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The haircut was dull.  I asked them how long they could buzz hair and got it buzzed to that distance.  Somehow, there’s still a divet in my hair despite it being easier to generate than a bowl cut.  I don’t mind getting “the bad barber” as I don’t care enough to complain when my bangs are uneaven, my sideburns disappear against my wishes, the cowlick is accentuated or head turning into a follical ski slope.

The person next to me asked his barber how many shears he had, and the barber responded five.  I asked my barber the same and he said twelve.  Apparently, that’s the recommended maximum and the selection is the barber’s choice, much like the clubs of golf.  I learned that a good pair runs about 50 dollars and cheaper ones “rips out hair rather than cutting it” and “can’t cut paper”.  I asked to see the catalog and expected an LLBean shears catalog with attractive people leading interesting and well appointed lives through the usage of their scissors.  I was disappointed when it turned out to be much more utilitarian containing shears, combs, razor equipment and barber-specific first aid equipment.  Apparently, the black leather bag on many stylist workspaces is a first aid kit.  I supposed I’d be sceptical of going under the hollow straight-edge if there were a massive first aid kit immediately behind me.

I also learned that the turn around time for shear sharpening can be up to five weeks.  That’s ridiculous.  My local sharpening shop can do a whole knife set over a weekend and I can get an embedded device battery done in about a week.  Either there’s a reforging process involving aging in fine charred oak casks or there’s room to start a shears-oriented startup that will make the current fat-cats of scissors sharpening quake in fear.

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I’m engineering a campaign to rename my otherwise dull-pepper coworker “giggles”.  I began planting seeds and went to begin plastering his Facebook walls with references to him as “giggles” only to find he’d already been given another nickname by a friend “faggot pants”. Don’t think I’ll be spreading that one around at work.

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I’m watching my coworker nearly attack the large, Soviet-style printer to the left of me.  The thing jams like Dizzy Gillespie and no longer faxes.  A coworker commented that this was caused by increased complication of modern gadgets and that he wanted a phone that just made calls and printer that just printed.  Being a child of the 80s and growing up with surly printers like the HP LaserJet II that would only print under a waxing moon or certain tidal periods, I have no problem making the device function.   It is like a child that’s a picky eater and won’t take a ream of paper if the top sheet is off-kilter or toner cartridge isn’t seated just right.  The noise of a properly inserted toner cartridge is that of loading a Thompson submachine gun with a drum of 50 caliber dum-dums.  In the modern office environment is unmistakable.

So my older coworkers are a lost causee, my peers are versed in the ways of hardware-fu but what of our coworkers’ children?  Having grown up in the age of functional printing knowing neither mimeograph nor tempermental laser printers we need to give them the tools to succeed with the next generation of grumpy technologies.  I propose the Fisher-Price My First Printer.  It’ll be large and plastic with easy to identify trays and cartridges with a display that simply shows a happy face everything’s ok and a sad face if something’s jammed or otherwise out of order and will play happy music with bursts of bright light when a printer problem is properly fixed.  Best of all, there’ll be a “at least you tried” feature where the device will provide audible instructions if the operator isn’t able to solve something quickly to avoid early frustration.  Wouldn’t it be great, going up to a printer, having it jam and that experience bringing up memories of a joyful childhood.  That’s the world I want my kids to live in.

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I don’t watch much television, so when I do (I was baking), all the commercials are new to me.  Observations:

  • Why is Thor in The Hulk vs. Thor cartoon speaking Medieval English rather than either Middle English or contemporary English?  The guy he inhabits was born in the 60s and Thor was last worshipped around 1200.
  • Buzz Ballads offers RUSH delivery.  I suppose for a small fee it’s dropped off by Geddy Lee.
  • The latest issue of Reader’s Digest has “Secret Tips to a Healthy Heart”, I’ve read them, I can’t wait to cash in as a cardiologist dispensing “10 Life Extending Facts That’d Be Immediately Obvious to a Faulknerian Idiot Man-Child Raised by Tak-!Sung Tribesmen”
  • I was so thunderstruck by the idiocy of the Cash 4 Gold commercial (does anyone notice that the foundry worker is covered in prison tattoos?) that I missed our dog Max eating one of my silicone baking mats.  I’ve heard chocolate can kill dogs, how about silicone?  It certainly didn’t hurt my brother.
  • There are over 200 types of dwarfism.

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A benefit of early arrival at work is that I get my pick of parking spots.  Today, I arrived at around 4 AM after the lot had been plowed but not yet salted and was completely unable to make out any of the painted lines defining the spots.  I went so far as to park, get out, and start hacking at the thin layer of ice with the tip of an umbrella to try to find a line with no success.  So, I tried reparking in what I thought was my usual spot in the front row, as a pull through, second from the left which I think is the best spot in the lot.  I got out, eyeballed it and went about my day.  When I left around noon the ice had melted and the parking lines became clear: I truly did get the best four spots in the parking lot.

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I went to the council service center for a webinar, I had to drive to.  I left 75 minutes ahead for what’s normally a 30 minute ride and barely arrive on time because of all the snow for a webinar, I had to drive to.  We all squinted at the screen, which was projected, which was hard to see because the resolution of the projector was different from that of the laptop, which didn’t rescale, at the webinar I had to drive to.  The meeting started and the man began describing the amazing interface which I’m pretty sure was powered by three things:

  • ASP Nuke
  • TinyMCE
  • RSS
  • Mysql

All of which are either open-source, a web standard or flat out free.  I learned they used these technology at the webinar that I had to drive to.  I learned that the recommended way to move from a Word Document to a web document was to move the text into notepad and then copy it into the TinyMCE form making the block body text and completely unformatted, at the webinar I had to drive to.

In this vein of fearsome efficiency I look forward to having to snail-mail an email or possible drive to a conference call.

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I love salsa and cheese dip or the aptly named salsa con queso and decimate several loaves of Velveeta annually creating this magnus opus of chip toppings.  But the one failing of this East-meets-West culinary paragon is that it doesn’t store well, turning into a form of cheesy cement that doesn’t reheat well.  But magically, the store-bought stuff can happily sit on either countertop or refrigerator shelf maintaining its always dippable texture due to some dark deal a food-scientist made with Satan to defy food physics.  I must make my own.

Reading the ingredients list, the storebought dip large consisted of cheese parts (whey, lecithin, squirrel) and a few chemical stabilizers, oils, fats, actual cheese (holy crap) and the always present maltodextrin.  Knowing I could create dextrin from baking corn starch and isolate the requisite sodium salts from other household goods I set to work.  I melted the Velveeta and set about adding the various meth-lab reductions to prevent the Velveeta from hardening at room temperature while reducing the salsa after a bath in some decade-old molecular sieves.  Final step: Create an solute of oil and Velveeta to reduce the melting point.  So, I melted and mixed.  And mixed, and mixed and mixed.  So looks like, despite the fact that Velveeta is 62.5% fat, it won’t dissolve into oil.  So, I have what looks like amazing nacho dip, with this puddle of greasy spittle floating on top of it like tard-drool on a math test.  I went so far as to add a small amount of rendered lard as an emulsifier and put it in a blender and once again the non-emulsion laughed at me wearing a hat of corn oil.  I tried some, and it tasted like it looked, really good nacho dip that had just gotten into a baby-oil soaked girl-on-girl cat fight.  Our dog Max loves the stuff.

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On Fridays I attempt both the Friday and Saturday Scrabble Calendar puzzle and today I solved both correctly:

Provide three anagrams for SERIF that end in S (fries, fires, reifs)
And another where I needed to make a seven letter word with the rack given (AEIIRTZ) and a free S, (SATIRIZE)

Which prompted the following:

Boss: Terry, is everything ok?
Me: Yeah, why?
Boss: On my way out earlier I saw you yelling “IN YOUR FACE!” at your desk and wanted to make sure there wasn’t a problem.

Far from, I look forward to remembering my ignorance come Tuesday when I have three days worth of fail to endure.

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I’m running the Playwicki District Klondike Derby and learning from my previous errors planned and advertised the program months in advance.  It’s now three weeks from the event date and I’ve 12 stations of 30 covered.  I started placing calls to leaders and was simply stunned by the responses I received.  One was curious as to why we wanted his kids and adults, apparently not realizing that someone need put on the program their kids will enjoy as if the district had a legion of elves that pop out to perform programs.  Another stated he needed his parents to go around with their sled, really?  You need that many kids to escort Boy Scouts with a fake sled to stations where kids do practically infant-safe activities, in a park where almost the entire event can be viewed at once?  More amazing is that they were bringing more parent escorts than the unit of special needs kids.  And these are genuine special needs kids, retard-strength and all.  They manage to do fine, maybe because they’re a special kind of special that makes them a different kind of special compared to this lazy group’s special.

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I was approached during the Roundtable by a leader who’se never seen quite eye-to-eye with me about Scouting and program and such when he asked me a question:
Leader: Terry?
Me: Yes.
Leader: I had a question about the Klondike Derby Packet
Me:  I didn’t think your unit was participating.
Leader: We’re not, I was wondering what font you used for the top part.
Me: Copperplate Gothic
Leader: Thanks.

Wow, what kudos!  I think I’ve made a real breakthrough with this guy.