I discovered today that I'm allergic to something at the office - what I thought was a combination of tiredness and post-lunch eyestrain was actually sinus clogging that disappeared within two minutes of going outside for a walk. Bah.

Medical exemption from office duty? Or more spider plants?

1. Went to a focus group Friday night, subject: television. Was hoping for an intimate atmosphere where I could fail to impress anyone with my sparkling snarky comments; instead, had to write WHO BUYS THIS SHIT??? in the free-response box after viewing a commercial for some kind of over-engineered storytelling air freshener. Perhaps some data-entry temp worker will be entertained by my brief summary of the situation in Darfur as it relates to the ethics of publicizing capitalism's absurdist excreta.
   
2. Took the GRE on Saturday, and utterly 0wnzøred the quantitative reasoning (as they say in common parlance). For once I actually sat down and answered the questions that were asked, as opposed to similar questions not asked at all. Did okay on the rest of it as well; my "analyze an argument" argument was about earthquakes. Ha!
   
   
   I am so smart, SMRT! Now I'll go to grad school and feel stupid again for another half-decade or more, hoorah!
   
3. Our dish drainer is on top of the fridge, for lack of counter space and because we can't be bothered to keep the table clear. It's taken quite the toll on our dishes - even indestructible plastic bowls will break falling from that height. I broke the last one today, and had to make an emergency run to Goodwill. $2.72 for four cereal bowls, estimated lifespan, 3 months.
   
   
   But what I wonder is: why do people like such shallow bowls? Or perhaps they don't like them much at all, given how many of them seem to end up at Goodwill for me to puzzle over on my way to the deeply curved scaled-up tea cup style bowls, the correct kind of bowl, hiding at the back of the shelf with the commemorative shot glasses.
   

Being a responsible jalopy owner, I threw some oil into the engine this morning. Drove to work, and got off the freeway to discover that my engine was smoking - as sometimes happens. Upon further inspection, I noticed the cap to the oil-goes-here bit sitting happily on the intake manifold. D'oh!

At least I was clever enough to bring along a spare quart.

I seem to be spilling my seed all over everyone else's blog today. Definitely time to start thinking about egocentric comment-aggregating doohickeys so I can feel at least halfway erudite when I load my own page. Meanwhile, here's a frill-free, not at all arranged to maximize numerous potential punchlines, summary of my weekend in a convention center full of classic video games and pinball: WHEE BLING BLOOP BLOOP BLOOP!

Okay, so I was in a room with the official world champion of Dig-Dug, and didn't ask him to autograph my breasts. But is that really so wrong?
(more...)

So I needed that root canal after all - tooth started hurting Friday night, off and on, okay with ibuprofen but I'm not keen on being continually medicated or continually subject to stabs of pain if I gasp or swallow incorrectly. Pricey, but I was able to postpone getting a crown, hoorah! All in all, the last two weeks of dental work are still the most valuable thing I own (if and only if they are granted an amount of thingness superior to the sort of thingness possessed by savings accounts and college educations, but the ontological questions raised by labor theories of value are best left to experts, I say) but they're not more valuable than the next two things put together. And so I calm my wallet.

I don't understand the fuss about root canals. They're long and dreadfully dull, but don't involve nearly so much squealy drilling as filling cavities. Plus, the array of color-coded needles is appealingly reminiscent of a crayon box. While I had my jaw drilled and stuffed, I learned two (2) things:

1. My dentist is also the dentist for an adult film producer, who continually refers his "girls". It's apparently common practice for the actresses to visit the dentist wearing see-through things and too much porny makeup, to the consternation of the more conservative patients in the waiting room. No starlets around when I was there, though, just teenagers of varying surliness.
   
2. Although your textbook standard bicuspid has just one root canal, mine has two. Take that, you pathetic losers of evolution's supernumerary tooth-root competition! I wonder if the X-rays have activated the second canal's hidden superpowers yet.
   

Ancient Egypt swings in and out of fashion, of course, but why can't I find noodles in the form of hieroglyphics? Capitalism has failed me! Stupid capitalism.

Alternative thinkier question: what language and character set of soup gives you the greatest probability of finding a word in your spoon? I'm tempted to say Chinese, because any realistic Chinese alphabet soup would have a limited, and carefully chosen, set of characters - but is it cheating to use a cherry-picked noodle distribution?

1. Go to the dentist regularly.
   
2. Salivar pH levels vary from person to person; if you have acidic spit, you should eat the whole box of chocolates at once rather than spacing it out through the day, and rinse your mouth with water immediately afterwards, and then brush your teeth five times when you get home. If you have neutral spit, just shut up, okay?
   
3. No, really, your teeth don't have shit for internal diagnostics, they need to be checked on a regular basis even if they don't hurt and you don't have a dental plan.
   
4. You know there's a lot of people in this world who would love to have the nice root canals we have in America.
   

I have only a 50/50 chance of a root canal, depending on the performance of a rather large chunk of composite filling... and two cavities apart from that. Sigh.

When I was in Denmark my room back at Tech was occupied by a Danish mirror-self...

Yup,
he's got a blog!

But is this sort of thing, as Anna may or may not say, somehow indicative of a fundamental property of blogging? More than anything else it reminds me of walking around downtown Iowa City, where I usually meet someone I haven't seen in years; occasionally someone I know but don't immediately recognize (cuz, you know, years) will walk by and tell me that someone else I haven't seen in years has been looking for me, even though by rights both of these people should be halfway across the country and definitely have no sane way of knowing I'm in town. Which is to say, that's just how life is most of the time, and a good thing it is too.

As I previously alluded, I've signed up for the GREs at the end of next month. As soon as I stopped learning things at work it got exceedingly dull, and I expect it will only get duller if my varied managers don't carefully cherry-pick interesting assignments for me - which they don't because they rightfully cherry-pick them all for themselves, as payment for having more stress and rottener work hours.

I snagged the (free) official preparation software and took part of a practice test over lunch; it's just swell, but it's all on computer, as is the test nowadays, and somebody decided that ~20 characters would be an appropriate column width for all the reading comprehension passages. Twenty characters (ish)! At that width, every fourth word is hyphenated and it's impossible to tell where paragraphs start and stop. Slows my reading speed down immensely, and makes it rather difficult to answer questions about things "as described in the third paragraph" since I have to actually scan for breaks in thought.

Everything about that test has been focus-grouped to a fare-thee-well, so what were they thinking? There's certainly some need to have a test program that will run on minimal hardware, so it can be standardized worldwide, but for $120 bucks a pop you'd think ETS could buy a set of new monitors for their third world test centers and run things at better than 640x800. I mean, geez.

To: Customers at the Foothill & Claremont Arco

Cc: SUV owners in the greater Los Angeles area

Peak pumping hours at the gas station (e.g., after work or at lunch) can be stressful - customers must often wait several minutes, fingers tapping on the steering wheel and fuel light flickering, while those ahead in line finish filling their swimming-pool sized gas tanks. We all prefer sitting in traffic on the freeway to sitting in the gas station parking lot, so it is to everybody's benefit if pumps are utilized as efficiently as possible.

Many gas stations are configured with three pumps per row. Effective pump usage requires that all three pumps be occupied at all times, with minimal time losses during maneuvers to and from the pump. This can be most easily accomplished if, when driving up to a row of pumps where both the immediate and middle pumps are open, you drive to the middle pump.

It may be impossible to ensure that the fuel intake of your very large vehicle is directly aligned with the middle pump. Please note, however, that most modern gas pumps are equipped with hoses of adequate length for use with vehicles parked within a reasonable radius of the pump, and you don't have to have it exactly fucking perfect, jackass. If you have questions as to the ultimate limitations of the hoses at your filling station, observe the Geo Metro in front of you, crudely jammed between two SUVs and pumping gas while located several feet from the commonly-used pumping area.

It should also be noted that this is Los Angeles, not San Fransicsco, and drivers here are not particularly well-known for their parallel parking finesse. Cars larger than subcompact class may be prevented from using the pump at all until you have finished; even if they are not, forcing the car behind you to parallel park at the pump wastes others' time and patience, and increases the risk of a minor accident.

Following proper etiquette and taking care to keep the middle pump easily accessible will make the fueling experience better and safer for everyone.