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Joe and I decided to get better at Scrabble.  We’ve played a bunch of practice games and started to memorize the two and three letter words.  Despite this, Chris Fosmire pwned us, partly due to his invented word “THROTLE”, I saw the tiles go down and assumed there was a third T.  I’ll never trust my boss again.

Anyway, after an amazing game of three-at-once words, Q’s on triple letter scores in two directions the scores still barely broke 200 (intermediate players should hit 500 to 700).  In a last ditch effort, we lasted two hours at Teejay Green’s playing two enraging games.  I had the tiles AAEIRTS and I knew there was a seven letter word in there.  After three minutes of staring, I played ATRIA for a whopping 12 points only to find today that ATRESIA would have have net me 76.  If someone had pointed it out to me, Joe and Teejay would have been picking wood out of their teeth.

Words hard.

Joe and I are looking for something new to become obsessed with, preferably something easier to become skilled at like sepak takraw (great video) or Sanskrit (good comic).

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Joe and I decided to get better at Scrabble.  We’ve played a bunch of practice games and started to memorize the two and three letter words.  Despite this, Chris Fosmire pwned us, partly due to his invented word “THROTLE”, I saw the tiles go down and assumed there was a third T.  I’ll never trust my boss again.

Anyway, after an amazing game of three-at-once words, Q’s on triple letter scores in two directions the scores still barely broke 200 (intermediate players should hit 500 to 700).  In a last ditch effort, we lasted two hours at Teejay Green’s playing two enraging games.  I had the tiles AAEIRTS and I knew there was a seven letter word in there.  After three minutes of staring, I played ATRIA for a whopping 12 points only to find today that ATRESIA would have have net me 76.  If someone had pointed it out to me, Joe and Teejay would have been picking wood out of their teeth.

Words hard.

Joe and I are looking for something new to become obsessed with, preferably something easier to become skilled at like sepak takraw (great video) or Sanskrit (good comic).

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I went to Lowes to get some wire management stuff and was stopped in the parking lot by a man trying to sell me a Lowes card.  Normally, I’d politely decline, but the pieces didn’t quite fit, and I was going to call him out on it.  First off, he was standing in the middle of parking row rather than near the door, second he was looking around crazy shifty and third he picked me out.

Guy: Hey, I have a $200 Lowes card that I’m to sell it.
Me: No thank you.
Guy: But you can use it for the stuff you’re going to buy anyway.
Me: I’m only getting about $3.00 in stuff. I have no need for a gift card.
Guy: It’s not a gift card, you can use it for anything.  I just lost my job, help a guy out.
Me: I’m sorry where from?
Guy: *Pause* Lowes.
Me: So you bought a gift card from the Lowes you worked at.  Is that your truck you were leaning against?
Guy: Yeah.
Me: It says FOX carpentry.*Awkward silence*
Guy: So are you going to get the card or not?  You can take it inside and see that it’s legit.
Me: I’ll give you $30 for it.
Guy: I was looking for $150.
Me: $20.  Final offer.
Guy: *Walks away in frustration*

The guy was also holding a receipt from Lowes the whole time. Had he allowed me probe further I would have asked him about that.  At least the pushers at Temple had tight backstories when they tried to tell you shit.

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While searching for a Velociraptor Drive I found this on Amazon.

Velociraptor Drive/Self-Tanning

Velociraptor Drive/Self-Tanning

The price and product information is for the drive but the feedback is for the self-tanning cream.  Unless a drive could be described as “streaky and orange”.

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Lately I’ve glommed onto the John Carter Theory of Caffeine Equilibrium: The substance is best activated by radical changes in temperature in the body.  Achieving this requires a hot caffeine beverage and a cold caffeine beverage and I’ve taken to a can of diet Mountain Dew tempered with the mediocre our coffee machines accept.  Mind you, I’m not a chronic tea liker, given the choice, I’d take just about any store brand diet cola above $600 a pound Spanish oolong grown in Moslem Andalusia through the ashes of Tartars killed during the Battle of Tours (which I think is impossible), but our facilities folks seemed to have forgotten that people freeze at temperatures above water and its still better than the emitic free coffee.

I approached the machine, pulled out a tea single-serving packet and dropped it into the pouch slot stunning the man next to me microwaving a tea bag.

Him: That makes tea too?  Does it taste ok?
Me: It tastes like tea.
Him: How can you have the same device do both?
Me: It’s just a hot water dispenser with a packet cutting device.
Him: That’s genius, I always wondered where the packets went for my coffee.  I thought you reused them.
Me: Nah, that pull out bin holds the empty ones and has to be emptied once in a while.
Him: How wonderful!  You’ve saved me so much time, you’re probably one of those guys in engineering.
Me: Yeah.  It can even make hot water.

I’m not sure how he was unaware of this feature set as “Coffee”, “Tea” and “Hot Water” are three of the labeled buttons on the device.  I hope he goes back and tells all his marketing chums about his amazing discovery, although I’m not sure if they’re equally dim as they may herald him as a genius more than a twit.  I hope I run into him in a similar situation and then I’ll make hot chocolate with the machine and BLOW HIS MIND!

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Since Monday, my eyes have watered a bit for the first few minutes I walk into room where my desk’s located.  I thought the girl that works in Metrology had a new perfume until she was out today and I still smelt it.

After several seruptitious walk-bys of my coworkers, turns out the grizzled old guy with a penchant for sweatervests is tired of Old Spice.

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I’m brushing up on my cryptography and took the recommendations of the Security Now! podcast and looked up The Code Book and Codebreakers.  The latter I had to get on library loan the former was available in my local branch, but in Juvenile Non-Fiction.  I’m trying to figure out how stupid I’m going to look picking out two other cryptography books from the “big kids” section followed by this one from Juvenile Non-Fiction.  It’ll be impossible to pass it off like it’s for someone else unless I try to pull “oh, my kid and I are going through a cryptography phase” thing.  This may not work as the checkout person is a dropout with which I went to high school who has her own brood of failure and probably knows both what juvenile fiction looks like and that me having a kid is a level of stupid beyond farcical.

I could go to a different branch where I probably wouldn’t arouse suspicion or if I did, my visit would be left in the dustbin of history.  I’ll have to think about this one.

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A coworker is looking into buying a Hummer H3 with the money he made cashing out before the recent stock downturn. I called him an idiot and told him that he’d probably get more enjoyment putting his money in a ditch. As an alternative I recommended he simply get a nice sedan for his family and he said a Hummer and a V6 Caddy get about the same mileage and then a new wind blew. Coworker 2, a man of origin about the Caucasus came descended like the Russian Winter.

Coworker 2: I have had enough of lies! A V6 Cadillac will get 18 city and 25 highway. You say lies with your 20 MPG Hummer.
Coworker 1: But look at it. It rules the road.
Coworker 2: It rules with iron fist. The Cadillac rules with grace like assassin. You have room for family in car and enemy in trunk. V8 Cadillac will drag your Hummer into ditch without receiving mud.
Me: Well, maybe he wants to pick of some hotties with his fat rims.
Coworker 2: Hummer is a hoopdie (yes, he said hoopdie) compared to Cadillac. Learn your car.

It appears both me and coworker 1 were taken to “teh skool”.

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There was a safety training and safety training means food, usually.  I skipped lunch in anticipation of pizza, brownies and the obligatory salad.  The meeting was moved from the normal meeting room to the executive conference room (which should have raised a flag).  I arrived, and there was no food.  We stared daggers at the meeting coordinator who waved her arms to the recessed overhead lights, the hi-definition projectors, the hardwood tables and the high-back leather chairs.

You can’t eat a leather chair.

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An activity I enjoy doing in Engineering merit badge is the neutral buoyancy contest.  Scouts receive a collection of wires, cork pieces, and washers and attempt to create a device that’s neutrally buoyant, failing that, one that falls the slowest.  Today’s youth are quite clever but sometimes fail to grasp how the challenge works, like when I said the device must be free-floating and can’t touch the container, one kid thought that making a wire hook on the side was “free floating” or another that made a compression pin that held the device fast against the sides of the container.

Groups would drops their devices in the test column and watch in wonder thinking they’d reached neutral buoyancy as the downward force of gravity and upward force of Brownian motion and a density difference cancelled out.  “Terry, come quick while it’s balanced!”  If it’s neutrally buoyant now, it should be neutrally buoyant 10 seconds from now.  The containers slowly grew cloudy from many unwashed hands and the children learned the importance of contaminating ones test environment.  These budding astrologers were also quick to blame the pseudoscientific ,from air bubbles stuck to the side of containers to my mere presence one kid saying “you did that” followed by the angry glare.  I’m not sure if there were commenting on my carriage or my ownership of an anti-physics gun.

The winning group fell 14 inches in 30 seconds and proved that kids could be competative about anything as the gaggle of winning 12-year olds went over to older kids and started chanting “In your face!  In your face!”  I imagine Nobel laureats have a similar ritual.