Archive
Last year, my family and I applied for passports. We got ‘em and used ‘em, so no big deal, right? Recently, though, I was looking at mine and noticed that, inexplicably, my gender was marked as “F” instead of the correct “M.” Ha-ha, very funny, but I have a clearly male name, my photo shows [...]
Huh. After a few months of working at home, I’ve just finished two days working in the client’s office and rediscovered several annoying things I’d forgotten: People with loud and/or annoying ringtones who let the phones ring and ring (and RING) while they decide whether to answer the call. You know, you CAN silence the [...]
The Divine Miss P, despite being only 3 1/2 years old, is an absolute KILLER when it comes to the card game “Crazy 8s.” She gets confused about the suits sometimes, she has NO concept behind the strategies for using the “8″ cards, she even shows her hand regularly… and she wins over, and over, and [...]
Okay, “reference post” alert, but this article by Sam Smith at jalopnik.com hits so many nails on the head that he should probably consider joining the carpenters’ union.
This video amply illustrates how ukeleles are simply stringed instruments with a constrained tonal range when compared to a more-typically “rocked out” instrument like a guitar. (If you think it’s a little too slow or whatever, wait until the middle section. This is what guitar geeks call “shredding.” ) After you’ve watched Jake Shimabukuro cover [...]
Okay, so nothing but a link this post, but: A whole series of 1/24th-scale photos that look like the real thing. (And they are, too. No Photoshopping at all.)
Now that the Avatar juggernaut is heading into the Oscars, I thought I’d post a quick note about two very different SF movies: Avatar and Moon. I saw Avatar the week after it opened, in 3D. Having actively avoided the 3D versions of movies the past several years, I was somewhat apprehensive about seeing this in RealD [...]
I know that LED lights are becoming more and more popular for cars, especially for tail and brake lights (I seem to recall reading that the brighter LEDs cause people to react some-tenths of a second more quickly), but I would like to register a complaint: They’re freaking annoying. I’m sure they’re phenomenal in the [...]
Back in the day, when the grunge movement was getting going, I was fairly “cool” for a while. I went to the “right” clubs, knew a lot of the bands, hung out with a lot of the movers-and-shakers, and so on. Hell, I’m even in the movie “Singles“… if you know where to squint in [...]
Let’s anthropomorphize a little, shall we? http://xkcd.com/695/ (Still kinda sad, though, innit?)
The same J-hole who prompted me to post about hallway etiquette sits across the hall and a couple doors down from me. He sits right next to the open door of a shared office. Why are these details significant? Because he has this disgusting habit of belching loudly and with annoying regularity. Not polite, easily-covered burps, [...]
The kitchens here at Microsoft have these nifty little Starbucks brew-on-demand coffee machines. One of the two in my floor’s kitchen has suffered some sort of failure and is showing a “brewer failure” message on its small, text-based display screen. Someone stuck a Post-It next to it saying “Brew Screen of Death.” Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha…
A few weeks ago, early in November, I upgraded my desktop machine at home to Windows 7 Professional from Windows XP Professional. Why Professional? For a number of reasons, but one of the big ones is the ability to use Remote Desktop. While I use RD to manage our “headless” server and other PCs in [...]
That 10lbs of body weight I puked out over a 48-hour period a couple weeks ago? Yeah, I’ve successfully gained it all back, along with another pound or two for good measure. <grumble>
The last dream I had last night was a borderline nightmare. Wanna know what it was about? I was relaxing near the swimming pool of a Hawaiian resort, listening to a heavily-tattooed Madonna sing a quiet song in a language I didn’t understand, when an apparently-amphibious moray eel came out of the pool and started attacking guests, [...]