PRILLAMAN.NET EASTER EGG
Last Updated on the day it was uploaded...
Back in college, I had a page hidden on my site, with a link on my front page that was a "pi" symbol in the lower right corner (the lower-case Greek letter, not 3.14). It was a joke shared by several of my friends because of some of the absurdities we found in the Sandra Bullock movie The Net -- a EE roommate who worked part-time as a sysadmin at a research center by campus was rather irritated by the IP addresses using numbers well above 255, and we all found the "pi" in the corner of a web site a silly sort of interface for breaking in to all sorts of networks. The content of the page is sadly gone now (I think all that remains of that site are the pictures of dad's plaque from the U.S.S. Whirlwind, actually), but while cleaning up my site recently I came across several rather random odds and ends that reminded me of that old "hidden" page, including the somehwat odd computer rendering of Gonk the power droid that you see to the below (click on it for the 9MB, four-minute trailer for the Star Wars: Episode II DVD that was released in November 2002). This page is the result. I don't know how many of you will actually find it, but considering that my brief story about my uncle's last day at the flying field gets a handful of hits each month I suspect somebody will...
So what do you get for finding this page? Well, I can offer you a few interesting pictures...
Got a Panasonic DVD-A310 or DVD-RA60 DVD player and need the manual? The A310 manual PDF file disappeared from Panasonic's main customer support site a couple of years ago, and the RA60 manual was never there. Interestingly, depending on the route you choose, both still appear here. They are also available below:
During my summers in college, I interned for the consulting engineering firm where I now work. Shortly before I went back to Starkville for my ninth and last semester, one of our electrical engineers left to work at company in town. Four years later, he ended up coming back to work for us. He's a pretty good guy to work with and we were glad to get him back, but as sysadmin I needed to find him a computer to use. I got him set up with a machine that I had been using until around that time, a Pentium II 400MHZ Dell witih a 19" monitor (keep in mind this was late 2000, so it was not too bad a system). But rather than let him know that right off the bat, I scrounged up an old 15" monitor (soon joined by a dead monochrome CRT that one of our guys came across at a jobsite) and rattled through my spare parts bins to build a fully functional computer -- except for the fact that it didn't actually have a case. It was a Pentium 166MHz, with the motherboard resting on a foam mat on his desk. A box kept the mobo safe, and a cut out on one side allowed access to the cards. I even had a few ventilation slots cut -- we're talking "ready to overclock" sort of ventilation here. The power supply and dual floppies (a 3.5" and 5.25", of course) were resting on the desk, with the power switch pinned to his peg board. It was on the network and had a basic Windows install in place, complete with a scrolling marquee screen saver begging for a case to live in. He actually started moving into his cube, ready to use it for a while, before I finally pulled another box away from the Dell hiding on the floor. Of course, we had to get a picture of the cardboard computer...
You know that weird image you see in the background of some of my pages? Or the one that used to be there? Here's where it comes from.
Need some "smileys" for your web page? There's a collection at nightdog35 that I have mirrored here. Don't know why I've got it mirrored, just the packrat in me I guess...
Becca and I have been watching these people near our house work on their yard for almost two years now. It's been a neverending process, and most of the time they leave it in these odd incomplete states for months at a time. Then last summer they actually completed the area inside their circle drive, and the result left us somewhat stunned. It's a somewhat fuzzy picture (the deer is hard to see), but you get the idea. We're not sure why the ungulate has the place of honor and Mary is banished to the corner, but then we're not sure about a lot of things in this case...
