Squish wrote this morning to let me know about a fellow over in England by the name of Ben Fillmore, who in order to raise money for charity, re-enacted Monty Python’s fish slapping skit. I don’t think I’d be willing to pay $400 to hit someone with a fish, but I congratulate all involved on their willingness to do something offbeat for a good cause. (Between this and the toilet decorating contest which Z mentioned, it looks like there’s still plenty of room in the world for “unusual” fund-raising efforts.)
The article goes on to say that Mr. Fillmore has plans in the works to climb Mount Everest. This is clearly someone who’s familiar with Monty Python, so I’ve gotta wonder… Do you suppose he’s planning to climb the actual mountain? Or is he more likely planning to do the equivalent, scaling a city street?
All posts by dividingbyzero
Fairly Insane
Laura and I headed over to the Montgomery County Fair on Saturday. It was pretty much everything I’ve come to expect from a fair – a midway filled with carnival rides and games, tents with local merchants selling their goods and services, and a variety of farm animals raised by members of the local 4H club.
This fair also included an exhibit which demonstrates that the world has gone stark, raving bonkers! I’m not speaking of the various “freak show” entries they included (Even the five-legged sheep was understandable, though animals with that sort of birth defect are usually culled early on). No, for me, the proof that the fair’s organizers are insane was their decision to include – and there’s no way I could ever make up something like this – restroom attendants.
Yes, that’s right, the Montgomery County Fair has restroom attendants. Complete with professionally made signs (not hand-lettered, somebody actually planned this out) asking for tips.
Perhaps I’m old-fashioned. I’ve always felt that what goes on in the bathroom is strictly between you and the plumbing fixtures, no need for any third party involvement. Definitely have someone check now and again to make sure everything is clean and in order, but do you really need to have someone hanging out there the whole day?
I’ve occasionally run across stories that this sort of thing is all the rage at upscale nightclubs and bars, but nobody’s ever explained why they think this is a good idea. Several years ago, I encountered a restroom attendant on one of my rare nightclub outings. This fellow was holding court at the sink and had an assortment of colognes, hand lotions, breath mints and other items covering every square inch of counter space and approaching the sink felt like a pricey toll road.
I can’t imagine why the county fair would want to recreate that environment. Nobody I’ve spoken to understands it either.
By comparison, the trees scattered around the fairgrounds seem quite inviting.
Wylie's Big Win
When Wylie first came to live with me, he came with a note of caution. He also came with a number of signs on his kennel inlcuding, “Live Animal,” “This Side Up,” and the classic “I’d rather be fishing” (I don’t doubt for a moment that he would have preferred fishing over air travel). But what Steve told me over the phone was, “He’s gonna trash your house.”
For the first ten months, everything went splendidly. When I left for work, Wylie would watch me out the window and when I returned, he’d greet me at the door. After a few weeks he even started imitating Snoopy, but instead of sleeping on top of a doghouse, he’d sleep on top of the couch with his head strategically positioned so he could see out the window. It was a good arrangement and I soon forgot about Steve’s warning.
Over the course of the summer I became increasingly busy with work and the planning for the Jaycees’ participation in a series of events that became known as “Pumpkin Season” (with three back-to-back “Paint-A-Pumpkin” events in under a month, the label certainly fit). All this activity necessarily left me with less time at home and Wylie noticed. When I came home from Oktoberfest, one of the sofa cushions was in ruins with pieces of stuffing scattered throughout the first floor.
There was no point in getting angry with Wylie, he wasn’t going to make the association between his actions and my anger, so I did nothing. Assuming it was a one-time occurrence, I left him loose in the house the next day while I went to church. It wasn’t a one-time occurrence, when I got home a second cushion had met its fate.
Over the next two years, any time I had to leave the house, Wylie spent the day in his kennel. First in the plastic travel kennel, and later, after he’d shown a talent for breaking the latch on that one, a metal cage. As evidenced by his frequent escapes and attempted escapes, Wylie never liked spending time in the kennel, but we at least got into a routine where Wylie would already be in the kennel before I came downstairs.
Although he accepted the cage, it was clear that Wylie didn’t like it. He had frequent anxiety attacks, drenching himself in slobber and more than once hurting himself. Needless to say, I felt quite guilty about it, but what was I to do? As much as I didn’t want him to have anxiety attacks, I didn’t want him to destroy the furniture either. So I did some experiments.
The first experiment, conducted a few months after the first couch incident, was to try leaving him out during the day. I started out leaving him alone and out of the cage for a few hours at a time over a long weekend. It didn’t work, when I came back from work on Monday there was another (mercifully undamaged) cushion in the middle of the living room.
Over the past couple years, I’ve tried the experiment a few more times. The most promising one was when I tried leaving him in my bedroom. That worked great for the first week. Then I went out of town for a weekend, leaving him at the kennel. I picked him up on Sunday, giving him the day to re-acclimate. It didn’t work. I came home from work and found that in his efforts to find me during the day, he’d tried digging out of the bedroom. There were shreds of carpet everywhere!
Back in May I decided to repeat the experiment with leaving him in the bedroom. This time there was more than a month before I’d be going out of town, giving Wylie plenty of time to get used to being in that room. Just to be safe, I decided to take a lesson from the previous experiment, bought the smallest chair mat I could find, and cut it down to fit in the doorway. That way there if he tried digging again the damage would (hopefully) be limited.
The experiment seems to have worked. I’ve been out of town twice in the past six weeks and Wylie hasn’t destroyed the house.
One of the results of Wylie’s anxiety attacks has been an incredible amount of drool on the floor and bars of the cage. The result is that over a short amount of time, the cage has rusted and become quite an eyesore. Wylie seems to be OK staying in the bedroom all day (no doubt the softer bed is as much of an attraction as the larger amount of space), so on Saturday I took the cage apart and plan to put it out for Tuesday’s recycling pick up.
Wylie spent most of Saturday smirking.
Overhaul
Two years ago I created the web site for the Germantown Oktoberfest, basing it on a publicity flyer from a year or two earlier.
The problem was, from my perspective anyhow, it looked like something an engineer had created. It got the point across and people were able to find out about the festival, but I just didn’t like the appearance. The web sites I create come up quickly and – I hope – aren’t too hard to navigate. But they also tend to be more functional than aesthetically pleasing.
A couple months ago, after perusing a few other information sites, I set out to create a new Oktoberfest site. My criteria were that it had to A) have all the information from the old site, B) be easy to maintain and add to, C) be easy to navigate and find information on, and last but not least, D) look good.
It took a week or two, but I eventually came up with something that met my goals. I even managed to meet one of my secondary goals and do it without overusing HTML tables. (As a result, it even looks pretty good on a handheld computer.)
Naturally, right on schedule, life got busy and even with a week off from work I couldn’t find time to finish it and replace the old one. sigh
Thursday evening I decided that enough was enough and pushed everything else off my schedule. (Hey, I’m a guy! Who cares about a sink full of dirty dishes anyhow?)
It took five or six hours (part of the design involved an easily reused template or it would have taken quite a bit longer), but the new Germantown Oktoberfest web site is now open for business.
I kind of like it. 🙂
Road Rage Revenge
When it comes to the pain of commuting, it appears that someone out there really does share the commuters’ pain. And in a refreshing move, they not only reacted appropriately, but with a sense of humor as well.
Now that the first span of the new Wilson Bridge is complete, the government agencies responsible for the construction are searching for the commuter with the most frustrating story about their commute over the old bridge.
The winner(?) gets to push the plunger to demolish the unused span of the old bridge.
That’s awesome!
Party Animal
Wylie watched as I carried my overnight bag and his supper dish out to the car in preparation for an overnight trip to Pittsburgh. “Whatcha think Wye? Are you thinking ‘road trip’?”
Wylie looked up and blinked as if to say, “‘Road trip’? I was thinking ‘toga party.’ But sure, ‘road trip’ sounds good too!”
Car v1.01
I was out with one of the Karens a few years back when we realized her car’s console display was entirely dark. The speedometer and other instruments weren’t digital, so we’d been OK going down the road, but the clock, radio, climate control, and everything else was out.
Once we realized there was a problem, we pulled over, shut off the engine and after waiting a few moments, restarted the engine. And then I started laughing.
Karen’s look of confusion turned into her own laughter as I explained, “We just rebooted the car!”
One of the bits of internet flotsam that frequently shows up in my inbox is a piece titled, “If Microsoft Built Cars.” It includes such scenarios as only being able to use “Microsoft Gasoline,” cars crashing several times daily, and so on.
I’ve never taken it too seriously. Sure, today’s cars do make use of embedded computers for a number of purposes, but the list was really just a bunch of overblown generalizations and exaggerations. Cars and desktop computers don’t really have much in common, right?
Honda sent me a postcard last Tuesday. It seems that they need to install an upgrade to some of the engine control software in order to correct some problems. Or, put another way, Microso Honda was releasing a patch to upgrade my car.
Hopefully this won’t lead to the Blue Screen of Death!
Shore-Leave recap
We just had the Shore Leave 28 wrap-up meeting yesterday and it brought all the memories flooding back.
Thursday I picked up S. and her son L. at Dulles. As we were heading down I-66 toward the beltway, she asked if we might find time over the weekend to visit the monuments so L. could see them. After some brief discussion, we decided there was “no time like the present” and set off on an impromptu tour.
This was the first time in about 10 years that I’d intentionally driven into DC. (I accidentally found myself on the National Mall back in December when I made a wrong turn on my to see Serenity, but this time, I was going on purpose.) Given the huge amounts of traffic you usually see downtown, I didn’t hold out much hope for finding a parking space and thought we’d have to settle for driving past a few memorials and content ourselves with the view. It turns out that there’s a parking lot for tourists over by the FDR memorial.
That was just what Doctor ordered! So we parked the car and set out on foot. Over the next couple hours we visited the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Wall, the World War II memorial (the first time I’d ever seen it too), the Korean War memorial and several smaller ones as well. Before leaving DC, we also stopped by Albert Einstein memorial near the intersection of 21st and Constitution.
Stopping for dinner in Rockville, we arrived in Hunt Valley about 10:30pm. It was a longer trip than originally planned, but we had fun.
After meeting Amanda Tapping in person, I’m happy to report that she’s just as friendly in person as you might hope. One neat thing with her was on Saturday, she helped auction off a “Wonder Twins” item to benefit the Julien Fleming Memorial Fund. The item was a plush toy panda in camouflage fatigues dubbed “A Panda Tapping.” Not only was Amanda a good sport about the name, she went on to tell a story about how her brothers once nicknamed “Amanda the Panda.” Then she made an offer to the audience – whatever the top bid was for the Panda, she’d match it, dollar for dollar. In the end, that promise ended up costing her $1,000. (As a nice touch, the runner up in the bidding later contacted the charity and donated an additional $1,000, bringing the charity a total of $3,000 from that auction.)
During the day on Saturday, I had a chance to speak with Corin Nemec. After some initial hesitation I told him there was a question I’d been debating whether to ask him to which he replied, “Go ahead, ask me anything.” So I did. If you’re a fan of country music, you’re no doubt familiar with Toby Keith’s “Beer for my Horses.” Corin made an appearance in the video and I told him it looked like it must have been a lot of fun to shoot. So then I asked him, “Did you know about the dress before the day of the shoot?” He laughed and said that he’d known but he was excited about the opportunity to work with Willie Nelson.
One of the other actors I had the opportunity to interact with was Kent McCord, he was at the con because of his roles on Galactica 1980 and Farscape, but I knew him better for his role on Adam-12.
A few years back, I had the opportunity to chat for a few minutes with Mike Stoker. He’d had a small part on Emergency!, but his real career was an LA county fire fighter. The role on Emergency! came about because they needed an actual fire fighter to drive the engine on the show. One of the questions I asked him was whether he’d ever arrived at a fire only to have someone try to send him away because they didn’t think he was a real firefighter. It turns out that it really did happen!
Based on that experience, I asked Kent if he’d ever been mistaken for a real police officer and found out that happened to him and Martin Milner on several occasions. Once they were filming on location in downtown LA, jumped out of the car with guns drawn, and the people on the street ran because they didn’t know they were actors filming a TV show.
Other highlights of the weekend: I had a rare Mark Anbinder sighting. Mark makes it Shore Leave every year, but for four years in a row, I never saw him, just heard reports afterward that he’d been there. I did see him last year, but didn’t have a chance to talk. This year we actually managed to chat for 10-15 minutes!
Marriott’s Hunt Valley Inn is, of course, still quite hideous. Rumor has it that they’re losing a lot of wedding receptions because nobody wants that décor as a background for their big day. I had my own fun with it back at Farpoint, equipping the entire Farpoint committee with “carpet deflectors.” At Shore Leave, Todd Brugmans handed out 50 pairs of “Carpet Secret Message Decoders” – cardboard sunglasses with red cellophane lenses that would purportedly let you read secret messages encoded in the carpet patterns. (It’s as good an explanation for those carpets as any other.)
One of the many people who don’t like the décor is Sophia Kelly-Shultz. Sophia’s been a regular at Shore Leave for a number of years and this year she entered an item in the Art Show titled, “Law & Order – Artistic Intent”; poking fun at the hotel’s decorating and claiming that the decorators “…received a sentence of 15 1/2 to life for turning a perfectly good hotel into something Andy Warhol would eschew.” With additional comments about an ongoing search for “…the LSD that inspired the carpets.”
All told, it was a great weekend. My only regret is that it was over so soon.
When infrastructure attacks!
I think my company’s IT infrastructure is out to get me. Maybe not physical harm, but my productivity is definitely being impacted.
It wasn’t all that long ago that I spent the day twiddling my thumbs because the computer’s power supply failed. The twiddling was, of course, metaphorical. It’s been several years since I spent any significant amount of time literally twiddling my thumbs. Instead, I spent the day researching uses for the word “metaphorical.”
And then, just last week, I got a bonus day off when the building power went out. The backup generator failed too, so I got to go home and start my July 4th celebration a day early.
This morning, it was the corporate network that failed. I rebooted my computer and when it came back up, it could no longer connect to the network. It wasn’t just my computer having problems, a number of my co-workers had the same problem.
I’m not complaining though. Technology has always promised us more leisure time. I may as well enjoy it.
Perhaps I’ll brush up on my twiddling technique. 🙂
Rough Week at Work
The original plan for this week was pretty nice: Saturday & Sunday off, work Monday, Tuesday off for the Fourth of July, work Wednesday, and then take Thursday through Monday off for Shore Leave. Or, put another way, two off, one on, one off, one on, five off. If you have to go to work, that’s not a bad way to do it.
After a fun weekend that included the Germantown fireworks, I showed up at work on Monday, raring to go. I got there right around 9:00 and not only was the power out (rumor has it there was a fire on the lines and the fire department cut them), but at some point the emergency generator had run out of oil and now there were no lights in the stairwells and the key card system was dead. (Folks could leave the office, but they couldn’t go back in.) Around 45 minutes later the first manager from our group arrived and after a short interval, started telling people to go home. (At this point the lights had been out for three hours with no known timeline for a resolution.)
Cool! Now I effectively had a four-day weekend, a one-day work week, and a five-day weekend. Now that’s the way to do it! (Especially since I didn’t have to use any extra vacation days.)
The lights went out at home for two hours on the fourth, so I thought it would be kind of fitting if my only remaining work day this week was canceled due to a third outage, but no such luck.
But it was still a great way to spend a holiday work week!