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What To Do With 78 USB Drives Next Christmas?
ArfBrookwood writes "Every year, I write a Christmas Letter and send it to about 50 people, and every year, it's different. One year it was just the word blah blah blah over and over with keywords, one year I made papercraft wallets with full color cards and money in them, another year I created a Christmas Letter writing contest that instructed the recipients to create our Christmas Letter for us and we awarded prizes to winners, last year, I took a fake retro photo of my family, Inkscaped/GIMPed in a chemistry set and some wall art, printed it onto CD covers, and burned retro Christmas songs onto digital vinyl and sent everyone in the family what looked like a miniature Christmas album. Last week, I came into the possession of 78 2GB USB drives. I have already taken the time to wipe them clean and reflash the memory so they are blank slates." Now, Arf's looking for suggestions for how to best use all these drives; read on for more.
"My first inclination was to remove the USB drives from their careful packaging and plastic enclosures, dump them into a slurry of glue and rock dust, sandpaper the USB port to make it look ancient, and then make some videos or include some oddly formatted numbered/whatever text files to make them look like they cam from some dystopian wasteland fallout-3 type future and then package them in envelopes that looked like they were from some central futuristic government post office. The idea would be that in the future, incidents that happened this year would have had a profound affect on the future. I never tell anyone what the Christmas Letter will look like, and I have only one rule — I have to outdo whatever I did the last year."
"My first inclination was to remove the USB drives from their careful packaging and plastic enclosures, dump them into a slurry of glue and rock dust, sandpaper the USB port to make it look ancient, and then make some videos or include some oddly formatted numbered/whatever text files to make them look like they cam from some dystopian wasteland fallout-3 type future and then package them in envelopes that looked like they were from some central futuristic government post office. The idea would be that in the future, incidents that happened this year would have had a profound affect on the future. I never tell anyone what the Christmas Letter will look like, and I have only one rule — I have to outdo whatever I did the last year."
Well, whatever you do, it's going to get out now, I'm sure at least one of these people read /.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
Thing Drive Tricks
Give-away Drives
...then read it and realize that it's still June (well almost).
Photoshop, like Google, is well on its way to becoming a common verb. One should be able to photoshop with any competent raster image editing program.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
That would be kind of hard since 78*2=156!=158, but if you figure out a way to do it, let me know.
He sounds like the kind of person the rest of his family hates to be around. What a clown! "Hey, I wonder the retard will come up with this Christmas."
--
Global warming is really caused by gay sex.
Yeah, what grandma really wants for Xmas is an pre-loaded Linux thumb drive. I'm a dork and I don't even want that. It's Christmas. Give a gift that means something, not your ideology about FOSS.
That's an awesome suggestion.
Add to that the fact that the guy made me think about Xmas in May.
How we know is more important than what we know.
You "the birds and the bees" fail.
RAID5! (x-1)*size, where x is number of devices. :P
Now this sounds like a winner. If I got a Christmas card saying a 5th grader is using a flash drive donated in my name, I'd be damned proud.
-Troll, Flamebait, and Offtopic are NOT equivalent to disagreement.
Where are my mod points when I need them? This is probably the only actually "insightful" reply on this post. You have 78 of something useful that you don't need, and you're asking what you should do with them for Christmas? (And most of the other replies suggest, in one way or another, that you send them to 78 people who don't need them and won't appreciate them.)
You might have no friends left, but damn. Funny.
No friends = easier to top next year, less letters to send out
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
That's why I've been saying for years that Slashdot needs a -1, Internet Spiders Track Down and Devour Poster Alive mod.
This is a winner. Last Christmas, I put "spend $25 doing something nice for a complete stranger" on my Christmas list. Best Christmas gift I ever got. A couple stories of people who had something done for them for no reason at all. The stories were priceless, and made the turkey taste all the more better. If the poster doesn't send you his contact info, prove your geekness by tracking him down yourself.
Don't link your blog on Slashdot, then make it invitation only to read. Stupidest thing I ever saw.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
You have no right to waste the time of your students by getting them to produce this guy's latest Christmas Card Project.
Let's see. Fifth graders. Recieving an educational tool at no cost, and learning the value of writing "thank you" notes.. something that is all too often lost on us. It's a school. They're learning something valuable. I don't see the waste here.
-Troll, Flamebait, and Offtopic are NOT equivalent to disagreement.
Install a good PortableApp AntiVirus and Anti-Malware program, along with a nice HTML or Flash message with some links to some other good driver update, etc scanner programs...Do yourself and your Christmas Card list a favor - help them help themselves!
Nothing to see here but us trolls...move along...
Make sure you point out that they're legally available for distribution.
The 'sharing is stealing' propaganda is widespread enough that some of the people may assume they're receiving illegal stuff.
Really, I completely despise folk like you who have nothing better to do with your time than craft delusional "Christmas Greetings" to send to your less artistic/creative/self-important acquaintances. Of course, in times past the cretinous, badly photocopied "Christmas Letter" or "Roundrobin" was equally abhorrent, but at least that could be seen for what it was and disposed of accordingly.
Do you really think your recipients are going to wade through 512Mb of computer dross, just because you sent it? Or that it'd get more than one play before getting reformatted and used for something more useful?
Here's a suggestion that would generate a bit more seasonal cheer.
Buy a big bundle of high quality Christmas cards supporting the charity (or charities) of your choice. Write an individual, unique heart-felt greeting in each one and post them in time for the last week before Christmas. Then the recipients can pin them up and have a colourful reminder of your regards throughout the Christmas season, rather than a few minutes of irritation.
As for the USB sticks, why not enclose them as an unencumbered gift to those who might have a use for them. Or donate then to a worthy cause.
And people that gain satisfaction from anonymously judging people on the Internet and saying the "sense some condescension" fall into which category? :D
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Next time you post a story, put links that actually work without a fucking password, mmmkay?
ArfBrookwood? More like Arfwit.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Apparently you've never heard of Facebook.
Well, then it sounds to me like what he's doing is a GREAT way to discourage some members of his family from hanging out with him; those which might don't have, for him, many qualities worthy of hanging around with anyway, for example. (kinda like I almost encourage gossips about me - they are a GREAT tool, thanks to which, often, people I wouldn't really like hanging around with select themselves out of my sphere of friends/etc. ...meaning I don't have to do that work)
Why, exactly, do we have to like/hang out with most of family in a manner that you think is appriopriate? Just because they share relatively large portion of our DNA? Might have been a factor in times when staying alife was difficult without every bit of effort and cooperation possible (and our DNA-relatives were best for that because of highest chance of reciprocity).
Furthermore lines determining with what portion of DNA-relatives we're willing/have to hang out change with times, cultures and...individuals (and you DO draw them; we all have quite recent common ancestors, not even getting into Y-Adam or mitochondrial Eve). And he actually seems to dedicate a bit of memory and effort for his relatives, which seems a lot more worthy than cultivation of old models, which today are mostly for show, mostly for hanging out for the sake of hanging out.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Of course, every family member will just wonder why you like Rick Astley so much. I don't know about you, but my mother hasn't been keeping up with 4chan memes lately.
The nerd sending it will then explain why it's funny to the family members. In his mind, he will still think that he is being amusing.
I hate nerds.