Tag Archives: Personal Blather

At work today, I ran across the stupidest chart I’ve ever seen. It’s a “Quality of Life” measurement, ranking people from 1 to 7 based on their symptoms. Down at #1 is “No Symptoms”. At the top, #7 says, “Dead”.

Personally, if they’re measuring quality of life, I think they could have stopped at #6.

Hey! Tuesday night I sharpened up some sticks, broke out some new flint knives and bearskins and poked at the webserver until it cried for mercy and agreed to update the Booniverse with a shiny new WordPress installation.

So go check it out. Leave a comment or two. They may not show up instantly – there were a couple of hundred spam comments left over from the original Movable Type install that had to get flushed out of the queue – but comments are officially re-enabled!

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Today’s comic is either like tiny insects in the palm of history or was written by an iron fist in a glove full of vaseline.

Oh wait… That’s not the comic. That’s a Thomas Dolby song…

I’ve been working on losing weight. I don’t want to get on the crash diet bandwagon, since I know it’ll just lead to a subsequent ballooning, so it’s been a slow, gradual process. This can be discouraging sometimes. You see yourself every day, so you don’t notice any progress. Over the weekend we had dinner with my in-laws, and my sis-in-law commented that I’d lost weight since last she’d seen me.

I’ve noticed some other things myself, some good, some bad. On the good side are the generic “physical health” benefits. I don’t get as winded on stairs. At work, I can toss around rolls of 42″ gloss paper with ease. And I can comfortably wear some of the previously too-tight pants which have been hanging out in my closet.

And that’s led into one of the not so good things. After a weekend of knocking around in scruffy old pants, I forgot that when I wear my newer, nicer pants, it’s vital that I also wear a belt.

I didn’t notice it first thing this morning, oh no. Freshly washed jeans tend to be a little snug, at least until the fabric warms up and relaxes. For me, this happened as I was walking down one of the longest hallways in my whole workplace. And it’s really tough figure out a casual way to keep your pants from heading south. I wound up casually hooking my thumb in the top of my pocket and sauntering in the direction of the nearest men’s room to undertake a quick program of waistline hefting and shirt tucking.

All day long, it’s been the battle of the beltless. Standing up and sitting down have become little contests between me and the force of gravity. It’s really kind of embarrassing. Because you know your first reaction on seeing someone in my kind of situation isn’t going to be, “Hey, he’s lost weight!” It’ll be something along the lines of “Huh. Burgundy underwear. Is that Fruit of the Loom or Haynes?”

This screenshot will only be cool to the very tiny subset of people who read both this blog, and this webcomic, but to that very tiny group, this will be very, very cool.

I just like the tortured syntax of this:

Note that all claims process and clearance procedures must be duly completed early to avoid impersonation arising to the issue of double claim.

We have a fake plant in our office. It’s kind of annoying, because we can’t get rid of it.

It sort of came with the space. And it seemed like a good idea at the beginning – back before we moved in more people and equipment and just plain stuff. After a while though, it became just another thing to bump into or trip over.

We tried sending it to Property Disposition and were told not to bother. “Nobody,” they said, “would ever buy it.” And they’re probably right. It would just crowd up their warehouse of junk, and heaven knows we can’t have that.

So we’ve started slowly distancing ourselves from the plant. At first, we’d set it outside our door when we opened in the morning, and bring it in when we closed. Then we just stopped bringing it back in.

It started with a little pantomime. The last person out of the office in the evening would close the curtains, turn off the light and step out into the hall. They’d lock the door and then “notice” the plant, sitting there all forlorn and forgotten. But they’ve already locked up, and their keys are in their pocket… Surely it’ll be ok to leave the plant out there overnight! Nobody would steal it, after all…

And (unfortunately) no one has. Yet.

More subtle work ensued: the last person out would adjust the plant, straightening it out so that it presented its best side to the hallway. Coincidentally, this would nudge it an inch or two away from our door every night.

This week, they put new carpeting down in the hall. And when the carpet crew moved back the various hall benches and stuff, they put our potted plant a good ten feet away from our door. As a matter of fact, it was now perilously close to blocking access to one of the courtesy phones in their alcoves outside our door.

This was a great opportunity.

Back in the pre-cellphone days, there used to be three pay phones, one in each of in these alcoves. Now there’s just one pay phone and one “internal calls only” courtesy phone. The middle alcove has a hole in the wall where the phone used to be, but is otherwise empty.

Well…. was otherwise empty.

Now it has a lovely potted plant that mostly conceals the hole in the plaster. Looks like it belongs there…

A YouTube video via Peter David’s blog…

This site features a twenty-frame animation that shouldn’t be viewed by anyone with agoraphobia.

It’s the full Moon. Actually, it’s about 20 full Moons, taken at the same scale and the same orientation. As a result, you can really see the little variations in angle and distance caused by the Moon’s elliptical orbit of the Earth.

A friend and fellow World of Warcraft gamer’s birthday is today. He jokingly said he was 77 years old.

Not everyone realized this was a joke.

And, of course, it got embellished. He quickly became a 77 year-old power gamer, dating an 18 year old he met via MySpace. I’m curious as to how far this whole thing is going to go….