After spending a few hours to clean up the banquet area, the Scrabble board came out and Chris Fosmire, Anthony Celona, and I dueled. We played with what I call speed rules which stipulate no more than 2 minutes per move, no consulting a dictionary, but allowing the 2- and 3-letter word lists to be on the table. While I recognize this is both slower than tournament Scrabble and more permissive its pace is break-neck compared to the geriatric version where one can consult one of three dictionaries and actively solicit advice from other players. I had a few notable plays:
- In my first attempt to use all 7 tiles to spell ELOPING I created the word GLOTS. I bullshitted that this was a colloquial term for the area comprising the glottis and epiglottis. Chris detected my bullshit and I lost my turn, and my chance at ELOPING.
- Creating ZING to get a triple letter score on the Z led me to play ELOPER and created the word OPE.
Chris: What does it mean?
Me: I have no idea, it’s on the 3-letter word list.
Anthony: Dictionary says it’s an alternate spelling of OPEN.
Me: That’s a special type of lazy man’s elision if it’s from the South.
Anthony: Nope, it’s apparently Middle English and was used as AWAKE is to AWAKEN.
Me: I don’t know if I feel smarter or dumber now.
- My attempt at scoring big.
Me: If you leave that trailing I open, I’ll give you a dollar.
Anthony: IRON. Your turn. What were you going to spell?
Me: QUYTING, probably for the first time in recorded Scrabble history.
I’m not as angry now that I know that QUYTING is only allowed in International Scrabble competitions and not American ones.
The Lodge Banquet is rare among Scouting feasts as being a reasonable length of under two hours. After many successful years, the Lodge Banquet had become a victim of its own success and was to be choked with “dignitaries”, “award recipients”, “speakers” and other such drivel that drives one’s patience to ruin.
This year’s banquet had an unusual savior: A power outage. Not 5 minutes into the event, a tree near the dining hall fell and took out power just to that building. Being the Order of the Arrow candles were deployed in under 15 minutes and the event resumed. The 30 minute award presentation was cut down to 10 when the PowerPoint was removed and the shot to the head that would have been the chapter video competition was axed. Overall, the event had a certain charm to it as the generator hooked into the building allowed some sets of lights to go up for a minute, blow a breaker, and then go out again. I also had a chance to try ISO 12600 on my new camera which I’ve dubbed “21 MP cellphone camera” mode.
The peculiar lighting led to some interesting portraits.
One of my duties is to patch our servers when we find issues. It’s not terribly difficult but involves some things people are uncomfortable with like Remote Desktop, Drive Mapping, and the Command Line, so I gladly do it as a two-hour “Get Out of Legitimate Work Free” card. I wanted to patch one of our systems as a test and requested remote access as the access restrictions had changed and was surprised by the response:
Him: What would you like to do?
Me: Apply a patch to the test machine.
Him: Please provide documentation that the patch will function.
Me: I can’t, that’s why I want to try it on the test machine.
Him: I’m sorry, I cannot allow access without proof of efficacy. You can try applying the patch locally.
Me: So, you recommend I take the software to which we only have one license, took a specialist 3 weeks to setup, and normally requires 3 PCs in a cluster to run, and run it on my local machine?
Him: *no response*
Me: *hang up*
I’m going to take a stab in the dark and assume this person isn’t familiar with the setup. Work around: Create a batch file that when run produces a wall of text followed by the line “Patch Applied” and send him a screen shot of that. If that works, my last few weeks of work just got a lot easier.
The results of the first test under the fake colon waste method didn’t come out as expected so I met with the requester to figure out what the cause was.
Him: There were two sources of error, first, I think you applied the product incorrectly.
Me: Really? I’ve done it this way for every previous running of the test.
Him: The method says use a round base rather than a square base that you used.
Me: But you said that was fine.
Him: Well, it wasn’t, do it again with round bases.
Me: You said there were two sources, what was the other?
Him: The recipe I gave you was off for a couple ingredients.
Me: How off?
Him: Somewhere between a factor of nine and a factor of 11.
Me: So, the recipe you gave me was off by an order of magnitude but you still think it was the shape of the base?
Him: Yeah, pretty sure.
Only one test method I’ve learned required signing legal documentation. The mixture for this particular method is the colonic equivalent of the recipe for Coke syrup and the entire time I’ve done this mixture I’ve treated it with a deference bordering on the sacred. Today I was running through the blending process when I found what appeared to be an error in mixing. I approached the creator:
Me: What the tolerance on the mixing of the 3rd ingredient set, I think your calculation is off by 2%?
Him: I don’t know. Anything within a factor of two should be fine.
Me: A factor of two? Like 200%?
Him: Yeah, this isn’t a precise thing.
Me: Your shitting me, I’ve been trying to squeeze measurements out to thousandths of a gram.
Him: Why?
Me: Because that’s what the method said. Didn’t you write this?
Him: No, a technician did a while ago.
Me: What happened to him?
Him: I fired him; he was way too uptight.
Hm…
I purchased 1000 stickers for my TF2 team’s second anniversary. I received a note from the printer that the stickers would be printed as soon as I paid the amount on the invoice. Here’s a screen cap of the attached invoice.
That’s the easiest invoice I’ve ever been asked to pay.
Boss: Terry, did you disconnect that license server?
Me: Yea. It’s been down for an hour.
Boss: I can still connect to it.
Me: How?
Boss: Well, I can ping it. What do you think’s causing it?
Me: Honestly? Internet gnomes.
Boss: Gnomes?
Me: Well, maybe faeries, but rarely do web faeries work on the business levels.
Boss: So, gnomes?
Me: Yes, gnomes are well known for finding packets destine for disconnected computers and ferrying those packets to the appropriate computers. That’s why my iPhone works in some train tunnels.
Boss: So… what do we do?
Me: Act quickly to get the server back online, otherwise, the gnomes will get tired and turn against us. Remember that day we had 10kbps upload to the offsite server?
Boss: Yes.
Me: We angered them without offering tribute. They extracted their pound of flesh.
Boss: Hm…
I love knowing I’m going to be fired.
The 5D Mark II has some wonderful features or at least I assume so as I have no idea how to use them. I excreted a sizable chunk of masonry on finding that most of my lenses didn’t work. What was I left with? My 70-200mm zoom lens. I went to the troop 5 banquet which as it entered its four hour I dubbed the Scoutathalon and babied my photogun until the Eagle Scout ceremony began. When the lights dimmed and the event started everyone started taking pictures. On camera phones, with point and shoots, by running down the aisle to get adequate zoom. The camera+lens I had probably weighed more than every other device in the room and the shutter noise crowded out the artificial din of mock-shutters. Heads turned, conversations stopped. I won.
There was a problem though, getting shots of anything within 10 feet of me. After the main event someone requested I take pictures of the recipients and I kept running to a problem as people would walk between myself at the kids because I had to be 30 feet away from them. I lost.
My birthday gift this year is a little photography robot called a Gigapan. One places a point-and-shoot digital camera on the base, calibrated the setup, and the stand will go to town and take a crap-ton of pictures and stitch them together with an the included software. Here was my first test:
Use the zoom slider and your mouse to poke around.
The next two taken at Arcadia University came out a bit nicer. The one below is made of about 200 pictures.
My favorite was taken at an Arcadia hardscape and consists of 400 pictures or so and generated a 2.5GB tiff file.
These are nice, but still pales compared to others composed of hundreds more images.
Teejay had the novel idea of doing a “Where’s Waldo?” gigapixel take involving costume changes at a sports stadium or some other large venue. Who’s interested?
I found a 5D Mark II for a reasonable price on Ebay and pounced when the seller offered to allow me to pick it up sameday not far from where I worked. I met him at a gas station and received the camera for six hundred dollars cheaper than the equivalent new in box but with the caveat of no accessories. How much could replacing the accessories possibly cost? Well, 5 D Mark II batteries are apparently fashioned from the tears of the pope and cost $120 for battery plus charger. The neck strap is made from the breath of fish, the roots of mountain, and the noise of cat chiming in at $30. Finally, Compact Flash cards are forged by union dwarves that fashion them with potent runes of storage costing about $130 for 16 GB storage. Oh, also, the camera’s from Australia so the normal two-year limited warranty and 100k shutter actuation warranty is also void unless I want to remail it from Sydney. I determined the value of this by checking what a homeowner’s policy rider would cost to cover the same thing.
So how much did I save? $12! This final dose of savings was removed by the gas spent driving to the location and the extra money I spent on getting lunch out that day. Another amazing move like this and I’ll lose a corner from my Personal Management merit badge card.
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