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The Mac OS pointer icon of a colorful spinning wheel indicating the program currently under the mouse pointer is no longer responding. Called the beachball of death if the program never recovers or causes the operating system to become so busy (usually due to insufficient memory) that nothing else responds.
I ran a new shareware program, but killed it after I got the beachball of death.
38π 2π
A usually fully functional almost-Apple Macintosh computer rebuilt from various dead-Mac pull-out and commodity PC parts to avoid Apple's high prices for similar Apple-sourced but functionally identical parts. A cousin somewhat to the Hackintosh.
Jim got a bunch of Apple and non-Apple parts from some dead Macs, PCs, and his own workbench and cobbled together a little FrankenMac. Not quite as pretty but it works fine.
A psychological state more than a geographic state of a person: a belief in a community's or culture's superiority, correctness, or specialness compared to other communities or cultures. Inspired by positive-minded well-meaning groupthink, increasing homogeniety over time, isolation-induced ignorance of other cultures or communities, fear of the unknown or being outnumbered (and a desire to compensate for their smallness amid the world), and lack of conflict with/lack of destruction by other communities (improving relative progress and social harmony and giving some creedence to their feelings of superiority).
Progressive and possessive attributes of English and Japanese histories show an island mentality.
62π 13π
A recent type of mortgages given to those with no apparent means and little to no chance of rendering repayment. NINJA is an acronym referring to the borrower as having No Income No Job or Assets.
The housing bubble was greatly helped by financially suicidal bankers issuing NINJA loans like candy to anyone who could fog a mirror!
7π 13π
A game of volleyball played over a border wall, often a fortified border between countries.
I've heard they've got some pretty good wallyball games at the Mexican-American border!
4π 4π
A word widely coined in journalistic circles to describe the mutually opposite words and actions over time, redefinition of various terms into their opposites, and generally confusingly self-contradictory behavior of the Bush Administration. Derived from Bizarro and Bizarroworld.
In Bushzarro world, up is down, white is black, mass murder is democracy, truthiness is lies, left is right, and right is wrong.
243π 58π
A Chinese-manufactured MP3/MP4 player with a case and form factor generally to closely resembling one or more models of Apple's iPod. ChiPods are generally a fraction of the cost of Apple's iPod, have generally equivalent but inferior implementations of iPod functionality, don't accept Apple-proprietary formats, and often include supersets of iPod features like larger screens, additional audio processing features, audio recording, additional data formats, and FM radios. However, chiPods are very rarely connector-compatible with iPods and won't attach to iPod docks, opting to instead use industry-standard interfaces. (Notably, Apple's iPods are also Chinese-made--a chiPod is a player which visually bears some resemblance to an iPod.)
I just got several chiPods today. Some of them look a lot like iPods, they aren't as cool to use, but work fine.
15π 3π