Back in 2005, Squish was trying to decide what her next adventure should be and I suggested she should start a blog. If anyone should have a blog, it’s Squish because despite all her claims to the contrary, I’ve never once caught her when she didn’t have something interesting to say. And so on December 7, Squish announced that her blog my fault. (I can’t help thinking the fact that this announcement came on Pearl Harbor Day was deliberate.)
At about the same time, Z. (another one who’s never at a loss for interesting things to say) was also looking for a new adventure and having started Dividing by Zero only a few months earlier, I made the same suggestion. Z. has never blamed me in public, but her first post was also in December.
A few days ago, after posting more than a week of flower photos, I dared anyone who read Dividing by Zero to post photos of flowers on their blog.
To help assure a bountiful harvest of flower photos, I emailed the link to a few friends who I knew had cameras and/or flower beds with the email subject line saying, “I Dare You!” One such recipient was Sue. I’ve never known Sue to back down from a fun dare, and particularly not from a double-dog dare. (Indeed, she’d be the first to tell you, you can’t ignore a double-dog dare.)
Today Sue wrote her first blog post. Not only does it have a photo of a flower, she also blames me for her decision.
I’m so proud of her.
So there you have it. I’m officially a Bad Influence™! Not merely a bad influence, but a Bad Influence™. With capital letters and everything!
(And if I had it do over, I’d encourage them all again.)
Category Archives: Assorted Ramblings
Conversational Topography
Moving around over the past 20 years, I’ve noticed that different areas of the country have different favorite topics that all conversations eventually gravitate toward.
For example, growing up outside Pittsburgh, all conversations eventually turned to the fortunes of the various local sports teams. Be it the Steelers, the Pirates, the Penguins or the rivalry between Pitt and Penn State (which is ongoing, even though the two football teams haven’t played in nearly 20 years), people who live in or near Pittsburgh love their sports.
After college, I spent six years living in Nevada on the Northern shore of Lake Tahoe. Frequent conversational topics included environmental issues, wildfire preparedness and local politics, but sooner or later, everything came back to recreation. Mostly skiing (the ski resorts are major employers), but plenty of hiking, camping, and boating too.
The tendency toward a single conversational topic seems to be stronger in the DC area than any other part of the country. The sports talk turns to the politics of funding for stadiums. The talk about recreation turns to the politics of who’s in charge of what, and when you turn on the TV or radio, much of the news and entertainment revolves around (you guessed it) politics.
The only relief I’ve found is that when folks meet Terry or Wylie, the topic turns to pets. So hurray for the kids! They’re about all that’s saving my sanity!
Kung Fu and Honky Tonk
Apparently AJ’s employer is requiring everyone in the company to learn Karate. (I can’t help thinking that this sounds a little like the early 90s when instead of improving their products and services, companies instead tried to boost productivity and revenues by slavishly imitating any fad that originated in Japan. How many US companies launched morning calisthenic programs because they’d heard Japanese companies had them?) Unfortunately for me, AJ’s post was titled “Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting” and as a result, I’ve spent most of the past week trying to get that infernal song out of my head.
Finally on Thursday I got a different song stuck in my head.
But that’s OK, Brooks & Dunn have lots of fun songs.
Old Computers
Technology is one of those things where for the most part, things don’t improve with age. The main exception to this rule seems to be the old-fashioned division by hand versus trusting certain bits of silicon. (Thus leading to the expression/warning, “Don’t Divide, Intel Inside.”)
A couple years ago, an acquaintance gave me a notebook PC. It was in working condition, it just didn’t have a hard drive. (The original drive had failed and he’d decided to replace the entire thing with an Apple Power Book.) I tried to get a new drive from Dell, but eventually discovered they were no longer available. So the computer sat in my guest room, just gathering dust.
I think the correct term here might be “pack rat.”
A friend gave me a talking-to the other day and I resolved to do a bit more follow-through on my plans to Disenclutter™ the place.
So this morning I sat down and typed up a description of the notebook computer, making it clear that there was no hard drive.
This is an older (6 years?) Dell Inspiron 3000 notebook.
The specs are:
- 233MHz Pentium MMX
- 143 MB RAM
- Swappable CD and Floppy drives (plus a cable allowing whichever isn’t plugged in to be connected to the parallel port)
- PCMCIA Network and modem cards
- Power supply
There is one catch: This computer has no hard drive. The original drive (3.2 GB, 2.5″ form factor) is no longer available from Dell and I haven’t had the time/energy/need to track one down elsewhere. The computer is otherwise in working order; you probably won’t be running Vista on it, but it should be fine for most word-processing or email tasks.
I then posted that description to the local Freecycle group.
The item was posted at 8:03 AM. Given the age of the computer, I didn’t expect there would be too many takers. In fact, I was a little worried some might accuse of me using the list as a means of getting rid of trash.
How’s that saying go? “One person’s trash is another’s treasure”? By 8:13 AM there were already seven people asking for the computer. Thinking that perhaps some had seen the word “computer” without reading the part about “no hard drive” I wrote back to the first one (for this stuff I figure it’s first come, first served) to make sure she understood that part. Yep, she’d understood that all along.
Evidently that computer still has some life ahead of it.
Literary Meme
You should blame Marauder for this.
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open the book to page 23.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence in your journal…along with these instructions.
To access any of the framework’s features, you need to know which namespace contains the types that expose the facilities you’re after.
(Who the heck keeps great literature – or even a comic book – near the computer?)
Checkpoint
During the course of any lengthy journey, it’s important to stop from time to time and find out where you are on the map. This allows you to check your progress and take corrective measures before you wind up hopelessly lost. Poor map-checking is how it once took me six hours (and a side trip to Delaware) to get to Ocean City while the rest of my group made the same trip in half the time.
I thought I had learned from that mistake, but evidently not. Today I took a few moments to find myself on the map and discovered that something has gone horribly wrong!
It’s been more than 2 1/2 years since I started Dividing by Zero. With so many internet success stories out there (Facebook sold for how many hundred million?), it seems reasonable that by now I should have one of the five most popular sites on the web, several million in the bank, a Porsche in the driveway, and a steady date with Jennifer Aniston.
That was the plan anyhow. Instead, my site is still largely unknown, though I do have the number one search result for chirping smoke detector; I only have enough money in the bank to cover my mortgage payment; and the car in the driveway is a Honda.
Still, I do have to admit, my situation could be a lot worse. The smoke detector thing is cool in its own way, I do have a car, and I can make my mortgage payment. And although I’ve never met Jennifer Aniston, at least I’m not getting drunken phone calls from Britney Spears or Paris Hilton.
At Least I'm not the Bad Influence (this time)
I get the most interesting voice mails from Marauder. He apparently spent most of Easter Day with his girls. Nothing wrong with that (it certainly beats my Easter Day activities which largely consisted of putting off some housecleaning until early evening) and as part of his father-daughter time, he taught Evangeline how to use a magnifying glass to start fires.
The next sentence in the voice mail clarifies things a bit. What he was really teaching her was how to do wood-burning but she immediately saw the additional applications for this skill. He then quickly added that of course she understands that she’s not supposed to do this unless there’s a grown-up present.
But still, I can’t help thinking that Evangeline is developing a most interesting skill set. She’s already demonstrated a knack for opening locked doors. Now she has a method for covering her tracks.
Fortunately, this also means that her life of crime will be limited to daylight hours.
(It looks like Marauder is also starting to wonder about the skills he’s teaching.)
Something to Smile About
This comes from DDMD who is an Air Force dentist and therefore has an interest in seeing people smile.
Smiles are good. Smiles can change a day around. Giving someone a reason to smile is a gift and then some.
Using anything you can, any way you can, through the power of the comment box, make me smile. Look at my interests, past entries, anything, pictures, fanfic, facts, links, drabbles or even just a cool word, anything to pass on a flash of a smile!
Post this in your own journal so I can pass on the favor 🙂
So… What Makes You Smile?
Growing Corn Chips
At the moment, my yard looks and smells like a giant corn chip. I haven’t tried it (nor do I intend to), but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that my yard tastes like a corn chip too. There’s plenty of good reason for my yard to look, smell and (probably) taste like a corn chip. After all, I just got done covering the yard with a fine-layer of corn.
The weather’s been getting warmer the past few weeks and before much longer, the flowers will be in full-bloom. And once that happens, along with my allergies kicking into gear, the weeds will start to grow.
I used the Scotts company lawn care regimen for a few years; fertilizer and pre-emergent weed-killer in the early spring, fertilizer in early summer, and winterizer fertilizer in the fall. It worked wonderfully too — the weeds disappeared and the grass grew so thick and high that you could lose a dog in it. A few years back though, I read the warnings on the bag about how you shouldn’t use that stuff in the garden. That got me to thinking about how anything I used on the grass was eventually going to end up in the garden. Not only is the garden in middle of the yard, it’s also on the downhill side, so when it rains, the runoff is going straight into the garden.
So for the past few years I haven’t used any sort of lawn treatment. As a result, these days, I probably have just as much grass as weeds.
After reading a recent column on lawn care, I decided to try something new this year. Instead of putting down any sort of traditional weed preventative, I went out to a local garden center this afternoon and bought a 50 lb sack of Corn Gluten Meal. Spreading it was a familiar enough process, but this stuff comes out of the spreader in billows of yellow.
And so help me, it leaves the yard looking and smelling like a big ol’ corn chip.
Now it’s just a matter of waiting to see how well it works.
The Calendars of Penzance
Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance begins with Frederic parting company with the pirates upon reaching the age of 21. In a subsequent plot twist, it turns out that the terms of his apprenticeship are that he will serve with the pirates not until he reaches the age of 21, but until his 21st birthday. Normally, this would be one and the same, but the specific plot twist is that Frederick was born on a leap day and won’t reach his 21st birthday until 1940. (Evidently the decision to release him from his apprenticeship based on his age instead of birthday was one of those pesky clerical errors)
This means:
- The musical takes place in March. For some reason it seems to me like more of a summer thing.
- If Frederick won’t have his 21st birthday until 1940 (at which point he’ll be 84 years old), then he must have been born in 1856 and the events in the story take place in 1877. (According to Wikipedia, the musical premiered in 1879)
I don’t know why, but every time I’ve seen the play or listened to the soundtrack, I’ve found myself thinking about the dates involved. Today I finally sat down and figured out what they were.