Monday, August 19, 2013
Hearing Test for Firstborn
Parenting Note #23761: Firstborn tends to get caught up in whatever he's doing, to the point where he may not hear me even when I'm standing in the same room and addressing him directly. This is not symptomatic of any sort of hearing problem, as he can still detect the soft beep of the Playstation 3 firing up, with perfect accuracy, from the other side of the house.
Friday, August 16, 2013
Rocket Man has a Little Toy Gun
We're troubleshooting an iPad for one of the managers here at work. The problem is that the wee beasty seems to lose power when he's using it - which sounds pretty normal until you realize that it he has it plugged in. That shouldn't be possible. The thing should be able to charge no matter what it's running.
We've tried just about everything. We've made sure it really is plugged in. We've switched out the cables. We replaced the tablet itself.
It's still doing it.
At this point, we've pretty much narrowed it down to the brick - the piece that converts the power from the wall plug into something the iPad can use. We think it's just an elderly brick that isn't working as well as it should. (We actually tried replacing the brick earlier, but apparently changing it out for an equally elderly brick didn't solve the problem. Go figure.)
To test this, we've plugged the iPad into a new brick, and turned on everything - every app it has on it is running. Which means, of course, that we are now... privileged... to listen to the music of upper management. Unfortunately, Upper Manager only has two songs on his iPad, so we've been playing them on a loop (and presumably in random order, but as you might imagine it's a bit hard to tell).
To help you better envision the effect this is having, I'm embedding both songs below the cut. All you have to do is play one, and then the other, and then repeat this process until you run out of electricity.
We've tried just about everything. We've made sure it really is plugged in. We've switched out the cables. We replaced the tablet itself.
It's still doing it.
At this point, we've pretty much narrowed it down to the brick - the piece that converts the power from the wall plug into something the iPad can use. We think it's just an elderly brick that isn't working as well as it should. (We actually tried replacing the brick earlier, but apparently changing it out for an equally elderly brick didn't solve the problem. Go figure.)
To test this, we've plugged the iPad into a new brick, and turned on everything - every app it has on it is running. Which means, of course, that we are now... privileged... to listen to the music of upper management. Unfortunately, Upper Manager only has two songs on his iPad, so we've been playing them on a loop (and presumably in random order, but as you might imagine it's a bit hard to tell).
To help you better envision the effect this is having, I'm embedding both songs below the cut. All you have to do is play one, and then the other, and then repeat this process until you run out of electricity.
Thursday, August 15, 2013
Celebrity Dreaming
I woke up this morning from one of the weirdest dreams I can remember.
I mean, why would I suddenly decide to take a trip to Japan. I speak Japanese with all the fluency and ease that I speak Romanian, Classical Greek, and Esperanto. In other words, I don't understand a word of it. But, you know, it was a dream, and by dream standards that's only a little weird.
This particular hotel, though... They didn't number the floors of the hotel. They used symbols instead: square, crescent, filled circle, star, triangle, empty circle... That was pretty weird. I mean, how are you supposed to figure out the sequence?
What really tipped it over into WTF territory, though, was the company. I mean, seriously: how on Earth did I end up on the same trip as Britney Spears and Kevin Federline? It's not like I know either of them. Britney, I can sort of understand. She was reasonably famous, and if my brain just randomly picked someone I'd heard a lot about, well, there you go. Not someone I'd heard about recently, but still someone with a slot in the back of my mental filing cabinet. Federline, on the other hand, is one of those people that... well, I really shouldn't even know he exists. I shouldn't be aware of him at all. Which means that the only reason for him to appear in my dream is by association with Britney - which is pretty much the only reason I know about him at all.
That said, neither of them did anything particularly odd or obnoxious in my dream; the bizarreness of the dream came entirely from the setting (big, peculiar hotel staffed by people whose language I don't speak at all) and from the fact that they were there at all. (In the dream, as in real life, I was not at all famous; so ending up on some sort of travel tour with a pair of famous people [or, well, one famous person and her ex-husband] struck me as odd even in the dream.)
I mean, why would I suddenly decide to take a trip to Japan. I speak Japanese with all the fluency and ease that I speak Romanian, Classical Greek, and Esperanto. In other words, I don't understand a word of it. But, you know, it was a dream, and by dream standards that's only a little weird.
This particular hotel, though... They didn't number the floors of the hotel. They used symbols instead: square, crescent, filled circle, star, triangle, empty circle... That was pretty weird. I mean, how are you supposed to figure out the sequence?
What really tipped it over into WTF territory, though, was the company. I mean, seriously: how on Earth did I end up on the same trip as Britney Spears and Kevin Federline? It's not like I know either of them. Britney, I can sort of understand. She was reasonably famous, and if my brain just randomly picked someone I'd heard a lot about, well, there you go. Not someone I'd heard about recently, but still someone with a slot in the back of my mental filing cabinet. Federline, on the other hand, is one of those people that... well, I really shouldn't even know he exists. I shouldn't be aware of him at all. Which means that the only reason for him to appear in my dream is by association with Britney - which is pretty much the only reason I know about him at all.
That said, neither of them did anything particularly odd or obnoxious in my dream; the bizarreness of the dream came entirely from the setting (big, peculiar hotel staffed by people whose language I don't speak at all) and from the fact that they were there at all. (In the dream, as in real life, I was not at all famous; so ending up on some sort of travel tour with a pair of famous people [or, well, one famous person and her ex-husband] struck me as odd even in the dream.)
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
A story by Firstborn
I am sick today, so Firstborn is filling in with a story.
Red and the zombie
By Firstborn (age 7)
It all comes with a phoenix named Red. He was a great guard. When a friend needed him, he would teleport there to help. And help he would. Unluckily one day he found a zombie.
The zombie was on the loose, and the zombie could create other zombies. And so there were zombies everywhere. Red wasn't expecting the zombie to multiply. The zombie bit him! Red put out his flames and left an egg. The zombie was all like "I win! I win!" and then, "Uh-oh."
The egg was hatching. A little baby phoenix came out of the egg and grew into a big phoenix. The new Red decided to teleport behind the zombies so the zombies would think the new phoenix just automatically died because it was a hologram. The new Red shot fire behind and burned them all up.
The End.
Red and the zombie
By Firstborn (age 7)
It all comes with a phoenix named Red. He was a great guard. When a friend needed him, he would teleport there to help. And help he would. Unluckily one day he found a zombie.
The zombie was on the loose, and the zombie could create other zombies. And so there were zombies everywhere. Red wasn't expecting the zombie to multiply. The zombie bit him! Red put out his flames and left an egg. The zombie was all like "I win! I win!" and then, "Uh-oh."
The egg was hatching. A little baby phoenix came out of the egg and grew into a big phoenix. The new Red decided to teleport behind the zombies so the zombies would think the new phoenix just automatically died because it was a hologram. The new Red shot fire behind and burned them all up.
The End.
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Real Work Conversations: Because I'm Awesome!
Me: "...That's because I'm awesome."
Boss: "Is that what it is?"
Me: "Obviously. It's the only possible explanation. In fact, I think it'll be my explanation for the rest of the day. Whenever anything goes right, it's because I'm awesome."
Boss: "You're an optimist. What makes you think anything else will go right?"
Me: {shrugs} "Eventually I'll get to go home. Because I'm awesome."
Dollyrots below the cut. (This is Geds' fault.)
Boss: "Is that what it is?"
Me: "Obviously. It's the only possible explanation. In fact, I think it'll be my explanation for the rest of the day. Whenever anything goes right, it's because I'm awesome."
Boss: "You're an optimist. What makes you think anything else will go right?"
Me: {shrugs} "Eventually I'll get to go home. Because I'm awesome."
Dollyrots below the cut. (This is Geds' fault.)
Monday, August 12, 2013
Writing is Research
Still working on the short story for Midian Unmade. Just a short story, mind you, but it has me looking up information on alopecia, Merlin, and herpetological symbolism in the Catholic church. (Spell-check recognizes one out of three of those terms.)
Research is a vital part of writing, even when you're writing about things that you're, well, completely making up.
A friend of mine once had the pleasure of watching a college librarian realize that the pile of a dozen books (everything the library had on the topic, plus some inter-library loans) that she was checking out were all, every single one, on the topic of human sacrifice. Admittedly, that was was academic research, and nothing to do with writing fiction, but even so: what's the weirdest piece of research you've ever done? The one that makes you wonder just how freaked out the NSA might be getting?
Research is a vital part of writing, even when you're writing about things that you're, well, completely making up.
A friend of mine once had the pleasure of watching a college librarian realize that the pile of a dozen books (everything the library had on the topic, plus some inter-library loans) that she was checking out were all, every single one, on the topic of human sacrifice. Admittedly, that was was academic research, and nothing to do with writing fiction, but even so: what's the weirdest piece of research you've ever done? The one that makes you wonder just how freaked out the NSA might be getting?
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