Well, which is it?
I’m working on my Halloween costume and found something I need on Amazon. The product description has me a little confused, though:
Although I’m glad it’s “carefully manufactured, tested, inspected, checked and packaged by experienced workers” (we can’t have inexperienced workers doing this sort of thing!) I don’t know if the ankle cuffs are elastic or non-elastic…
Choose Your Own Adventure
Holy cow I thought this was hilarious. It’s true… so painfully true. But if you’ve never read one of these books as a kid, you will completely, absolutely, unequivocally not understand this joke.
Shooting star
Yeah, I’m an adult. Yet I still derive some crazy sense of glee and fulfillment when I open a Tootsie Pop and see the native American shooting a star on the wrapper.
Hey presto
Apparently I lost my business credit card… I last used it at a restaurant in downtown Denver, but I called them and they haven’t found it. I can’t track it down in my car, or the laundry, or anywhere sensible. So I resigned myself to calling Chase to get a replacement, dreading the complicated maze of their customer service phone tree and then the inevitable security verifications.
As it turned out, I was able to login to my account online, click a link for “Replacement credit card”, and confirm which card I wanted to replace. BAM. Apparently a new card will arrive in a few days.
It’s nice to be pleasantly surprised by a big bank…
Pinball guts
Now that we have a pinball machine in the house (temporarily), I’ve had to learn a few things about it. One of the flippers started to “stick” a bit, making it hard to play at times. I opened up the case to see if it was something obvious and easy to fix. I’m not exactly Mr. Fixit.
As it turns out, the guts of a pinball machine are amazingly complex. I guess it’s not too surprising, since they’re mainly mechanical, but I shudder to think what would happen if I had to do a serious repair.
This is beneath the playfield:
There are solenoids everywhere!
And here are a few ball’s-eye shots from the surface of the playfield:
Fortunately in this maze of wiring, I was able to figure out a few adjustments I could make to get the flipper back in line. Now it’s back to attempting to get a new high score (I’m the record-holder at 356 million points, beating Zack’s previous high of 333 million)…
Yoda on a shark
There are so many people in this world who are much more clever than me.
Well played, whoever you are.
Schenectady
As I’ve been listening to Pandora, I’ve noticed that many of the ads are targeted at people in the “greater Albany area”.
Modern browsers have the ability to send location data to sites that request it, so I figured maybe something weird was going on there. Perhaps the IP address associated with my internet connection was somehow linked to an ISP in Albany?
Then it hit me. In my Pandora profile, I’d given my ZIP code as 12345. That’s Schenectady, New York… about 30 minutes from Albany. Schenectady is my old standby whenever a site asks for a ZIP code and has no real need for it. Take that, Pandora advertisers!
Elevator science
Last night I read a fascinating study of people in elevators by a psychologist named Lane Longfellow. By “fascinating” I mean “I can’t believe someone actually studied this, but it’s fun and cool and exactly what you’d expect”. Here are the highlights of the study:
Normally the first person on the elevator grabs the corner by the buttons or a corner in the rear. The next passenger takes the opposite corner. Then the remaining corners are seized, after which comes the mid-rear-wall and the center of the car. Then packing becomes indiscriminate. “When the sixth person gets on you can watch the shuffle start,” says Longfellow. “People don’t quite know what to do with the sixth person. Then another set of rules comes into play governing body contact.”
In an uncrowded elevator, men stand with hands folded in front; women will hold their purses in front. That’s called the “Fig Leaf Position”. Longfellow says, “As it gets more crowded you can see hands unfold and come down to the sides, because if you have your hands folded in front of you in a really crowded elevator, there’s no telling where your knuckles might end up. So out of respect for the privacy of other people you unfold them and put them at your side.”
High-status individuals are given more space. For instance, if the president of the company gets on, he gets more space.
Men leave more space between themselves and other men than women do with other women.
See? Fascinating!
I don’t like that
I was scrolling through Facebook posts on my tablet just now, and apparently I hit the “like” button on accident as I was scrolling. Horrified, I looked at the post. It was a friend talking about her thoughts on switching health-care providers from Anthem to Kaiser (or something like that). Holy cow, what an inane thing to “like”! I attempted to undo or withdraw the like but it’s not possible. Sheesh.
On the bright side, at least I didn’t accidentally like someone’s relative dying.