Archive for July, 2020

The Vanilla Asylum

At least once every thirty-six hours, one of my coworkers tries to tell me how impossibly wacky my office is. They say things like, “I bet you didn’t know you were getting in to such a mental institute!” and “We sure do cut up a lot around here” and “Are you having trouble getting used to the craziness?”

My co-workers are the most normal people I’ve ever met. I mean, I like them; they’re congenial, they’re witty (more or less) and they have interesting things to say about non-work subjects. They’re certainly not bland or uptight. But they’re normal; they’re bourgeois anti-revolutionaries; they’re muggles. The daily strongbad breaks (”it’s, like, weird and funny, at the same time!”) don’t disrupt the professional atmosphere. The German shepherds don’t even disrupt the professional atmosphere, unless they think the Fed Ex man is trying to attack our Bold Office Leader; they’re more like a furry distributed fika break.

There are two possibilities here. One is that everyone at work has an excellent deadpan, and they have been teasing me. The other is that in an office park, cubicle signs reading “do not taunt the animals” are actually dizzying heights of hilarity.

yami · 22:56 · 31 Jul 2020
Filed under: Diary

Pinball Cardinality

Each morning I am astonished that my alarm goes off, and I am required to get out of bed again even though I just went to work yesterday. Except for the mornings when I wake up and head straight for the Extreme Pinball Video Games convention.

One of the comforting things about infinite sets is this: if I lived forever, I would spend just as much time playing pinball as I would working.

yami · 20:30 · 29 Jul 2020
Filed under: Diary

Gilfillan Airport

I was looking at a map yesterday afternoon with one of those dinky little desert airstrips marked on it… alas, it appears Gilfillan Airport is no more. It’s worth browsing Abandoned & Little-Known Airfields for a few that haven’t been paperd over with awful houses, though I’ve no idea what to do with an old airstrip once I’ve found one.

I’m sure some of you can tell me.

yami · 21:14 · 24 Jul 2020
Filed under: Links

Becoming a Yuppie

Here I am, blogging on my lunch break. Whoo-ee boy, is yuppie life ever exciting! I haven’t plugged in to the narrative structure of the workplace quite yet (data entry and spreadsheet manipulation is not conducive to well-structured texts with subtle interleaving themes & symbolism) so I’ll make use of Ye Olde Ordyrred Lyste.

  1. There is an electric pencil sharpener immediately next to my monitor, which makes the screen go wurble wurble zoop whenever it sharpens a pencil. I’ve taken to sharpening pencils far more often than necessary. Wurble, wubble, whee!
  2. English units are the most hurtful, soul-gouging thing I have experienced at work thus far. Everyone uses them in business-and-government-land, apparently; I think it’s the same collective delusion that created neck-ties. My mind is very boggled indeed, but not too boggled to know how many gallons are in an acre-foot.
  3. No one here wears neck-ties on a regular basis, which is good because my supply of professional gear is plenty low without requiring that it button down and coordinate with pantyhose.
  4. Top perks: there’s a florist in the office park who often leaves nice things in the dumpster, and I get free steel toed boots.

Right, that’s it, back to work.

yami · 12:45 · 23 Jul 2020
Filed under: Diary

See ya, Soul

I am now officially a professional, with a job and a salary and not quite enough vacation time and everything. W00t!

The company which has leased my soul isn’t a bad one, as companies go. They do ground water work, lots of contracting out to county governments and regional water boards, some expert testimony in suits against the sorts of people who ought to be sued. Come Monday, I’m'a be a geohydrologist. W00t encore!

yami · 12:52 · 18 Jul 2020
Filed under: Diary

Robosnail!

Mechanical Creatures from the Fluid Dynamics Lab. Dude.

yami · 20:35 · 17 Jul 2020
Filed under: Links

Foam Cardboard Dogs

I didn’t know how long these corn dogs had been in the freezer before I put them in the oven. Their insides taste like burnt motor oil and have the texture of a dense acoustic foam. Their outsides remind me of used condoms lying along the road, not for any particular reason but for overall yuckitude. Physically, the outside layer is crumbly brown drywall, or perhaps a piece of femur that has been cracked open and gnawed on before being left to some freeze-thaw cycles and a drought - but it tastes like margarine.

yami · 15:10 · 17 Jul 2020
Filed under: Food

Sweet Hot Modem

The Internet-man came by my house with a new and functioning cable modem, so all is well and good in the land of popsicles. The photoblog shall be refreshed shortly.

Ahh.

yami · 14:08 · 16 Jul 2020
Filed under: Announcements

And The Internet Melted

Once again I have reduced myself to a puddle of gelatinous slag. This time, it was going out to the desert for the weekend, on the grounds that “joshua trees are pretty” and “camping is fun”. It’s all true at night, but after trying to walk up one hill during the day I was forced to retreat to the air conditioned shelter of a Burger King and watch Fox News for two hours while the sun went down, lest my brain be frizzled and my nose turned to dust.

My brain was frizzled anyway, of course. But the sun eventually went down, enough to run around exploring the limits of camera in low light. Even with a tripod, they’re pretty annoying limits, and I think it may be time to move back into the realm of film - if I can find a sufficiently cheap old manual 35mm. Or else to explore the realm of electrical engineering and try building my dream camera: an old-school fully manual system with digital image capture in the back.

Intractable shutter and stubbornly useless autofocus aside, though, I took some nice pictures. I would post them, but even though the lights are blinking on my hub, there is no network at home. I think it’s gone for a nice winter vacation in Tierra del Fuego or someplace. Bleah.

yami · 11:02 · 14 Jul 2020
Filed under: Diary

Tara, I Hate You

I just woke up from a dream wherein the job I wanted was given to some girl named Tara, because she “seemed really cute”.

I wasn’t about to see Legally Blonde 2, but now there’s no way I’m going anywhere near that film until I’m safely employed. Stupid cute girls getting jobs. Stupid Tara. Grr.

yami · 7:18 · 11 Jul 2020
Filed under: Dreams