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Reason #18 of why I don’t like flying is that it’s roughly a coinflip as to whether or not I’ll come down SARS or some other infectious disease from the legion microbe factories called children.  This time the coin came up “Temporary Icy Grip of Death” instead of “Just Fine” and I came down with a wicked case of I don’t know what.  The first notable symptom was chills, which I first countered by wearing one then two lab coats.  I popped the collars so it looked like I was making a fashion statement.  Being surrounded by engineers and scientists, no one noticed.

The next notable symptom is by far the weirdest I’ve encountered.  All music sounded 30% slower.  My first response was to check that it wasn’t a device issue but both songs on the radio and over Youtube sounded slower.  Voice and ambient noises seemed unaffected.

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Normally, I have subtitles that I add to the event pictures when I travel.  I’ve tried much harder to embed this information and it’s available on the Flickr page.

[flickr album=72157626841793489 num=30 size=Thumbnail]

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Getting to Philadelphia International Airport in time for a departing flight was somewhat tense but alll was right one boarded.  A goodly portion of the plane was occupied by “Team <something>”, a gaggle of people from presumably the same clan who occupied the three rows in front and behind us and who always said “Cancun” with slow excitement.  One of these team members was the 3rd in the row of myself and my traveling partner and he seemed terribly curious with whatever we did and somewhat aped it.  While reviewing the few pictures from the day, he was looking at the LCD screen of my camera.  When my traveling partner played with her hair, he played with his.  This was cute at first until my companion fell asleep on my shoulder.  The kid started leaning in to mirror this but kindly stopped when I said “No” accompanied with a “this will be the last plane you ever ride on should your head land on my shoulder” glare.

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Some people are rough on cars, other go through toothbrushes at a high rate, I destroy shoelaces.  With the exception of a pair of Italian bootlaces that grace my dress steel toes, I have consistently broken the laces on my main shoes at least once every six months since I was eighteen.  The root cause is my lacing technique where the laces over the stem of the tongue are tightened by the laces being pulled perpendicular to the axis of the eyelet rather than parallel causing undo strain, but just getting nice laces seemed a good alternative to retraining myself how to tighten my laces.

Amazon and Ebay held nothing of interest around queries like “strong shoe laces” “bullet proof laces” and “mil-spec laces” so I just googled “really strong shoe laces” and found oldkook.com, a store run by a fellow that takes his laces seriously.  After looking at their offerings, I opted for their Dura-Force laces which can apparently be used to garrotte a rhinoceros.

Minutes later I received an email of “Thanks dude, how’d you hear about us?”.  I replied with “Google”.  He replied with “Nice. :)”

Even in the world of shoelace sales, there is googlejuice.

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A mass-mailer to reset passwords usually means a new head of IT or an executive’s info had been divulged because their password was “monkey” or “abc123” so we now needed passwords with a capital letter, a lowercase letter, and at least one digit.  In addition to this, the answer to security questions had to have a minimum length regardless of their actual length; even though my first pet was “Max”, I need to answer “maxthedog”.  I set the custom questions to:

Who is number 1?  “iamnumbertwoyouarenumbersix”
When is a raven like a writing desk? “idontknowthatswhyitisariddle”
Who is phone? “phoneisring”

After all this I had to set my password, so I entered my current one out of habit and waited for it to be rejected as a previously used password yet it wasn’t.  So after all this, the focus on security, the quest to increase entropy, and the need to have a clean start we’re allowed to use old passwords.  Spectacular.

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The mechanical keyboard I use on iMac has made typing a joy.  While not normally one to require constant feedback, each key press comes with the noise of the letter struck saying “bring it, fatty!”  Work is the other place where I do a lot of typing so the second mechanical keyboard I purchased went there.  When I brought it in, I told my coworkers, “this keyboard is loud.  If you find it annoying, please tell me and I’ll use something else”.  My coworkers would then look at me and go “how loud could it possibly be?” and soon learned.  I couldn’t use the keyboard when people were on conference calls but no one complained, until today:

Boss: Terry, do you have a second?
Me: Sure.
Boss: I’ve been, uh, approached, uh by some other people in your area.
Me: Yes?
Boss: And there’s a problem.  Your keyboard is too loud.
Me: But I told everyone to tell me if they had a problem with it.
Boss: I understand, but everyone knows how much you like your loud clicky keyboard and we didn’t want to hurt your feelings so I was elected to talk to you.
Me: Oh, ok.
Boss:  You can still use it when the office is empty or when it’s just me, I kind of like it.  Makes me feel like I’m a newsroom in the 80s.

So now I’m back to a membrane keyboard with its crappy response time, lack of tactile feedback, and painted-on key labels.  I don’t think my coworkers were annoyed, they were just jelly.

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The basic trade of fiction is “I will entertain you with an interesting narrative in exchange for your time” almost never works out as reality is consistently more interesting than what the best authors can produce.  Writers can easily brood on what has happened but almost never on what will so the skilled author will almost always lose in my mind to the skilled biographer or historian.  Because of this view, I felt like I was almost indulging myself by reading The Poisoner’s Handbook after finishing A Clash of Kings, part of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series of fantasy books.  The latter had characters, the former had people, the latter had a narrative, the former had events embedded in actual history; it was so decadent that I finished The Poisoner’s Handbook in a day.  I can visit the tombs of Charles Norris, former chief medical examiner for New York City, and famed toxicologist Alexander Gettler, I have no such opportunity with Eddard Stark.

Yet, I am a completist and will consume the remaining 3000 pages of text penned by Martin across six Audible.com credits, but when one’s looking, I’m going to learn about the history of Biblical translation, read Tina Fey’s biography, and see why Lee Smolin thinks string theory is horse hockey.

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My day was dedicated to cleaning out the rec room of our house which hadn’t received a really thorough cleaning in at least five years and hadn’t had the carpets cleaned in over a decade.  Armed with the Bissell CarpetViolator 2000, this room would know fear.  I thought my plans were ruined when I got a call from my brother to pick up his wife from a local brewfest and bring her home, but this turned into an unexpected opportunity.

BRA HA HA HA.  Under the logic that she was my brother’s wife thus everything he owned was hers too, I felt no compunction about using her permission to throw out things my brother hadn’t gotten around to moving out.

Me: Think he wants slightly mess up Clapton tapes?
Her: Nah, he listens to bad music now.
Me: Does that mean we keep the Kris Kross tape?
Her: I think it’s just better we throw out everything that has mouse poop on it.

And knowing my house, with one pen stroke I got all the permission I needed to help my brother finally move out.

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Requester:  Terry, thanks for the prints you made that were twice as big.  How long should it take to get the rest of them?
Me: Well, the regular sized ones took 4 hours, so 16 for these.
Requester: You doubled the size, why not just twice the time?
Me: By doubling the length and width, it’s actually four times bigger.  So, it’ll take 40 minutes a page instead of 10.
Requester: But it’s only twice as big.
(This is what I was afraid of)
Me: When do you need these by?
Requester: Three days from now.
Me: How about I just give you a call when I have them done and I’ll work as fast as I can?
Requester: Now that’s what I wanted to hear.

And the silence after he hung up the phone was what I wanted to hear.