[I trigger the update]
Installing. About 27 minutes remaining...
[5 minutes later]
About 42 minutes remaining...
[4 minutes after that]
About 49 minutes remaining...
[12 minutes go by]
About 48 minutes remaining...
[48 minutes later]
About 41 minutes remaining...
But not my coworkers. Them, I’m fine with.
I go to work early to avoid my coworkers. I leave early for the same reason.
— Vodka Time (@VodkaTiem) September 3, 2015
Although I don’t use work to avoid non-work peeps. I use antisocial behaviour, which works just as well.
One of the (dis?)advantages of being color-blind is that I tend to dress simply, in solid colors and materials that are easy to match—basically the adult version of Garanimals. I also favor darker colors in general, and a lot of navy, green, and blue in particular.
Today, then, I am an unintentional 6-foot freshly inflicted contusion:
This is the result of a few standard clothing items (I always wear black socks) mixed with random grabbing out of the dresser drawers and laundry basket.
Tomorrow I will probably happen to choose brown or green and so will switch to the Healing Bruise look on the holiday, because with the new year comes optimism, or something like that.
Thank heavens for technology. Otherwise I’d be lost.
I never get the flexible straw!
He looks up every 15–20 seconds to check if the signal has changed.
Darkness and fog, two great tastes that taste great together.
Set the Way-Back Machine to today, 06:50ish.
I’m waiting at the 4th & Pike bus stop for the Sound Transit 545 to Redmond. I’m holding my freshly prepared (and still a smidge too hot to drink) small skinny vanilla latte from the Seattle’s Best down the street, watching the traffic roll past.
A good many vehicles pass that location in the usually five or six minutes I have to wait for the 545. Fair number of buses, many private vehicles and business trucks/vans/whatever.
One truck catches my eye. Smallish tanker truck, it looks like the type that might deliver heating oil in the suburbs. The company name emblazoned on its side:
BAKER COMMODITIES INC.
In no way remarkable, no idea why it catches my eye.
So then my brain goes into overdrive in something like the following sequence of thoughts, which probably requires all of 10 seconds start to finish:
Crazy bald kid didn’t know WTF he was talking about!
(Clearly I am rapturously attentive in this meeting)
An indicator of how this Monday will likely go:
I required five attempts to leave the house successfully. I believe this is a personal best.
First try: Realized I had forgotten my work badge (and, by extension, my transit card since they’re in the same badge holder).
Second try: Forgot Netflix DVDs for return mail.
Third try: Turned to lock door, determined this would be difficult since keys were still on the shelf inside my apartment.
Fourth try: Halfway down the stairs, remembered my wallet was still on my desk in the living room.
Fifth try: Half a block away, noticed my phone’s charge level was only 63%. Considered returning for the wall charger, remembered I have a USB charge cable on my desk at work.
So then. How’s your Monday?
Stepped away for a lunch break, returned to find a little sweet perched atop my notepad courtesy of my coworker Jeremy. :-)
Text exchange just now.
David: What should I be for Halloween?
Me: A Chilean miner. You can phone it in.
John the Baptist with his pets, or maybe trying to sell used carts, or something, at Seattle Art Museum.
Got home today, retrieved the mail.
Found this vaguely alarming-looking item:
I am a Consumer Reports subscriber, but online only. I prefer to keep the paper out of my house, and it’s easier to search for ratings and product info online than by rooting through old magazines.
One of those rip-off-the-edges types of things. So rip off I did, and I found this:
It doesn’t say what the benefits on my account are, so I went to the site and found....
It’s an offer to subscribe to the print magazine for a year, a buck an issue.
Seems skeezy for a consumer organization like Consumer Reports to resort to this type of marketing in an attempt to maintain or increase their print subscriber base.
But it’s nice they admonish me to recycle the notice, even as they’re asking me to contribute to paper waste by subscribing to their print magazine when I’m already an electronic subscriber.
I’m pretty sure if it was a girl bear, I’d last less than half that time.
A quieter year compared to previous lists (see 2006, 2007, 2008). There would probably be far more than previous years if I included mobile chat status messages, but there’s no reliable way to record those for posterity, so I just ignore ’em.
The “available” messages first, in creation order:
And now the “away” messages—looks like I wasn’t away very often:
It’s not cold in this room. I know this for two reasons.
First, I have photographic proof:
And second, I don’t feel cold. But my hands do not know this.
My hands! They feel frozen and have for most of the day, dammit!
So, having achieved fluid equilibrium a few hours ago, that state where I must expel fluids at roughly the same rate I am consuming them, I went down the hallway a bit ago for a refresh of my beverage. And I thought: Ah ha! Hot chocolate!
Which I am now not drinking but am hugging closely to my person, in a so far vain attempt (because I have taken my hands off the warm cup so I can type this post) to warm my poor frozen hands.
Also, earlier (and unrelated), I sneezed five times in a row. Best. Sneezes. EVER.
So how’s your Friday?
IHOP’s newest thing: Football-shaped stuffed French toast for the new NFL season. Strawberries for AFC, blueberries for NFC.
I saw a brief reference to the 1987 stock-market crash online, so I looked up the Wikipedia article to refresh my memory about the event and BAM off I went into wikiwandering. After the jump, in the order I clicked the links, and with each article’s first full paragraph (minus links within it) included for context:
Continue reading "Today’s Wikipedia safari" »
Today was even more Monday than most of the Mondays I’ve experienced. In no particular order:
I thought of more items when I was riding home in the carpool and now I can’t remember them. I need a notebook or something, but I can’t read my own handwriting so that probably wouldn’t help me much.
I worked late on Wednesday and I have to go in early Thursday. These two simple facts have turned my brain against me and I’m lying here in the soft glow of my phone’s screen, typing a mobile post about how I’m not sleeping right now.
This is a crazy world.
Continuing an annual trend, my available and away status messages from iChat in 2008.
Previously: 2006 status messages; 2007 messages.
Lists in order I entered the status messages.
Continue reading "2008 in status messages" »
And rather a succinct summary of the weekend apart from the Thanksgiving holiday itself:
Twitter / Don Nunn: didn’t plan to spend the day off at work, goddammit (http://bkite.com/02FcQ)
13:37 Nov 28, 2008
But I ended up working much of the weekend, the luck of the on-call draw combined with a healthy dose of insanity from my teammates’ status updates on their ongoing projects and blah blah blah.
Long weekends that turn into extended periods of off-hours work just blow.
It’s a little blustery tonight.
Across the street is a tree that moves in the breeze across the line of sight between my balcony and the security light on the building directly south of mine.
The tree’s crossing the light keeps making me think there is someone walking across my balcony. In the last few minutes I’ve had several WTF moments.
Time, methinks, for bed. Have a nice Sunday night. :-)
Okay day at work, a bit busy this morning and then the day DRAGGED for the roughly 27 years between 09:30 and 12:15, and then it was a bit busy again in the afternoon to finish things out.
So home I went, normal commute with not much traffic (score!), couple quick errands on the way and when I walked in the door, I fell over a stack of recyclables and two cats because I forgot to take them (the recyclables) down to the bins this morning—actually didn’t forget at all, I chose not to take them down because I hate making noise at weird hours and I leave my house for work at 05:30, no one wants to be awakened by the sound of glass bottles clacking in their hideous high-pitched manner into the goddamned recycling bin—and when I stood up, I had a slight sore throat and a mild post-nasal drip.
Damned cold coming on! I think it’s actually the cold I thought I was getting a couple weeks ago, but that one never went anywhere, just camped out in my sinuses and/or lungs until it could spring on me as I lay prone with cracker boxes and Diet Coke cans and unread weekly advertisement-mail wads scattered about me and two cats fleeing in terror down the entry corridor. Its moment spotted, that dormant little cold pounced like 12 ninjas and now I am sniffling and my throat’s slightly scratchy and I’m out of night-time cold meds, but my head isn’t actually stuffed up, so I’m not going to the 24-hour Bartell Drugs nearby, it’ll wait until tomorrow.
The whole point of this was to mention that part of what I planned to do tonight was try to rescue my phone from yet another of its roughly quarterly calendar crashes, where my 10-year, 20,000-item-plus calendar gets eaten by a sync that fails because the computer crashes or the phone resets or the gods, enraged by my successful daily syncs over the previous 88 days, jealously wreak their vengeance and force the sync to fail, and the phone will never sync again after that. So I have to reset everything, set the phone to be overwritten in its entirety, a process that takes roughly 13 weeks and works maybe a third of the time.
Today it took only 90 minutes and worked on the first try. Possibly sympathy for the scratchy throat, but I have my doubts. I think it’s trying to gaslight me by making me think it’s on my side again, and three months down the line it’ll crash again, or next week it will burst into flame unprovoked, probably right as I’m trying to look up what movie I saw on Jun 11, 2003, after we had been at Tap House Grill and had probably more than a few beers before we saw... what movie was that again?
Here, I’ll look it up.
When they designed the automatic-shut-off valves for the faucets in public restrooms, did they survey how long most people leave a faucet turned on to rinse the soap off their hands, and then design the valve to shut off a second or two SOONER than that?
Always—ALWAYS, I SAY—I have to trigger the stupid automatic faucets at least twice to rinse my hands fully, and I’m maybe 2 seconds from a full rinse when the things shut off.
Damned engineers!
I’ve only broken one bone in my life, my left pinky during a game of fly’s-up in grade school. 4th or 5th grade, I think, but I don’t remember exactly when.
I had a hell of a time convincing anyone it was actually broken—it was only a hairline fracture and didn’t really hurt, it was just this strange sensation of warmth and a slight numbness for a week or so after it happened.
Some months later my pinky had developed a misshapen lump over the knuckle. Turns out bone had grown over the break while it healed, so my left pinky is lopsided now.
Answering:
Have you ever broken a bone? If so, how?
Originally posted on donnunn.vox.com
And I was thinking, hey dude in the stall by the sinks, you should turn your phone to its “silent” mode if you’re going to press a lot of buttons while you’re doing your natural business in there, because it sounds like you’re emitting an oddly staccato but low-pitched grunt otherwise.
Then I thought: Speaking of phones, I just put my phone in my pocket. Did I lock the keys?
Next thought: Wait. That sounds a lot like my phone.
Final thought, as somehow I managed to maintain my aim while I dug my phone out of my pocket and looked at the screen to see the short stack of random calendar events created by the keyboard presses the phone had endured in my pocket: Dammit, I really need to dig out my phone belt clip again. And stop, in the silences of my mind, giving other people shit about their weird bathroom habits.
After the jump, lists of the custom “available” and “away” status messages I used in iChat in 2007.
They made it easier to extract this info from iChat in Leopard. You can now choose “Edit Status Menu” from iChat’s buddy-list window, select the item(s) you want from the list(s), and use the Copy command to get a comma-separated text list. Only problem for me is I use commas in some of my statuses, so it’s not a simple search-and-replace function to get the list into a usable format, but it sure beats having to fire up Property List Editor and extract the list that way. Minor trade-offs, I suppose.
Anyway....
Continue reading "2007 in IM status messages" »
On the bandwagon of the “year in review” posts everyone seems to adore this time of year, I hereby present the full listing of status messages I used in iChat in 2006, in the order I originally entered them.
I like this time of year specifically because it’s so easy to fill dead air. :-)
Without further delay. . . .
Continue reading "2006 in IM status messages" »
