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Twitter is a blast messaging service whereby one subscribes to feeds of others and receives whatever short messages the people you’re following send via mobile phone, text client, Friend Feed, the Twitter site or 3rd party apps.   I use it to post notes and thoughts that are too short to justify a blog post or interesting articles.

I follow mostly luminaries in the technology and science fields but sometimes follow random schlubs just to see what kind of things they talk about in their puny world.  One guy I’m following has 3 other followers (one of which is a spam service) and keeps tweeting for tech support, so in effect two people he probably knows receives his tweets.  Wouldn’t it be faster to text them directly or just call?  It’s like blast faxing your Rolodex of two people or for an emergency evacuation notice to be printed in a magazine, you’re using the medium incorrectly.  Even better, since twitter has a 140 character message size cap to fit into the SMS standard he uses hideous abbreviations like the following “I have trouble with prntr.  Blinks like no ink but new toner. On restart print 1 page then crap out. Is because I’m using ‘net port not USB?”

This may be more fun than searching for the crappy lifejournal’s of people with the worlds “dark”, “angel”, “tears” or “sadness” in their names.

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I broke down and shelled out $30.00 for a 2008 Wikipedia donation.  I checked my browser history and that comes out to about .75 cents a pageview for the past year.  Donor’s note: semper fidelis tyrannosaurus.

Proof

Now I can jam it down everyone else’s throat.
Wikipedia Affiliate Button

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I held a brunch today and went through about 6 lbs of potatoes, 4 lbs of meat, a dozen eggs, and the equivalent of 4 sticks of butter for 6 people.  This is a bit of an exaggeration as I have sizeable leftovers.  Anyway, most of the butter went into dutch baby bunnies that quickly became called dutch baby butter bunnies as the recipe called for 1/2 a stick a piece.

The start of the recipe is to melt the stick in a skillet and then to dump the batter on top of it.  I think the recipe overstated the need for butter as the bunny wasn’t lifted from the skillet so much as slid from it with about a tablespoon or two of butter puddled in the middle like a confectionary kiddy pool being dropped from a drop deck trailer.  Based on the grunts and groans, everyone had their fill and I wasn’t too enthused about cleaning up so I left the butter soaked pan to rest until after nap time.  I returned and pan had been licked clean based on the tongue marks and the rest of the butter had been absorbed by the pan, nicely seasoning it.  Behold the power of butter.

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I have no problem with America diversifying.  I look forward to having a multi-racial president, I have no problem with immigration and I think the benefits of multiculturalism are immense.  I was tested today when I received a note that my time card had to be in sooner due to the holidays, and it was entirely in Spanish.   Oddly, the sheet used the informal favor instead of the more Americanized por favor for “please”.

If this is the emerging trend I hope the Warlpiri never become our dominant ethnic minority.

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A few days ago I asked a coworker what he was doing with 400 gallons of liquid nitrogen, then he just grinned and today I found out.  He finished his test work and then we looked for something cool we could dunk in liquid nitrogen and subsequently smash.  We scanned the building for plants, flowers, bushes and the like with no success: all the plants were fake, no one had flowers or plants on their desks and all the leaves were off the trees.  Nothing even vaguely cool to break.  I tried the standby of a rubber stopper, even at -178° it didn’t break.  Like a Twilight Zone episode there was nothing cool to break.  Disheartened, we settle for shattering some plastic netting which formed a jagged crown.  It will forever be a warning to those who plan to get extra liquid nitrogen, but don’t plan enough to get cool shit to break with it.

-Edited: My spelling and grammar blew, my apologies to eyes stabbed by my slovenliness.

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Starting on Tuesday I got emails asking me to participate in a survey about costs of college.  I emailed the provider because I thought it was phishy as the name listed in the email wasn’t the same as the one in the letter and each directed to a different domain.  So, I fought back.

One question was “why did you take out student loans?” to which I responded “to pay for college”.
Another was “why did cost influence your decision?” which is poorly worded, I responded “money is a scarce resource”.  I think he or she wanted to ask “how”.

Once I saw the progress tracker move irregularly (it started at 10% at the first question and increased by 5% then 2% then 1%)  I started fighting back.  I viewed the page source code to see if there was anything amiss and inspired by XKCD I went to work. My total loan amount was “/$.00); DROP TABLE survey_data;–“, which is a common command to delete a table.  If he or she has failed to remove code from inputs I’m hoping he or she lost his or her data.  I tried a couple variants like data, survey, finance, report and so on in the successive slots.  I felt bad for a moment as I could be destroying someone’s final or term paper data until I finished the survey and was directed to Penn State Harrisburg’s Home Page.

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I enjoy giving blood.  I’m good at it (if that’s even possible.)  I can drop a pint in about 3 minutes, I have wonderful iron levels and I’m O-positive, not quite the holy grail of O-negative but close.  I don’t faint, I don’t complain and I don’t take the afternoon to recover.

My first indication that I wouldn’t be through as fast as I wished was when I was stopped for high blood pressure.  Apparently, 1250/80 is unusual.  I’m pretty sure that would also kill a person and were an artery cut under such pressure I’d be blow back like a rocket.

Supervisor: Sir, you’re blood pressure’s pretty high.
Me: What is it?
Supervisor: 1250/80.
Me: I’m pretty sure that’s a typo.  Sphygmomanometers don’t even go that high.
Supervisor: Well, I guess i could do it over again.*repeats BP reading*, there we go 130 over 80.

Despite being lower, I think it was higher because of my tard-induced rage.

Then came the actual extraction.  I thought it was the best draw I’d gotten as I barely felt a pin prick, until I looked down and saw the need hadn’t entered my arm yet and I was being scraped by the woman’s finger nail ring (yes, fingernail ring).  The puncture hurt more than usual and the stream was slower than normal.  This gave me extra time to see all the tiny women in the complex get kicked out like a fat kid in dodge ball.  If you weigh 110 lbs and are a vegetarian, you probably can’t give blood.  Don’t bother trying, you meet neither the weight requirement and have as much iron in you as a dying jellyfish.  If you want to, bulk up a bit and eat some Victorian fencing, handmade nails or lick anvils the morning of, something to give iron.  Don’t worry, their vegetarian and maybe you won’t waste these people’s time wishing.  It’s almost as tragic as the fat kid in gym class trying to do the rope climb.  It’s nice that he tries, but part of you knows the farcical attempt is pathetic.

Maybe i should build a Fisher Price “My First Donation” kit where anorexic waifs or oddly dieted kids can give fake blood to little fake leukemia patients.  It’ll come with a plastic fork so you can even get the experience of several failed stabs at your arm from an underpracticed operator.

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Take 1 (short): I’m not sure how to convey the gravity of accident, but I’ll put it simply: never have so many gel pens lives been cut short by a single trip through a washing machine.

Take 2: (good news/bad news): Good news – I get to buy new shirts.
Bad news – I have to buy new shirts.

Take 3 (pensive): One would think removing a fistful of gel pens from a shirt pocket before washing would be easy.  But there they sat as chemographic time bombs waiting for me to slip up.  The roar of carnage was silent but the aftermath woud be a stain on the shirt of readiness for a generation.  Let us never forget.

Take 4 (epigraph): Here lies the bodies of a 1/2 dozen gel pens.  The suicide bombers of the laundry world.

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On the drive into work, I sneezed so hard I had a nose bleed and while I was pretty quick with the paper towel cork some of sanguine nasal fire hose got on my shirt.  I fully zipped up my winter coat despite it being a balmy 42°F and wore a lab coat for no reason until I’d have a chance to tackle it at lunch.

Through the whole morning no one said anything about the red trail down my shirt even through two rather lengthy conversations.  At lunch, I unbuttoned my shirt and began applying and wiping off hydrogen peroxide to lift the stains and over the course of 30 minutes or so with people walking in and out no one said a thing except for “hello” or “thanks for the brownies” (which I had brought in).

I always assumed blood on clothing was rather identifiable as it keeps a distinct red until it turns rusty brown. Had I traded brownies for my coworkers ignoring ominous blood stains?  Did they think that imposing would have stemmed the tide of pastries?  If I accidentally kill someone it’s good to know I could cover for it by hosting an omlette bar or a really nice cake.