That’s right! It’s LOLstoats!
Huh. Whaddya know? You can actually hear it when people delete your bookmark!
October 17, 2007 — 7:28 am
Comments: 24
Whee!
Okay, folks, this is it. I mean, it’s not it it…it’s Stage One of Operation Weasel Move. This is where we move the London house to the new house on the coast. The new, ancient house on the coast. But more about that when I get back.
For I shall be unplugged! The house won’t be broadbanded for another month. I hope to get a chance to check mail occasionally, but that’s about it. This’ll be the longest I go without the Internet since there was an Internet.
I’ll probably go out of my skin.
But don’t despair, minions. Through the miracle of the WordPress check-is-in-the-mail post-dating system, I’ve queued up an entry for every day I’m away. Yes, including weekends! It’ll be like Hanukkah in October!
See you in a few, if nobody drops a refrigerator on me.
October 16, 2007 — 6:09 am
Comments: 54
Tales of the commute
For twenty-four-and-a-bit years, I’ve been driving the same 26 mile stretch of I-95 between Providence and Boston. Now I’ve driven it for the last time. Probably. Unless we have a meeting up here or something. Anyhow, I’ve seen some wild-ass stuff.
I just missed being part of a 100 car pileup — that was the trooper’s estimate, anyhow. I only saw the butt end of it, about five car-lengths ahead. Snowy conditions, so nobody was going fast enough to be much hurt. Those of us behind it got out of our cars and milled around and chatted for a few hours in the snow before the troopers turned us around and sent us the wrong way up the interstate to the nearest exit.
Then there was the woman who committed suicide by leaping into traffic. I missed the event, but investigators came along afterward and spray-painted a fluorescent orange circle around every gobbet of meat. For months driving past the spot I had the same poignant thought: “shit fire, that lady covered a lot of asphalt!”
Funny weather. Accidents. Car fires. Bumper stickers. Vanity plates. Road kill. It’s an adventure every day. An adventure in suckitude.
But it dawned on me — I’m going to be totally lost! I do all my shopping up here. My liquor store is here. The store where I buy my underpants. The restaurants I go to. Now everything familiar will be a pointless forty-minute drive North. This moving thing is like peeling off a bandaid slowly.
But hey, check out this delicious moonbatmobile I saw in the way in this morning. The Lieberman slogan is repeated on the side window.
Connecticut handicap plate. Nice touch.
October 11, 2007 — 10:46 am
Comments: 27
Is it sick if you know you’re doing it?
Meet my desk toys! They sit on my monitor stand, inches from my busy fingers, waiting to entertain me.
The toothpicks and the picture tacks work in similar ways: I can shove them under the edge of the monitor only so far, and then they stick. Then they can be shuffled and arranged in various ways. Sometimes, neatly in rows. Sometimes fanned out from an imaginary centerpoint. Sometimes — as pictured — quite randomly. I’m flexible like that. Not like some people and their tight-ass OCD; mine is a loose, free-wheelin’ sort of obsessing compulsion.
The foam ring came out of a package of CD’s. It fits over the knuckle of my little fingers — either one of them — but not the next biggest finger. Amazing! Naturally, I have to test this astonishing property frequently to make sure it still applies.
The push pin is for raking across my data CD’s to ruin them before I throw them away. No stealing my data, you wicked imaginary dumpster data bandits! The paperclip is for sticking in the little hole in the CD burner and rescuing CD’s that have become trapped. One of my CD burners is occasionally naughty like that. When not thus employed, it is bent just so and stuck under the edge of the monitor, much like the toothpicks and the picture tacks.
Stickstickstick; sticky stickity stickstick. Things that stick and unstick are so gratifying!
The twist ties…don’t do anything. But I save them all in that spot. Because, hey! You never know when you might need a twist tie. In that spot.
The piece of artwork turned up recently. It’s a 35mm slide (remember them?) of a fish on a platter with big red lips and white teeth. It’s the second drawing I ever did on a computer, some time long about 1985. The first drawing I ever did was an elegant, understated graphical treatment of a fountain pen. I remember it distinctly. Does that turn up? No. All I got is this stupid toothy fish. Some legacy!
Look, I watch progress bars for a living. A bunch of my day is spent waiting for programs to compile or CD’s to burn or images to render; awkward, fiddly little chunks of time that aren’t quite enough to do some other productive thing but a tad too long to do nothing at all. Perfect for arranging toothpicks and slipping foam rings over your finger bones.
It’s a caged animal thing. Back and forth, back and forth.
But, you know, I can’t actually see myself moving these objects and setting them up in the new office. That seems a bit eccentric, even for me. I’ve put out hand several times with the intention of throwing them away. I haven’t quite made it yet.
Can you see why moving is a bit of a chore?
October 10, 2007 — 12:41 pm
Comments: 10
The incredible shrinking weasel
I’m not really an atheist. That’s just shorthand. It’s easier than explaining that inexplicable things happen to me, but they don’t seem to emanate from something grand and mighty like the God of Abraham. More like something small and relatively weak. With a rotten sense of humor.
Every turning point in my life bristles with weird coincidence. Like so: I’ve worked for the same company in the same location for almost 25 years. We moved office once in all that time — from one side of the parking lot to the other. So I could reasonably expect to serve out my last few months in a comfortable, familiar environment and stick the next poor bastard with clearing out my junk.
But no. Boss lady has decided we have to pick up stakes and move operations to the home office right now. Exactly one week before I fly to England to help Uncle B move the London house to the new place.
So everywhere I turn there are cardboard boxes and and bags of trash and huge hairy dust bunnies and the painful throwing away of things. I don’t throw away things good. I collect things real good, but every time I throw an object away it nibbles off a little piece of my happiness.
But a twenty year old computer graphics program is worth exactly nothing. Those barrels? Full of them. And the manuals that came with. Thousands and thousands of dollars worth of stuff…back in the day. Now, begone! Geroff! Vamoose!
Ow! Owowow! Boohoo. Shit. Woe is Weasel. Make it stop!
October 9, 2007 — 2:19 pm
Comments: 53
The Museum of Swingline
“Why do I have so many staplers?” I asked no-one in particular when they just kept turning up in every drawer and cabinet today.
“Because the last time we moved, you wouldn’t let anybody throw one away,” said a voice from the opposite cube, “don’t you remember?”
No. But I believe it. My boss usually waited until I took a day off to throw things out; it was so much less painful than prying my fists open and listening to my ululating wails.
Look at these beauties! Big and heavy and streamlined, like some mighty diesel engine of stapling. They streamlined everything back then, as if the efficacy of simple office supplies was determined by their coefficient of drag. Is your desk holding you back? Get the sleek, modern, aerodynamic model, new for 1952! Now with wind-tunnelocity!
This company is both old and parsimonious; stuff hangs around until it flat out disintegrates. Do you know how long it takes furniture of the mid-twentieth century to fall apart? And since we were the art department and got shit on everything we touched, we got the leftover’s leftovers.
My old desk was a heavy, grossly overengineered slab of a barge of a piece of furniture, something like the QEII on legs. Blaaaaart ding ding! Out of the way, you little fishing vessels! Weasel doing paperwork!
We shed most of that stuff when we moved here, across the street from our old offices. But I managed to rescue these few small time travelers. And some rather nice scissors. And a magnifying glass. And all the X-Acto knives and pica rulers. A french curve set. Two excellent multi-hole paper punches. A six foot tall motorized photographic enlarger. And a Bernoulli box.
Ambassadors from another era.
Come, my pets. Would you like to visit England?
October 3, 2007 — 5:52 pm
Comments: 42
Really, REALLY unfortunate wedding announcements
Or, When NOT to Hyphenate Your Name. What’s my favorite? Best Lay? Wang Holder? Weener Whipple? Peters Rising? No, I can’t choose. Go see them all for yourself.
Speaking of names, I am inevitably going to have to become Mrs Uncle Badger or they won’t let me stay across the pond or get access to the wonderful National Health Service. I am, of course, proud and delighted to wear a family name associated with thousands of years of smelly, lice-ridden, bad tempered mustelids who live down holes and eat worms, but this does present me with a problem.
See, in the UK, a woman typically exchanges her husband’s last name for her own, keeping her same old given first and middle name. In the US, she takes his last name, drops her middle name and her own last name shifts over and becomes her new middle name. So I have a choice here.
To complicate matters, I have TWO middle names, and they’re corkers. My mama approached baby names and dog names in a similar spirit of mad hijinks and good clean fun. If I’d been born ten years later, in her commune days, I’m convinced I would have ended up Lemondrop Polythene Snickerdoodle Weasel. As it is, I got a melange of cornpone polysyllabic family names, something very like Stoaty Terwilliger Rothschild Weasel.
So do I follow the Brit tradition — Stoaty Terwilliger Rothschild Badger — and continue to sound like something that wandered boozily out of a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon to piss down your leg? Or do I go with the alternate, Stoaty Weasel Badger, and sound all classy and shit, like some kind of a fucking duchess already? (Don’t even suggest hyphenating the two. Stoaty don’t play that. I think that’s getting married with your fingers crossed behind your back).
I know y’all are going to be disappointed in me, but I’m leaning toward “duchess.” I’ve enjoyed my stupid name very much, but enough’s enough. I think I’ll play grownup for a while. I’m sick of being unable to fill out forms (try fitting “Terwilliger Rothschild” in the little space they leave for middle names) and having to spell it out for people.
But, man, would I ever love to be Crystal Butts McCracken.
September 20, 2007 — 8:20 am
Comments: 26
Farewell to an old friend
This here is Stoaty’s hash pipe (I’m experimenting with speaking of myself in the third person. It worked so well for Bob Dole). A good friend made this for me in High School. It’s a layer of rosewood, a layer of ebony and a layer of ivory laminated together and carved to shape. It’s beautiful.
And until the ivory finally burned away from the business end, it tasted like you were smoking toenails.
Still, when someone gives me a gift, I use it. Only, I haven’t used it since 1980. I stopped doing illegal things entirely when I realized I was qualified for grown-up jail. I’m fairly agnostic on the topic of gay marriage, unless it involves me. I don’t want one. Especially by force in a federal detention facility.
Twenty seven years. So I was astonished when I poked it up one nostril and picked up the acid tang of illicit herbiage. Oops! Can’t bring it to England. They go through your stuff. Can’t mail it to one of you guys, just in case it goes astray. So I gave it to a friend of mine who occasionally still indulges.
I hope she remembers she put it in the glove compartment before her next traffic stop.
September 4, 2007 — 7:10 pm
Comments: 37
Before there was Photoshop
I don’t know how many thousands of dollars this baby cost new. Several, many. Can you get a feel for the scale of it? I should have shot the picture next to a Junior High School gymnasium for comparison. This is a Truevision videographics adapter, but everybody called it a Targa board. They were the only game in town for image manipulation in 1987.
Before there was Photoshop, there was this. Before there was this, people had a touching and almost religious faith in the veracity of photographs. It was my job to crush those tender feelings under the heel of my sneaker.
Truth is, we didn’t really need the bzillion dollars worth of graphics computing we bought in the ’80s. In some measure, the main purpose was to make our customers go, “woo!” My computer room was a stop on the company tour for every client. My boss would keep up a snappy patter about what the machines were capable of while I demonstrated in real-time. Like a freak show.
Or sometimes an engineer would drop me the client’s annual report before a meeting, and I would digitize a picture of their headquarters and set fire to it. They walk into the meeting, see a picture of a half-destroyed Conglamco Industries’ flagship facility projected on the back wall and dive for the phones. Ah, it was sweet.
Then there was a time I almost bought myself a lifetime of unwanted attention from the Feds. See, somebody was going to talk to Boeing, and he gave me this really crappy, blurry picture of a jet to use on the title slide. That wasn’t right, so I cleaned it up. Sharpened it, drew in the obvious lines. My boss saw it and nearly wet himself; it was the first released photo of a certain stealth bomber; it was supposed to be all blurry.
All our computer graphics stuff lived in a small, purpose-built room with a real door. A real door, and walls that went all the way to the ceiling. It was that important. Two complete graphics workstations, five monitors, assorted cameras and bernoulli boxes. Things that whirred and things that hissed, blinking LEDs of every color (except blue…those came later). The bridge of the Enterprise wasn’t a patch on it. The whole room worked on one circuit that was operated by a single knife switch by the door. I got to work before dawn and it was my great privilege to hit that switch and bring the whole glittering, wheezing chromium beast to life every morning.
I couldn’t possibly have used this board. It was nonstandard in every way. But my boss is a great thrower-awayer of things, and I’m a hoarder. (They had to wait until I was on vacation to biff our original three computers: an IBM XT and two ATs. Oh, god. Where are they now?). And I have the monitor that this board drove (also useless). But, you know…it just wasn’t fitting to let something this amazing and world-changing go into a dumpster. It had earned itself a flaming Viking funeral ship, at the very least.
Eh. I’m sure I’ve told you guys these tired old stories before, in some thread or other. Indulge me. It makes it easier to say goodbye.
August 21, 2007 — 6:46 pm
Comments: 20
Kicked to the curb: the Doomercycle
Today is garbage day (and a very happy garbage day to you). This week’s Casualty of the Week: the Doomercycle.
Let’s see. Doom was released in 1993, so it was maybe thirteen years ago I wondered if I could cross-breed a bike with a mouse and come up with a way to get some exercise while fragging zombies. (Whoop! There it goes. I just heard a door slam and looked up to see the Doomercycle ride off into the sunset. That didn’t take long. G’bye…! <snf>)
See, one variety of mouse works like this: it’s got two little spoked wheels inside, one for uppy-downy and one for sidey-sidey. When the mouseball moves, it turns those wheels. Each wheel has an LED on one side and a sensor on the other. So when the wheel turns, spokes interrupt the light, and the sensor sees blink-blink-blink and it knows you’re moving.
That wouldn’t be quite good enough. That would tell the sensor how fast you were moving, but not in which direction. Each wheel actually has two sensors; when it sees AB-AB-AB it knows you’re moving forward, and BA-BA-BA means you’re going backward.
I thought…spokes. Wheels. What if you took the uppy-downy wheel, and put the sensor on one side of a real bicycle wheel and the light on the other? That would give you running forward and backward, all you need for Doom. You could perch the keyboard on the handlebars for all the other commands. I went to Starvation Army and picked up the used exercise bike you see above for $15.
It took a couple of tries, but as it turned out, no soldering was necessary. I was kinda bummed, to tell you the truth. It was too easy. See, there was a little socket where an odometer or something used to go, and all I had to do was jam the mouse’s own uppy-downy wheel into it, and duct tape the circuit board in place around it. Voilà!
I had feared all along there would be a scale problem; that the wheel would move too fast and overwhelm the sensor. But, no…it worked eerily well, right out of the gate. It recognized slow, fast and in-between. It played a kick-ass game of Doom.
I can’t say as I got miles of exercise out of it, though. In order for the wires to reach, all the components were balanced precariously against each other. Too much enthusiasm would’ve put a handlebar through my monitor, or sent me ass over teakettle into the radiator. Eventually, I used it with a laptop balanced across the bars, but that was VERY insecure. It needed a sturdy platform or something, but the proof-of-concept was enough to scratch my itch. Then laptops stopped having serial port and that was that.
But it worked! So nuts to my boss, who laughed! And, dammit, my electric sneakers would’ve worked, too! I’m sure of it!
August 20, 2007 — 6:11 pm
Comments: 22