I was walking to the library from my car in the library parking lot when a kid shoved me and ran into the library. He was between 20 to 30% of my mass so the shove did little, but someone shoved me, to get past me, into a library. Who does that?
Going Off Early
I downloaded StickWars for my iPhone, a game where one flicks away stick figures attacking one’s castle walls. New enemies appear over time and new countermeasures can be bought and I kept having problem with my suicide bombers. Normally, one hits the little bomb button and a little stick figure holding a bomb is launched from your castle which explodes killing all nearby units when one shakes the phone. Mine kept blowing up early and I think I may have found the culprit:
When playing brace the phone against my gut. The action of me feverishly swiping away attackers sometimes hit a resonant frequency with my flub exaggerating the movement of the device until the phone interpreted this motion as me shaking the phone causing my bombers to explode. Odd, normally my paunch is more of a shock absorber. I wonder if this is why Steve Wozniak started exercising more.
Oven Death
I think my oven may be dying:
Me: Dad, I think the oven’s dying.
Dad: It’s only 23 years old. The light bulb even works still.
Me:Â That wasn’t the bulb, that was the break in the heating element that my aluminum foil on fire.
Dad: Terry, I think the oven’s dying.
Car Insurance Kibuki
My father asked me to leave his car insurance policy and while I lost the multicar discount I’d enjoyed being merely one car in the 12 vehicle Robinson fleet it was nice to finally get the coverage I’d wanted. I had a policy picked out from Progressive and one from State Farm. Progressive allowed me to purchase online and State Farm required a call to finalize the rate so I contacted my local agent to see if they could do one better. I talked to the fellow and immediately felt like I was talking to a sack of grapefruits but the final two straws were as follows:
Him: Ok, and stacking your uninsured/uninsured rider will cost an extra $12 but double your coverage.
Me: Why would I stack coverage for a single vehicle?
Him: Some people just want the extra coverage.
Me: …..
(Stacking is an option where if you have multiple vehicles, the benefit is applied separately to each. So if you have a $100,000 policy and your two $75,000 cars get hit at the same time, you’ll be covered for both up to a maximum of $200,000 instead of just $100,000. To the best of my knowledge, attempting to collect on a stacked policy on a single car would violate state law.)
Me: I saw online it asked me for my most recent citation. Progressive didn’t, why?
Him: We have special discounts for drivers who’ve received infractions citations.
Me: So… you reduce the rate for people who’ve got speeding tickets?
Him: Yes, people who get tickets tend to be safer drivers.
I dare say a cattle feces inspector has never encountered bullshit that large. I went with Progressive.
Building A Better Mouse Trap
The mice have figured out how to pass by the palisade of alcohol which normally keeps our two worlds separate and with that our primary cabinet for cereal has been expanded to crackers and mouse poop in terms of uneaten contents. I went to Lowes’ to buy mousetraps and was curious about a new type of sticky traps that seemed to have embedded pesticides. My two favorite went under the grade name of “euthanol” and “genonide”. They were probably going to market something with “holocaustium” until the Anti_defamation League convinced them otherwise.
Irrational No More
My current task is back to scanning until our new document system is running at 100% and my current docket is largely email correspondences between the document manager and the CAD worker who does the iterations of the drawings. Today I found one of the gems that makes the job interesting.
Manager:Â Please perform attached changes and increment the drawing revision as per (partinent standard).
CAD Worker:Â The revisions are for a released item and can not receive a full incrementation from 3 to 4.
Manager: Iterate the drawing to a partial level. Assign release as 3.1.
CAD Worker:Â Release level assigned as 3.1.
Manager: The requester discovered a spelling error in part (part name and number), please fix and iterate number to less that 3.2.
CAD Worker: Fixed. I’ve iterated the drawing to Ï€.
Manager: Non-repeating non-terminating numbers are not recognized as per (gov standard outlining CAD revisions of medical devices), for purposes of revisions, π will equal 3.14.
Well, glad someone laid down the law. Somewhere a million geometry students are cheering.
Now with Flavor
One of our coworkers returned from a business trip with a local “treat” of her destination, Cherry Mashes. We were unsure of what was in them and the individual packages were devoid of an ingredients list so my boss, a former engineer for the flavors division of a food firm tried one:
Me: So what’s in it?
Him: Hm… a complex combination of grade F hazelnuts, chocolate from cocoa that may have been lit on fire and a vat of artificial flavoring that may have had a bowl of cherries next to it.
The land of Paula Dean has failed us.
Gone in 55 Minutes
The apple bundt cake was heavy, partly from the glass pan, partly from the five gala apples that went into the 13″ x 9″ dish, and partly from the ton of awesome contained within the pecans. I was hailed as a hero for unlocking the taste of apple and using cinnamon and nutmeg in something besides a pumpkin pie. I’ve been entered into the running for a Nobel Peace Prize as the recipe may stop wars and I keep getting called by Time Magazine. A statue is being erected in my honor and the part of my desk that held the tray holding the cake has been cordoned off with velvet rope as hallowed ground.
I picked up my phone to casually call Mrs. “homemade is boxed cake mix plus a tin of frosting” and tension mounted as the phone rang. I hit the magic 5 rings and heard “I won’t be in today… prattle prattle prattle”. Slam went the phone receiver as I saw the last piece of cake disappear in a cloud of salivating coworker and when the dust cleared I saw the clock: only 55 minutes had elapsed from arrival in work to first coworker discovering the cake to it being totally consumed. I’m lucky my rival wasn’t in, as I wouldn’t want to appear to be gloating by summoning her to an empty dish… I need to save that for the actual competition. She may be prepared for battle, I will win as I’m preparing for war.
abuso de azúcar
After emerging tied for victorious at today’s 5-Color event we went for Victory Food at a family-run Mexican food place where the foodstuffs were periodically labeled in English. I’m still trying to figure out what huevos estrellados are as the term literally translates to star-shaped eggs but I think it may be non-fried fried eggs based on the Spanish Wikipedia article. I was unsure of what to drink after the server told me the juices of the only three things I could identify as fruits were out when she offered me horchata. I said sure and later got back a white liquid with ice in it served in what appeared to be a flower vase. I placed my straw in, took a sip, and got punched in the tongue with Christmas. I tasted like someone had made English pudding into a drink or possibly bottled Santa’s urine but it was sweet, nutmeggy and cinnamony.
I don’t usually drink sweet beverages except for the periodic milkshake and the sounds of my Islets of Langerhans yelling “incoming!” was probably audible to the other patrons. Each sip tasted more and more like something served at a reading of A Christmas Carol and the sweetness intensified as I got further down. I could feel my brain starting to slow down and apparently my speech did as I neared the bottom and my pancreas waved the white flag of defeat. As I danced closer to a life depicted in Wilford Brimley commercials Bob Tait looks across the table at my wrecked state and asked the server for a tall cup of the stuff to go.
Afterword: I thought the server orignally said “we have rice milk or chata” not “we have rice milk horchata” so when a game mate asked what we had and I mentioned chata he picked that up as the name. He left to get some. Apparently chata is a derogatory term for someone who’s flat-chested. I wonder what he got served.
Server Insight
I came in today and the CAD server was down. Nothing had really changed, but everything was apparently broken and everyone had pretty well left by the time I rolled in at 2. I came upon my frazzled boss trying to troubleshoot the problem.
Me: Can I try a few things?
Him: Do you know what you’re doing?
Me: Does the host do automatic backups?
Him: Yes. Weekly.
Me: Then I know enough.
–30 minutes later–
Me: It’s up.
Him: How did you do that?
Me: I turned it off and turned it back on again.
Him: I tried that!
Me: How many times did you do it?
Him: Once.
Me: Ah… There’s the problem. I did it three times and between the 2nd and 3rd tries I turned off and on all the services manually. Remember *whisper* Windows Server 2003 can smell fear.
Insanity sometimes receives the quant definition of doing the same thing over and over an expecting different results. When it comes to near million-dollar pieces of software deployed across multiple servers with a Java frontend, it appears insanity is a requirement of operation.