piss bug

A decal or other marker on a urinal indicating the best place to aim your urine stream.

I went to use a few bathrooms where they have these happy, funny little piss bugs in the urinals.

by esmith512 January 30, 2008

chiPod

A Chinese-manufactured MP3/MP4 player with a case and form factor generally to closely resembling one or more models of Apple's iPod. ChiPods are generally a fraction of the cost of Apple's iPod, have generally equivalent but inferior implementations of iPod functionality, don't accept Apple-proprietary formats, and often include supersets of iPod features like larger screens, additional audio processing features, audio recording, additional data formats, and FM radios. However, chiPods are very rarely connector-compatible with iPods and won't attach to iPod docks, opting to instead use industry-standard interfaces. (Notably, Apple's iPods are also Chinese-made--a chiPod is a player which visually bears some resemblance to an iPod.)

I just got several chiPods today. Some of them look a lot like iPods, they aren't as cool to use, but work fine.

by esmith512 December 24, 2007

island mentality

A psychological state more than a geographic state of a person: a belief in a community's or culture's superiority, correctness, or specialness compared to other communities or cultures. Inspired by positive-minded well-meaning groupthink, increasing homogeniety over time, isolation-induced ignorance of other cultures or communities, fear of the unknown or being outnumbered (and a desire to compensate for their smallness amid the world), and lack of conflict with/lack of destruction by other communities (improving relative progress and social harmony and giving some creedence to their feelings of superiority).

Progressive and possessive attributes of English and Japanese histories show an island mentality.

by esmith512 June 26, 2007

you can't polish a turd

unconvincingly attempt to make an irreconcilably bad situation look good.

They're trying to portray the poor financial reports as positive, but you can't polish a turd.

by esmith512 April 21, 2007

Beachball of Death

The Mac OS pointer icon of a colorful spinning wheel indicating the program currently under the mouse pointer is no longer responding. Called the beachball of death if the program never recovers or causes the operating system to become so busy (usually due to insufficient memory) that nothing else responds.

I ran a new shareware program, but killed it after I got the beachball of death.

by esmith512 January 08, 2008

chivalry

The act of a self-deluded sucker. Self-destructive self-sacrifice in favor of those seeking to exploit or destroy the practioner. Self-debasement to those seeking exploitive profit and lack of due recriprocation. Often stupidly misconstrued by those practicing as honorable or altuistic.

Many travesties of justice, self-destruction, and the concealment and promotion of evil have come from the chivalry of fools.

by esmith512 January 21, 2008

FrankenMac

A usually fully functional almost-Apple Macintosh computer rebuilt from various dead-Mac pull-out and commodity PC parts to avoid Apple's high prices for similar Apple-sourced but functionally identical parts. A cousin somewhat to the Hackintosh.

Jim got a bunch of Apple and non-Apple parts from some dead Macs, PCs, and his own workbench and cobbled together a little FrankenMac. Not quite as pretty but it works fine.

by esmith512 October 06, 2007