Tag Archives: Personal Blather

I’ve got one of those coffee cups with the sliding sippy lids, designed to keep you from doing a Stella Liebeck while driving. I mostly use it to make sure I don’t dump a cuppa joe on my computer by accident. For that, the lid works fine. It keeps the coffee inside unless it’s been clicked open. There’s even little air hole in the lid, cause you just can’t get the coffee out well unless there’s air flowing in to replace the caffeine that’s being sucked out, right? It clicks open when the lid is open, so there shouldn’t be a problem.

But there is.

The little air hole is spaced exactly the same distance from the coffee hole as my mouth is from the tip of my nose. So sometimes when I’m trying to drink, the cup sucks onto the tip of my nose. This prevents air from going into the cup, and keeps me from getting my coffee.

This is bad.

The solution is fairly simple. I need to tip my head back more while drinking. Unfortunately, this makes the cup useless for drinking coffee safely while driving. Sure, you won’t get a scalded lap, but staring out the sunroof is generally a bad idea while on the road.

This story from CNN:

Researchers: Dolphins found using tools
WASHINGTON (AP) — A group of dolphins living off the coast of Australia apparently teach their offspring to protect their snouts with sponges while foraging for food in the sea floor.

Reminds me an awful lot of one from The Onion:

Dolphins Evolve Opposable Thumbs
In an announcement with grave implications for the primacy of the species of man, marine biologists at the Hawaii Oceanographic Institute reported Monday that dolphins, or family Delphinidae, have evolved opposable thumbs on their pectoral fins.

I, for one, welcome our new aquatic overlords.

Nice little weekend of insomnia for me. Mostly due to the incoming summer and the fun changes in heat, air pressure and humidity. It’s happened before, so it’s not entirely unexpected, but it’s still not much fun to be sitting around at three in the morning counting sheep number 3587 and wondering if it’s a prime number. (It isn’t by the way, but the lowest prime factor is 17, so it took me a while to figure out in my head)

Ok, the folks at the Michigan Theatre are officially having too much fun with the movie titles… Of course, it doesn’t hurt that they’ve had subject / predicate pairs for the last two weeks.

Last weeks marquee: “Wild Parrots / Walk On Water”

This week: “Wild Parrots / Look At Me”

Ok, we’re up North, the wireless network is set up, and I’ve recovered from the drive.

Of course, it took a four hour nap to do that… And if you’re good at math and Michigan geography you’ve figured out that we got here remarkably early. We actually rolled in to town at around ten AM.
Continue reading →

Do you want to know, in a nutshell, the latest thing that bothers me about PowerPoint? I hate how they define the layout of your master slides. Sure you can modify title and text slides, but if you want to change the default layout of graphic slides, you just can’t do it. I spent far too much time yesterday and this morning trying to convince PowerPoint that what I really wanted was a layout with a title at the top of the slide with a picture centered below it and a caption at the bottom. That was fairly easy. If you then hit the ‘layout’ button for ‘picture with title and text’ it shuffles things around so that you’ve got a two column layout with the caption as a bulleted list next to the photo. This is wrong.
Continue reading →

Once again I’m falling into the self editing trap. I write a couple of lines, pause to think too much about what I want to write next, and then wind up canning the whole thing. Or I’ll start something and put it in draft mode and then revise it until I give up…
Continue reading →

I found out last night that an old friend of mine died. The memorial service is tonight, but it’s up North and there’s no way I can get to it. Some of his other local friends who are in the same situation are going to be getting together for some reminiscing. I’ll be doing an iChat session so that the Man in Japan can sort of be there too.
Continue reading →

I’d like to take this opportunity to let the folks who make the “Plung-R” drain cleaning device know that their product really sucks.

It also blows.

And it got the water flowing through the drains in the Condo’s bathroom sink.
Continue reading →

…we knew ye well.

After using enough paper to cover two football fields and enough ink to put an inch deep puddle in a cast iron bathtub, the big poster printer at work has kicked up heels and gone to join the choir invisible.
Continue reading →