Another good post (aren't they all?) from Mark Pilgrim. Tangentially about semantics, as a course of study. I toyed with it a bit, being a Math guy. But never went too far with it. Far enough to be an asshole. And that's really as far as I need to go with anything. ;)
This is cool. Some guy in Mansfield, OH (Kristi's hometown) does snow sculputures. This year he made one of Brutus riding a Hurricaine.
Before my trip home, I was wondering where I should eat. Circumstances rendered a trip to Bowling Green impractical. So I opted for a more convenient (but really no less enjoyable) Wilson Burger from Wilson's in Findlay, across from my former employer. Wilson's is great, best known for it's burgers. But also known for the unique ordering procedures. It works somethign like this:
Walk in. Get in line. When the line cook makes eye-contact with you, you yell out what you want. Me: Cheeseburger, plain!
It's very fun to watch this go on. Perhaps it's just that it's in Findlay, quite possibly the most boring place on earth. You find yourself looking for things to be amused by.
I also made it to Packo's while in Toledo. Opted for the Soup and a Dog combo, getting the Chicken with Dumplings. The hungarian dumplings soup is my favorite thing there. It lived up to my expectations. And perhpas not-so-regretably, the Cake Walking Jass Band has been replaced by a 60" TV.
Derek Balling, Asshole Extradonaire (and I mean that in a very positive way, as anyone who knows me will attest to) and RFC-Ignorant.org Guru had a nice exhange with Steve (Hi Steve.), UnixWiz, about the effectiveness of RFC-Ignorant's practices. Go read it.
I see both sides, but tend to come out on Derek's side. There are rules. It's really not too much to ask they be followed. It is too much to ask that you be allowed to play if you fail to adhere to the rules.
Is it?
[edit] Kasia posts about her frustrations, too.
DefectiveYeti.com is something you must read. Matthew Baldwin (the short one) has some of the wittiest prose in blogdom. This entry had me coughing up a lung, I laughed so hard.
*For some reason I kept calling Matthew "Micheal". Seems in my attempt to be clever some synapses got crossed. :(
Jeremy makes a great point about shipping from large online retailers:
When I'm making the choice between UPS Ground and FedEx overnight, I'm shooting in the dark unless I know where it's shipping from. It if comes from Reno, I don't care. Give me the cheap rate. But if it's coming from across the country, I might want to spend the extra bucks.
Give us that info, and let us make an informed decision about which shipping option we want.
We had a White Christmas. We drive 2 hours on Christmas morning. It's a shitty drive.
It made my truck very dirty, but a visit to Bunkey got it back into shape.
Trevor started Daycare today. Basically means someone else is changing his diaper and feeding him for 8 hours. And he's in a new crib. And I'm a few hundred bucks poorer. :(
Did pretty well.
Delta 10" Table Saw
Bosch 3/8" Drill
Norelco Advantage Electric razor (the "Goo" one)
SuperToe T
A new Goon Squad Radio T
Several books about babies.
A few more pooter/science books
Some Buckeye apparel
18pk of Craftsman Screwdrivers
DVDs;
School House Rock
Monsters Inc.
Tomorrow Never Dies
Goldeneye
And a tennis racket, Wilson Pro Staff 5.6 Ti (Titanium) which I can find no mention of on the internet.
I got Kristi a webcam, so she can watch the dogs while she's at work, and the Grents can check out the kid when he's home.
Seems like a twist on the old "you've won a TV, come down and pick it up" ploy where all they get upon arriving is arrested. Only these weren't crooks. And they weren't told they'd won something.
Instead, they are Iranians living in LA. Apparently 100s of thousands of exiled Iranians live there (since the 1979 exodus). Well the Feds said any adult male from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lybia, and Sudan that was not a naturalized citizen must register with INS. Presumably there is additional paperwork from whatever is needed to get in here legally.
Well a bunch of men, primarily Iranian, went down to register on the day they were told. Around 500 were immediately detained. I'm sure they were all terrorists. Genius.
I grew up in a fairly industrial midwestern city. I lived close to most everything. And that which required motored transport was invariably convenient to public transportation. And I was poor. So getting a car was never really something I felt compelled to do as a teenager.
When I was 18, I bought a bike. A real bike, one that could be ridden several miles at a time, at a fairly decent rate of speed. And I liked riding it to places I needed to go. And still, I felt no need to get a car, or even a license.
It was not until I met Kristi, who lived 25 miles away, that the value of a car was impressed upon me. So with newfound motivation, I went ahead and got my drivers license. I was 22.
Now, one thing that you get from riding a bicycle through rush hour traffic on a regular basis is a very deep appreciation for how that traffic works. You come to understand what the different types of drivers are, and to recognize them immediately. Your life often depended on it. Your reflexes and vision must be far superior to anything possessed by a typical driver. Or you could be dead.
I did that for 4 years. I got pretty good.
So once I started driving, that vision, those reflexes, didn't just go away. The rock solid calves and mammoth quads, those went away. But the vision remained. So I would do things in a car that scared the shit out anyone riding with me (and still do). It's always because they don't see what I see. They don't know what I know.
Of course, there isn't much room for error on my part. On a bike, there was no room for it. All it takes is another driver reacting unexpectedly to cause a wreck. And now that I have responsibilty, I'm finding I need to slow down. To not be concerned about getting from A to B as quickly as possible. To not lust after the throaty roar of 4K rpm. Or accelerate through corners. Or..and this hurts..to speed.
I'm finding it very difficult to change. It was almost easier learning to be nice to people. I'm having to change my view of the road. Let go of obsolete objectives. Abandon a well-honed skill. Kill a thrill.
I have a feeling I'll be spending a lot of money at Adventure Landing. I'm gonna need a lot of time in therap..er..go karts.
Thanks to Mark for giving me all of my content for today. :)
This is hilarious. Matthew Baldwin (the short one, I think) presents some gift ideas for the late shoppers amonst us. My favorite quote: "And Megan rolled her eyes and loudly said ‘No, ten o’chicken, dorkwad.’ ". Ten o' chicken. Classic.
He mentions the Bobblehead Jesus, which a friend of mine has. It's a very cool thing, and when we are desperate (say, Ohio State is trailing late) we ask him to ask Bobblehead Jesus to pray for us. So far, BJ has come through every time.
Mark has been reading my presently favorite forum. And he also linked to an upgrade to the second greatest game in the history of the Mac OS: Spaceward Ho!
When I was in school, we ran the labs. So we'd just take a key over to FSG after hours, bring some friends, and Ho! for a few hours. There was ethernet. And it was Good.
FWIW, the best game ever for MacOS was Escape Velocity, by our good friends @ Ambrosia Software.
Quinn McD (Canuck), has a recurring dream that he wrote about. I think it's a cry for help. If I were stuck in Canada, I'd be crying for help. If you're up on your Jung, go offer up some advice.
My favorite jaded fuck has taken my advice and joined the Blog world. I've known Brandt for the better part of a decade. He's without question one of my most favoritist people on the planet. In part because he can rant like nobodies business. He's jaded, cynical, and funny as hell. And while I'm often his biggest target, I'm always his biggest fan.
Check this snippet from his first installment:
i'm all for charity, but it's not up to fucking corporations to tell me where to give my cash, and you don't go around tooting your own horn telling everybody how goddamned great you are because you are involved with United Way. you don't give to charity expecting some sort of reward or a tax deduction. this is the reason i don't get all creamy when people say that Bill Gates is this great philantropist whose Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is worth $10 billion. big FUCKING deal. that guy is worth something like $50 billion. i can't even figure out how to spend $1 billion, and this guy hoards it like a new age scrooge. hey Bill! you can give your foundation another $49 billion and still fuck your wife on a fat pile of cash.
Ok Tivo Whores. I'm gonna begin lobbying the CFO for a Tivo. In part because this will make her life much easier, since she's the one that watches TV most often. The idea of pausing a game or show (or gameshow) while I change a diaper also holds great appeal.
So which models are you guys using? And what would you do differently if you could do it over?
Joe Gregorio (of Bitworking infamy) has lived here for a decade. So he has some insightful commentary about recent weather related events. I'm digging his verbage. :)
Welcome to the weather of North Carolina. When it comes to the weather here it's not the average that will get you, it's the standard deviation.
Mark, who lives down the road, got his power back last night, too.
Now, I know by the end of tomorrow all this stuff will have melted. So it's nothing like a good winter storm Ohio style. But given the layout of things down here, it makes things very shitty for a lot of people.
Our power went out at midnight. Came on 2:15ish (am). Went out again @ 4am. Just came back on @2:30pm. It's nice to have heat again. Temp inside got down into the high 50's. With a newborn, this is a concern. Stayed by the gas fireplace, and it was much warmer. It's on now. I've cranked it up to 80, as the power is likely to go out again, due to:
Trees. So many trees. Right along roads. Which happen to also have power lines running along them. Big conifers. Whose limbs get VERY heavy when coated with an inch or two of ice. And rest on, or fall and snap through, the aforementioned power lines. Nobody lives away from these trees. This morning, 1.2 million people (which is close to just about everyone) in Wake and Durham counties were w/o power. As soon as they get people up, more go down. They estimate some poeple will be out until the weekend. Hurricaine Fran was the last time (and only time) things were worse, according to the talking heads.
I took some pictures. Couldn't get too close, as branches are still falling. The 60' pine tree in the back yard lost three of it's biggest liiimbs, and still has a few threatening.
Pictures from around the house.
There is a nice thick coating of Freezing Rain that stopped becoming on everything. Power was out for about 2.5 hours from 12am. The trees look very cool. I'll take some pics in the morning. Provided they remain standing.
We don't get much in the way of snow down here. What we do get is rain. And when it gets down into the upper 20s, the rain becomes freezing rain. I've always loved the phrase, "freezing rain". The great thing about rain is its motion. And using a verbal to decribe it is pretty cool. Why not frozen rain?
The name denotes continuous activity. The rain is not just falling, it's in the act of freezing. Not yet frozen, but getting there. Maybe it's the math geek appreciation for Limits in me that is fascinated by this. Or my long-held axiom that becoming, rather than being, is what makes Life enjoyable.
Regardless, when the rain that is the act of freezing lands on something with a surface temp at or below freezing, it turns to Ice. This gets to be a problem, as the ice proceeds to coat everything outside. With a sheet up to an inch thick. It snaps tree branches, which in turn snap power lines. It makes the roads impassable. Planes cannot fly. The very threat of it empties grocery stores of thier products.
The lesson is that Freezing Rain is OK. In its becoming stage it is innocuous. But when it's journey is complete, when it stops becoming frozen and starts being frozen, Bad Things can happen.
So don't stop becoming. Else the grocery store will run out of milk.
I'd say that this ended up being fairly close to where I would have put myself. Perhaps it was coincidence. You guys can try it, and lets see how close to your self-image it gets.
I'm pretty close to where they put Ghandi.
Economic Left/Right: -5.25
Authoritarian/Libertarian: -5.28
I was looking to see if Mister Spot's had a website, and Google returned this link. My repsonse to this now 2 year old article is twofold:
1. Fuck Michigan.
2. Too bad I can't be around Brandt when he reads it.
I'm torn. I'd really like to stop by Packo's when I'm up in T-Town for Giftmas. Grab some Chicken Paprikas. Maybe a bowl of chicken-n-dumplins and a dog. Or the roast beef platter.
But I also have a serious hankerin for some college-town grub. Maybe a nice Philly w/cheese and fries from Spot's. Or a nice sit-down @ SamB's. Or I could stop by Myle's and spend the night on the shitter.
I really need to start eating breakfast.
*Jeremy reminds me that no greater joy exists outside of hot breadsticks from Pollyeye's. Maybe it's the roughly 3 hours and 14 minutes you need to wait for them to get to your table. Whatever the reason, they are a meal unto themselves, and unsurpassed in NWOH delectables.
