The flip side of Mac & PC

No matter which side of the issue you come down on—or if you're like me and don't really care—you've got to admit that as spoofs go, these have the originals dead to rights.

Now playing: Spock's Beard, The Kindness of Strangers

Transform yourself

It really was wrong of me to show you my M&M alter ego and not tell you where you could go to reinvent yourself. Enter the M&M Character Creator:

Now... go forth and get candy coated.

P.S - Here's my sweet wife...

Random Thursday

Wear Yellow

My life as an M&M:

Pizza what?

After a brutal, wreck-littered, stuck-behind-aimless-wanderers commute home from work, I stopped at a Pizza Hut a block up from our house. The traffic held me up long enough that I didn't get to see Turtle before she had to leave for her meeting, so she told me to fend for myself.

That's okay. I like pizza.

I walked in, and the gal at the counter promptly told me to wait. So I did. And I did for five minutes, while she was back in the back visiting with someone. When she finally got around to waiting on me, I asked for a supreme personal pan and laid my cash on the counter.

"Your phone number?"

"You don't need my phone number," I suggested, adding the Jedi Master wave of the hand to reinforce the point. "I have cash."

"I have to have your phone number, or I can't enter the order," she said.

I thought about that briefly. There I was, standing right in front of her with cash in my hand, and I had to give up a phone number too? I could have given her the number for time and temperature, but I didn't.

"I see," I said, pulling my legal tender back across the counter and stuffing it back in my wallet. "Well, you have a nice day. Bless your heart."

Twenty feet away, the neighboring Subway shop was perfectly happy to take my order without a background check. The young woman just smiled, welcomed me, and efficiently made me a tasty sandwich. The only questions I was required to answer were "What kind of bread would you like?", "Would you like it toasted?", and "What kind of cheese?" Those seemed relevant, so I happily answered them.

A Subway club was probably better for me than a supreme personal pan pizza anyway.

It's official

Back before the holidays, I made the decision to join a friend's small MS 150 team and ride in honor of his wife (also a friend), as well as several others in the same circle of friends, who also live with multiple sclerosis. We're the Wheeler Dealers, a reference to poker and The Gang's love of gambling. The jerseys are snazzy, with the faces of the folks we're riding for emblazoned on playing cards over a green background.

As of this evening, I'm officially signed up. It's time to start getting back in shape (I haven't been on the bike, on the road, since November) and start figuring out how I'm going to meet my minimum fund raising requirement without having to reach too deeply into my pocket. Any of you MS 150 veterans with an interest in sharing your tips? I'm all ears.

I feel for you (but don't tell anybody)

Every now and then, my lovely bride reacts so strongly to something she sees on TV or hears on the radio that I'm left feeling like I might have spent too much of my time in the company of machines. It could be argued that this is less the cause for my apparent lack of empathy than a symptom, but the fact is that I often take as facts of life the same things that nearly reduce Turtle to tears. Driving down the road, I see a bag of trash that fell off the back of someone's truck; she sees someone's German shepherd, hit by a vehicle and left for dead. She hears about someone setting a cat on fire or sticking a dog in a laundromat washer and turning on the hot water and is furious; I hear the same story, and I'm disgusted but not surprised.

That's why I found some encouragement in a chance encounter I had during Monday's icy slog home from work. At a stop light,* I found myself behind a black Kia Spectra hanging off the back of a tow truck. The right rear taillight was obliterated, as were parts of the rear and quarter panels surrounding it. I could see that the hood was buckled and most of the right front of the car caved in. Ouch.

As I waited for the light to change, I also noticed that there was a sort of fuchsia-furred tribble-like thing hanging from the rearview mirror. Young woman, I inferred.

The temporary license tag on the back read "1-29". When I bought Dorian, my temp tags were only good for about three weeks, so I further concluded she'd only had the car for about a week and a half.

That sucks, I thought. On my mental movie screen, I saw the Spectra's driver headed to work at The Gap (probably because I was stopped alongside a mall at the time). She'd rather not, because she's nervous about having to drive her new car on the slick roads with all the maniacs, but she has to. She has a car payment now, and she can't get off work. Suddenly, brake lights flash in front of her, and she steps on her brakes—new, unfamiliar brakes that work much better than the ones on her old, clapped out Toyota. The car starts to skid, the rear end slowly swinging to the right.

WHAM! She slams into the rear of the car in front of her. The slide turns into a spin, slamming the right rear of her car into the side of a car in the next lane. What a tragic mess, I thought, giving the unfortunate Kia owner a mental pat on the shoulder.

As the light turned, some young chicklet with a cell phone pressed to her ear whipped her Honda Civic between the mashed Spectra and Dorian's front bumper. My imagined scenario with the Kia driver changed, and my newly-rediscovered empathy evaporated as quickly as you could say "Hello... State Farm?"

NOTE: Apparently, that last paragraph was just a bit too poetic to be clearly understood. Dorian is not wrecked. Quite dirty, still, but unharmed. My State Farm comment was made in reference to a future that might have been, if not for Dorian's four-wheel disc brakes and what's left of my aging reflexes.

* Some people call them "traffic lights", but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I say it's a duck.

Winter Blast!

[cough]

To hear the local news stations tell it, the Dallas/Ft. Worth area is entering a second ice age. I guess they have to do something to stir up some excitement, but it's not really necessary. Just trying to get from Point A to Point B is excitement enough.

I got suckered twice this week. First, on Monday, when we had an "ice storm" that turned out to be significantly less severe than the meteoroligists had been trumpeting for the previous four days. I was at work by 7:20, but the office didn't open until noon. Today, we awoke to "snow" (in fact, a sort of airborne slush that only looks white when it accumulates), and not a warning shot from the weather persons. The sand truck drivers must've been depending on the TV weather, because when I hit the roads at 6am, there wasn't a sign that any of the overpasses had been treated.

Not that I cared. I took to the side streets where the only hazard I had to face was the frozen stuff, not some moron in an Econoline talking on his cell phone instead of concentrating on my brake lights. By 7:30, I had arrived at my office, where I immediately called Turtle to let her know I was still alive. Then I went looking for the usual idiots stalwarts who show up regardless of the crap on the roads.

My boss's boss looked up from his desk. "What are you doing here? The office is closed."

"I could ask you the same thing," I said. "But the fact is that the message I got when I called in to check said the office would be open at 9am."

"You're the third person who's told me that, but the office is closed." He then dialed the main number and let me hear for myself. Obviously, it had been changed since Turtle had checked while I was en route.

So I checked a few emails, drank a second cup of coffee, made a trip to the men's, and turned Dorian north again.

My morning in a picture:



(Hmm. That's interesting. Looks like Blogger's using Picasa for images now. Google truly owns my soul, now.)

I know: it doesn't look like much, but there's enough on the roads that I had to chip the slush dingleberries out of Dorian's wheel wells before tucking him in to the garage.

Maybe I'll go take a nap with the kittens...

Yes we have no words today

Sorry. Nothing new to report, because I used up all the best words writing novella-sized comments on other people's blogs, today.

Are you pondering what I'm pondering?

Why is it that spammers like Alexandra, who keeps e-mailing me about "emaciate whirlpool", constantly warn that "This is our final attempt to reach you"—but it never is?

Meanwhile...

The latest batch of search terms (not including the poor souls still trying to figure out how to make their cars and their RoadRunner internet service work):

• sasquatch's cousin Yeah... you know, I can't remember her name either. We only went out a couple times.*
• carrie underwood's nickname in college Just because we drove past her home town on the way back from our holiday trip, that makes me an expert?
• road rage shooting plano texas I could see that being a possibility...
• b48a7bb1654c8f50f2e1aee00dcb99828be05147360a Oh yeah? Well, 6120686578206f6e20796f7520746f6f.

* And having said that, I'll probably receive a nasty letter from the same lawyer who's representing the cavemen in those Geico ads.


Now playing: Coldplay, X & Y.

Down with those *&%#@ cyclists!

I know that some of my accounts of encounters with hostile and inattentive motorists have been met with some skepticism—and I really do understand. How can one guy have that much bad luck with his fellow humans unless he's doing something to bring it on himself?

That said, I'd like to provide an illustration of at least one instance of the sort of thinking that keeps me on full alert every time I go out for a ride. Check out the first comment in response to a posting about a proposed safe passing bill, on the local paper's cycling blog.

Ahhh...

The first week back to work after the holiday trip was reasonably calm; but after being off work for ten days and quite a few days during November, as well, four days seemed like a very long week. I'm getting back into the swing of things, though.

Turtle and I have been chipping away at the task of getting our new laptops set up the way each of us like things. Unlike Bret's new baby, ours aren't the fanciest or the fastest of Dell's line (or anyone else's), but they're nearly as fast as the four-year-old machine I use for my daily development tasks at work. That's a huge improvement over Turtle's old Toshiba, which had a pronounced tendency to lock up while trying to load just the antivirus software.

Aside from the speed increase and the ability run applications that were unavailable to us with the old Win98 machine, the most pleasant surprise is how much more sensitive the internal wireless card seems to be than the Linksys wireless-g card we were using on the old laptop. Add to that the relative simplicity of connecting to a new wireless network under WinXP using Dell's wireless connection manager, and life is going to be much easier for Turtle. One of the main reasons for her getting a new laptop was so that she could use it from her rented office space and... oh... the sort of upscale coffee shops where she tends to meet with prospective clients and collaborators. She never could get the old laptop to connect, because the process was just too fiddly.

For my part, I'm quickly becoming spoiled by the wide, crisp LCD display that at the same time is sharper and brighter than my flat screen monitor at home and handles wide content better than my cathode ray monitor at work. The Synaptics pointing device was a bit awkward, at first—I was used to the old laptop's "nubbin", which I could use without moving my fingers from the home position—but I'm getting used to it. Enabling the scrolling gestures and modifying the hot spots to my own preferences helped.

The new machine's battery actually holds a charge, and with that comes previously unexplored mobility. Unless it's during the day when I'm at work, you'll never know where I might be blogging from. This has been quite handy, this weekend. We've kicked off the new year for the Ride of Silence™, which means that I've had a torrent of e-mails from event organizers confirming their information. Each of these must then be update in the database and activated for display on the site. I've been hauling the laptop with me wherever I go in the house so I can keep working. Sweet.

And the heat generated by the thing keeps my lap warm.