The Vent and Rant Thread

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by wodin

OH GOOD! Does that mean we get to talk about religion?

Dearly beloved, let me tell you about my faith: The Church of the Sacred Cat.

The religion is simple, with two tenets.

1) The Lord Mota resides on Mars in the body of a sacred green cat.

2) If you believe that, you'll believe anything.

Instead of dogma, we have catma.

Instead of wine and communion wafers, our sacrements are beer and potato chips.

The church is administrated by a lowerarchy, with bishops and discardinals, and there is a privy council which meets in a privy to advise the spiritual leader of the faith.

Heresy trials are a popular activity. At one, one member was charged with heresy for having achieved cognitive dissonance, and another was charged with heresy for failing to do so.

I think there's a market for a religion that believes in fun as part of the religion.

(The Church was invented by an old friend in science fiction fandom, which has a tradition of hoax religions, like Herbangelism and Roscoe. I actually found a real world use for it. I once worked with a Jehovah's Witness who was more interested in preaching his faith than doing the job. After determining he wasn't about to listen to my arguments, I gave him the Church of the Sacred cat as my religion with a straight face. Possessing no sense of humor about such things, he took me seriously, decided I was an utter loon, and shut up about religion. Win-win! )
______
Dennis

[pshrynk]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Dearly beloved, let me tell you about my faith: The Church of the Sacred Cat.

The religion is simple, with two tenets.

1) The Lord Mota resides on Mars in the body of a sacred green cat.

2) If you believe that, you'll believe anything.

Instead of dogma, we have catma.

Instead of wine and communion wafers, our sacrements are beer and potato chips.

The church is administrated by a lowerarchy, with bishops and discardinals, and there is a privy council which meets in a privy to advise the spiritual leader of the faith.

Heresy trials are a popular activity. At one, one member was charged with heresy for having achieved cognitive dissonance, and another was charged with heresy for failing to do so.

I think there's a market for a religion that believes in fun as part of the religion.

(The Church was invented by an old friend in science fiction fandom, which has a tradition of hoax religions, like Herbangelism and Roscoe. I actually found a real world use for it. I once worked with a Jehovah's Witness who was more interested in preaching his faith than doing the job. After determining he wasn't about to listen to my arguments, I gave him the Curch of the Sacred cat as my religion with a straight face. Possessing no sense of humor about such things, he took me seriously, decided I was an utter loon, and shut up about religion. Win-win! )
______
Dennis

At the same meeting, I hope.

[vivaldirules]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Dearly beloved, let me tell you about my faith: The Church of the Sacred Cat.

The religion is simple, with two tenets.

1) The Lord Mota resides on Mars in the body of a sacred green cat.

Pfffttt! What a ridiculous religion! Only a bunny in a space suit would believe such nonsense. It's a blue cat. Haven't you read Green Man Blue Cat?!

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by pshrynk

At the same meeting, I hope.

That should have been "cognitive estrangement" above.

But, yes, in fact. The trials took place at an SF con. The church founder was trying to tie a tin can to the tail of a chap named Darko Suvin, who uses the term in a piece of criticism. Suvin got it from the Russian Formalists. See http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews...6interview.htm for more details.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by vivaldirules

Pfffttt! What a ridiculous religion! Only a bunny in a space suit would believe such nonsense. It's a blue cat. Haven't you read Green Man Blue Cat?!

I never said I believed it...
______
Dennis

[LazyScot]

Originally Posted by ShortNCuddlyAm

We can do counter clockwise roundabouts too (admittedly at the same time as clockwise ones): The Hemel Hempstead magic roundabout (there's one in Swindon, too) - the traffic goes round the mini roundabouts clockwise, and around the main roundabout either way...

Ah.. The mythical octopus roundabout. I maintain we should build those on every road leading into or out of every major airport or port....

Originally Posted by pshrynk

I got a headache just trying to understand the map.

And that is one of the reasons why...

Originally Posted by pdurrant

It's not really a large roundabout in the middle of the map.

The map actually shows six small roundabouts connected in a circle by some very short roads.

You can tell it's not a real roundabout in the middle by the fact that traffic moving around the centre island does not have the right of way. On a real roundabout, the traffic moving around the centre of the roundabout has right of way over other traffic.

Shhhhh. You'll give away state secrets about how the UK defends itself and on the use of strategic short range deleted-intelligence roundabouts.

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

some genius in the roads planning department decided that putting up signs for the round-abouts (which have become all the rage in WA State... go figure) is important. and these signs direct you to a website for round-about driving information!

<Mental image of road sign indicating which turning leads to "website information", that I guess is a new town.>

Originally Posted by pshrynk

No, no! Get it right: Some are morons.

Oh, so you have two political parties, the Idiots and the Morons?

Originally Posted by Slite

Actually, I'm pretty certain there is a doffus or two among them as well

Okay, so you have a minority third party, the Doffuses (doffi?) as well as the Idiots and Morons...

Originally Posted by pshrynk

Well, to be perfectly honest, there are a few cretins and dopes scattered about.

But what you really have to watch for is the homicidally depressed paranoid obsessives with a Dog complex.

Hang on. You have another two parties, the Cretins and Dopes as well. Just how many political parties do you have over there. How do you every manage to achieve anything with so many differing viewpoints....?

Originally Posted by kennyc

And at least one Twinky!

Oh good grief. Now you have a sixth party as well....

Originally Posted by Slite

I'm NOT homicidal!

How about homivore?

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Dearly beloved, let me tell you about my faith: The Church of the Sacred Cat.

The religion is simple, with two tenets.

1) The Lord Mota resides on Mars in the body of a sacred green cat.

2) If you believe that, you'll believe anything.

Instead of dogma, we have catma.

Are they related to our DGma?

Instead of wine and communion wafers, our sacrements are beer and potato chips.

Wot? Not Zany Carters and doughnuts or bacon? Can we form a breakaway sect that does?

[desertgrandma]

[QUOTE=LazyScot;701213

Are they related to our DGma?

[/QUOTE]

HEY!

[ShortNCuddlyAm]

Originally Posted by LazyScot

Wot? Not Zany Carters and doughnuts or bacon? Can we form a breakaway sect that does?

No chocolate???? Sacrilege! I'm forming my own breakaway sect from your breakaway sect (ZCs and doughnuts will be adhered to though)

[Laz116]

50 centimeters of snow... the car cannot go anywhere. shoveling snow is hard.

On the positive note: the car cannot go anywhere, so all of a sudden my wife has a lot of time off.

[montsnmags]

Gods, I hate blood-and-bone! The idea of making your suburban garden look pretty by polluting it with an odour so strongly foul no-one wants to come within eye-spying distance of it (and that causes you yourself to close your own windows against the stench) is beyond me. It's the neighbours this time, but if only I could convince The Loved One of the same.

Ugh.

[nomesque]

Originally Posted by montsnmags

Gods, I hate blood-and-bone! The idea of making your suburban garden look pretty by polluting it with an odour so strongly foul no-one wants to come within eye-spying distance of it (and that causes you yourself to close your own windows against the stench) is beyond me. It's the neighbours this time, but if only I could convince The Loved One of the same.

Ugh.

Yup, thoroughly agree with you there. Manure is better-smelling, dammit!

[DMcCunney]

Aarrgghhh!

I hate computer problems. I especially hate computer problems when I don't know what's going on.

I'm working on the computer, and suddenly realize I've lost Internet connectivity. Okay, shit happens.

Reset the wireless router. Still offline.

Reset the cable modem. Okay, back online.

Not okay. I can get to everything except my router. Trying to reach it times out.

SO's laptop can't even see our network via wifi. Connect it through a cat5 cable to the router and she can get out if I'm not connected, but only one of us can get out at a time.

Call and old friend who is a telecom and network tech, and describe the problems. He tells me it sounds like my router is failing, as he's seen that symptom at customer sites. That was my suspicion, too.

As it happens, I have a spare router. Take the old one out of the loop, plug in the spare, connect everything up. I can get out again, but I can't connect to the spare router, either.

It's as though the router is simply providing a physical circuit to the cable modem, but not functioning as a router.

I refuse to believe both routers failed. The spare worked fine when last connected, and hasn't been used in months.

I can think of nothing my ISP could have done that could cause these symptoms. They should not even be aware their modem is connected to a router.

I can't think of any changes made locally that should cause this.

I suspect this will be a "pound my head on the desk when I figure out what's going on" incident, but that will be good, because it will likely mean I don't have unfortunate hardware failures, but meanwhile, I am very confused.

______
Dennis

[wodin]

Originally Posted by Laz116

50 centimeters of snow... the car cannot go anywhere. shoveling snow is hard.

On the positive note: the car cannot go anywhere, so all of a sudden my wife has a lot of time off.

Yes, and isn't it ironic? Just during the UN conference on global warming!

[Dylrob]

I need to get out of this town. I need to get out of this town. I NEED TO GET OUT OF THIS %$&*^@ TOWN!

[devilsadvocate]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Aarrgghhh!

I hate computer problems. I especially hate computer problems when I don't know what's going on.

I'm working on the computer, and suddenly realize I've lost Internet connectivity. Okay, shit happens.

Reset the wireless router. Still offline.

Reset the cable modem. Okay, back online.

Not okay. I can get to everything except my router. Trying to reach it times out.

SO's laptop can't even see our network via wifi. Connect it through a cat5 cable to the router and she can get out if I'm not connected, but only one of us can get out at a time.

Call and old friend who is a telecom and network tech, and describe the problems. He tells me it sounds like my router is failing, as he's seen that symptom at customer sites. That was my suspicion, too.

As it happens, I have a spare router. Take the old one out of the loop, plug in the spare, connect everything up. I can get out again, but I can't connect to the spare router, either.

It's as though the router is simply providing a physical circuit to the cable modem, but not functioning as a router.

I refuse to believe both routers failed. The spare worked fine when last connected, and hasn't been used in months.

I can think of nothing my ISP could have done that could cause these symptoms. They should not even be aware their modem is connected to a router.

I can't think of any changes made locally that should cause this.

I suspect this will be a "pound my head on the desk when I figure out what's going on" incident, but that will be good, because it will likely mean I don't have unfortunate hardware failures, but meanwhile, I am very confused.

______
Dennis

Do you (normally) let the routers' DHCP function assign IP addresses to your individual machines, or do you assign the IPs statically? What you are describing would happen if the DHCP server is off on either of the routers and it was just being used as a hub (they may default to this if reset depending on make and model)...When you said you "reset" the router, do you mean power-cycling it (unplugging the power and waiting a few seconds), or pushing the little pinhole-button on the back that resets the router to factory defaults?

Modem = DHCP (you get your one external IP address from your provider) pretty much all the time; if the router is just acting as a hub, then it's the same as if you had no router at all, and you can't have more than one machine use one IP address.

I also refuse to believe both routers simultaneously expired, though I've seen stranger things happen (I'll tell you sometime about how my cheapo Belkin router earned the nickname "Lazarus"). I would try assigning an IP statically to one machine, 192.168.x.y, where 'x' is usually a 0, 1, or 2; then try getting into the router again. If that works you can make the required changes. If not, try a hard reset (the pinhole-button deal) but be careful: each make has a slightly different way of doing that. The hard reset will bring everything back to default factory settings.

I hope this didn't appear "dumbed-down" but I'm tired ATM; hope I was of some help. And of course by all means ask more questions if you feel the need-