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Zing owns a nice MacBook Pro that we aren’t using, so rather than just have it sit and gather dust, I figured I’d sell it. Craigslist is the easiest way to sell stuff like that, so I put together a nice brief ad on Saturday and waited for a buyer.

It turns out I didn’t have to wait long for the scammers to pounce. Within a few hours I had five or six of them, all texting me asking about the laptop. What’s funny is they all use the same formula:

1) Send text with a brief greeting and the name of the item from Craigslist.

2) Regardless of my response, they respond with a short story about how they’re out of town and want to buy this MacBook for a nephew or brother-in-law or whatever. Of course I’ll have to ship it to that person. They’ll pay an exorbitant rate for shipping ($100-200 above the asking price).

3) If I respond to that, they jump into something about using PayPal and conducting the deal as soon as possible.

I think after another response, the bot (or whatever computer software is handling this) notifies an actual human to take over. I’m guessing they figure at that point if the sucker is still engaged, they need to act like a real person. I figured that was the point where I needed to start getting weird.

Sadly, despite the absolutely adorable puppy photo, this scammer didn’t want to continue the conversation.

I used the approach again on someone else:

At least this guy acknowledged how cute the puppy was, but apparently decided to give up on the scam.

All of this would be funny if it wasn’t so sinister. Scams like this must be successful to some degree, or people wouldn’t use them (and in such volume! I had the same guy actually contact me twice even after I called him out as a scammer). I figure there’s a special circle in hell for low-lifes who do this kind of thing.

For the past week or so, the air conditioning hasn’t worked in our office. I have a little desk fan that manages to move the 80-degree air over my left arm, so at least a part of me feels a little cooler. It’s bad enough that some of the guys have actually left to work at home instead of enduring the heat. And it’s bad enough that the chocolate chips in my cookies have melted as they sit on my desk.

Brent’s dealing with it by sitting at his desk and eating ice cream directly out of the half-gallon box. He has the right idea…

I found a fascinating article online about the order of words based on the sounds. The lead-in question was “Why do we say ‘tick-tock’ and not ‘tock-tick’?”

It turns out the reason is that words like that must follow a certain order to “sound right”. If there are three of them, the vowel order must be I, A, then O. If there are two, the first is always an I, followed by an A or O. For example:

tick-tock
mish-mash
chit-chat
dilly-dally
tip-top
hip-hop
flip-flop
tic-tac
ding-dong
ping-pong

Of course saying “dong-ding” for a doorbell sounds weird, and that’s why. It’s one of those unwritten rules that everyone knows but no one really thinks about.

The article went on to explain the even more fascinating adjective order, which is:

opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose

If a noun has multiple adjectives describing it, and they’re out of order, it’s immediately obvious (and strangely disturbing). For example:

lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife

sounds right, and in fact much better than:

green lovely rectangular whittling little French silver old knife

Things get even more interesting when you combine the two. Does Little Red Robin Hood face the “Big Bad Wolf” or the “Bad Big Wolf”? Well, the adjective rule clearly places opinion (bad) before size (big), but the vowel sound rule says I comes before A, and therefore “big bad” sounds right and “bad big” sounds awkward.

Incidentally, this rule of vowel sounds is called ablaut reduplication.

Laralee and Kyra seem to know all of the spells from the Harry Potter series, but I have a whole different set of incantations– stuff like this:

Yay, shell scripting! I was faced with the task of parsing a gigabyte of log entries, counting the number of posts to an external API and organizing them by date. Done, in a single line of black magic.

After three consecutive championships, I failed to make it a fourth tonight. My team ended the last indoor league in a close second-place finish. But we had a lot of fun and a great team.

Tomorrow night is the summer league draft, and games start next week. On to the next season, and the next run for a championship!

It cracked me up to see Dad modeling those awful Kohl’s suits…

I think he sports the look better than I do…

It was awesome to get a surprise visit from my good friend Matt over the weekend. He and his family moved to Utah about a year and a half ago, but came back to celebrate his nephew’s graduation. Here we are at church: the old bishopric reunited!

Today was the sort-of-annual Memorial Day ultimate hat tournament down in Boulder. While 50,000 people are running the Bolder Boulder, about a hundred ultimate players are on the soccer fields battling for eternal glory. A “hat” tournament essentially means everyone throws their name into a hat, and the teams are picked randomly.  It’s a fun way to meet some new people and play with old friends.

It’s a four-game tournament, with two rounds for seeding and then semifinal and final games. My team won our first game handily, then tied our second one to advance to the semis. True to form, Colorado weather struck and it rained during the entire game. It made the game a bit more interesting as we slipped on the grass and tried to huck a wet plastic disc. But we managed to win that game to get to the finals. Our opponent for the championship was the same team we’d tied a couple of hours earlier. This time, however, we crushed them in a decisive victory.

It was a lot of fun, and a great group of players. Here’s to my third championship in a row!

Last night marked the end of the Longmont spring ultimate season, so we had the big tournament. Last week’s regular-season games had been snowed out and the weather yesterday was pretty crazy. When the tournament started, the wind was probably blowing at a consistent 20mph, which always makes for a tough game with a frisbee. Halfway through the first round of games, the rain started… at first as a little bit of mist, but then as a full-fledged downpour.

We managed to eke out a win against our opponents, moving to the semi-finals. The rain continued and the temperature dropped. It was a hard-fought game, and we came out on top to advance to the finals. The team who had been dominating the league all season was knocked out in the semis, which was a little bit of a relief because we’d had trouble against them in earlier games. They later admitted it was because of the wind: their core strategy was to huck long passes to their fast/tall runners, and that simply didn’t work. I guess that’s a lesson in not being a one-trick pony.

As the final game started, the weather became strangely calm. The rain and wind stopped, and unbelievably, the sun came out as it was setting over the mountains. That caused a fantastic huge double rainbow to arch over the fields– beautiful. We played a hard game and dominated the first half, leading 7-3 as we took a few minutes to rest at halftime. But the second half was a struggle, and we found ourselves tied 8-8 after they’d outscored us 5-1 in an amazing comeback. We traded a couple more points and at the time cap we were still tied. That meant it was “universe point”, where the first team to score would be the champions.

It went back and forth as both teams played strong defense. Finally we managed to drive it into the endzone for the win. Woo hoo!

The championship prize was GRU athletic shorts, which everyone was pretty excited about. We took a few pictures to celebrate our win:

This was one of the most fun teams I’ve been on in a long time. Instead of the usual cheers that teams traditionally write after each game, we decided to play goofy games on the field like Ninja, Wah, Bang, and even Rock-Paper-Scissors. So all season long we’d finish our games and then challenge our opponents to something silly. I hope to make it a new tradition (partly because I’m terrible at writing cheers).

After last season’s indoor league championship, I have two in a row under my belt. Nice!

Isn’t it amazing that we live in a time when you can buy an entire bag of Smarties for a dollar at the dollar store?

It’s also important to note that they’re fat-free, gluten-free, and peanut-free. So they’re basically nutritious!