Pinball!

After Zack and I went over to the local pinball joint a few weeks ago, I had a hankerin’ for a pinball game. Of course the “good” ones cost around eight thousand dollars, so it wasn’t really in the budget.

Enter my friend Roger, who happens to own three pinball games. He also happens to have an idea about renting them out to people (on a monthly basis) and make a little money when he’s not using them. He’s been kind of sitting on this idea for a few years, and never really made anything happen with it, so a few days ago I talked him into allowing me to be his first customer.

This afternoon we hauled one of them over to my house and set it up in the basement. Voila!

pinball

I played a few games and had a great time. Now I can learn all the “tricks”, especially because Roger included a sweet DVD that will teach me how to master any pinball game. Wow!

A piano? In this house?

After something like twenty years of talking about it, this week Laralee finally accomplished her goal of having a piano in the house. She’s been telling me for years that she actually already owns a piano, but it’s up in Idaho at one of her siblings’ houses (she “inherited” it from her parents or something). Since we don’t really have a good way to transport it from Idaho to Colorado, we’ve been piano-less for all these years.

She stumbled across an ad where a woman in town was looking to give away her piano for free. Nice! So Laralee went to see it, decided it was decent, and then worked on how to get it to our house. She called a few piano movers, who told her that it’s really super important that you use a piano mover any time you want to move a piano, because transporting such a delicate, precious instrument in, say, a (shudder) pickup truck would be ridiculous. Legs could break off! The sounding board– or whatever it’s called– could get warped. Oh, and once it’s at home, don’t put it along an outside wall because the humidity will warp everything. And don’t put it too near an air vent because moving air will cause mold and rust and fungus and herpes. It was kind of funny how all of them were very protective of an old free piano we were looking to move a few miles.

In the end, the cheapest piano mover was something like $250 so Laralee gave up on that idea. I rounded up some friends and we drove over to the woman’s house, where we loaded the piano into… wait for it… a pickup truck. Oh, and it was raining at the time. Yikes, humidity! We threw a tarp over it, hauled it across town, and had a grand old time hoisting it into the house.

Now it sits in our living room, probably quietly warping. It’s definitely out of tune; even I can tell that. So we’ll get it tuned, and I predict the piano tuner guy will tell us it needs to be tuned at least every few months for a hundred bucks a pop, because if we don’t then it’ll cause dogs to howl and whatnot. (My guess is we’ll tune it once and that’ll be it for the next decade.)

In any case, I’m happy that Laralee is happy with her piano. I sat down to play a few notes and realized just how horrible I am– I can’t even read music. I look at the staff and count up (“F-A-C-E… okay, that’s a C. Now where’s the C on the keyboard? Okay, here.”) and finally play one note, then look at the next note. Every measure takes about 30 seconds. It’s breathtaking, to be sure.

Kyra, on the other hand, sat down and immediately started playing some great music.

piano-1

piano-2

piano-3

It’s too bad that she’s the only musical person in the family, and about to move away to college. Zack enjoys sitting there banging away on random keys, which of course is fantastic. I guess the question is whether any of the three of us will take the plunge and actually learn how to play…

King Jeff

Kyra and I just played a couple of games of Dominion… my favorite game (and maybe hers as well).

dominion-1

I won both of them, which makes the fifth and sixth win in a row. A long time ago we decided that there are different terms for each win in a series:

1 win – just a win, nothing special
2 wins – coincidence
3 wins – lucky
4 wins – a streak
5 wins – all hail the king
6 wins – an empire
7 wins – a dynasty!

So I’m at the level of an empire now, and another win will give me a dynasty. Since the two of us are pretty evenly matched, it’s rare that we go much beyond “lucky”.

I have nine Dominion sets, and the latest one, Empires, was just released. I’ve already ordered it and expect it within a week. Awesome.

dominion-2

It’ll be sad when Kyra heads off to college, because I won’t have anyone who wants to play against me…

rm -rf

Back in the day, it was possible to completely trash any ‘nix system by running the recursive delete command in the root partition:

# rm -rf /

There are plenty of stories of system administrators who did something like this (with slight variations, and always by accident) and ended up with a mess.

Today I ran that command on four different servers, on purpose, so I could wipe out everything on them. Imagine my surprise when I ran into a safeguard!

# rm -rf /
rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on /
rm: use –no-preserve-root to override this failsafe

Well, shoot, my operating system is warning me that I shouldn’t be deleting every file on my computer!

It’s funny that someone actually thought of that and added it to the delete command. Of course I forged ahead and added the flag so I could proceed with complete system destruction. Take that!

Cover letter of grammar

Today’s winning job applicant, in the category of Choppiest English in a Cover Letter, goes to…

In just about every aspect of communication there may rise an issue that must be addressed and worked out and I would love to be apart of a team of problem solvers that work towards a common goal of turning requirements into code in a fun reasonable time efficient way.

Hoo boy. I count eight spelling and grammar errors… and that’s just one sentence of many. Indeed, there is an issue in this guy’s “aspect of communication”…

School photos

Today Zack headed over to Skyline High to get his class schedule and have his school photo taken. The photo is used on his student ID, and if we don’t have a professional picture to submit, it’s also used in the yearbook.

He brought his Super Afro Wig and wore it, but was stopped at the door by a woman who said he wasn’t allowed to wear it. He sweet-talked her somehow, and she relented. “Okay, if you can get past the other people, you can wear it.”

He waited in line, afro on, and eventually sat for his photo. Just as the photographer was about to snap the shot, some older guy popped over and said sternly, “You can’t wear that in your picture.” What a killjoy. Sadly, Zack had to lose the wig.

Man, that kid.

Boobies

Last night we were watching Lost (long story) and Laralee asked where the term “booby trap” came from.

Without missing a beat, I said, “It’s from the days long ago when they would catch boobies, which are little birds.”

Both Laralee and Kyra were immediately skeptical. “You totally made that up.” They didn’t believe there was such a thing as a booby, and of course that my story about the etymology of the phrase was complete fiction.

Fortunately I had Zack on my side. He confirmed that boobies are little birds. The girls were adamant that there was no such thing. Laralee finally decided to end the debate by looking it up on her phone.

Kyra remarked, “You might want to be careful about searching for ‘boobies’ on the internet.” Ha ha, indeed you might!

Anyway, with some careful searching, Laralee was able to confirm that (1) there are indeed birds called boobies, and (2) there were indeed traps set for them back in the 17th Century. To be clear, a competing theory about the origin of “booby trap” states that it was intended for people who weren’t very bright, often referred to as “boobs”.

Vindication! Kyra still insisted I’d made it all up, and of course she was right, but it was nice that my more-or-less educated guess was correct.

Jihad

My friend Sean wrote this:

Autocorrect fail of the day:

We use a tool called Jira to track in-progress projects, bugs, features, etc.

I meant: “I’ll start a Jira to get this fixed”
It said: “I’ll start a Jihad to get this fixed”

Now they think I’m really passionate about fixing bugs…

Not a doctor

First, a word of explanation. On the first floor of the office building where I work, there’s a chiropractor’s office. He sees patients well into the evening, so often when I’m leaving to go home, people are pulling up in the parking lot to visit him.

So yesterday I was walking out, heading down to Boulder to play some ultimate. As such, I was wearing athletic shorts, my team jersey, and of course no shoes. A little kid came up on the sidewalk and said loudly,

Mommy, he doesn’t look like a doctor.

True, true.