Geico rejects claims from Optimus Prime

Here’s a look at what a letter from insurer Geico might look like in regards to claims submitted by Optimus Prime.

We have received your accident-claim reports for the month of June-they total 27. I regret to inform you that GEICO will not be able to reimburse you for any of those repairs.

. . .

Since becoming a GEICO customer in January of this year, you have reported 131 accidents, requesting reimbursement for repairs necessitated by each one. You have claimed not to be responsible in any of them, usually listing the cause of the accident as either “Sneak attack by Decepticons” or “Unavoidable damage caused by protecting freedom for all sentient beings.”

The list of some of the rejected claims is sufficient justification for reading the full post. The letter ends well, at least:

…but due to the high number of accidents you have been a party to this month, combined with the many accidents you have had in the preceding five months, your premium has increased to $235,567.50 per month. While that may seem like a lot, I remind you that it is a savings of $137 over Progressive and $98 over State Farm.

Pure gold. (via Consumerist)

[tags]Geico, Gecko, Insurance, Transformers, Optimus Prime, I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance[/tags]

Unsolved mystery – tree robs bank – police mystified

I think we’ve got a case that will be extra tough to solve. It seems some clever criminal masterminded the ultimate bank robbery. With tree branches held on to his shirt and head by duct tape, one James Coldwell robbed a bank recently. Here’s some news of the robbery, as reported by police captain Dick Tracy (Hey! I’m not making this up – hit the link to see).

708a1bank2.jpgVideo surveillance of the Saturday morning robbery showed a thin white man leaving the bank in a shroud of tree branches, all duct-taped to his shirt and head. His short, dark hair and mustache were clearly visible between the leaves.

Tracy said police were tipped off by several anonymous callers after the footage appeared on a nightly news broadcasts.

“I think he was hoping the disguise would camouflage him enough that no one would recognize who he was,” Tracy said.


Checking out the image, I can’t see how he was identified. Maybe there’s hope for a not guilty verdict? Always a chance of reasonable doubt, right? Or maybenot guily by reason of stupidity.

[tags]Stupid crook, Dumb criminals, Tree robs bank[/tags]

Blender render settings tutorial

As so often happens, I find something of interest to me and share it with all three of my readers, even though I know it will be of interest to zero of them. Such is the life of a self-centered geek with an online voice.

Since I’ve been trying to learn new stuff (that’s an industry standard term – it means stuff) on the computer lately, I’ve worked a bit with the open-source 3D modeling tool Blender in my spare time the past few weeks. My artistic skills are roughly equal to my social skills, which means I’m pretty sucky at creating artistic content. Still, I’m having fun learning, even if it is something I’ll never use beyond fun-time play. While tooling around online finding more Blender guides and tutorials, I found this old but still relevant guide to render settings for generating final Blender scenes.

Blender’s built-in rendering options offer many different possibilities for size, effects, and quality. Different settings may drastically affect rendering times. The goal for this analysis is to discover the most efficient methods for achieving the desired image quality with the minimum rendering time. When rendering for animations it is extremely important to achieve the best results is the shortest time possible, since one second of animation represents 30 rendered images.

The author goes on to cover half a dozen different renders and show the visual output as well as the necessary run times to generate a frame. Now the tutorial is from 2004, which means current hardware improvements and probable software improvements have made these times far higher than what they would be if the tests were run on modern hardware. But the relative time is the important point, and the difference between the simplest render setting that gives good results to one of the best render settings that consumes loads of time for improved results is clear. If you have thought about playing around with modeling, I highly recommend Blender, the Blender noob to pro tutorials, the Essential Blender book, the Blender model repository, and any guides you can find (like the one I’ve highlighted here) that can help with render settings and content creation.

[tags]Blender, Tutorial, Tutorials, Render settings, 3D modeling, Open source[/tags]

I’m back! Did you miss me?

I’m guessing no one even noticed I was offline about 90% of the time over the past 8 days. My children and I traveled to my mother’s house while the wife was out of town. Mom doesn’t have an internet connection at her house currently, although I could occasionally but not reliably leech from neighbors wireless networks while there. Aside from over-eating a few times, thereby slowing up my progress on losing (a target of) 60 pounds, it was a very good week. If you care about my wonderful time away from home, continue reading below the pretty ‘more’ link. I assure you it is more tedious and dull than my normal writings – you’d be best served by skipping to the next post…

Continue reading “I’m back! Did you miss me?”

National ice cream day

I almost missed this one. Today is national ice cream day.

In 1984, President Ronald Reagan designated July as National Ice Cream Month and the third Sunday of the month as National Ice Cream Day. He recognized ice cream as a fun and nutritious food that is enjoyed by a full 90% of the nation’s population. In the proclamation, President Reagan called for all people of the United States to observe these events with “appropriate ceremonies and activities.”

And my wife tells me Reagan didn’t do anything good as President (for the record, I already disagreed with her before finding out about national ice cream day). (via Consumerist)

[tags]National ice cream day, Ice cream[/tags]

But she’s “not a violent person”

This really isn’t the kind of thing you read about every day. At least, I hope it’s not the kind of thing you read about every day. It certainly isn’t something I’ve heard about too many times before.

A woman who ripped off her ex-boyfriend’s testicle with her bare hands has been sent to prison.

Amanda Monti, 24, flew into a rage when Geoffrey Jones, 37, rejected her advances at the end of a house party, Liverpool Crown Court heard.

She pulled off his left testicle and tried to swallow it, before spitting it out. A friend handed it back to Mr Jones saying: “That’s yours.”

. . .

In his statement, Mr Jones said she grabbed his genitals and “pulled hard”.

He added: “That caused my underpants to come off and I found I was completely naked and in excruciating pain.”

It does sound a little something like Ron Shock would talk about. But outside of that – yup, it’s a fairly rare story. By the way – if you ever have the chance to see Ron Shock, he is one of the funniest comedians I have ever seen. Go see one of his shows. Buy his videos after the show. You won’t regret it.
Also, that story headline here? It’s an actual quote from the lady who did the, ummm, ripping. And I must say, I know of no non-violent or loving way to rip a man’s testicle from his body.

[tags]Violent testicle removal, Unwilling partial castration, I’m not a violent person[/tags]

Why I should be playing World of Warcraft

As you may remember, I’m a bit of a gamer. My current addiction is City of Heroes. But another poster in the CoH forums linked to this little screenshot that shows why I should have been playing World of Warcraft instead.

mount_me.jpg

As much as I play my MMO, I probably would have had enough gold for that exchange had I been playing WoW all this time.

mount_entry-points.jpg

Not adverse? I can at least confirm my wife isn’t secretly playing WoW. Might have to give up CoH and start playing WoW so next time I can take advantage of a chick trading anal sex and was in to costumed nasties for in-game money.

[tags]WoW, World of Warcraft, Anal, Group, I’m playing the wrong MMO[/tags]