Category: Uncategorized

I lost a couple of ping-pong games against Brent this afternoon. During the game I kept feeling my socks sliding around under me. These are new socks I just bought because I’ve worn holes in a few other pair.

Back in my office, I discovered the reason they felt strange. Both socks had literally rotated 180 degrees around my feet and were upside-down. What the heck is this:

Much better:

Clearly this was the reason for my loss. I’ve appealed to the U.S. Table Tennis Association to find out the ruling for “rotated socks”. I believe that’s in the rules somewhere.

My basement office is always a little cooler than the rest of the house. On a hot summer day, that’s a wonderful thing. On a cold winter day, it means I have to bundle up a bit more as I venture downstairs to work.

Today it was cold enough that the lava in the lamps beside my monitors couldn’t muster up the courage to actually float.

The lamps were on all day but only managed to make huge blobs that sat morosely on the bottom.

I had to explain to Kyra and her gaggle of friends that lava lamps work by heating up the waxy “lava” material, which then floats up in the liquid where it cools off and then sinks back down. The cycle repeats, and the mystical beauty of lava lamps is created.

It’s kind of a bummer that today I just saw fat blobs.

It seems like kind of a shame to reboot a server that’s been running non-stop for six and a half years:

Zack’s friends have been playing Dungeons and Dragons with him lately. It’s kind of funny because he comes home after a six-hour marathon gaming session and tells me all about the excitement: “So we opened the door and there was a group of orcs and I cast a level-ten spell of orc-slaying and took out their leader with my Sword of Magical Stuff (+5 against orc leaders) and then we found the mystical Orb of Seeing Things and…”

So for Christmas I gave Zack my ancient collection of D&D manuals:

These are vintage early-80’s books that have been gathering dust in our crawlspace for a while. I remember buying them and reading about all of the rules, abilities, monsters, and so forth. But then Dirk’s mom decided that he couldn’t play D&D because it promoted satanism and killing people with swords. We ended up playing Star Frontiers instead, which is basically a science-fiction version of D&D where you kill people with laser blasters instead. Oh well.

I’m glad these books will finally go to good use.

A few weeks ago I shipped my entire collection of old photo negatives to a company called ScanCafe. Today they were returned safe and sound, along with four DVD’s packed with the high-resolution digital scans of those photos. There are 4,044 in all.

I’m just poking around right now, but in the next few days I’ll probably sit down with the kids and we’ll walk through all of these on the bigscreen (our TV can show photos from our collection). I’m sure it’ll be an absolute riot as we remember some hilarious moments. Heck, moments aside, it’s just funny to see how my friends and I looked twenty years ago.

I’ll probably post some of them here in the coming days, partly to share stories but partly to embarrass anyone else in the pictures who happens to read this blog.

Yep, this pretty much sums up professional sports.

Props to VectorBelly

For reasons beyond my ken, Brian and James have been talking for weeks about having a grand chicken-nugget-eating competition. James insisted that a real man would be able to down sixty nuggets at a sitting.

Today, finally, was the day. They went to McDonald’s (purveyor of the finest nuggets) and each bought a box of sixty nuggets. The cashier handed Brian a slip of paper and told him next time he could call ahead for an order like this.

Back at the office, they went to work. They both managed to put down thirty-some nuggets before deciding sixty was a bit too ambitious. Brian finally managed to polish off forty, but James had to call it quits after a mere thirty-one.

Real men, indeed.

I received an error email from Ben’s development machine, where he’s doing some work for a client. In the email I can see his computer’s hostname, vinz_clortho. I didn’t know what that meant, but a quick internet search revealed that Vinz Clortho is the Keymaster of Gozer, and the alter-ego of Louis Tully.

Now it all makes sense. Ben has proven once again that he’s the king of obscure cultural references.

Brent and I stopped by a client’s office today to talk briefly about a little project they have. We dropped off a Zing lava lamp as a token of goodwill.

The women working there literally shrieked with delight. They were ecstatic about it, and kept going on and on about how this was the “best schwag ever!”

It’s fun to give a nice little marketing gimmick (Brent’s idea) that makes people so excited. Then again, these lava lamps are pretty cool… I have one on my desk.

One of my resolutions this year is to get up earlier. Laralee and the kids are all up and going by 7:00 every morning, and I would tend to sleep until 8:30 and then roll into the office by 9:00 or a little later. I’ve always enjoyed staying up late and sleeping in, but I felt a little guilty snoozing for more than an hour after everyone else was already at school.

So this year I’ve decided to be in bed by midnight and up at 7:00 at least four days a week (I get one day to sleep in). Last night I was engrossed in some research and ended up staying up until about 1:00am. Not surprisingly, this morning I decided to make it my sleep-in day. I finally rolled out of bed around 8:30. But I felt pretty groggy, and didn’t have the usual energy I’ve felt the past few weeks as I’ve been rising at 7:00.

Clearly I ended up with roughly the same amount of sleep, but the late start was kind of a drag. I hate to admit it to myself, but I may be slowly turning into a morning person. No, not one of those people who rises with the sun and dances about, talking about what a beautiful day it is and insisting that everyone else be up with the birds as well. But still, perhaps there’s something to getting an early start on the day and going to bed at a reasonable time and not 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning.

We’ll see how this turns out…