I ate my first fig
I didn’t care for it. It tasted nothing like Fig Newtons.
We have an elderly neighbor who sometimes calls upon us to wrangle technology for her. She has a large and attentive family, but when they aren’t available, we’ll do. We had to sort a DVD player for her.
We’re building up a karmic reserve. Ain’t no large and attentive family for us when we go gaga.
Once years ago she grew all sorts of things in her garden, but now all she has are those things that survive and produce after years of neglect. We get paid in things like figs, artichokes and walnuts.
Have a good weekend. Don’t eat anything I wouldn’t eat!
August 16, 2024 — 7:04 pm
Comments: 8
I bought another thing
I bought a sun hat made of paper. It looks like a regular straw sun hat, but weirdly floppy.
It’s hard to see how it’s made. It like little tubules of paper rolled and then woven. Seems strong. Perfectly comfortable.
I made a joke about not getting it wet, but the man who sold it says that’s not an issue and you can crush it in your suitcase and it springs back to form. Probably because it was mostly formless to begin with.
August 15, 2024 — 6:52 pm
Comments: 9
I bought a thing
You’ve probably figured it out, but I was stumped. It’s a dandelion puller.
Works a treat on soil. You dig the prongs into the earth and rock it back. I have a whole bunch of thistles popping out of my sad, brown excuse for a lawn and it did for them. Sadly, it’s useless for pulling weeds out of brick work, which is what I particularly hoped it would tackle.
One of the pleasures of country shows, there’s always at least one guy selling reclaimed old garden tools. The forks and shovels are too heavy for me, but the small tools are beautiful and feel wonderful in the hand.
August 14, 2024 — 8:02 pm
Comments: 11
Oh no!
Yesterday, James Lileks published his last column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. I know this because Iowahawk tweeted it. (The two men congratulate each other for being funny in the thread).
This is confusing, though, because the internet tells me Lileks’ column stopped in 2007 after a round of budget cuts at the paper and I can’t seem to find the rest of the story.
Whatever. I used to read him a lot, but I admit I lost track of him over the years. Happy to say, his website is still there. He’s actually kept it somewhat updated, including his blog the Bleat and the Institute of Official Cheer.
I could (and probably will) wile away the afternoon with the Gallery of Regrettable Food (updated for 2024!). I’m quite sure my grandma made some of those dishes.
August 13, 2024 — 3:39 pm
Comments: 7
Loved it.
It’s the only two minutes of the Olympics I watched. You’ll be hard pressed to find a version of it on YouTube that doesn’t have a huge, bouncing watermark or breaks halfway through to ask you to subscribe to their channel. People obviously trying to glom onto this silly cow’s fifteen minutes. And the official Olympic channel doesn’t feature it for some reason (snicker).
I’m sure most people would argue that break-dancing shouldn’t be in the Olympics, but it isn’t the silliest Olympic sport. And if you watched clips from the proper entrants (which I did trying to find our friend Raygun), it’s kind of mesmerizing and athletic as hell.
Here’s a guy who takes it seriously and tries to explain why she was so awful. If you care. Just a small rabbit hole I fell down this afternoon.
A rare hot Summer’s day here and I’m trying not to move too much.
August 12, 2024 — 7:17 pm
Comments: 9
Say what now?
I’ve slept to a white noise machine my whole adult life. Probably longer. My dad taught me old style – tuning the TV to an off channel. Doubles as a night light!
I was happy with that until that one night I had a terrible vivid dream I was sitting in a rowboat with Margaret Thatcher watching Panama burn. I remember the firelight glittering in her hairspray. Turns out, it was 1989 and the channel was running a broadcast about the US invasion of Panama.
Then I got a fancy audio gadget that sat on the bedside table and made whatever kind of hiss I asked it for. I liked it well enough, but it wasn’t suitable for married weasels.
For years now, I’ve used a tablet, earbuds and Rainy Mood. I’ve gotten good at turning over without losing me ears. It has the added advantage that my alarm plays through the headset in the morning and doesn’t wake Uncle B.
But for months now, the tablet chimed quietly in the wee hours for unknown reasons. A small sound, but often enough to wake me. Sometimes happens twice in a night. Never anything on screen to tell me why. I finally got the idea to turn on notification history so I could find out what program was doing it.
Sonofa bitch. My alarm app has an upcoming alarm notification (see above, now turned off). That’s right – my alarm woke me up to tell me it was going to wake me up in a few hours. Who wants this?
Uh-oh – here comes the cat. Gotta go. Have a good weekend!
August 9, 2024 — 5:45 pm
Comments: 9
help am stuck under cat
please send st bernard, brandy.
August 8, 2024 — 6:38 pm
Comments: 6
That creaking sound you hear…
…is my elderly braincells springing into action. We’re getting a new touch-screen kiosk at work that runs entirely on PowerPoint. I’ve worked on oodles and oodles of PowerPoint presentations. Like, twenty years ago.
Fortunately, I got a copy of PowerPoint with Office at home and, from what I can tell poking around, it hasn’t changed much.
In my corporate gig, back before PowerPoint came out in the late Eighties, my department made upwards of 100,000 physical 35mm slides a year. The process became more digital over time, but we still created them in the art department.
Then I remember the newly-hired fancy-pants head of IT sitting with me to work on a slideshow, telling me that my services wouldn’t be needed as soon as everyone had their copy of PowerPoint and could do their own presentations.
Hilariously, that’s not what happened.
Turns out it’s not a smart use of resources to task an elite engineer on an elite engineer’s salary to spend hours fussing about fonts and colors and transitions. I mean, they loved doing it, but it was a serious time waster and they sucked at it. Engineers are not known for their aesthetics.
I remember one Indian engineer who created all his graphs in multiple eye-raping colors. He explained cheerfully that his data was so boring, this was the only way to make his presentations bearable.
The illustration above isn’t even all of the possible slide transitions available in PowerPoint. And boy, do engineers love them some slide transitions. Every new slide skittered, slunk, faded, bounced or turned the page onto the screen. It was dizzying.
In the end, either they created an initial presentation and we polished it for them afterwards, or (what usually happened) they gave us notes and we created the whole thing. We were cheaper, faster (I did it all day long!), and (theoretically!) in better taste.
Who’d’a thunk I’d be doing PowerPoints again at my time of life.
August 7, 2024 — 6:36 pm
Comments: 6
Srs bsnss
The Summer Fete season is nearing the end for 2024 and I haven’t posted about it once. It’s the same every year. That’s part of the charm, but it makes for lousy content.
This weekend, I petted the same two donkeys that I petted last year and the year before. Nice beasts, but you know. Limited replayability.
I do get a kick out of the judging at this one every year. They take it so seriously. If you can’t read that, it says “Great cake and flavour but quite messy finish. What a shame.”
Silver cups for the winners, so there are stakes. I’m sure there were plenty of noses out of joint in the aftermath.
The sad truth is, Summer is almost over. I just hosted a Zoom meeting and we set the date of the next meeting for September. It’s almost September, y’all.
It would help if we hadn’t had such a cold last three months. Hottest year on record, everyone.
August 6, 2024 — 6:50 pm
Comments: 4
I’m hornswaggled
Whenever I have to do something graphic-y for work, I have to bring it home to my personal copy of Photoshop. They’ve made it stupidly expensive to buy now because they want you to sign up for a subscription service instead (in fact, I’m not sure you can even buy a standalone copy now), and it’s just not worth it for the amount of stuff I have to do.
Then I get home and my willingness to do work crashes through the floor. I am so behind.
I finally decided to give Photoshop Elements a try. None of the comparisons were good at telling me what the difference was, but I figured I could at least do basic layout with it.
Well, lemme tell you – there isn’t a difference. I did some fairly complex masking and layering today and I have yet to find a single function that was missing. Even the keyboard shortcuts are the same.
The only thing I can think is that my copy of Photoshop is so very old that the program has changed enormously in the interval. Elements is like a 15-year-old copy of Photoshop, I guess. If that’s true, it makes me kind a curious what a 2024 Photoshop can do – but obviously not enough to pay £20 a month for a subscription.
As the history society I work for is a charity, I got a legal working copy of Elements for £69. w00t!
p.s. yes, I did try GIMP. It is free and full-featured and I’ll use it in a pinch, but I find the interface hella irritating.
August 5, 2024 — 6:48 pm
Comments: 4