“You want a piece of me?” Cows Gone Wild!

Original post from 9/26/2003…
Macromedia bought a Segway a while ago, but it’s been living up at the San Francisco headquarters (motto: We’re So Much Hipper Than You). The company threw a party up there on Thursday, so they sent busses to pick up the Redwood Shores employees.

While we were up there, a few Redwood Shores people slipped away from the sushi and fondue on a daring mission to swipe the Segway for us. (Cue Mission Impossible theme.) It was secreted away on the bus by the time it pulled away.

And now (Bwa ha ha!), we have one at work.

People have been tooling around the office all day. There have been a few casualties. Bonnie has a collection of plastic bits that used to be attached to the Segway. One of them used to be a kickstand. The other two are of mysterious origin. One of them is rather disturbingly spotted with dried blood; rumor has it that there was a mishap in the elevator late last night that resulted in a scraped knuckle or two. There are also telltale black scuff marks on several of the cubicle walls.

A handful of us took turns riding it on the way to the local deli. Nothing produces instant celebrity faster than possession of a Segway in Silicon Valley. We were giving interviews and fielding questions the whole way.

Update…
Within the span of one week, the Segway was completely destroyed (and there’s a suspicious hole in a wall outside of one of the conference rooms) and is in for service. Reportedly, somebody got hit with the recall problem.

Before catastrophe struck, we took some movies of people riding around the office. Here are a couple of me (they’re a bit large, but I can’t be bothered to fix that)… one and two.

“Rebecca Hyatt” can be rearranged to “Ye CA tech brat”.

Also “Racy beta tech”, “Yet acerb chat” and “Ye bat catcher”. (That last is patently untrue, as I immediately called for backup during the Great Bat Incident of 2000.)

Internet Anagram Server (“I, Rearrangement Servant”)

Sir Mix-A-Lot’s Baby Got Back. Now in Latin.

magnae clunes mihi placent, nec possum de hac re mentiri.
(Large buttocks are pleasing to me, nor am I able to lie concerning this matter.)

Mother of Killer Files Workers Comp Claim. Mental note… be sure to punch time card before going on killing spree and committing suicide.

Unless, of course, it was a grapefruit.” Washington Post Correction:

A Sept. 21 item in the Metro in Brief column about a woman fatally shot in Prince George’s County and a child who was wounded incorrectly reported the woman’s age, the child’s sex, the child’s location at the time of the shooting, and the street on which the shooting occurred. A correct account of the incident appears in today’s Metro in Brief column.

“Surely, there is no sight more moving than a man and three square yards of carefully tailored cavalry twill moving in perfect harmony.” Trouser Semaphore. Don’t miss the Trouser Semaphore in Action video.

Those wacky kids at Merriam-Webster have announced the 11th edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate® Dictionary with a Spinal Tap reference that I’m sure they’ve been planning for at least three or four of those editions…

We go to ELEVEN!

Temporarily stymied on the cup stacking front (awaiting arrival of official Speed Stacking equipment) and slightly bruised and frustrated from the Astrojax, the team was in serious danger of having to do some work when Jack was kind enough to suggest another amusement… Truck Dismount.

Truck Dismount is a physics simulator that allows you to finally answer nagging questions like “How much damage would a person take if he were riding on top of a truck when it went over a ramp and then slammed into a wall? (Answer: between 15000 and 45000 points.) You place the crash test dummy (on top of the truck, in the truck, in front of the bumper, etc.) and up to two ramps. You choose the truck speed and a couple other parameters. Then you press the big “Dismount” button and watch as the accident plays itself out.

My personal favorite is the catapault, where the guy starts out on top of the truck and completely clears the wall. It never scores very high, but there’s just something about those windmilling arms and legs that brings a smile to my face. Best viewed with the camera angle that is fixed on the guy, of course.

My personal best score is 56887. Several people at work have scored in the 56000-57000 range, but no one has been able to beat it. The posted high scores on the web site go above 200K. If anybody has suggestions for what sorts of arrangements produce such high scores, I’d be very interested to hear them.

The scoring is a little suspicious… rolling the truck over length-wise so that it falls directly on top of the dummy should really do more than 5000 or so points of damage. Also, I’d like to see some concept of style points. It’s so disappointing when you do something really nifty, like landing the guy on top of the wall, or balancing the truck on its nose, and the score isn’t very high. What you really want to hear is that the US and Canadian judges both rate it an 8, but the Russian judge only gives it a 6.

Addendum: I wrote this last week, when the collective high score was in the 56-57K range. When I came in this morning, I discovered that Jim had managed to get 137K by getting the dummy’s head stuck in the grill (where it was mashed between the truck and the wall). So the bar has been raised.

While taking a break from wanton destruction with his Astrojax, Jack mentioned the sport of cup stacking. Apparently, very bored people living in very cold states compete in cup stacking. They stack cups in pyramids and break them down again. For speed. Competitively. Really.

For a stunning example of this, go to the Speed Stacks video page and click on the link titled “Emily Fox does Cycle in 7.43 seconds”. Turning on sound will enhance the experience. Keep in mind that the stacking in question is being shown real time.

Naturally, our first reaction was “Pffft. We could do better than that.” We immediately descended on a conference room with a stack of paper cups. We were having lots of problems with them sticking together, so we made some very scientific modifications with the pointy part of a pen. Our efforts met with limited (actually no) success. We might have saved ourselves the trouble if we had first consulted the Speed Stacks cup comparison chart. Apparently, you need to use official plastic cups with shoulder ribs, air holes, and exterior texturing in order to be competitive. I have a set on order.