Tag: rants

The curse be broken!

Fer th’ last three trips t’ Starbuccaneers, I ordered me the same brew, blended with ice. The scurvy dogs arsked me an I wanted whipped cream atop me drink, and every time, I replied, “No, thanks.”

Yet every time, me drink, it had whipped cream atop it!

This were three different houses of coffee, scuppering the same drink i’ th’ same manner!

It’s enough to make a pirate want to walk th’ plank hisself!

But today, aye, at yet a fourth tavern, were the barkeeps listenin’! Today, I had me a drink without whipped cream!

Methinks I oughter have tipped ’em an extra piece of eight!

Random Restroom Rants

The restrooms where I work have automatic sinks. In theory, motion detectors determine that your hands are below the faucet and turn on the water, then shut the water off when you pull your hands away. In practice, you tend to wave your hand around trying to get its attention, give up and move to the next sink over…at which point the first sink starts running. I keep meaning to draw up a 4-panel cartoon to illustrate this, but I’m not sure my limited drawing skills are up to the task.

I have actually washed my hands, gone over to the towel dispenser, dried my hands, opened the door, and walked out…with the sink still running (and no way to turn it off).

These sinks have been made worse in recent weeks. You see, someone decided they needed to turn up the water pressure. The faucets are angled slightly outward. Placing your hands under the faucets provides a surface for the water to bounce off of, and it splashes forward… over the edge of the sink… landing just below the belt.

Then, of course, there’s dealing with people who don’t wash their hands. It’s easy enough to use an extra paper towel on the handle, but what do you do when there are no paper towels? The place I went for lunch today had an air dryer, complete with the usual blurb about how much more environmentally sound and sanitary air dryers are compared to paper towels (which I think is mainly there to give you something to read while you wait for it to actually dry your hands), but the restroom door opens inward, with a handle on the inside. I walked in and there was a guy standing next to the sink, as near as I can tell waiting for someone to open the door so he wouldn’t have to touch the handle!

Random Weekend Bits

Thursday: Went out for Cinco de Mayo Sushi. (We figured the wait would be shorter than if we actually went out for Mexican food.) Realized I’ve never actually had a Corona. It’s probably just as well. Came home to find UPS had tried to deliver our copy of Mac OS X Tiger, but there was no one to sign for it. Naturally, they only try to deliver at times when no one is home. Ah, UPS!. Redirected it to my office, since I’ll actually be there when they show up.

Friday: Fought with UPS to clarify why they think I gave them the wrong address and determine whether they tried to deliver Tiger again today or not. Theoretically should arrive at the office on Monday. B5 and comics for the evening. (alenxa and I are trying to stay a couple of episodes ahead of the viewing parties with maldis and andrea_wot.) Brakes are definitely making a funny sound. This is really annoying since I took the car in for a full inspection last weekend.

Saturday: Slept in too late to take the car in and get it back earlier than 5:00. Wasted time cleaning out my inbox and random websurfing. Dropped by local comic store for Free Comic Book Day (and to get new comic bags) and picked up the Keenspot Spotlight. Made up for lack of Mexican food on Thursday. Re-watched The Phantom Menace in preparation for Revenge of the Sith, which is starting to look like it might be worth seeing. Neither of us had watched the movie on DVD before, just the special features, so it was a surprise to us that Lucas actually made changes to this movie too. Two brief exchanges were added (I can only remember the second one, just after arriving on Coruscant, where Jar-Jar calmly(?!?) remarks to Anakin that Queen Amidala is being awfully nice to them). He may have dropped the scene where they return to Naboo and notice the blockade ships are gone, or I may have just blinked.

Incidentally, Episode I is a rather different experience with beer involved.

Sunday: Responsible Adult Day. Many hours of laundry, calling mom for Mother’s Day, packing up the computer parts I recently sold on eBay (and discovering that of the dozens of boxes I’ve saved from Amazon and eBay purchases, the motherboard and cpu won’t fit in any of them), etc. And staying up late to post another in the series of much-slower-than-I-intended Hawaii reports.

Tomorrow I’m taking the car in on the way to work. I figure this guarantees that UPS will deliver Tiger before I get there. Fortunately there are other people in the office, and they don’t necessarily need my signature, just a signature from a live person.

Current Mood: 🙁melancholy
Current Music: Tori Amos – Concertina

Morning – what’s so good about it?

Insufficient sleep.

30 minutes to drive the 7.5 miles to work. The 405 was so bad I decided to take University to Alton, which would have been fine except for the construction on University, where they stopped all traffic one car ahead of me so that construction workers could run a cable diagonally across the intersection, then hand it to a guy in a crane who lifted it up to the top of the opposite pole, at which point they all started pulling to raise it above the level of traffic. Which was at least interesting, even if it did slow down my commute.

So I arrive at work, and the monitor on my desk is showing not the blackness of a sleeping video display, but a blue screen starting out “STOP 0x00000a”. Yeah, just the way I want to start my morning, fixing my computer. It at least booted afterward, but it apparently didn’t get very far in the defragmenting I started before I left last night. For all I know the defragmenting caused it.

Fortunately I have two computers at my desk, so I can work on server admin stuff on the Linux box while the Windows box defrags. Or tries to.

Old Town, New Town

Ever since I found out there was actually an area called “Old Town Irvine,” I’ve found the idea somewhere between funny, pretentious, and oxymoronic. Looking at nearby cities, we have Old Town Orange, a collection of streets with shop buildings dating back to the late 1800s or early 1900s, centered around an actual traffic circle. The place could have been the model for Disneyland’s Main Street. There’s Old Town Tustin, another collection of streets with shops going back to the late 1800s or early 1900s, with contemporary houses nearby for good measure.

Then, there’s Old Town Irvine, a couple of barns that have been converted into restaurants and a motel. Why? Because there effectively is no Old Town Irvine — it sprang whole from a designer’s master plan in the late 1960s. Most people assume UCI is named after the city, but it actually predates the city of Irvine. Both were named after the Irvine Ranch (or possibly the Irvine Company or the Irvine family — all three are tied together) on which they were built. Maybe 50 years from now there really will be an “old town” — and it’ll probably be Northwood or Woodbridge or something. But the name will already have been trademarked by the shopping center, so they won’t be able to use it.

Don’t touch that tract, you don’t know where it’s been!

I already find it disturbing that someone decided it was a good idea to leave a religious tract—really, an ad for a particular church—in a public restroom stall. (Imagine the circumstances under which someone will read it. Or better yet, don’t.) I find it more disturbing that the church it advertises is located in Temecula, at least 60 miles away, in another county, on the other side of a small mountain range, and a minimum one-hour drive in good traffic. But most of all, I find it disturbing that it’s the second time it’s happened.

I suppose if there are people in the building who commute from Riverside, they’d be closer, but still…a bathroom stall? If you’re going to advertise in a public restroom, the least you can do is use a sign, or a one-sided postcard—something people won’t have to touch to get the details.

Politics, press, and lip service

Was listening to the White House press conference on the way to work. Someone said “Mr. President, you may not have had a chance to hear this, but it appears Yasser Arafat has passed away. What are your thoughts?”

Now, this turns out to be inaccurate, but at the time my reaction was a mix of “Holy $#!7” and “Maybe the Israeli/Palestinian peace process can get somewhere now.” It’s sad, but I’ve come to the conclusion that Arafat is perhaps the Palestinians’ biggest obstacle to peace, and they don’t see it. (Although now that I think about it, an interesting parallel can be made over here: no matter how clear it is that Bush is likely to keep us at war, people still voted for him in droves.) Perhaps Arafat being ill and out of the region will help other Palestinian leaders work towards a peace settlement. At least W has figured out by now that resolving the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is important. If he’d caught onto that at the beginning of his first term, instead of virtually abandoning the region, things might be a lot less messy today.

Meanwhile, Bush has again promised to be a “uniter, not a divider,” (as if that held last time) and is calling for the support of Kerry voters. Peter David put it this way: “I assure you I will give Bush as much of a chance as the GOP gave Clinton.” Here’s a hint: there are reasons we voted against you. Look into them, attempt to compromise, and maybe you’ll get people supporting some of your policies. Ignore them and you’ll just see more anger.

Depending on how they are handled, I can get behind things like fighting the AIDS epidemic, reigniting the space program, even simplifying the tax code. But there’s no way I’ll support your overwhelmingly conservative social agenda, there’s no way I’ll support poorly-planned unilateral preemptive strikes based on flawed intelligence, and there’s no way I’ll support financing the nation on the credit card model. People are worried enough about individual Americans living in debt up to their eyeballs, but it goes all the way to the top. (Fiscal responsibility? Sure, I’d like to see some.)