I had been making some personal backups of my DVDs this evening when I decided to pop one in to make sure everything looked OK. In my office I have a little 26" LCD with an internal DVD player so I stuck one of the copies into the TV when a heard a very unfriendly grinding. It's widely documented that I'm not a hardware expert, but even my untrained ear told me that this was a bad noise to be coming from the player.

Sure enough, the player soon spit the disc right back out at me. I tried a few more times (yeah, like that was gonna work) to no avail when I decided I'd grab a screwdriver and take the thing apart to see if I could get lucky and fix the thing.

As I started to work on the 58 or so screws that held this amazing little player together I began to hear a familiar rattle. The kind of rattle that only the actions of a mischievous toddler can produce. Before I'd even removed the cover I already knew what to expect. Sure enough when I finally got the thing open my suspicions were confirmed:

Thankfully once the offending currency was removed and the device was reassembled it returned to it's previous working state.

In honor of the CFUnited Topic Survey I present the topics that just barely missed making the final list.

So this morning my wife and I are getting ready for work, the usual routine of running around getting the kids ready, making coffee and whatnot and she casually states to me "I think I'm done with Internet Explorer. It's so slow and it crashes all the time." I had to simply stop what I was doing and embrace her in a loving hug. OK, so I didn't really do that, but I have to say I'm extremely proud of her for finally making the decision to use Firefox. She'd be the first to admit she is not terribly computer literate, but even she has finally realized that IE is the 'devil's browser' and is ready to make the switch.

I just hit one of the sites that I support (which I rarely visit - must be very well built...) and was reminded of an easter egg that exists in the site that was put in before I 'inherited' the site. There is a hidden link in the site banner that plays a quick little .wav file. Some may find easter eggs unprofessional, but I think they're mostly all in good fun. So what is your favorite easter egg? Do you ever sneak them into your sites?

Here's another one that we found absolutely hilarious. We had another site that would serve random quotes in the footer. Mostly silly stuff, but our users seemed to find them amusing. So a while back we decided it would be quite funny to slip in the good old 'All Your Base Are Belong To Us' - every time we demo'd that site that quote would invariably slip in and us developers would have a little chuckle while everyone looked at us like we were crazy.

Ever wonder how to dereference a scalar variable of type class java.lang.String as a structure with members? This diagram finally reveals the secret!

The Secret Revealed!

I just stumbled onto a CF site that I had never seen before via Google and was poking around a bit to see what I could learn when I found this little bit of irony. An article about error handling with a big fat unhandled error right in the middle of the page. Check it out here. Please don't get me wrong, I'm not putting down the site, the authors or anyone involved in it - I just thought it was funny, that's all. It looks like the site hasn't been updated in quite a while.

I've seen all the "nerd tests" floating around lately, and, well to be honest I've never thought of myself as a "nerd" - now geek, that's a different story. So I found the "Geek Test" and sure enough, my score of 88 proves that I'm more "geek" than "nerd" (my nerd score was around 53 or so).