Author: cosmo

Brian, Tony, and I just got back from lunch and two guys in trenchcoats followed us into the office. They immediately introduced themselves as Walter and Tyler and asked what we do here at Zing. This seems to happen about once a month: despite the big “NO SOLICITING” sign beside the door, people like this seem to think it applies to everyone but themselves. Go figure.

Anyway, as soon as they asked what we did, Tony launched into a monologue about how we build online poker systems and run the money through the Netherlands to avoid prosecution under U.S. law. He was absolutely brilliant. He did all of this with a completely straight face while Brian and I bit our tongues trying not to laugh. Tony continued by explaining how we can accept hard cash, or World of Warcraft currency that’s traded on eBay. He then asked Walter and Tyler if they’d like to sign up for an account with us right now.

The best part was that these guys were completely at a loss about what to say. As Tony continued to regale them with stories about how we use our Comcast connection to manage all of our poker systems, and how when the connection goes down we’re still liable for bets in the pot, and all kinds of other technical-sounding things, they just stood there listening like deer in headlights.

In the end they managed to toss in a few words about what they were selling (T1 lines for a vendor I’ve worked with and despise), but they beat a hasty retreat before Tony could get them to ante up some cash for an online account.

Sweet. Two gold stars for Tony.

Interesting thing I learned today:

There are five tastes. Everyone’s familiar with bitter, sweet, salty, and sour… those were identified back around 400BC. But it wasn’t until the early 20th Century that a Japanese chemist identified a fifth taste, called umami (Japanese for “delicious”).

Oddly enough, monosodium glutamate (generally known as MSG) triggers umami pretty strongly, which is why MSG makes things so darn tasty.

Now if I can only work that into a dinner conversation somehow: “Mmm, these ramen noodles are really umami!”

I’m signing up for an online bank account and I’m faced with the inevitable Stupid Security Questions, where I have to select from a list of questions and provide answers that “only I would know”. The problem is that all of the standard questions have already been abused:

* What’s your mother’s maiden name?
* What are the last four digits of your Social Security Number?
* Where were you born?

So now they have to resort to things like:

Come on– even I don’t know the answers to some of these! I have no idea what high school Laralee attended, nor do I know my father’s mother’s middle name. And if I choose something like “What was your favorite college year” it’s not like I have a particular year that was so rockin’ awesome that I would always remember, “Oh yeah, 1993 was my best year in college ever!”

So instead I just pick various questions and always answer them with the same thing: “Steve”.

* Note that I don’t actually put “Steve”, but you get the idea. The real word I use is much more secret than that, and certainly I can’t publish it here where the Identity Thieves’ Guild would find it.

Today, to celebrate the impending holiday, we decided to goof off all afternoon at the office. So Rob brought in his Wii and Xbox and we jacked them into our projector and some speakers. Then we cranked Rock Band and played some Mario Kart, interspersed with the usual games of foosball and liberal helpings of Cheetos and Double Stuf Oreos.

Brian jams on guitar:

Rob accompanies on bass:

And Tony provides drums:

Good times, good times.

It is finished.

I just dropped my 200 or so Christmas letters in the mailbox. The kids helped by stuffing envelopes and slapping on labels and stamps. What a production. Every year I have a rush of creativity about some new thing I can try. And every year I run into crazy problems I wouldn’t have expected. We ran out of toner in the printer. The labels all printed a quarter-inch too high. We ran out of stamps (well, technically we were short by a single stamp– so someone ended up with a Liberty Bell stamp). Et cetera.

Back in The Day I would buy a dozen boxes of Christmas cards and hand write all of my little missives to friends and family, but that just doesn’t work any more. When I retire, maybe I’ll go back to that…

“Don’t think you can. Know you can.”

— Morpheus, in The Matrix

Awesome ThinkGeek t-shirt:

“Do or do not. There is no try.”

“In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.”

— Thomas Jefferson

Wow, it’s cold out there today. In fact, it’s booger-freezing cold, which I is a technical term I use to refer to the fact that when you step outside your boogers immediately freeze up.

Alex and I walked over to Blockbuster to return our movie, and it was maybe a quarter-mile but by the time we got back home my cheeks were burning and my fingers were chilled (even through my thick ski gloves).

It looks like the rest of the week is going to be more of the same. Winter is definitely here.

I just bought a new hard drive online. One terabyte. One hundred bucks.

Holy cow. I still remember my first hard drive, a forty megabyte monster that sat on my desk and was bigger (and much louder) than the laptop I’m using to write this. It cost something like four hundred dollars used. Now, for a quarter of the price, I get twenty-five thousand times more storage.

Isn’t technological progress marvelous?