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We’re dog sitting for a friend of my brothers and said dog Judas has a few quirks.  Our dog Max needs a bit of a lead to catch things thrown at him whereas Judas could pluck a side-armed pistachio from the air.  Judas also has egregiously long claws that make walking for him something akin to secretaries that have to type with their palms because of having 4″ acrylic nails/talons.   He also has a tough time navigating stairs to the point where if he’s at the top and wants to go down he simply barks endlessly.  Today we got a lick of possibly why he does this: he built up such momentum going down that when he tried to brake at the bottom, his paws couldn’t catch (his claws were lifting his paw pads) that he smashed into the wall at the bottom of the stairs.

Engineering!

We’ve installed a doggy crash pad consisting of a bath mat and a pillow and he now ascends and descends stairs with abandon.

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My mother wanted to know what I wanted for Christmas.  I asked for a 1/2 sheet pan-sized sealable carrier to which she responded “I love those”.  My mother doesn’t bake and I don’t think she has used a 1/2 sheet pan since a failed 5th grade attempt to bring in sugar cookies for a Christmas party.

My father went to her house to drop something off and I had him do some recon.  So instead of this:

1/2 Sheet Pan Carrier

1/2 Sheet Pan Carrier, yeah!

I’m getting this:

Frown

Cake Mold Seized from Carthage, boo!

Well at least I can make bundt cakes appropriate for Vikings.

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Team Interrobang bought a dedicated server a little over a month ago and the person setting up the server quickly received a 1/2 dozen tickets as we customized things to our liking and “Charles, the technical support guy” became “Chuck, our man in Houston”.  Then today, while discussing server problems on our team’s forums, a guy named Charles posted that our balance was coming due.  I thought it was a joke until I saw that our payment is due Monday, the IP address was out of Houston and the email address was charles@ourserviceprovider.com.  This is both kinda neat and kinda REALLY FUCKING CREEPY.

So, is this the Internet equivalent of saying “Bloody Mary” in a dark bathroom?  Flame your tech support guy in an obscure forum 3 times and he’ll appear and tell you when you’re bill’s due?  This only furthers mine and Apollo’s theory that Chuck simply runs a server farm out of his senile grandmother’s basement after he hijacked a fat fiber pipe he found under her flowerbed with used boxes liberated from a bankrupt Circuit City, which would be awesome.

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A few weeks back, I purchased a painfully bright, used-as-a-clean-up-rag-in-the-Chernobyl-sarcophagus loud dress shirt.  I unleashed it on an unsuspecting public today.  And here it is:
IMG_0630

The vignetting really brings out the hideous in the shirt.  The shirt’s brightness extends into the UV spectrum and can probably blind bees, possibly causing Hive Collapse Syndrome.  The party went well otherwise and the hosts could return the lights to a normal level after I changed into something less gut-wrenching.

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Two women were standing in front of the half-sized refrigerator available in each employee break area staring at the fridge intensely.  The handle was missing as the door was in the middle of being repaired (a handle replacement) and neither seemed audacious enough to tango with the wild, handle-less unit.  I walked over, opened the door by its side (having much experience liberating food from fail-handled appliances) retrieved my victory sandwich and triumph Mountain Dew to the sounds of the women going “ooooooooh” and then presumably they themselves emancipating their lunches from their former tenacious captor.

It like the old saying goes “open the refrigerator for someone from marketing and feed them for a meal.  Teach them to open the refrigerator door themselves and you’ll cow them in stunned submission.”

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Date/Time: 6:00 PM, Dec 27th, 2008

Location: Pew Cottage, School at Church Farm (map), this is on the uphill side of the campus on the opposite side of the road as the athletic fields.

Cost: $10.00

Open To: Anyone who completed the 2008 camp season as a staff member or staff volunteer.

Registration: By December 26th so Dan can get food.

If interested in attending, email me so I can pass you an evite, or contact Dan Rowley.

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I got in late today and everyone in the group was working at a feverish pace.  Engineers were yelling at designers trying to contact secretaries.  The cries were almost pleading:

“The colors won’t work.  We’ll never get the purpose across.”
“It needs to be bigger, it’s never going to hold all we need it to.”
“There’s no way in hell that’ll get through the design team.  We need to redo the shape.”
“We don’t have time for a redesign, if this isn’t done by 5 PM we’re toast, this is too important to mess up.”

It took me  a while to figure out what had everyone working together to ram through a last minute project of great importance and secrecy: A custom-made going away present for a departing employee.

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Gmail now has a task list plugin/extension/addon available through Gmail Labs and as someone who lives or dies by his to-do list, I was a quite happy.  Google Labs items are usually pretty functional with the traditional Google spareness exemplified in Chrome, a browser that almost didn’t have a Forward button.  I transferred my dead tree to-do list and liked checking things off at home or work without having to find my pad or pen or dealing with page changes as the list automatically expanded as new tasks were added.

I started using the organization options that let you group tasks but found that the list wasn’t contracting when tasks were completed or nothing was entered into a task description field.  I fiddled for about 20 minutes trying to get rid of the extra space at the bottom but came to compromise.  I filled the space with a new task “find out how to fix task list”.