Sturgeon’s Law Ninety percent of everything is crap.
Derived from a quote by science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, who once said, “Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That’s because 90% of everything is crud.” Oddly, when Sturgeon’s Law is cited, the final word is almost invariably changed to ‘crap’.
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Today we went to work a half hour early to make up some time missed by Donna for a follow up doctor’s appointment (mouth healing nicely, thank you very much.) Seeing as I didn’t have any time to make up, I used this extra time constructively in paper, by doing another Desktop Gremlin. I love these little things, one sheet, no glue and in about 15 minutes…
I am working on a papercraft project that is little more difficult, perhaps 2nd grade level, and is a slight departure. Instead of printing everything on one sheet of paper, this one has several pieces layered on top of each other to give the object a bit of depth* and it is taking a little while to do because I have to cut out the pieces during breaks at work where there is more light and fold and glue at home. It should be finished by tomorrow, so try and remain calm.
*Well, as much depth as can be achieved with something .010″ thick.
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 937
EPA to limit rocket fuel chemical in tap water
The Good News is that maybe I will lose that metalic taste I always have in my mouth, but the Bad News is that I will no longer be able to refuel the jet pack with my pee when I get stranded far from a missle base.
Another Desktop Gremlin, this one is a Special Edition available only to “subscribers” i.e. people who sign up with their email address to receive notice when a new gremlin is available. Some folks* might classify the octopus as the groundhog of the deep and this cephalopod mollusc saw his shadow this morning thereby predicting 6 more weeks of winter, unlike the landlubbing marmota monax on Gobbler’s Hill.
*mental unacheivers and bloggers
This morning while discussing the upcoming evening’s entertainment, whimsical holidays and animal weather predictors at work, I came up with the brilliant idea to watch Groundhog Day with Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell tonight and wondered why TNT didn’t run a 24 hour marathon of this movie like they did with A Christmas Story on that day. I don’t own it, so I asked myself, “I wonder if it is available as a Watch It Now movie on Netflix.” Good news, sure enough it is, bad news, Donna hates the movie* (maybe there are a lot more like her and that is why there is no 24 hour marathon.)
*She liked it the first time, but once was plenty.
Our network is locked down pretty tight at work, no Youtube, no Vimeo, no streaming music, so I figured there was no way I could watch Netflix, but being the curious type I had to try. You know what? A person could watch the streaming Netflix. At least I’m pretty sure I could, as soon as the Starz Play intro started I disconnected. I don’t know if alarm bells went off in the basement in St Louis or not, but I’m certain I didn’t want to get caught watching a movie at my desk because my instincts told me management would probably frown on it.
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 937
By Marshall Alexander — Paper Engineer
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 937
Mazda MX-5 Miata number 900,000 rolled of the assembly line sometime yesterday, a soft-top, six-speed manual-equipped Copper Red MX-5, and destined for Germany. It took 21 years and 10 months to get to that figure, so after some not so quick math I figure that the one millionth car will be made less than 2–1/2 years from now on July 13, 2013.
The photo accompanying the Autoblog article has this caption: 20th Anniversary Mazda MX-5 Miata special edition – Click above for high-res image gallery. I don’t remember any 20th Anniversary Edition. So I clicked on the link and was taken to a post from March 3, 2010 about the car at the Geneva Motor Show. This was a photo of the European 20th Anniversary model. There were also a Japanese and a British version of the 20th Anniversary car, but alas, no US version. You would have thought we would have gotten one too, after all, according to the 900,000th car press release, the US received nearly 45 percent of these little cars.
In that gallery are a couple of photos that interest me, one showing the outside badge proclaiming “20th Anniversary” and other was of the sill plates with “20th Anniversary” above “0000/2000.” The Emperor is a 2003 model, I wonder how much it would cost to have a couple 13th Anniversary badges made up? Of course the number plate would read 1 of 1.
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 937
Right now it looks like Troy’s seven fingers up is at risk as the Steelers trail 21 to 17 near the end of the 3rd quarter.
We finally got a really nice day for geocaching, so we headed over to North Augusta and snagged 8 of 10. Seven of the eight finds were along the rails to trails Greeneway and one of those caches was quite the adventure. It was off the trail and down a steep embankment to almost the Savannah River. It was so steep that we had to walk down and up using a zig-zagging path similar to Tour de France cyclists in the Alps. We ended up walking a shade over 6 miles doing those 7 caches.
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 938
A Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder parked just like a pedestrian Camry at the North Augusta Riverview Activities Center on an early Sunday morning. “Honey, I’m going down to the park and go running. I’m taking the Lambo.”
It still has the local Mercedes dealer paper tag on the back and judging by the wheels I’m thinking it is a 2007 model. It is much smaller than I imagined it was, looks not much bigger than a Miata. But in truth, this car is 14 inches longer, 9 inches wider and only 3 inches shorter in height. It weighs a whopping 900 pounds more than a Miata, but that penalty is nicely offset by the 420 more horses than than the Mazda’s 140. I wonder how much a 4 year-old Lamborghini goes for?
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 939
Home is a movie for those of us who didn’t catch the point of Koyannisquatsi from its Hopi Indian title and time lapse photography images. Home also uses time lapse imagery, but to drive its point home (no pun intended, unless of course the film makers did mean it that way too) there is an in your face narration that leaves little to doubt the movie’s message; humans are mucking up the planet.
I’m a sucker for time lapse, so I’ve watched a little more than half of Home and will finish the rest tomorrow. Both Home & Koyannisquatsi are available to watch in their entirety on YouTube. From reading the comments, Koyannisquatsi has a few commercials placed in it, Home does not.
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 939
Today is Truck Day, the day they load up an 18-wheeler with baseball equipment outside of Fenway Park and drive it down to the FRS’s spring training home in Fort Meyers, FL. The truck left Boston today around noon for arrival sometime on Friday.
Google maps says the trip is nearly 1500 miles and should take one day and one hour. The truck driver must be only driving 8 to 10 hours a day with 3 overnight stops. After a few minutes of GMap research I figure my best chance to watch the truck go by on I-95 is near Walterboro, SC around lunchtime on Thursday. 
Stubby is the February 2011 Free Papertoy of the month over at Custom Paper Toys and is fairly easy build with only 4 pieces. I didn’t particularly care for the slogan that was being espoused by the original, so I changed it to something that is more office work related.
When putting it together I had the hardest time getting the pencil point inside the hexagonal shape of the pencil. I actually had to reprint the body a second time and attacked the build from a different direction before successfully getting it together with the flaps inside. Tonight when I linked the toy’s web page I noticed that the originator’s construction showed the pencil tip flaps on the outside. I had wondered why the flaps were rounded in shape…
I am also currently working on Stubby the Rocket which is a papercraft model by Robert Nava of the “mascot” of Tor.com, a Science Fiction site. I hope to be finished by this weekend.
OK, that was only 2 Stubbies, so I’m 117,998 shy, but the Emperor is not, he ticked past that mileage point on the way to work this morning.
Yesterday Donna had a dentist appointment and I gave her one of my Minimimmoes to give to the receptionist. Tonight we went out to eat and I left another Minimimmo on the table when we were done (I also left a monetary based tip too.) I guess I’ll make a few more and just leave them about haphazardly about the CSRA.
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 939
Friendship among Women:
A woman didn’t come home one night.
The next morning she told her husband that she had slept over at a friend’s house.
The man called his wife’s 10 best friends.
None of them knew anything about it.
Friendship among Men:
A man didn’t come home one night.
The next morning he told his wife he had slept over at a friend’s house.
The woman called her husband’s 10 best friends.
Eight confirmed that he had slept over, and two said he was still there.
I really could have used that sarcasm font for the post title.
It is a top of the line Miata (power hard top Grand Touring) with special interior and exterior colors, plus a few shiny bits and nearly every option in the book tacked on. Naturally the price reflects this, $31K. Yikes! To make it really special there are two exterior color choices. Huh? Why more than one? Maybe because not many people will want a car painted with the pigment made from poor marine mammals unsuspectingly trapped in tuna nets, Dolphin Gray, and will opt for the Sparkling Black. Truth is, the gray is not a bad color on the car, but the porpoise colored leather on the seats is just icky.
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 940
After about a week of 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there, before or after breaks and lunch, the Tor.com Stubby Rocket is finished. It is 2 times scale of the downloaded PDF and is literally hung by a thread from the drop ceiling in my cube.
I wonder what the reaction will be, if any, on Monday from my supervisor and my manager, who were both are out of town on business this week. The big cheese Director of Operations, who sometimes makes a sweep of the area, wasn’t in today either. He is probably who told my manager to instruct his charges that the new offices should be more business-like and not be shrines to our individual personalities…
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 941
Today Donna and I, along with friend Joan, headed to Blackville to have lunch at Miller’s Bread Basket, a great little Mennonite restaurant there. Of course we did a little geocaching too. After we ate, we headed south to Barnwell State Park where there were two ammo cans crying out to be found. When we got to the park we were surprised to learn we had been here BC (Before Caching), when we had circled the lower lake on the Dogwood Interpretive Trail. We didn’t even know there was another trail in the park until we discovered that there were a couple of geocaches there.
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 941
If my tagging of posts is 100% accurate, which is doubtful, the last time I washed the car was November 14th and that was really only dusting and Quick Detailing. Well, whenever the last washing the Emperor actually was, he got the real deal today and it is amazing how purrty he looks from 10 feet away without any of that nasty road dirt on him.
About a year ago Donna lost her wedding ring and we replaced it with a cheapo one we found in a local Dillards. We both got two copies of the same ring in our size and in the past three hundred and sixty odd days we have worked our way through both. Mine currently has one of the diamonds (AKA piece of glass) missing and the gold plating no longer exists on either of our rings. I thought what a nice thing to do for Valentines Day would be to buy some actual gold replacement rings. After hunting around on the web for a bit last night we came up with a ring we both liked. Unsure of our correct sizes we opted to wait until we visited an actual Zales store and had our sizes determined by a trained professional. Which we did today and they measured Donna’s finger as a 7–1/2, which shot a big hole in our plans, as our chosen ring was only available online and only in whole sizes. Back to the net and in short order we found our second choice and ordered them.
We watched The Town today and were tempted to turn on the English Subtitles the Boston accents were so thick. We had an easier time understanding the liverpudlian ones in Nowhere Boy.
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 943
No, I’m not putting up a fence, just didn’t want to miss more than two days of top count…
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 946
 No, not summer weather, spring weather is just now sneaking in, but bathing suit season has arrived in the form of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition.
What started as a few page diversion from the mid winter doldrums has morphed into an extravaganza! There is no sports involved anymore (and no, you can’t count comely female athletes in bikinis as sports content), for that you get a separate regular issue of the mag.
I glanced through the issue and it took all of five minutes, because if you have seen one swimsuit issue you’ve seen them all. Dazzling warm weather locales; check. Incredibly expensive suits on supermodels; check. Girls with nothing on but incredibly painted-on replicas of of incredibly expensive suits; check. Girls with nothing on but shells; check. Girls with nothing on, but hiding behind strategically placed palm fronds; check. Random erect nipple or two; check. And unlike playboy when can actually say with a straight face, “I read it for the articles,” the only words in the magazine are two page “stories” on how arduous it was to shoot photos of nearly naked supermodels in each dazzling warm weather climate.
And now there is no real reason to buy the magazine off the newsstand if you aren’t a regular subscriber, just click on that cover photo there and off you go to the web site where there are more more photos than on paper, with videos too.
And like all things that start small and become wildly successful, it has sold it’s soul to commercialism in an effort to make as much money as possible. There are more ad pages than swimsuit pictures…I tossed out two of those smelly fragrance ads, 4 pages for Lexus, 8 pages for Direct TV before giving it up as fruitless. And now it is not just ads in the magazine, Nissan made several TV commercials that feature it’s very ugly Juke and swimsuit models.
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 947
My excuse last night is that we were out late at a movie, so I didn’t have time to blog. Tonight I have no excuse. Maybe tomorrow…
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 948
Just on the other side of this bridge is a new cache on a trail in McCormick County. We were the second folks to visit it in the 3 weeks that it has been active. The only thing is, that bridge is a little over 4 miles along the trail from the parking area. We are not totally insane, we didn’t walk all the way out here just for this one cache. There were 5 others along this trail and we found four of them (5 of 6 total for the day.)
We used to mountain bike on this trail way back in the early 90s and there were lots of places that were familiar. We didn’t ride this trail as much as the others in the area because it was a lot more technical, but there are lots of nice scenic riding in between the several rocky creek crossings we remember having to get off the bike and walk.
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 948
In a scene eerily not at all reminiscent of Larry Kroger and Kent Dorfman getting their Delta Tau Chi fraternity names of Pinto and Flounder, Joan received her geocaching user name today, tag-a-long.*
What started as a simple couple hour trip, with a mile and a half walk, to grab 5 geocaches along a new, not completely finished, section of the North Augusta Greeneway, turned into six hours, 6.2 miles of traipsing hither and yon, nine finds, 2 DNFs, meeting seven geocachers, one of whom is the local “godfather”, and lunch.
On the first pass we couldn’t find one of the five, so we got in the car and drove down to a different parking area to look for a few new caches located on the original section of the Greeneway. We were signing the log when a couple of folks walked up and one had a GPS in his hand. As is tradition, when meeting a cacher who is a stranger, you introduce yourselves with name, geocaching handle and then fall into discussing common finds, hints for DNFs and an invitation to the next group gathering.
With a hint hot in hand, we walked back to the car, drove back to the original destination to look for the one we missed in our first pass. As we walked up the gravel pathway, we saw up ahead, four adults, a loose kid and one in a stroller milling about at a spot that held one of the caches we had found earlier. Again we introduced ourselves around. One of the women looked at Joan and asked what her geocaching name was. I said, “She doesn’t have one.” Joan answered, “I’m just tagging along.” The woman said, “See, you have your name, tag-a-long.”
*She’ll have to add a number on the end though to differentiate between the other user who already has that name.
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 948
Yesterday was our yearly eye exams and after skipping it last year, this year we are going to go ahead and get new glasses. We have both gotten quite used to the EasyClip frames with the magnetic sunglasses. They only had a small selection in the store to chose from for women and zero for men. Donna picked a couple of decent ones, but the one she really liked had a very short vertical dimension. While the helpful staff member said that they were fine for progressive lens, they have about the same measurement as my current glasses do and it took me a long while to adjust to that configuration. Just because something is possible it doesn’t necessarily mean it should be done. We asked if we could hunt up some frames on the web and bring the model numbers to them so they could order a copy for us to try on and touch. The answer was yes.
This evening I did some shopping on the web. My current glasses have full frames and the pair I had before were rimless, so this time I split the difference and got semi-rimless. These are the four I picked out four for me to try:
The first pair on the left is one of the ones Donna liked in the shop. Her current glasses are gold with pearl accents and she wants a little more color this time, so I went looking for reddish frames. The other three are what I chose from online for her to try:
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 950
I’ve updated to WordPress 3.1 and I couldn’t be more excited.* Down below is my new desktop wallpaper and has nothing whatsoever to do with WordPress, it is just a pretty picture and it is helping me fill up space. Clicking on the picture should net you a full 1920x1080 version if you want to use it too.
*here would have been another place for the use of that sarcasm font…
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 951
Sumo by PaperTom
When I was growing up in Connecticut when you saw a robin in your yard that meant spring was on its way. Here in Aiken that doesn’t work so well, I don’t think the robins ever go away here. Today I saw three signs that Punxsutawney Phil was correct in his prediction that spring is just around the corner.
The first thing I noticed that portends spring, even though we are still nearly a month from the vernal equinox, was a box of Girl Scout cookies on someones desk. Number two was the Bradford Pear tree outside the front door of the Valve Store™ was starting to bloom and lastly, and most troublesome, was that there was a light coating of yellow pine pollen covering the exterior of the Emperor when I parked it in the garage this evening.
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 952
Tomorrow it is going to be 81° and on Monday even warmer at 83°.
Surprise, surprise, we ate breakfast at Dunkin Donuts and then did some geocaching. The real surprise was that we didn’t roll out of bed until 8 o’clock. And that made DD quite busy, but we did luck out by just missing one onslaught of customers and ended up right ahead of another. While we dined, we read in the Aiken Standard about a local nominee for the World’s Stupidest Criminal — Robbing A Bank Is Thirsty Work and the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal reviewed one of the 16 contenders for the Bogardus’s new car — Hyundai Elantra by comparing it to the new 2012 Ford Focus (which will now be added to the list replacing the previous generation’s coupe).
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 956
Donna and I piled into Joan’s car this morning and drove back to up to the Modoc Trail in McCormick County to find the one that got away last weekend. We had received an unsolicited hint from the CO after he read our DNF log. We might have just chalked this cache up to a loss and moved on, but this is the first stage of a multi with about 16 stages that takes you on a tour all around the state of South Carolina. We figure we have lived here long enough that just maybe it is time for us to explore the place a bit and see what this state has to offer.*
*Imagine this sentence rendered in the sarcasm font.
The hint turned out to be no help because it told us to look somewhere we had already looked, but we had to give it try anyway. Seeing as we drove all that way and came up empty handed we tried a couple more caches over by Thurmond Dam. The first one we looked for was listed as kid friendly, so we figured we shouldn’t have any trouble with it. Wrong, apparently it was adult un-friendly as we came up empty handed.
There was one other cache, a short three stage multi, that was also on the South Carolina side of the base of the dam. Stage 1 was easy, but at stage two you needed to get a date that was to be found on top of a stone column for the coords for Stage 3. Unfortunately there was no plaque on top, just a metal lid with a padlock covering the column. We got the north coordinates by counting the flood gates, but still needed the two digits of a day in July 1980 to add to the last three digits in the Stage 1 west coordinates to get the final stage’s west coords. Being patriotic Americans we started by plugging in the number generated by using July 4, 1980. That took us to the middle of the parking area for a boat ramp. Hmmm, no good. So I created a waypoint for the first of July and then another for the 31st. Because we had the north coordinates the cache had to lie somewhere on a line between July 1st’s waypoint and the 31st’s waypoint. Knowing that, and reading the clue, it allowed us to make the find, with Joan making the actual grab. Time constraints sent us home after this so we could up our Find/DNF ratio.
This afternoon the Emperor got a transfusion and had his socks swapped with his gloves (oils change and tire rotation.)
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 956
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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 958
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