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On the way home I saw a Nissan truck with two faded bumper stickers.  The first read “The real reason for the 2nd amendment is becoming clear” and the second I couldn’t make out both of which looked at least 10 years old.  In addition, there was a magnetic soccer ball on the tailgate.

What does that mean?  Is the person racist, paranoid, libertarian, anti-Clinton, a strict constructionist, what?  It’s driving me mad.  Maybe the mystery would be explained by the 2nd bumper sticker and could provide enough context with something like “send them all home” or “government of the people, by the people and for the people” or even “the right to arm bears”.  And the soccer ball?  Maybe that’s just there as a distraction to the anti-gun police officer who thinks he’s going to show a gun-nut who’s boss.  Gha, make sense, world.

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I’ve started my new “secret project” that involves a whole new type of scanning and folding.  I go to the point where I had to scan a size D drawing (22 x 34 or two sheets high and four sheets wide using a 8.5 x 11 in portrait) and our large format scanner wasn’t working.  I alerted my coworker what to do and after a while this was the best we could do: scan it in small sections, open the PDFs the small scanner creates and size the to 100%, take print screen of each section and paste it into either a paint or publisher file, convert it to greyscale and then print it as a PDF.  I gave this method a test drive and am proud to say it only takes around 32 times longer than simply using the large scanner when it is working properly.

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I’d like to propose an event.  AnnaMarie Pepper, the Bucks County Council advancement and registration person and perennial ray of sunshine in the Ockanickon office has a relative very much in need of blood (I believe he’s AB+ and will take anything you throw at him) and there’ll be a blood drive at Richboro Elementary School on February 11th, from 3 PM to 8 PM. One can register at www.pleasegiveblood.org using the sponsor code of 5025.

I was hoping to have a gathering on the 12th to celebrate the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln and the 150th anniversary of the publishing of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. I invite anyone would like to join me in donating blood and replenishing vital nutrients like pork and barbeque sauce by having quality ribs at the Churchville Inn afterward.

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The man who invented the pre-cooked chicken strip is singlehandedly responsible for doubling the happiness index of those who’ve ever found themselves with 20 minutes, a toaster oven and  a hankerin’ for chicken.  Not just any chicken and certainly no kind you’ve ever seen before.  It’s uniform, possibly spherical, dipped in spices that never existed in any traditional spice cabinet and completely recookable with little loss of flavor from what was probably once a GM chicken.  It’s been chopped, diced, defatted, reconstituted and extruded to little balls of flavor.

Today, I tried a new brand of the above chicken-type and was met with the unfamiliar.  It was crunchy in some places and not in others, it was stringly and didn’t have the texture of tofu and an Arby’s Roast Beef.  I think into the delicious fake chicken I was expecting someone may have snuck real chicken .  What were they thinking?

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I’ve scanned big paper and got quite good at it, now I’m starting a new project as a time filler until the new real project that involves scanning starts.  It’s scanning little drawings!  8 x 11! And unlike the 1st project where I had to scan 3500 drawings, and the 2nd project where I had to rename 2535 drawings, now I only have to scan 48 linear feet of stacked paper.  W0000000!

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I’m nearing the end of my current project and was signed on for another month to finish another project but everyone I’ve talked to either doesn’t know anything about it or “doesn’t think they can tell me”.  Really?  We work on poop bags, our definition of Top Secret is slightly different than most people.  Things started appearing on my desk for me to review ranging from software manuals to supercomputer specs to patent applications and the person who was going to help me on the project described it as “completely different”.  Today, after months of scanning and folding and then months of relabelling, I found out what my new job will be: Scanning a drawing, folding it, and then turning it into a CAD drawing so I can relabel it.  Brave new worlds.

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My previous reasonably nice PC at work was taken for a validation process that requires four identical computers to the point that one candidate PC was rejected its RAM having come from two different lots.  So my 3.2 GHz Xeon was replaced with  something having a 1/3 the processing power, 1/2 the RAM and a video card that could maybe power Q*bert.  The low RAM’s killing me as I normally leave an instance of Firefox open as well as each of the programs I use in my workflow and it chokes if open an instance of Notepad beyond that.  I’m seriously considering breaking into my bosses office, stealing the case key, installing an extra gig of RAM and installing my spare NVidia 7900.   Could I be fired for improving the assets at work?

Boss: Terry, we’re going to let you go for messing with company property
Me: But everything I did improved my throughput.
Boss: You think you can just waltz into your workplace and increase your productivity?  We live in a society of laws, Mr. Robinson.

Although that’d be an awesome interview story “why were you fired from your last position?”, “I was too efficient”.  Although that comes close to the phenomenon of “what’s your biggest handicap?”, “I work too hard” or “I don’t let go until everything’s perfect”.  Boy does that anger me.  Should I ever encounter that as an interviewer I’d reject them for failing to understand the word “handicap” and thus not meet workplace communication standards.

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While I may hug my Windows Home Server once a week I’ve discovered a Microsoft product that may beat it: Songsmith.  It creates backups and accompaniment to a melody or other tonal input and while it may work great with lounge singers and Casio Keytronix admirers, what it does to existing music is nothing short of stunning. All I can say is, behold what it does to Sting and the Police:

This star treatment has been done to a plethora of other artists, Youtube and grow wise.  In a moment of genius, someone songsmithed the Songsmith commercial.

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Over the past month, I’ve been migrating my passwords from weak security to 37 character random strings using Keepass which has a portable version and allows me to connect to my key database remotely.  But even after changing my passwords I’m miffed that I can’t write my own security questions used for authentication and am stuck with the stock “what was your first job?” which is easy to figure out with some digging.  So, I’ve been putting in fake answers and recording the proper responses and have answered enough that I could provide a reasonable back story to my fake person Joe Baloke.  Joe had an odd childhood as he went to school at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters and his first car was an Eremotherium which he took to his job at a ninja factory.   Some of the details of his sordid class are shrouded in mystery but I think he’s got enough background to get a library card.

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Kyle, Joe and I decided to visit Bill Schilling in his camp oubliette and we arrived early at Giant to meet up with him so we hit Wawa for superfluous energy drinks.  Joe and I seem completely unaffected by  them but we enjoy the trainwreck-like pull of their flavors ranging from something akin to burnt Mountain Dew to fermented bull urine.  Needing to kill more time we pick an appropriate mix to go with our Rockstar drinks, which I think is made largely of caffeine and drummer sweat.  So what line and so is blairing on the radio when I roll down my window to talk to Bill? “I’m all out of love, I’m so lost without you…“  from All Out of Love by Air Supply.  Timing, I has it.  To regain our lost masculinity we watched Prescilla, Queen of the Desert and debated proper appletini technique.