Tonight was a meeting of the Bucks County Council Technology Committee and at its end we discussed when to reconvene.
Leader: So when do we want to meet here again?
Me: We’re the technology committee and there are five of us, can’t we use a conference call, or Skype?
Leader: But I like seeing people’s faces.
Me: How about we do a monthly conference call but have a physical get together every quarter when we start forgetting what people look like?
Leader: I like it.
Compromise!
As the end of the year approaches, there’s been a notable uptick in internal email at my company about promotions, free seminars, facilities options and the like and all are marked “Important” or “Urgent” in Outlook. I consider this tagging almost an insult and after reviewing all the mail I’ve received over the past year and seeing that no one else uses these labels, I have set up a mail filter that automatically marks as junk anything I receive marked as “Important”. Congratulations, they’ve broken email again. Should I ever get fired for missing a legit email which was marked as important I will gather my things and say “you may blame me, but the real culprits are the cafeteria lady, the blood drive captain, and person that arranged the Halloween party”. My head will be held high.
Boss’s Boss: Terry.
Me: Yes.
Boss’s Boss: I need a picture that clearly shows how gas flows through one of our products. Â Can you do it?
Me: Yes. Â I’ll have it to you when I’m done.
Boss’s Boss: Good.
—Two days later—
Boss’s Boss: Thanks for the image. Â Did you get busy with other stuff?
Me: No. Â I’ve worked almost exclusively on this.
Boss’s Boss: Â And it took you two days?
Me: Computers hard.
Boss’s Boss: Come to think of it, they are. Â Good work, Terry.
Of all the life experiences I had culminating in my current job, working at RadioShack still ranks among the most useful. It granted me the power to fake caring about what someone is saying AND set up a home theater system. This skill was called upon when my area supervisor threw up his hands, yelled “I give up”, and asked me to select a flatscreen TV to replace the one in the CAD area that we used to play videos on tours.
My boss’s boss was keenly interested in the selection process and came by immediately upon learning the task had been passed to me.
Him: So, you’ll probably get a plasma?
Me: Plasmas generally consume more power and have burn-in issues if not properly maintained, that’s what did our last TV in.
Him: But the picture’s great.
Me: Modern LCD TVs are just as bright and rich. We’ve figured out how to make good LCD TVs.
Him: But the contrast on plasma screens in remarkable.
Me: Backlit LED will do just as well. I’ll see what the data says when I look for options.
Him: Ok. *leaves*
Supervisor: The guy that’s paying for us to get this and that can fire us requested a plasma. I recommend you include that in your selection criteria.
Me: Noted.
First line from email sent at 4 PM that day. “I am pleased to announce I have selected the following plasma television for use by the CAD group”.
My father received an iPad yesterday and he used it unaided for a solid 15 minutes. At one point in the evening my father showed my mother a video, she indicated that playing a YouTube video at a holiday part was rude to which I replied “let him flourish. And give me my happiness!”
I came down stairs this morning at the crack of noon and the Ipad was on the table. I could tell from the streaks on the stream that he’s used it so I unlocked the device and saw that he’d been watching videos of trucks fording creeks that were far too deep for them. Thank you, Steve.
Someone in our marketing department was having trouble formatting something for the web and she came by to ask us for advice. I happened to be in the room when they were talking and I gave my point of view that to save space in simpler images she should use PNG with custom palettes instead of jpegs. She didn’t seem swayed and we went back and forth until finally a coworker burst out with “Mary, listen to the kid. He may not have formal computer training but he has a blog”. That is apparently a standard of some note and she departed without any more questions.
For the last three years, my black toner cartridge has given out on the first weekend in October as the Webelos Weekend has me go through several reams of paper.  This year, I decided to head it off and purchase a black cartridge in anticipation.  I began printing furiously at 11:00 PM and 30 minutes later the toner cartridge died. I pumped my fist in triumph, replaced the cartridge, hit the RESUME button and 30 copies later the cyan cartridge died. As with all modern printers, lacking cyan crippled the entire device despite only printing black and white and the standard tricks of resetting the count gear, obscuring the measuring light, and shaking the cartridge did nothing.
I resigned myself to not having a printer for the evening before a big event and made up a queue of documents that I’d need to produce the next day but forgot something: I couldn’t print it.
My father’s recently shifted his TV watching patterns away from “Hitler’s Secret Wizard Coven” to “Wipe Out”. Â I first thought this was a bad thing, on review it’s caused some positive changes.
1) My dad’s learned how to use the DVR
2) He laughs more
3) I no longer deal with Tim Taylor-esque pidgins of things like “did you know that at Gaudalcanal captured GIs created a Gatling gun that used weasel teeth as ammunition?”
I’m most excited about the first as if this trend continues I look forward to showing my dad how to use BitTorrent to get back episodes of Takeshi’s Castle.
I had my previous pair of sandals for at least six years which is a personal record for shoe ownership. Most of my clothing has about 1/2 to a 1/3 of the lifetime of other people’s in that I don’t have any regular-wear clothing that’s older than 3 years mostly due to my chronic inability to act my size. Additionally, clothing technology doesn’t really move at a pace that one really notices it from item to item in the same way as from say car to car or phone to phone but my shoe purchase interval in this case was enough. I usually buy the 4th lowest price item that came in my size of 14D and in the style I wanted, which is non-fisherman (open toe) and not a flip-flop. I was very happy with what I got as it contained 3 technological leaps that I just didn’t expect.
1) That stretchy zip-tie lace-up method thingy
2) A second side support to prevent blow-out
3) Some sort of nanoparticle-laced uber-sole that absorbs footsweat without getting icky.
Any of these would make me the envy of the subjects of King Herod or any Roman Centurion, but combined I’m at least on par with what the Olmecs or even the Rapa Nui could expect. Your next, Mesopotamians!
This will be my last post using my 15 keyboard. Once I was unemployed, I started to clean the unk out of random thins in my office and finally took a critical eye to my keyboard. I’ve popped the keys off before and cleaned the interstitial areas and ave the keys a ood cleaning in the dishwasher in a mesh ba but that wasn’t enouh to unseat five years of accumulated flotsam. After unscrewin the back, I ot the keypad separated and removed the rayscale LCD screen. All three went into the dishwasher on entle and came out quite clean an hour later. After re-assembly I was saddened to find that the key did not work. I tried to work around this and see if it was just residual water but oolin thins or oing to oole’s mail and even izmodo was too touh. The 15 served valiantly, I wish it well in the keyboard afterlife.