Luke started it. I was reading his Easter post and ran across a video of someone dancing for the sake of dancing.
A short time later, Natasha followed this with a link to the “Sound of Music Train Station.”
Both of these videos make me smile. They serve to remind me of The Eleventh Commandment:
I believe it’s important for people to eat in groups. This way you can watch each others’ backs in case there are predators.
Plus, that way maybe someone will remember before the eggs explode.
I haven’t spotted any robins yet, but the daffodils are blooming, the forsythia are resplendently yellow and just this evening, Wylie and I spotted the season’s first running air conditioner.
I have no idea what that guy’s gonna do once we start getting temperatures above 70 on a regular basis.
There’s a policy at my office that I’m not allowed to make jokes for the final few weeks before a software release. That’s because my jokes have a history of unexpectedly coming true.
The most famous example of this came about a year and a half ago during a deployment planning meeting. When we got to contingencies, I half seriously asked something about the plan in case there was a problem in the server room, for example, somebody tripping over the power cord.
The IT manager laughed and said whoever it was would have to be extremely clumsy since there were six different power cords involved.
That evening there was a network outage involving the electrical system. It took a day and a half to get everything back in order.
So I’m not allowed to make jokes any more.
I’m not sure if this is a curse or a super power, but I just grin and laugh whenever the project manager feels the need to bring up the topic (at least once per release). And up until recently, I thought I was alone in bearing this burden.
There’s been a joke floating around in email for at least 10 years (and probably longer in other forms) which takes the form of a letter from home written to a young man who has left hillbilly country. The letter, from a relative, contains a number of the “usual” hillbilly gags such as “I know you can’t read very fast, so I’m writing this very slowly.”
It ends with the sad tale of a group of the young man’s friends who drowned when the pickup they were riding in went off the road into a lake. The letter explains that the driver was able to get out, so he survived, but everyone riding in the back drowned because they couldn’t get the tailgate down.
It sounds like just another joke taking a shot at “ignorant hillbillies,” but I’ve come to believe that whoever originated the joke may possibly share my gift/curse for having jokes come true.
This evening I read the account of a Florida woman who had to call 911 from her cell phone because she was trapped in the car after the battery died and the power locks stopped working.
I fear for our civilization.
I’ve thought this quotation was profound from the first time I set eyes on it:
Judgement comes from experience, and
Experience comes from poor judgement.
Simón Bolívar
I’ve been asked to chair the Jaycees’ “Dessert of the Month” social event.
On April 1.
That’s one of my favorite holidays.
Given that this particular model has a reputation for draining it’s battery even faster than I can drain a can of soda, it’s good that the new new phone includes a card with “Tips to make your battery last even longer.“
My favorite tip? Turn off GPS satellites when not in use.
Well OK. But won’t that be inconvenient for the rest of you?
I spent some time at work on Thursday troubleshooting a problem on a QA system.
This raises an important question, specifically, what is the correct past tense of “troubleshoot”? “Troubleshot” shows up in the spelling checker, but it just doesn’t sound right. At best, it sounds like a kind of shotgun cartridge (sorta like birdshot). Likewise, “Troubleshooted” (which shows up in the Firefox spelling checker but not Microsoft’s) sounds like it’s both present and past tense at the same time.
According to Merriam Webster, the correct form is troubleshot, which is good to know. This sort of question tends to come up when I go looking for trouble.
Today is March 14. If you’re not sure what the significance is, or what it has to do with math, I suggest you adjourn to the nearest bakery and order a slice of pie.
The desk calendar I use at work occasionally includes some “interesting” quotations. One recent example – from no less a personage than Genghis Kahn – left me laughing:
I am the punishment of God… If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.
I admit to being something of a wiseguy, so I showed this quotation to my co-worker Olive and asked, “Does this remind you of anyone you know?”
She laughed and replied, “Yes it does. But I’m an atheist.”
Olive paused for a moment and then added, “Oh. Do you think maybe that’s what I’m being punished for?”