Category Archives: Technology (Probably Apple)

January 24, 2012

The Smart Baby Scale: And to think, you used to have to bore your Facebook friends manually

By Jeff Vrabel

It's shocking how much time was not needed to locate this image

GateHouse — You know what Facebook could use is an increased level of unprovoked information about people’s kids, and before any of you jumpy gophers who leave a Facebook tab up “at work” to pounce on posts/comments like rabid animals get all “snarky” and “sarcastic” and “busy with quotation fingers” I know I put kid pictures on Facebook all the time too; I am not saying that I never do it or you should never do it, particularly if hypothetically your child was all sweet pushing his baby brother around in a stroller or that baby has a particularly lively reaction to your eerily accurate Swedish Chef impression. I am just saying that oh my God seriously if I see another child I don’t know sitting on a toilet I am definitely canceling the Internet service of the elderly neighbor/nonprofit I’m stealing wifi from, which is either “rutner house” or “Beaufort County Orphanage” or “linksys” or “linksys” or “linksys” or “linksys.”

(Incidentally this is where my 8-year-old would roll his eyes and go, “Don’t listen to him, Dad’s being sar-castic,” not that I would put that on Facebook or anything EVEN THOUGH IT’S UNBEARABLY CUTE AND YOU SHOULD ALL KNOW ABOUT IT.)

And yet here we are, thanks to the Consumer Electronics Show, an annual gathering of people to whom I would normally ascribe a dumb, nerdworthy nickname like “coding goobers” or “zittlywankers” or “Parrotheads” except I’m sure that any one of them is capable of building a nanorobot 14 molecules high that could kill me in my sleep using an endoplasmic reticulum. If you haven’t read up on this thing take a look online; seriously, it’s like a “Star Wars” convention for nerds.

Well, make that nerds and their parents: Because of CES we will soon have access to a device that will weigh your Precious Little Angel and auto-fire the results to Twitter and Facebook, saving you the trouble of weighing your child on some vintage hand-cranked lead-painted off-the-grid scale from Service Merchandise in 1983 and using a whole separate app to bore everyone to tears manually.

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5 comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Culture And / Or News, Dad Stories / Parenting, GateHouse, Humor Columns, Technology (Probably Apple)

November 17, 2011

Hooray! My iMac broke for good this time!

By Jeff Vrabel

GateHouse — Oh my God you guys the best thing just happened: my Mac finally broke! For good! It’s totally useless! THIS IS AMAZING!

Wow, this, I don’t need to tell you, is fantastic news if you are 1. a dippy Mac nerd and 2. a Vrabel, because the regular replacement of even sleek sexy Apple objects, whose very existence demands expensive upgrades at regular intervals, does not come easy to Vrabels.

Which is not to say that we eschew technology. My 80-year-old Uncle Jim, for instance, last year brought home a forehead-slappingly monstrous new iMac, one whose screen was easily large enough to humiliate most of the movie theaters in my hometown. It was terrifying, not just because my family wouldn’t have been more surprised if he came home and announced he had just purchased a previously undiscovered Jackson Pollock from an auction in Amsterdam, but whatever, it was way cooler than anything we had.

And what did he do with this glorious piece of sleek gorgeousness? He literally set it up on a desk that has been around since before I was, next to a computer called a Commodore Amiga that he literally purchased in 1989, on which we literally spent spent visits there playing hours of “Zac McCracken and the Alien Mindbenders” and which is literally STILL SITTING WHERE IT SAT IN 1989. I haven’t the foggiest notion if it functions or even turns on or has been totally gutted and is housing a family of vagabond gerbils, but it is there, this wonderful metaphor or progress, of the inexorable march of technological improvement, of my family’s still-lively inability to even remotely begin considering to throw things out if there is any chance it can serve some vague purpose down the road, or, failing that, if they can sell them to people for Bears-ticket money.

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14 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in GateHouse, Humor Columns, Technology (Probably Apple)

September 13, 2011

Go ahead. Leave the last item in the bagging area. Watch what happens to you.

By Jeff Vrabel

GateHouse — Welcome to Self-Checkout, automated for your convenience. Please slide your VIP card to continue.

(slides VIP card)

Welcome, VIP customer Jeff! Please scan your first item to begin.

(scans coffee)

Coffee, $7.99.

(scans cereal)

Cocoa Pebbles, $2.29.

Pebbles on sale! Score. (scans milk)

Please rescan last item.

(scans milk again)

Please rescan last item.

(scans milk again) (grumbles)

Please remove last item from bagging area.

Uh, I haven’t put the item in the

Please remove last item from bagging area, thief.

What?

You heard me. Rescan the milk, criminal.

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2 comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Culture And / Or News, GateHouse, Humor Columns, Technology (Probably Apple)

April 11, 2011

Stay awhile, STAY FOREVAR: Top 12 Games For The New Commodore 64

By Jeff Vrabel

At bottom right: AAUAUAUAUAUAUAUAUAUUAAUUAAUUAUUAAUUUAUAUAUAUAU

GateHouse — You kids, you can have your Wii and your DS and that Microsoft thing where you hop around your living room like a lunatic; my heart will always belong to the Commodore 64, the mauve, 95-pound cheese block that, along with “Raising Hell” and an enormous pair of brown plastic Harry Caray glasses, basically defined the mid-1980s for me and set me on a rewarding lifelong path of being able to type really fast (95 words per minute, Mavis Beacon WHUT).

The imbeciles in charge of the “budget negotiations” can have the important TV space this week; for a particular crowd of inveterate nerds, and by that I mean all the people I spent messaging things like “DO YOU THINK I CAN GET ‘STREET SPORTS BASEBALL’ ON MY PHONE?” the news of the week was that the C64 is being re-released for the modern age. The new Commodore will feature modern wonders like a fancypants new processor and Blu-ray player, but keeping the exterior, in the words of the company’s Web site, “as close to the original in design as humanly possible.”

In preparation for what will likely be several weeks of uncontrollable joyful sobbing, here are My Unbearably Scientific Top 12 Games For The Commodore 64, which I know because I played them instead of doing things like learning sports or marketable career skills. If you did not have a C64, you have no idea how much you want to stop reading right now. If you did, welcome, Another Visitor.

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Impossible Mission: To usher in the modern era of video games, Epyx thought it’d be fun to star with an INCOMPREHENSIBLY DIFFICULT PUZZLE that no human could remotely hope to accomplish, and then added passwords, hidden doors, some NORAD-level computer code and sheet music to it. “Impossible” was also one of the first games to use digitized speech, which sounded like Darth Vader speaking through an inverted traffic cone from 30 yards away, but still made people literally drool in glassy-eyed amazement.

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10 comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in GateHouse, Humor Columns, Technology (Probably Apple)

February 14, 2011

iMreallysorry: The confession app for the penitent Catholic who’s also rocking some Angry Birds

By Jeff Vrabel

GateHouse — When you are a barely functional idiot who attempts to “write humor” for a living, and by “living” I mean “occasional side deposits of nickels and/or circus peanuts that augment your salary from maintaining the slurry tubes at the poultry processing facility,” it can be sometimes impossible to come up with a decent topic. Revolution in Egypt, for instance, is a heartening story of the power of the united human condition, but it’s not terrifically funny, except for those protestors who kept stepping on rakes that would fwap up and hit them in the noses. There are times when it can be difficult to think of a topic, although generally during these times I just give my son eight or nine cups of coffee and follow him around with a voice recorder. And then there are times that the Catholic Church approves an iPhone app designed to assist with confession. Bless me Father for I have sinned, although you apparently don’t mind that much, because you TOTALLY HAVE MY BACK THIS WEEK.

To recap: An iPhone app that handles confession — although, if we’re being literally interpretive about it, which we probably should, given the circumstances, the app “prepares” you for confession, in the same way that online poker “prepares” you for Vegas. So let’s just get some things right out of the way:

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  1. “Yes, Father, I can hear you just fine, please stop asking me that.”
  2. I’m on AT&T, so I probably have a better chance of getting a decent signal in hell than on my back porch.
  3. Whoever had “Touch-screen confession before women can become priests” in the pool is a big winner this week!

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Because if you’ve ever felt confused that a life’s accumulation of sins, impure thoughts, impure memories, thoughts about impure memories and so forth could be recalibrated into math, wait until you see it done by the same device with which you tweet.

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“Weird Al” Yankovic – Confessions Part III

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4 comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in "Weird Al" Yankovic, Culture And / Or News, GateHouse, Humor Columns, Technology (Probably Apple)

December 7, 2010

Gobo Fraggle ends child abuse, a nation rejoices

By Jeff Vrabel

Hey, kids! Come over here and let Gobo tell you about the Whig Contract With America

GateHouse — Let me preface this by saying that despite what you might suspect in about four minutes, I oppose child abuse. Very much so, actually.

But because I’m also against this weird new Facebook-born style of quasi-activism-that’s-actually-just-neediness-and-nostalgia, I’m also declaring my opposition to witty image-oriented viral movements as well. You know, not as much, but still.

Still, having now been on Facebook through four solid years and one talky movie, I’m convinced it’s most effective at the following:

  1. Compelling people to smilingly hand over a profusion of personal data, ensuring that everyone from space satellites to John Boehner to the 12 clones of Mark Zuckerberg that have been hatched to date (LOOK IT UP) can accumulate Assange-loads of information about your shopping, income and drinking habits, mostly drinking. True fact, just this afternoon Facebook encouraged me to install a New Profile feature, one designed to paint a more complete picture of who I am, rank my friends like NCAA tournament seeds and tell you my work and travel habits, so you know exactly when to steal my TV.
  2. Delivering the news that you’re hoping, once again, for a win by the NFL franchise nearest your house.
  3. Identifying your neediest friends, who can be spotted by frequency of posts or liveliness of tax-oriented rants.
  4. ‪Making blatant, desperate calls for help through status updates, so that friends may be obliged to comment supportively. For this reason, the last time a friend did this, my comment read, “That sucks, I bet it’s infected, and you probably deserved it.”‬ People really like my friendship.

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10 comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Culture And / Or News, GateHouse, Humor Columns, Technology (Probably Apple)

September 7, 2010

HANG ON, LITTLE 160GB IPOD CLASSIC, I STILL LOVE YOU

By Jeff Vrabel

I suppose the Nelly Furtado cover on this promo art is a pretty good indicator of how popular this thing is, huh

GateHouse — Do you know those annoying, pretentious, patronizing Mac people, the indigestible elitists who swear by their little ivory-colored best friends, the ones who wear small T-shirts with clever slogans on them to work, the ones who schedule days off of work to watch Steve Jobs’ keynote presentations and the ones who shake their heads in sympathetic bemusement at their friends with “drivers” and “security patches” and “several hundred dollars of Norton-based expenses”? Yeah, that’s me. Please take your shoes off and leave your Vista laptops in the car — we don’t serve their kind here.
I am a Mac nerdperson because, much like my indestructible Honda and this previously blue Cubs hat from like 2001, they’ve worked, really well, for a long time. I realize this may not be the common experience, and I can actually hear my reflexive Mac-hater friends clickity clackity-ing up witty rejoinders, but to them, as always, I say: You are probably using them wrong. Try checking the instructions.

For example, I have a nearly-destroyed five-year-old iPod that has basically been through the MP3 version of the Bataan Death March; it has been dropped and kicked and nearly put through the washing machine and almost fumbled into the sea, but the damned thing just will not expire, like that liquid metal Terminator, or John McCain. The front screen is now in a state of such unreadable scratchiness and pixel blowout that you can literally only read titles if you hold the device at a 40-47-degree angle to your nose, and do you know what? IT STILL WORKS FINE. I’m scared of it, to be honest.

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10 comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in GateHouse, Humor Columns, Technology (Probably Apple)

May 10, 2010

Computers are ruining everything, specifically the global economy and the Houston Astros

By Jeff Vrabel

Pictured: The device responsible for last week's stock market collapse (it's powered by Windows 7, obvs)

GateHouse — If you are a computer, chances are good that everyone kind of hates your guts right now.

First, they hate you for attempting to flatten the global economy by putting your 1 and 0 keys so inexplicably far away from each other, an indefensible design oversight which, when coupled with a human error in which someone e-mailed the word “infer” when he really meant “imply,” last week irrevocably demolished the whole of the American economic system and caused literal billions of dollars to spontaneously burst into flame and fly through space to China, where they were going anyway. (Along the same lines, Greek people hate you for reminding them repeatedly that goods and services must be paid for with actual currency.)

Second, people on Facebook are confounded and irritated by your sudden, unturnoffable refusal to let them talk about their children’s illnesses in peace until they announce to the global human experience their approval of music by Train. (Note: Making this joke gives Facebook implicit consent to sell my immunization records to Netflix; don’t be alarmed about the tetanus thing, I feel fine, I swear.)

But third, and most importantly, computers have been jerking around with the Houston Astros — and that, robot army, is where us carbon-based rebels draw the line at your manufactured tyranny.

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Download: dkioZo

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1 comment   |  tags: , , , | posted in GateHouse, Humor Columns, Technology (Probably Apple)

March 8, 2010

Dear Apple, FINE, I GIVE UP: Send me an iPad / interocitor / frog exaggerator immediately

By Jeff Vrabel

Pictured: The Apple iPad, due April 3 (drives sold separately)

GateHouse — Well, as usual, my attempt to avoid coveting a sleek and impractical object produced by the nerd-leprechauns at Apple has lasted until the exact moment they showed a commercial for it on the TV. Thanks, Oscars, not only did you throw my spring budget into chaos with your deliciously tempting ad for an electronic device I couldn’t possibly need but would give me something do with my other hand while I’m futzing with the iPod during the commute, but also you gave Best Costume Design to “The Young Victoria?” Um, did I miss the part where you all became gravy-brained goat-people? Because the costume designs in “The Young Victoria” are a HUMILIATING JOKE WHEN COMPARED TO THE SHATTERING GRANDIOSITY OF THE COSTUME DESIGN OF “COCO BEFORE CHANEL.” This is why real America hates the Hollywood elite; go back to British Columbia and take your Neil Patrick Harris with you, appeasers.

Anyway, I was talking about Apple (for the purposes of finishing this piece I’m turning the Oscar broadcast off before they announce Best Documentary Short because if it isn’t “Music By Prudence” I am going to smash all the windows at the mall). We have all Apple products here at the house, for two very simple reasons:

  1. We deeply enjoy feelings of smug superiority.
  2. They work. Knock on wood, but in four years we haven’t had one notable thing go wrong with either, which, given the amount of illegal music and international pornography I download, is a miracle on par with that time I found the Virgin Mary’s profile in my yogurt swirls. And I really mean this, I’m not just saying it so Apple sees me on their Google Alerts and decides hey we should send this guy some free gear or something just for being so nice and complimentary to us and besides Apple Apple Apple Apple.

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Download: d4ibZl

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4 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in GateHouse, Humor Columns, Technology (Probably Apple)

November 30, 2009

Five lightsabers, one walrus, one WordPress and several demolished config. files: A Parable

By Jeff Vrabel

GateHouse — A short parable for this holiday season, starring .htaccess files, five lightsabers, inessential ambition and egregious, carrying-a-walrus-with-two-hands-over-your-head stupidity:

I am, as anyone who has spent more than four minutes with me and my collection of stories involving personal interactions with “Weird Al” Yankovic (there are six) will attest, a nerd. Not a geek, mind you, nor a dingus, and not really a twerp, although there was a good period of pronounced twerpery between the years of 1987-1989 that cheerfully coincided with the purchase of a new camera by both my Dad and the school yearbook staff. Good times.

The point is, nerd. To wit, I spent Thanksgiving this year at the home of lovely and hospitable friends who have one baby and five lightsabers. Also to wit, I just said to wit, which actually makes me want to beat myself up. Anyway, after dinner the husband component of this couple produced the replica lightsabers — I’m going to stop and do that again with overbearing punctuation: five. replica.lightsabers — and the small percentage of guests who were able to regard this development without releasing a sigh of utter despondency adjourned directly outside and — well, there’s no other way to say this — had a Jedi fight. I would say we did this for the benefit of my five-year-old son, but I’d be lying if I suggested that I found the entire endeavor to be anything south of way awesome.

Anyway, this minor though not entirely un-violent episode coincided with a time in which I decided, hey, you know what, this Internet thing seems to be gaining traction amongst the youngsters and the media, in that order, so let’s see if I can’t get my blog looking a little spiffier and moved to a new host that can make that happen.

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Download: af0mky

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1 comment   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in GateHouse, Humor Columns, Technology (Probably Apple)

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