by ·0 Comments

My shopping list of the camporee has involved some strange bedfellows like 12 hula hoops, 13 tennis balls, 2 funnels, 3 beach balls and 2 kids sized exercise balls.  Some oddities:

  • I went to Toys R’ Us to buy kids exercise balls thinking they’d make giant kick balls.  I asked a store attending how burst resistant they were to which she replied “profoundly, I know someone who couldn’t even pop one with a mechanical pencil.”
  • Me yelling asking a cluster of teens at Oxford Valley mall to make way as I walked through their cohort with 12 hula hoops wearing aviator glasses.
  • The Leslie’s Pool desk attendant asking me if diving rings would do instead of a beach ball for my giant volleyball game.

by ·0 Comments

Camporee preparation has proven…. difficult.  Today I walked the event site and found a collection of gopher holes, poison ivy bushes and meteorite impact sites that sized to perfectly consume the human leg.  I paced out sites for the various giant events and traced lines like trying to construct a golf course about Centralia, PA.  I was dressed in work cloths as that’s where I’d come from and got not a few odd looks from disc golf hippies, parents and kids regarding the strange man walking about in business casual but removed all doubt of my insanity when I went back to my car, took out my 75 cm exercise ball and started rolling around the field on it testing its resistance to bursting on thorns and such.

Apparently I passed some rubicon of sanity as the park ranger only slowed and stared but didn’t quite stop as I sat on the ball rolling around in a wheat field.  Some day I should do a performance art piece and get 10 fat men in business suits to do jazzercise in a wheat field with exercise balls.

by ·0 Comments

My current work task is a glorified game of “find the hyphen”. I need to go through CAD drawing names and separate the title from the subtitle. Seemly a simple task until I found complications like “STD” used instead of “Standard” and “XS” instead of “Small” or “pediatric”. I thought I’d figured out all the oddities until my boss pointed out an error. One person had switched back and forth between XS, Small and Pediatric which I had just labeled XS. After parsing the filenames and datestamps and product types and request channels the only pattern I could find was that the term “Pediatric” was used if the request was reviewed by a female and “XS” or” Small” was used if the request was approved by a male. Hm…

by ·0 Comments

A charismatic Team Interrobang member proposed we change our names to AFI top 100 villians and raid other servers and try to make friends. So, 16 of us gathered and I as Auric Goldfinger raided some servers. The first server had 10 people or so in it, and after joining all but 2 of them left leaving a 9 to 1 ratio of Team Interrobang members to pubs. The second server called me for mic spamming for asking what stats package they used. Finally, we found a 32 person server with 18 slots and we piled in only to be greeted as some sort of TF2 savior for filling their server. One admin changed his name to “OMG Our Server’s Full” another wondered aloud if they could handle so many people. It was quite sad.

So, what started out as a recruiting expedition turned into some sort of bizarre deliverance for a failing servers. But it wasn’t a total bust, we’re thinking for a small fee a server that has trouble filling could rent us to create some sort of gaming Potemkin village. We could throw the same softball questions each time like to make them look good like “Is your server always this awesome?” and “do you have a program where I can pay money to you for guaranteed placement?” and for a little more, we’d even engineer it so the side of the renter’s choosing would win. Direct all paypal payments to teaminterrobangpayments@gmail.com at a rate of $3.00 per shill/hour.

by ·0 Comments

A charismatic Team Interrobang member proposed we change our names to AFI top 100 villians and raid other servers and try to make friends. So, 16 of us gathered and I as Auric Goldfinger raided some servers. The first server had 10 people or so in it, and after joining all but 2 of them left leaving a 9 to 1 ratio of Team Interrobang members to pubs. The second server called me for mic spamming for asking what stats package they used. Finally, we found a 32 person server with 18 slots and we piled in only to be greeted as some sort of TF2 savior for filling their server. One admin changed his name to “OMG Our Server’s Full” another wondered aloud if they could handle so many people. It was quite sad.

So, what started out as a recruiting expedition turned into some sort of bizarre deliverance for a failing servers. But it wasn’t a total bust, we’re thinking for a small fee a server that has trouble filling could rent us to create some sort of gaming Potemkin village. We could throw the same softball questions each time like to make them look good like “Is your server always this awesome?” and “do you have a program where I can pay money to you for guaranteed placement?” and for a little more, we’d even engineer it so the side of the renter’s choosing would win. Direct all paypal payments to teaminterrobangpayments@gmail.com at a rate of $3.00 per shill/hour.

by ·0 Comments

I was tired, it was late and I wanted to read something during my end of the day constitutional so as I printed out the Technology Monitor from the Economist my adrenal glands kicked in when I heard the 60″ plotter fire up and begin spitting out beautifully rendered text wide enough to fold an origami canoe.  I ripped the 5′ x 2.75′ printout from the plotter holding 21 pages of text and made an impromptu scroll from two film rolling cores (toilet paper rolls on steroids) and I went off to the can.

Once I mastered the mechanics of rolling and unrolling the cores and my arms got tired of holding my techscroll I realized why very few members of the rabbinate do Torahnic criticism on the can, or why those who do probably have massive forearms and triceps.

by ·3 Comments

I let friends borrow Magic cards for tournaments and received a text asking if I could drop off a few cards to someone who’d forgotten them and to just leave them at his doorstep as he was going to sleep.  I gathered the cards, boxed them, and being a swell fellow purchased  a dozen donuts for him and his car mates with which I’m friends for there pre-dawn departure the next day.  I attached the box of borrowed cards to the box of donuts with packaging tape, affixed a sticky note saying “for Gregg, good luck” to the box of donuts and put the ensemble on the door step.

I texted him the next day asking if the donuts’d gone stale and he replied he’d never received the donuts.  His parents had apparently removed the sticky note from the donut box, placed it on the card box, removed the packaging tape binding the two and put the donuts into dry storage in their pantry.  When asked by Gregg what happened they simply responded “we didn’t know they were for you”.

by ·0 Comments

Penny Arcade’s recent comic comments on Gillette’s Razor Power Fusion for Gamers.  The Amazon product info states the following:

Also living inside the handle is the onboard microchip, which creates an entirely new platform of technology that improves the system’s performance and brings electronics to wet shaving for the first time. The microchip serves three primary functions: It regulates voltage for consistent power, it controls the Low Battery Indicator Light, which alerts you when the battery runs low, so you always have power when you need it, and it powers theAutomatic Shut-Off, which turns the razor off after about 8 minutes in case of accidental activation and protects the battery during travel.

There’s no actual indication of what the onboard microchip does.  The power functions are entirely self-referential and part of me thinks it’s a joke.  But I kind of hope it isn’t strictly to watch it fail.   I felt the same way about Mana Energy drink and Gamer Grub, as if gamer’s used unique muscles and obscure metabolic pathways that explained our collective lethargy as our bodies recovered from byzantine demands and scarcities of rare earth metals required to keep us going.

I see this entirely the work of some daft marketer who will next debut a razor or shaving social network and some facial hair night club in 2nd Life.  This razor “helps you collaborate memes on the Web 2.0” and “your hair is now open source.  Have your soul patch collaborate on our wiki” and other such rubbish.  Although there are several beards and moustaches I’d follow on Twitter.

by ·0 Comments

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.

by ·0 Comments

Two women were standing in front of the half-sized refrigerator available in each employee break area staring at the fridge intensely.  The handle was missing as the door was in the middle of being repaired (a handle replacement) and neither seemed audacious enough to tango with the wild, handle-less unit.  I walked over, opened the door by its side (having much experience liberating food from fail-handled appliances) retrieved my victory sandwich and triumph Mountain Dew to the sounds of the women going “ooooooooh” and then presumably they themselves emancipating their lunches from their former tenacious captor.

It like the old saying goes “open the refrigerator for someone from marketing and feed them for a meal.  Teach them to open the refrigerator door themselves and you’ll cow them in stunned submission.”