this normal spotted in a timeless animated gif showing how to recover your desktop and in effect hack around the login prompt in the highly secure and reliable Windows98 operating system. The hack uses some printer dialog box to route back to the desktop, and has an instance of “Normal” print quality.
for the entire animated gif, click here
[thanks Steve]
Plaxo was originally used by this blogger starting many years back as an online address book or rolodex. Moving house every few months, including between different countries, meant it was becoming increasingly difficult for me to keep track of who was where, what their phone number was, etc. - also because a growing number of my peers were following the same nomadic living patterns. I started using Plaxo to compile and keep track of all of this data, knowing that no matter where I went to in the world I could always access the Internet (even from a library public PC) and retrieve the data I was looking for. Plaxo’s most-useful function for me was their Address Book, with database fields for multiple emails, phone numbers, integrated maps, etc. Very useful. These days Plaxo is looking to increase its membership base by supporting social networking functions such as integrating the ability for Plaxo members to share Flickr photos, calendars, etc. Well, either way, I noticed when recently inputing a new entry in my own address book that the address bar of my Firefox 3 browser included a coded reference to normal:
more geekathon-normal going on here, this screengrab is from the options menu of Activision’s late-2007 release Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, at times set in parts of the world that pit US marines (or UK SAS operatives) against Russian ultranationalist forces, ironic considering the current political turmoil and conflict in North Ossetia, Georgia, the former Soviet bloc country.
It would seem “Normal” is a standard term in gaming development to describe menu options and variables, and so being somewhat of a geek gaming enthusiast, I reckon there’ll be more where this came from!
Continuing today’s geekathon-game posts:
Type or Die. Write or I’ll Bite!
Just a couple of the taglines for the SEGA franchise title House of the Dead (1996) which was later ported and modded to kill zombies with your keyboard instead of a game-gun. Originally an arcade game (no shit, see image below), the above images are from a PC (Windows) port of the game. A more-recent version has been ported to the Nintendo DS Lite for Japanese players looking to improve their English writing skills (see here) - but some of us are forever attached to our keyboards (be they Qwerty or… Dvorak!) so if you’re looking to improve your typing skills while killing zombies and zombie-bosses:
From one of the opening sequences of the CAPCOM title Okami, this shot shows Issun, the game’s guide embodied as a bouncing bug, asking the sun god Amaterasu, “The tree’s returned to normal, huh?”
Just before, the Kamiki Village tree was under some sort of curse. Issun would often ask or state things in a reverse manner, but it must be questioned, what is a “normal” tree?
Ubuntu is an operating system that has proclaimed itself to be Linux for Human Beings (as opposed to Linux for Linux Beings, or geeks or dweebs or dorks or l33t-p30pl3z as they may be affectionately called). Regardless of what species of Hominidae the sapiens Linus Torvalds intended his code to benefit, the Ubuntu project prides itself on being a version of Linux that is generally more-approachable by lay computer users to install on various computing devices as a free, open-source alternative to bloated & expensive proprietary operating systems (while still being a highly flexible and secure environment based on Debian).
Ubuntu’s screen resolution preferences contain an interesting reference:
Options for rotating displays are normally taken care of by the xorg.conf file. While many users report that the rotation option is not readily working, Ubuntu’s coders decided to refer to the default or standard monitor rotation orientation as… Normal.
If only more computing preferences were so simple a choice…
Google Pages is part of the Google Labs initiative to build an online playground of web technologies that may or may not get integrated (it is a ‘lab’ after all) into the growing set of tools google has to offer beyond its comprehensive search engine (and mapping, and reader, and calendar, and advertising, and and and). Google Pages describes itself as ‘a free online tool that finally makes it easy for anyone to create and publish useful, attractive web pages in just minutes.’
It really is easy for anyone to create webpages without any HTML knowledge, thanks to the integrated WYSIWIG editor with clickable buttons, quick drop-down menus, and limited set of options for modifying your pages. Two of those options contain references to normal: the heading menu, which uses classes like h2, h3, h4 and p for paragraph or as googlepages call it, Normal - not Default; and the font size menu which has the options small, normal, large and huge - common terminology of CSS font properties.
thanks google for recognizing the potential of normal:
who is Gordon Freeman?
the man ain’t just some ordinary regular joe schmoe kinda guy, running around in remote areas of America’s southwest, wearing a HEV suit battling government operatives and aliens alike. the man runs on CODE! (he’s also a MIT doctoral graduate!)
should you be in the midst of a battle with Combine cops, headcrabs or those howling fast zombies (they always frighten me to the point that I unload my machine-gun grenade right in my own face like BL0000SH!) then feel free to press ~tilde~ to access the game’s console commands, where you might find normal passing through.
(
)
or was it Esc? or Del? or Alt+F10? or Fn+Ctrl+F11?
oh just hit all those buttons together, I’m sure something wonderful will happen!
(but Normal is the #1 choice for boot options)
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