According to this, I have the most interesting Rickrolled photo on Flickr.

Confession: I have a nasty habit of gnawing on headphone cords. Enough of that abuse, and I’ll sever the wire. I have done this twice now, once with the ones that came bundled with my old nano, and again with some cheap-o set that I think Becki got free in a back of AA batteries.

This time around, I picked up a set of these, on the same trip to the Apple store where I bought a keyboard (I don’t know why I bought the keyboard, but I have to say the decision has worked out pretty well), because I figured that if I shelled out for something a little nicer, I might not try to eat it.

I didn’t like the things at first, because you have to cram them well into your ears to keep them from falling out, and even then they tend to wiggle loose at the slightest provocation, but they’ve grown on me. The in-ear design blocks out background noise by acting as an earplug, and sound quality is good enough for me. I suppose it probably isn’t up to Audiophile snuff, but I have a lot of CDs I ripped in 128 kpbs MP3s before I knew what VBR was, so I doubt that the headphones are the real bottleneck here.

Anyway, the point of all this is that when I’m listening to music above a certain volume, I can’t hear a thing. Since I’m usually hunched forward staring at my monitor, I can’t see much of anything either. Neither would be bad by itself, but taken together, I end up in my own little world, completely unaware of my surroundings. The building could catch fire and I might notice before the sprinklers went off, or something killed the power.

Which is pretty much what I was doing this morning, when a bunch of IM windows started blinking at me, and I finally noticed a couple of people waving at me.

Apparently, they’d been trying to get my attention for a while, and since I wasn’t responding, half the people in the room started waving and yelling at me to see if I’d notice. Then, in a space of 11 seconds, I got the following messages:

“Earth to Greg”

“hey greg look up”

“GREG!@” [sic]

The interesting thing here is that these were all from different people.

This is not the first time this has happened - sometimes the guy who sits right across from me, facing me, six feet away, has to IM me if he wants my attention. Other people come up right behind me and tap my chair*, which scares the crap out of me

*This is totally unrelated, but I love that chair - I managed to upgrade from the regular office chairs we have to a spare Aeron floating around the office. Best. Chair. Ever.

So yeah, I am totally, embarrassingly, out of it sometimes when I’m working. But I want to thank (blame?) Apple and their earbuds for that, at least in part.

I think we’ve all done this before.

It wasn’t up there for long, to their credit, and I don’t actually care, but this is a really hilarious screen shot to me. Probably only to me, since I can more or less imagine what was going through this poor bastard’s head when he did it.

On the plus side, there are four awesome football games this weekend. Hell yeah.

I just typed a sentence and ended it with a semicolon. In my defense, I was talking about code, but still.

- I finally got around to playing Bioshock, and I’m positively embarrassed that it took me this long. Zero Punctuation pretty well nailed it - it’s essentially a steampunk System Shock 2 that’s been dumbed down for the console crowd, but don’t let what it isn’t distract you from what it is. Which is a brilliantly executed FPS-RPG with beautiful graphics, jaw-droppingly brilliant art direction, and a good, well-written, story. I would say that BioShock is an over-hyped disappointment that still succeeds on  some levels and is still worth playing, but while accurate, that really doesn’t do it justice. It’s absolutely amazing, and the fact that it could’ve, and was advertised as being, even more so, shouldn’t distract you from this.

I’m also happy that I sprung for an 8800GT, because it runs this sucker at max settings at 12×10 without aa hint of slowdown. Totally worth having to re-route half my cabling just to fit the stupid thing in my case.

- 8 Diagrams,  the new album from the Wu Tang Clan. I haven’t heard the whole thing yet, but on first listen, this is pretty awesome so far. It’s exactly what you’d expect from the Wu Tang Clan, which is not to say that it sounds like a re-hash of 36 Chambers. RZA managed to still sound like the RZA without getting stale. I’ve heard the album is hit and miss overall, but so far there have been 2 “meh” songs - full review pending further listening.

- Finally, and most awesomely, Becki officially graduated college today. Woo hoo! We’re all very happy for her, and I managed to take 25 pictures of her walking across the stage. The whole ceremony yielded exactly 150 shots, so those are going to take a bit of time to sort and toss and flickr.

That’s about it for 2008 so far - 2007 mostly came up Aces for me,  so it’s going to be a hard act to follow.