Nothin’ like nerdy Microsoft humor

overheard, technology / /

In January 2002, I was running for the position of Vice President of the St. Louis Unix Users Group. On the SLUUG listserv, someone proposed that those running for office come clean on any ethical lapses. Here’s what I wrote:

Fine … I’ll go first and admit my ethical lapses.

I used to use Windows. A lot. All the time. It was really hard to stop. I mean, it came free with my computer. The guy at the store said, “Hey, try it. It’s free. Everyone else is doing it. You’ll feel good.” So I did. I gave in. I was weak. And then it got really hard to just say no. I kept giving more and more money to Microsoft, and Microsoft had me in its claws. I’d come to it every couple of days: “Hey, Microsoft, got anything else for me?” I sold things to buy more Microsoft products. I withdrew from my family, my friends, other people. Finally, one day I hit bottom … I looked around, and saw little multi-colored flags everywhere on my computer. I knew I was powerless. And that’s when I knew things had to change. I came to a LUG meeting, and I stood up, and I said, “Hi. My name is Scott, and I’m a Windows user.” Everyone was really nice … a lot of them had been in the same situation I was. Since then, the group has helped me gain the strength to get the Microsoft monkey off my back, and now I’m happier and more fulfilled than I ever was. Thank you, St. Louis Unix Users Group!

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Movies in the night

commonplace book, history, true stories / /

Another image that enters my mind unbidden:

My brother and I are spending the night at Grandma & Grandpa Scott’s house. We’re pretty young … I might be 8 and my brother 6 or 7. It’s the mid-70s. At our grandparents, we go to bed pretty early … say by 10 p.m. This night, Gus and I know that the original King Kong is on TV, and we are determined to see it. We stay awake talking in bed (we’re in the guest bed together), and then we quietly sneak into the family room and turn on the TV, ever so quietly, and watch a 40-year-old (only 40 years!?) black & white movie, listening carefully for the footsteps of our grandparents. I don’t think we were caught.

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Early winter morning with my father

commonplace book, history / /

An image of my father that enter my mind at odd times:

I’m in high school in the early 80s, it’s the dead of winter and early in the morning, so it’s still dark out, and very cold. My Dad always got up at 6 a.m. and was at his gas station by 6:30. I’m sleeping on the couch in the front room of his small house, and it’s a school morning … my mother must have been out of town. At 7:15, I’m awoken by the sound of my father coming in the front door to wake me up and take me to school. I look up bleary-eyed from the couch to see his face in the small window at the top of his front door, never locked. When I remember this event, I think of my father’s love for me, often hard for him to express, but obvious to me here.

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The spirit of the real Texas Rangers

commonplace book, history, overheard, true stories / /

I rather like this, even if it’s probably not true:

The story goes that Captain Jack Hayes and his men, the fabled Texas Rangers, were surrounded and vastly outnumbered during one of the many skirmishes of the Mexican War. He made the following prayer, certainly one of the most colorful ever made before battle: “Oh Lord, we are about to join battle with vastly superior numbers of the enemy, and, Heavenly Father, we would like for you to be on our side and help us; but if you can’t do it, for Christ’s sake don’t go over to the enemy, but just lie low and keep dark, and you’ll see one of the damndest fights you ever saw in all your born days. Amen.”

As I said, probably apocryphal, but a great story nonetheless.

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Ben’s crazy dream

commonplace book / /

Following is a dream from my buddy Ben’s blog, in May 2002. Ben’s dreams are great. Most people’s dreams are boring as hell, at least when they’re retelling them to you, but I always enjoy Ben’s. In fact, I still have an email he sent me 5 years ago describing a dream he had involving floating and Bach’s music. Enjoy.

Dream 5/1/02

I dreamt last night of going to an alternative theatrical presentation of the works of Mark Twain, down at what started out to be Marshall, Missouri and ended up being Drury College, in Springfield. Jans and I did help stack sand bags for a fire station in Marshall, which became an impromptu fly fishing workshop. The college had the most amazing printed flyers, generated by their print shop. I went back to see the print shop, and the director of the library, who was in charge of the print shop, thought I was trying to hire away his prize employee. I saw the speech beforehand, but missed the performance itself. People talked about how amazing it was – the performance was ongoing, and focused on character sketches of various Mark Twain creations in everyday settings, so one could simply walk in and catch snapshots of it without losing the narrative flow.

Coinciding was an animation festival, which included cartoon and live-based animation, with special effects. Howard, of Kaldi’s coffee, had an entry about a man trying to fend of a giant mosquito that was keeping him up at night. One of the entries was a live action puppet show, with an interaction between a large, golden painted, crudely made beetle and a quarter that kept up a barrage of insults and challenges, underneath a glass dome, . To hear it, you had to stand right next to it, which I let the rest of the crowd know when they were trying to figure out why they couldn’t hear since I was the only one nearby.

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Incompetent people don’t know it

commonplace book, science / /

From The New York Times:

Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent.

On the contrary. People who do things badly, Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities — more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.

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One of my favorite ideas: flow

commonplace book, cool stuff / /

From BrainChannels:

Mr. Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced chick-sent-me-high-ee) is chiefly renowned as the architect of the notion of flow in creativity; people enter a flow state when they are fully absorbed in activity during which they lose their sense of time and have feelings of great satisfaction. Mr. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

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The strictest of teachers

commonplace book, overheard / /

From Nat Friedman:

For twelve months in 1998 and 1999, I went through this phase of trying to “diversify my interests,” and signed up to take piano lessons. My teacher’s name was Peter, this rigid Eastern European math major who instructed piano to idiots like me on the side. In our first lesson, I was showing off that I knew a few notes of Fur Elise, when he abruptly interrupted, shouting: “What? Beethoven? Do not try to express what you cannot understand!”

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Perfect Score Achieved on Pac-Man

commonplace book, cool stuff, technology / /

From Twin Galaxies

For the first time in video game playing history, a perfect score was achieved on the legendary arcade game, Pac-Man.

On July 3, 1999 at 4:45 P.M., taking nearly six hours to accomplish the feat — on one quarter — Billy Mitchell, 33, a Fort Lauderdale hot sauce manufacturer visiting the famous Funspot Family Fun Center in Weirs Beach, NH, scored 3,333,360 points — the maximum possible points allowed by the game. The results will go into next year’s edition of the Twin Galaxies’ Official Video Game & Pinball Book of World Records — which is the official record book for the world of video game and pinball playing. …

To get a perfect game on Pac-Man, the player has to eat every dot, every energizer, every blue man and every fruit up to and including board 256 — where the game ends with a split screen. This must be accomplished on the first man, too.

When I was a freshman in high school in Marshall, I played Pac-Man constantly. I actually won a contest for Saline County Pac-Man champ, and my prize was an Atari 2600. My all-time high score was 1,187,000, played in the Wal-Mart lobby over the course of two hours.

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Great story about Shaw

commonplace book / /

George Bernard Shaw supposedly asked a woman if she would sleep with him for a million pounds. Her demure response was “Certainly.” But when he asked her if she would sleep with him for 10 pounds, her response was “Sir, what do you think I am?”, to which Shaw retorted “Madam, we’ve already determined what you are. Now we’re just haggling over the price.”

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She’s a poet and don’t know it

commonplace book, on writing, overheard / /

So I’m listening to Car Talk on NPR, hosted by Tom and Ray, AKA Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, and this woman calls in, and she says this:

Well hello, Click and Clack,
My name’s Mary Mack,
And I’m from Portland, Oregon.

And I thought, my God, but that scans really well. Try it — her meter really flows well. Very impressive.

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A wonderful postmodern joke

commonplace book / /

A postmodern joke from Disinfotainment:

How many deconstructionists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Even the framing of this question makes a grid of patriarchal assumptions that reveals a slavish devotion to phallocentric ideas – such as, technical accomplishment has inherent value, knowledge can be attained and quantities of labor can be determined empirically, all of which makes a discourse which further marginalizes the already disenfranchised.

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Jans clarifies it for us

overheard / /

Back in November 2002, a bunch of us went camping in a cabin in the woods. Around midnight, we were sitting around the fire, talking. The subject of crime came up, specifically the statute of limitations.

Scott: I think the statute of limitations doesn’t apply only in cases of murder and rape.

Denise: That’s right.

Scott: What about terrorism? Is there no statute of limitations on that?

Paul: Well, usually terrorism includes murder.

Jans: If there’s no murder, then it’s just scaryism.

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Man, I lived a lot of this

business, history, technology / / 
Ode to the 90s
Found on FuckedCompany.com

I part-time telecommuted
as a Webmaster
for a dot com
in Y2K consulting.
They said it was
temp-to-perm.

it didn't pay
but there were options.
I swung by the office to make trades.
(Not that there's anything
wrong with that.)
cause we had a T1 Line
and there was a bull market
with a strong,
virile President.
and you never knew
when it could
crash.

I was a millionaire at 27
for thirty seconds.

I dug grunge.
then eighties.
Tony Bennet.
then Chumbawumba.
how bizzare.
how bizzare.
smoked Cohibas.
(Not that there's anything
wrong with that.)
but I didn't inhale.

Alrighty, then...

I learned HTML
and swing dancing.
moved to Seattle
but I was back on the redeye.
why did I eat
those krispy kremes?
it all seemed like a good idea
at the time.

I had a Pentium III
yeah
baby
yeah
with 9 gigs and a DVD.
It can do anythingh
even play movies.

I fell in love
in a chatroom
with a .BMP
I got the .JPEG
I wasn't so sure.....
I got emails,
but I couldn't Reply
my server was down
and our IT can't handle the MIS.
And my email didn't allow enclosures...
her ICQ was in my PDA
but I upgraded and
the memory's gone.

[Boing Boing Blog]

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A beautiful Indian song

commonplace book / /

Beautiful poem of the day: I was reading a lot of Native American myths in preparation for a class I was teaching at Washington University several years ago, when I ran across this song by the Popago people. I really liked it, and I hope you do too.

Song for the Puberty Rite of a Girl Named Cowaka

A poor man takes the songs in his hand
And drops them near the place where the sun sets.
See, Cowaka, run to them and take them in your hand,
And place them under the sunset.

A beautiful Indian song Read More »

A man who loves his feet

overheard / /

From Ben Jones’ Benblog, in February 2003:

My friend Ben Jones talks about his feet, back when he was a waiter: “My feet are my lifeblood. Even after I’m done waiting, I don’t think I’ll ever think of my feet the same way. They have been my best friends over the last year, suffering through miles of abuse and experimentation. Now, I know them better. I know what they like. They’re less like the strange reptilian appendages they sometimes seemed and more like mongoose, cute and furry and sleek, but capable of turning it on when danger is near. Riki-tiki-tavi. I love my feet.”

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