What To Do With 78 USB Drives Next Christmas? 381
ArfBrookwood writes "Every year, I write a Christmas Letter and send it to about 50 people, and every year, it's different. One year it was just the word blah blah blah over and over with keywords, one year I made papercraft wallets with full color cards and money in them, another year I created a Christmas Letter writing contest that instructed the recipients to create our Christmas Letter for us and we awarded prizes to winners, last year, I took a fake retro photo of my family, Inkscaped/GIMPed in a chemistry set and some wall art, printed it onto CD covers, and burned retro Christmas songs onto digital vinyl and sent everyone in the family what looked like a miniature Christmas album. Last week, I came into the possession of 78 2GB USB drives. I have already taken the time to wipe them clean and reflash the memory so they are blank slates." Now, Arf's looking for suggestions for how to best use all these drives; read on for more.
"My first inclination was to remove the USB drives from their careful packaging and plastic enclosures, dump them into a slurry of glue and rock dust, sandpaper the USB port to make it look ancient, and then make some videos or include some oddly formatted numbered/whatever text files to make them look like they cam from some dystopian wasteland fallout-3 type future and then package them in envelopes that looked like they were from some central futuristic government post office. The idea would be that in the future, incidents that happened this year would have had a profound affect on the future. I never tell anyone what the Christmas Letter will look like, and I have only one rule — I have to outdo whatever I did the last year."
Give away the secret (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're looking for something useful ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Thing Drive Tricks [lifehacker.com]
Give-away Drives [lifehacker.com]
Put a calendar in them... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Altered for the Slashdot audience (Score:5, Insightful)
Photoshop, like Google, is well on its way to becoming a common verb. One should be able to photoshop with any competent raster image editing program.
Re:RAID (Score:2, Insightful)
That would be kind of hard since 78*2=156!=158, but if you figure out a way to do it, let me know.
Re:The world's best christmas cards? (Score:1, Insightful)
--
Global warming is really caused by gay sex.
Re:Remastersys (Score:5, Insightful)
mod parent up (Score:3, Insightful)
That's an awesome suggestion.
Add to that the fact that the guy made me think about Xmas in May.
Re:Where's the fun ideas? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:RAID (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Be useful. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Be useful. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Easy (Score:1, Insightful)
You might have no friends left, but damn. Funny.
No friends = easier to top next year, less letters to send out
Re:Send them to me. (Score:2, Insightful)
That's why I've been saying for years that Slashdot needs a -1, Internet Spiders Track Down and Devour Poster Alive mod.
Re:Be useful. (Score:2, Insightful)
Idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't link your blog on Slashdot, then make it invitation only to read. Stupidest thing I ever saw.
Re:Be useful. (Score:5, Insightful)
You have no right to waste the time of your students by getting them to produce this guy's latest Christmas Card Project.
Let's see. Fifth graders. Recieving an educational tool at no cost, and learning the value of writing "thank you" notes.. something that is all too often lost on us. It's a school. They're learning something valuable. I don't see the waste here.
What a good friend would do... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Books (Score:1, Insightful)
Make sure you point out that they're legally available for distribution.
The 'sharing is stealing' propaganda is widespread enough that some of the people may assume they're receiving illegal stuff.
You're not funny and you're not clever. (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you really think your recipients are going to wade through 512Mb of computer dross, just because you sent it? Or that it'd get more than one play before getting reformatted and used for something more useful?
Here's a suggestion that would generate a bit more seasonal cheer.
Buy a big bundle of high quality Christmas cards supporting the charity (or charities) of your choice. Write an individual, unique heart-felt greeting in each one and post them in time for the last week before Christmas. Then the recipients can pin them up and have a colourful reminder of your regards throughout the Christmas season, rather than a few minutes of irritation.
As for the USB sticks, why not enclose them as an unencumbered gift to those who might have a use for them. Or donate then to a worthy cause.
Re:The world's best christmas cards? (Score:5, Insightful)
And people that gain satisfaction from anonymously judging people on the Internet and saying the "sense some condescension" fall into which category? :D
Next time (Score:3, Insightful)
Next time you post a story, put links that actually work without a fucking password, mmmkay?
ArfBrookwood? More like Arfwit.
Re:Send them to me. (Score:0, Insightful)
Apparently you've never heard of Facebook.
Re:The world's best christmas cards? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, then it sounds to me like what he's doing is a GREAT way to discourage some members of his family from hanging out with him; those which might don't have, for him, many qualities worthy of hanging around with anyway, for example. (kinda like I almost encourage gossips about me - they are a GREAT tool, thanks to which, often, people I wouldn't really like hanging around with select themselves out of my sphere of friends/etc. ...meaning I don't have to do that work)
Why, exactly, do we have to like/hang out with most of family in a manner that you think is appriopriate? Just because they share relatively large portion of our DNA? Might have been a factor in times when staying alife was difficult without every bit of effort and cooperation possible (and our DNA-relatives were best for that because of highest chance of reciprocity).
Furthermore lines determining with what portion of DNA-relatives we're willing/have to hang out change with times, cultures and...individuals (and you DO draw them; we all have quite recent common ancestors, not even getting into Y-Adam or mitochondrial Eve). And he actually seems to dedicate a bit of memory and effort for his relatives, which seems a lot more worthy than cultivation of old models, which today are mostly for show, mostly for hanging out for the sake of hanging out.
Re:Easy (Score:1, Insightful)
Of course, every family member will just wonder why you like Rick Astley so much. I don't know about you, but my mother hasn't been keeping up with 4chan memes lately.
The nerd sending it will then explain why it's funny to the family members. In his mind, he will still think that he is being amusing.
I hate nerds.