Tag Archives: Personal Blather

I love messing with telemarketers. I have a sort of game I play with them to see what sort of reactions I can provoke.

I get
• one point if the conversation ends because they hung up on me,
• two points if I can make them audibly angry,
• three points if they yell at me,
• four points if they swear and
• five points if they start crying.

So far, nobody has gotten a perfect score by doing all of these, but I have had a few six point calls where they do the first three…
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OK, so this poster comes in with a really cool title:

SUMO Modification of the SC Motif in C/EBP Alpha

And I have no idea what it means. But I’ve got this mental image of some scientist taking two cells, fattening them up and slamming them together at high speed. In South Carolina.

Unfortunately, according to the abstract, it has something to do with Synergy Control and a Small Ubiquitin-like Modifier. Alas.

I don’t go out of my way to watch sports. If there’s a sporting event on a TV in the background, I’ll occasionally glance over at it out of a general interest in what’s going on, so I’ve got a passing acquaintence with sports in a generic sense. Still, Sunday afternoon at the In-Laws, we watched the Superbowl commercials, with the TV muted during the actual game. We missed the halftime show though, so I’ve felt a bit left out of some of the office gossip about Janet and Justin and the “Wardrobe Malfunction.”

On the other hand, I have a theory about it all…
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Found a nifty site that lets you create a custom world map with places that you’ve visited highlighted in red…

create your own visited country map

Back in November, I mentioned that there was a markup language that seemed to be developing to deal with the complexities of cooking. Msr. Dagoski recently pointed out to me that someone has done the same sort of thing to help with the choreography of folk dances. Here’s the big quote from their website:

The goal of the CDML Project is to define a comprehensive formal language that describes contra dances and similar folkdances, can be read and understood by both software and humans, and can be extended.

Is that really what we need? Computers that know how to dance? Cooking I can understand. One of the staples of science fiction is the ability to walk into your kitchen, call out the the name of the dish you want, and then have the automated appliances serve up a batch of, for example, “Tea, Earl Grey, Hot.”
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I’m thinking of having a video camera installed on the end of my arm. It’d make things so much simpler… All I’d need to do would be to point in the general direction of whatever it is that I’m supposed to be taping. I’ve been videotaping so many things lately, it’s a wonder that a camera hasn’t spontaneously grafted itself to my hand.
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You know, I’m pretty sure I left my sunglasses sitting on the top of the dresser in the bedroom. I put them there because I’d left them in a shirt pocket, a bad habit that has more than once resulted in my shades going for a ride through the washing machine. They were in my shirt pocket because I was worried that they’d get folded in half in my coat pocket when I took my coat off, and I’d tucked them in the coat pocket absent-mindedly when I meant to put them back in the sunglass holder in the car. Where they’re supposed to be so that I can find them when driving…

Hopefully, today won’t be as bright and sunny as yesterday.

I can’t believe I’m hoping for sodden, miserable weather.
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‘Way back in the early 1800’s, a bunch of otherwise nice folks took a look at what technology and industrialization was doing to the job market and decided that the best way to stay employed was to smash the machines that made it easier for less skilled people to do the same sort of work that they’d been doing. Ever since then, people who fear or distrust technology have been given the name “Luddite“, even if they don’t have the same sort of motivations.

I’ve got a sort of reverse Midas Touch going on. Everything I touch turns to junk. It’s not an instantaneous effect, obviously, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this. I’m just starting to worry that, if things don’t change pretty soon, someone will coin the term “Mattite” and apply it to people whose presence causes technology to spontaneously smash itself.
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More and more construction around the Hospital these days. It’s tough to get from one side to the other, and the parking lots that have been devoured or blocked off have added a hint of desperation to the normal morning commute. I’m lucky. My Wife can drop me off in the morning and take the car away to the law school, where the parking is much more abundant. I’m sure when construction begins on the new annex they’ve got planned, our situations will reverse.

Either that, or there’ll be no parking at either place.
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