In honor of pitchers and catchers reporting in a mere three weeks, here's a baseball-related way to waste some time in the office (or at home, for that matter).
No penguins were harmed in the making of this movie.
(personal high: 321)
Or this one (Sammy Sosa steroid version).
(personal high: 593.5)
Or this one (Sammy Sosa steroid, corked-bat version)!
(personal high: 1204.4)
For some reason both my last entry and my wife's last entry were both deleted - vividgreen changed servers unbeknownst to us and any uploads and whatnot made yesterday seem to have been undone.
At any rate - this picture was posted on MLB's web site yesterday (thanks to my brother for the link) as part of a listing that was selling this shirt for $99.95. Kinda freaked me out for a while. Then later in the afternoon, it was replaced with this error message, which I found hilariously appropriate. I wonder if Tom Hicks used those exact words - the item is no longer available...
Today the news story comes out that someone got access to MLB's servers and put this up as a hoax. Don't know why they're not just selling them, though - why not just make them available, see how many people buy them, and finance the deal that way?
A random-blast format of the latest things I just don't get:
- How the hell to fold fitted sheets. Quite possibly THE most maddening thing on the planet, and entirely unsatisfying. Especially considering that I don't really care how wrinkly the damn thing is, because a) it gets that way anyway after one night of sleeping on it, and b) it's just covered up by three layers of covers and sheets anyway.
- Why I need to have a second pillow on my side of the bed. Seriously, I never lie on it. I put a pillowcase over it and then gently lean it up against my nightstand until it's time to change the sheets. It's like wearing a tuxedo to sit around the house in - why get all dressed up?
- If/why anyone really does love Raymond. Basically, make Ross Geller Italian, add about 50 pounds and an even more annoying family, and there you have it. Just not hilarity central for me.
- How one person can possibly have such extraordinarily dry skin.
- Why I have to be that one person. Ow.
- Why cable networks feel the need to show the same movie five times in one weekend. Doesn't that guarantee that people won't watch your station for the other eight hours that movie is on?
- Why Darius Rucker sounds like he's passing a kidney stone while singing the theme song for next weekend's overplayed weekend movie event-who-must-not-be-named. Check that - if I actually had anything to do with that huge sopping bucket of treacle, I'd probably prefer to pass a kidney stone instead.
#1: Things you can only get away with saying while working on a glossary: "Can I have a look at your P?"
#2: A cover of an actual book, written by one of our clients:
Bad news for cows, indeed. This just cracks me up every time I see it...every few months we'll send it around as an attachment in the office just for a laugh. Today was one of those days.
So while this month has sucked for work purposes, it's been pretty bad-ass as far as me getting new taper toys. My latest purchase that I actually have in my hands is a Kangol VentAir Tropic hat, the hat of choice for stealth tapers everywhere. You've seen the type - the Samuel L. Jackson cabbie hat. He wears it backwards and looks cool. I wear it forwards and look like a Swiss Army knife (12 tools in one!). But the key is that it's black, it's got some room inside it (unlike a baseball cap), and it's got a brim on the inside that I can rest my mini-mics on for low-profile situations. I just got sick of clipping them to a baseball cap - this is much sleeker.
The latest latest purchase, however, is on its way to me as we speak - some custom-made microphone cables. A guy I know from the Blues Traveler list has a friend who's pretty good with a soldering iron (not to mention patient as hell) and he offered to build me some custom right-angle cables with parts I sent him from Markertek instead of the straight-angle BLUE Kiwi cables. I still wanted green cables, so here's what the new ones look like - one by itself, both of them together, and a close-up of the custom right-angle Neutrik black/gold connectors. HUGE thanks to Chuck Cage for putting these together for me - can't wait to use 'em in the field!
Edit and update: links to cable pictures are fixed for all both of you who actually want to see them.
At work I'm in charge of a Spanish reading program - student edition, teacher's edition, tests, workbooks, the whole nine yards. We're almost complete with the SE; we're actually working on the backmatter at the moment. You know, the eighty pages of reference material that you, as a student, never looked at. Apparently even the client has admitted as much, but that's another story for another time, when I couldn't be sued for revealing project details.
I foolishly made the promise of delivering by today the very last piece of backmatter, the one piece you should always dread when writing backmatter manuscript: the glossary. This particular glossary includes active vocabulary (stuff that the student is taught and tested on) as well as passive vocabulary (everything else in the instruction lines, readings, culture notes, exercises, footnotes, etc.). In short, it's a real bitch to compile. I started working on it on Friday, went in to work for a few hours on Sunday, worked on it pretty much all day Monday, and then even had someone helping me ALL DAY today at work (Tuesday). Yet here I am, at 2:45 Wednesday morning, still smashing my head against this beast of a glossary. And in actuality I'm nowhere near done. I think the sun will be coming back up by the time I finish. But technically I'll consider myself to have held up my end of the bargain if I deliver prior to the beginning of the business day, so I figure I've got another six hours and change to work on this sucker.
So what other than utter, acute and abject boredom prompted this entry? I'm going through the passive vocabulary for Chapter 10 (the last chapter...then I get to do the active vocab - whee!) and this pair of words is sitting one on top of the other. It was just too good to pass up.
desvelar - to stay up late
diligente - diligent
The other night we got home late from going out and running errands so we copped out on dinner and decided to heat up a frozen pizza. So I fished the box out of the freezer and started to read it to figure out how long it would take to heat up. Right there on the front is the admonition: "Do not serve frozen. Heat before eating."
After heeding the ever-so-sound advice of not breaking my bicuspids on an icy block of dough, cheese and pepperoni (but still not wanting to wait the 18-20 minutes it would take to heat up said pizza without eating something in the meantime) we decided to make a salad. So out of the fridge comes the bag of romaine hearts (or "les cœurs de romaine" as Viv pronounced it rather accurately. Of course, I heard "liqueur de romaine" and started wondering who the HELL figured out you can get drunk off of lettuce.). No admonitions on this bag, but they did have this gem at the top of a bag of lettuce. A mostly transparent one, mind you: "Ingredients: 3 romaine hearts".
I've been planning on changing my primary care physician through Harvard Pilgrim for a while but never got around to it until the other day. If you're looking for some great story why I need to change doctors, I'm sorry to say there isn't one. But when I related this story to my wife, her response was basically one or two-word answers. Jokingly I said "sounds like you don't want to join me in this rant", and she replied "no, not really...and besides, you're just going to blog about it anyway." So as not to disappoint her...
I called the customer service line and go into the voice menus. I'm asked to enter my membership number. No problem. Then I confirm my birthday. No problem. I navigate to the "Select a new PCP" option. No problem. Then someone comes on the line to help...and promptly asks me for my membership number, birthday, and asks me how she can help me.
Maybe someone out there who's more familiar with phone systems than I am can explain this phenomenon, but what's the point of having to do eight million key strokes on my phone when I just have to explain everything again to a human operator? I guess I can understand if it's a way of weeding out crank calls from people who don't have membership numbers, but why isn't this information passed along to the person answering the phone somehow? Anyone?
About three months ago I was trying to convert a show I'd taped in Albany and I was getting these weird clicks and pops all over the recording. Zooming in on the wave form I could see that it would be running along smoothly and then randomly jump up and back down, so instead of gently sloping up ___/```\___ it would just jump ____------____. Bad ASCII rendition, I know. Also bad transfer.
So over the next eight weeks I tried just about everything. I used different decks. I tried converting different shows. I switched digital cables, USB cables, USB ports on my computer. I booted into OS X, I booted into Classic. I reverted to an older version of my software and looked for upgrades. Recorded to my main hard drive and a secondary hard drive. Changed software completely. Downloaded new drivers for my sound card. Spent $200 on a new one. I now know Guster 10-30-03 like the back of my hand, now that I've converted it easily a dozen times and listened carefully for clicks and pops. (Side note: How well do you really know the back of your hand? Is this something people study on a regular basis? I don't have any particularly identifying marks on the back of my hand, to the point where I could pick it out of a lineup of other hands.)
Finally, someone suggested bad RAM. I bought this thing less than a year ago - a 512MB Kingston ValueRAM chip. Popped it out, ran a transfer, smooth as butter. Popped it back in and took out one of the three-year-old 64MB chips that came with the computer, snap-crackle-pop. The 512MB RAM was the culprit. So now it's sitting in my desk, and though my machine has slowed to a crawl without 80% of its memory, it's rock-solid and transferring fine again. Whew.
Things I learned over the past two weeks of traveling adventures:
- A goose is a damned hard bird to carve, and ultimately not all that rewarding. Turkey, much easier.
- My mother takes joy in encouraging my brothers to gamble.
- Gin tastes like ass all by itself. Tonic tastes like ass all by itself. Together, some weird alchemy happens. Don't know what it is.
- "Garni" is apparently a) a noun, and b) French for "a slice of cantaloupe".
- Don't try to sneak a camera into the House of Blues. However, a gigantic gear bag and a huge blunt metal object like a mic stand are both ok, as long as security is able to see into the pockets.
- You can only go all in twice in Texas Hold 'Em. You WILL lose the third time.
- A plate of sliced limes is free if you order some other random food from room service.
- Those little "press for heat" button things at Chicago's outdoor train stations are cool. Red Sox owners, take notice for those of us who go to games in April.
- Sister Hazel - not as bad as I was expecting.
- Sometimes that last blue chip is the hardest one to pry loose.
