Nail the license key to the mast

From a tattered diary page found floating on the mucilaginous ooze of the Salton Sea, June 28 2006:

Day 3 of the Windows XP install. Aft #3 torpedo tube is flooded. Captain refusing to leave his quarters. Lt. Zip has not returned from installing the Com+ Deep Fryer and Full-Service Hapax Legomenon (Disabled) (Automatic) (Brazilian). I know that I shall never see my true love or my dear parents again. A watery grave awaits.

Best Garlic Press Ever Made

The Rösle Garlic Press (Amazon link)

It reliably crushes even two cloves at once. You don't have to keep cleaning it as you use it. And when you're done, you swing out the grate and put it under the tap and rinse it off, done. None of that "is all the garlic out yet?" stuff, and it doesn't have one of those plastic "cleaner" thingies that will promptly get lost. HIGHLY RECOMMEND.

ARR! Me coasters not of paper and not being table linen!

List of Disney trademark registrations for the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie, from Deadline Hollywood via Waxy:

( LICENSE ME )

The back of loaf

1. Silver Spoon Considered Harmful.
   
   
2. Massive Fandom Wank containing the phrase "fandom unity luncheon" somewhere in it. Jesus H. Christ.
   
   
3. Abstain from sex; win fries.
   
   
4. List of unusual deaths (Wikipedia).
   
   
5. I refuse to believe that smllr is a real service. Only John Waters can do Smell-O-Vision anyway.
   
   
6. Doom awaits kitchen gadget lovers: Sur La Table is having a big sale.
   
   
7. How does this violinist make weird subharmonic noises?

THE FUTURE LIES AHEAD

One of our internal webservers at the office blew up. It's an intricate and bizarre hack on a little-used platform, and we're terrified of it dying because our knowledge of the internals is bad. I was pretty sad about it, and especially so because I had to fix it.

A careful search of the internet found a mailing list thread in which many, many other people had the same problem, all starting after 2006-05-12.

The thread starts here: http://www.mail-archive.com/aolserver@listserv.aol.com/msg09812.html

What turned out to be the problem? All these systems failed at the same time, exactly one billion seconds before the 32-bit Unix epoch ends in 2038. The timeouts set for database threads caused the software to look ahead, gasp in horror and died.

Ladies and gentlemen I'm in a select club of the first victims of the Year 2038 Bug.

My job is weird.