emphasis mine)
I’ve completed a detailed textual analysis of all references to Tom Bombadil in the Fellowship of the Ring and consulted supplementary texts such as The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (reprinted in The Tolkien Reader) and I’ve concluded that Bombadil is indeed Boabdil. The implications of this upon the subtext of the entire trilogy (and especially the reinterpretation of the prequel, the Hobbit) cannot be overstated.
It’s no accident that later that same year, Columbus – aka Celebrimbor – sailed into the West.
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