I acquired an MP3 all the way back in 1997 or 1998 which is a parody of Jingle Bells holiday tune that laments Microsoft-branded bloatware. Mildly humorous at the time, the song now serves as a technology time capsule. The internet seems unsure of who wrote or performed the song or when it was recorded, but the lyrics give a clue about its vintage. The singer complains that MS Word takes a whole 60 megabytes of RAM to run and occupies 900 megabytes of disc space.

Nine-tenths of a gig, biggest ever seen,
God, this program’s big: MS Word 15!
Comes on ten CDs, and requires–damn!
Word is fine, but jeez, 60 megs of RAM?!
Oh! Microsoft, Microsoft, bloatware all the way!
I’ve sat here installing Word, since breakfast yesterday!
Oh! Microsoft, Microsoft, moderation, please.
Guess you hadn’t noticed: Four-gig drives don’t grow on trees!

This clearly hearkens back to a time when 4 gigabyte drives were considered premium. I’m trying to remember when 4 GB drives were introduced and would have commanded a prohibitive price. Whenever it was, it still strikes me as ironic considering that I am typing this on my Linux-based Eee PC 701 which is equipped with 4 GB of storage which is just barely enough for Ubuntu 9.10 to tread water (ran out of space today, in fact, and I had to scramble to make room to keep working).

I purchased a Sony PlayStation 3 recently. I thoroughly read the accompanying manual on a train ride and a particular detail caught this optical media aficionado’s eye:

Wait… what? Star-shaped discs? Heart-shaped ones as well? Are those real? How would those even work? I know about 80 cm discs that fit in the smaller groove of a CD tray. I also know about the business card-shaped CD’s; I even have a few games that were published on such a form factor (for example). But a star has points. And a heart? How?

A brief bit of Googling for “star shaped disc” leads me directly to the Wikipedia article on shaped CDs, which happens to showcase a heart-shaped CD. But how would a star-shaped disc work? That (typically) has 5 points. Where would the circular track go, the one that holds data? I figure there could be sort of a fat star, a circle with 5 points. This turns out to be the correct idea as this disc manufacturing page indicates.

Check out the page and see the oddest shape– the house CD.

In the interest of using the internet to facilitate original scientific research, I am publishing the results of my inadvertent experiment regarding the relative freezing points of various novelty sodas.

Revenge of the White Elephant
At a white elephant gift exchange a few years ago, I received a re-gifted set of novelty holiday-themed sodas created by the Jones Soda Company. They created several of these over the years. This one had pumpkin pie, cranberry, wild herb stuffing, turkey and gravy, and — sigh — Brussels sprout flavors. I never got around (or got up the courage) to sample them and they have languished in my bachelor refrigerator ever since. The reason for the “bachelor” qualifier is that it stays fairly empty and I generally keep a pretty good mental inventory of its contents. Imagine my surprise when I noticed a strange, light green liquid on the bottom.

It smelled strange but I figured it was coming from a plastic container containing a friend’s homemade pickles. I removed the pickles from the equation and cleaned up the liquid. Later on, I noticed some more liquid had collected. The inside bulb is burned out (remember, bachelor fridge) so it’s a bit dark inside. However, I eventually spied a shard of clear glass.

Results
So it seems that the Brussels sprout soda had frozen and expanded until the glass bottle could no longer contain the block. That explains the sound of crashing glass I recall hearing the night before which emanated in the general vicinity of the kitchen.

The bottle was in pretty bad shape but much of the soda was still frozen inside what remained of the bottle. That it must have been gradually melting explains why there was more fluid sometime after the initial cleanup. I immediately, but gingerly, removed the other 4 bottles for fear that they might be ready to burst as well. But none of the 4 showed any sign of freezing.

What to conclude? Either the brussels sprout soda has a significantly higher freezing point than the other 4 flavors and was adversely affected during a freak temperature drop; or the Brussels sprout soda was situated in a colder section of the refrigerator. It’s also possible that all of them were affected by the temperature event but the others didn’t make it to the breaking point before the event reversed.

Impact
I can theorize about it all day. But in the end, I need to clean it up. How does this pertain to multimedia hacking? Well, I was going to add long-overdue test cases to FATE tonight, but that may have to wait. Fortunately, I was at the end of a shopping cycle and all I had to toss were some soda-saturated bananas. I’m keeping the butter since I don’t think it was affected, much. To any coworkers reading: if my cookies taste vaguely of Brussels sprouts over the next month, then, well… I happen to know that’s the closest some of you will come to consuming a vegetable all month.

And I never got to taste the Brussels sprout soda. Actually, that’s the part about this episode that bothers me the least.