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’.

Random Images

Chugwater, WY Women's Vietnam War Memorial November Big Top

Geocaching

Profile for Brian_the_Red

Miles Per Gallon

Fuelly Fuelly

Best of 2008

Jan­u­ary

Juror #6…

Thurs­day the 3rd

…didn’t get picked.

I was glad I didn’t get selected, but would not have been dis­ap­pointed had I been. This wasn’t for a reg­u­lar trial ses­sion jury, but for Grand Jury duty. You would have to report one Thurs­day per month (more if needed) to decide if the prosecution’s case had merit for trial and if it did, hand down indict­ments. There are 18 Grand Jurors, 12 picked today for the year of 2008 and 6 return­ing mem­bers from 2007. So, although today’s lucky selectees were cho­sen to serve for one year, half of them would get held over and serve a sec­ond year.

First, all of us assem­bled in an unused court room and then at the appointed time we were guided into the actual court room. The judge came in and then the Clerk called the role. We were num­bered alpha­bet­i­cally, so because my last name starts with a B I was a low num­ber. As the clerk called our num­ber, start­ing at #1 and going all the way up to #99, we had to stand and say aloud our name. They skipped quite a few numbers/names, lead­ing me to believe some folks had called in with excuses already.

After every­one had sounded off, the clerk informed the judge he had 64 per­spec­tive jurors with one no-show. He asked the miss­ing per­sons name and then told his bailiff to inform the Sheriff’s Office that he wanted a bench war­rant issued for that per­son to be before him next Mon­day at 9:30. The judge then read a series of ques­tions that if you could answer yes to you might be excused from duty. One per­son was excused because they had moved to Augusta (last week­end) and two more were excused for med­ical rea­sons. There were about a half dozen who had hard­ships that made it incon­ve­nient to serve once a month and they got swapped into the reg­u­lar jury pool for a two week ses­sion later in the year.

This left about 55 peo­ple eli­gi­ble for the 15 spots (twelve plus three alter­nates) giv­ing me a 27% chance of get­ting cho­sen. Our juror num­ber and names were writ­ten on small slips of paper and loaded into a “high tech’ metal box the size of a cigar box and pro­fes­sional shaken up by the Assis­tant Clerk of Court. The slips of paper were then drawn out one at a time.

The first num­ber called was for a woman seated right behind me. She mut­tered an exple­tive under her breath as she made her way up front. The woman sit­ting next to me went “Oh my,” in mock sur­prise. I whis­pered to her, “Yeah, she didn’t seem to happy about that.” About halfway through call­ing the 12 Grand Jurors, the clerk called out, “Juror num­ber six — ty seven.” My heart skipped a beat there. I fig­ured for sure that I was going to get picked as one of three alter­nates, but didn’t.

All of us unwanted jurors were directed back to the orig­i­nal room where we were given a writ­ten excuse for work and a check for $20.

Thanks Aiken County for buy­ing my wife and I BBQ at Bobby’s for tonight’s dinner.

Feb­ru­ary

Scratch and Sniff Post

Wednes­day the 20th

Smell MeWhen I entered the garage this morn­ing to get in the car I was struck by an odd smell. A very chem­i­cal smell. I opened the garage door and it was quickly disbursed.

I didn’t rec­og­nize it, wasn’t motor oil, wasn’t gaso­line and it was not anti-freeze. Wasn’t com­ing from the car at all. It really only smelled right on the stairs from the house to the garage. I opened the cab­i­net doors one by one and sniffed. It was faintly there, but I was unable to pin­point it. Didn’t smell like paint and it wasn’t nat­ural gas. It had a sweet odor, so it cer­tainly wasn’t a dead crit­ter under the house.

As I pulled into the garage tonight after work the smell was still there, so I started a more thor­ough search of the garage. Wasn’t the fire ant killer or the pot­ting soil. Not the 3 in 1 oil or the liq­uid wrench. Didn’t come from the car wax or Amour-All. Not the Sim­ple Green nor the tire shine. Wasn’t com­ing from the bicy­cle chain lube. Ditto the “clean” rags. Not the wall­pa­per paste or the wall­pa­per remover. Kind of smells like it was com­ing from the spray paint area. Didn’t smell like paint, but I started pulling out the dozen cans of par­tially full cans. What’s this?

AH HA! A pint can of Paint & Var­nish Remover way in the back. As soon as I put it on the counter I knew I’d found the cul­prit. I don’t remem­ber ever buy­ing this. Prob­a­bly pur­chased when we first moved into the place to clean paint off the mold­ing or some­thing. Pretty toxic stuff I guess, only took 18 years to eat right through the metal can.

March

Happy Day­light Sav­ings Time Day

Sat­ur­day the 8th

If your fam­ily is any­thing like my fam­ily, today is a big day and cel­e­brated by exchang­ing gifts. We are bid­ing our time sign­ing car­ols and drink­ing the tra­di­tional aqua vitae until the appointed hour when we gather around and watch the lower right of the PC screen as the hour mag­i­cally jumps back from 2:00 AM to 1:00 AM.

Now excuse me while I go change all the other clocks in the house to tomor­row already.

April

That Was Unexpected

Thurs­day the 24th

Did you ever have a really cool idea for a joke and have it go hor­ri­bly wrong, but still be worth it?

A co-worker (Hi Mark) and his sis­ter are always trad­ing gotchas and he has been after me to take some cheesy steer­ing wheel cover on vaca­tion out west and mail it to her so she won’t have a clue who sent it to her. See­ing as we are redo­ing bath­rooms in lieu of going west this year he cooked up a dif­fer­ent plan that I could help with. And it fit right into Donna and my Post Office pic­ture taking.

Mark bought a deck of cards, a box of envelopes and 3 books of stamps. We would put one play­ing card in an enve­lope and mail it to his sis­ter from each Post Office we vis­ited. I used a laser printer and addressed 55 envelopes to his sis­ter with a return address of John Smith, 123 Main St, Any­town, USA 123456. The first enve­lope con­tained the box so she would have a place to put the cards when they arrived. To ensure she kept the box I printed out a lit­tle note to go in the enve­lope with the help of the Ran­som Note Gen­er­a­tor. Two week­ends ago Donna and I made a trip up to Green­wood, SC to mail the box. We picked Green­wood, the sister’s home­town, so she wouldn’t imme­di­ately sus­pect Mark (even though he knew she would think it was him any­way.) Mark didn’t even tell his wife what we were up to because he knew his sis­ter would call her and get the truth out of her.

Because I didn’t want to just put a play­ing card in an enve­lope, I was going to put a piece of blank paper in with it. Then I thought maybe I’d put one word on the paper and when she had all the pieces of paper there would be a sen­tence that explained the whole gag. But I thought that was a lit­tle too much, so Plan B was to gather 52 quotes from the inter­net and put one on each page. For extra fun I made sure to get a quote that included a bolded word match­ing the card, i.e. “When I have to choose between two evils, I always try to pick the one I haven’t tried before.” – Mae West went in with the two of clubs.

This week­end when we went on our PO photo trip we mailed an enve­lope from nearly every Post Office on Sat­ur­day and a cou­ple more on Sun­day. Because the Post Offices were all closed when we got to them we mailed them inside when we could, but most ended up in the blue box out­side. Because the blue boxes don’t get emp­tied until late in the day, almost all our “let­ters” didn’t make it into the sys­tem until Mon­day night.

Yes­ter­day Mark’s sis­ter got 11 pieces of mail that included a play­ing card and a quote. Now here is where it went off course, instead of think­ing it was her brother hav­ing a lit­tle fun, she thought some­one was harass­ing her and went to the local police. That’s right—the police.

This morn­ing Mark’s sis­ter called Mark’s wife to tell her about the ordeal she was going through. Now because Mark’s wife knows noth­ing of the prank she can only lis­ten with con­cern about the prob­lem. Nat­u­rally when they get off the phone with each other, Mark’s wife calls him. She tells him about his sis­ter going to the police with these harass­ing let­ters and how the offi­cer has told her it looks like the work of a sex­ual preda­tor and if she gets any­more (which she will tomor­row) to bring them right in and they’ll try and get some fin­ger­prints off them. At this point Mark real­izes the jig is up and con­fesses to his wife that he was behind the letters.

Mark then came up front to tell Donna and I the story where we all had a great big laugh about it. Then, because both Donna and my fin­ger­prints are on file from being in the mil­i­tary, and not being real sure how seri­ous the detec­tive was tak­ing the case and not want­ing to really worry his sis­ter Mark emailed the quote file to her and then called to tell her to check her email while he was on the phone with her. She was some­what relieved at not being stalked, but some­what mad. We are hop­ing in a cou­ple weeks she will see the humor in the whole thing.

May

Hail To The Emperor

Tues­day the 20th

There was a 40% chance of after­noon thun­der show­ers. We took the umbrella to work, but left it in the trunk. My job was to keep track of the radar and if it looked like thun­der rolling our way I was to go out, take off the cock­pit cover, raise the top and bring the umbrella back in.

I failed mis­er­ably at my job. When it was time to go home at 4:00 PM I got up from my desk and walked down to the other end pf the plant to get Donna. As I passed by some win­dows it looked very dark. Uh-oh! As we left the plant some­one was walk­ing in with an umbrella say­ing that it had just started rain­ing. He was right and they were big fat drops too. As we walked quickly to the car the rain inten­sity picked up rapidly. We started run­ning (this is the only time I regret park­ing in the north forty), it was com­ing down at a pretty good clip by the time we reached the car. I popped the trunk tossed in every­thing I was car­ry­ing and started to take off the cock­pit cover. Tossed the roof up and Donna tried valiantly to click it down while I wadded up the soak­ing wet cock­pit cover and tossed it too into the trunk. I started the car and raised the win­dows as the rain poured down. The inte­rior was pretty dry, but we were pretty wet.

About a mile from the plant the skies really opened up, even with the wipers on high I had to slow down because of vis­i­bil­ity. Then it sounded like some­body was shoot­ing at us. Pow! Bam! Rat-A-Tat-Tat! Call 911 we’re under fire. It was hail­ing. Pea-sized up to grape-sized frozen water was pelt­ing us. With absolutely no place to hide I just kept dri­ving. I’m afraid to go out in the garage to look at the car and see if there are any lit­tle dents, but not as afraid as I was dur­ing the storm that the hail would get big enough to start tear­ing through the can­vas roof and start hit­ting me on my nog­gin. After a cou­ple more miles, and a cou­ple more cloud bursts, the skies cleared, the rain stopped and we donned our sun­glasses for the rest of the trip.

June

Cash Back

Mon­day the 30th

We did our weekly gro­cery shop­ping yes­ter­day and as our cus­tom I load the con­veyor and Donna moves to the end and will start bag­ging if there is no one there. I have the coupons in my pocket (Donna hands them to me as we buy the item the coupon is for) and the loy­alty card for the store in my wal­let, plus I have the debit card for pay­ing, so I stop oppo­site the cashier.

When the cashier was done scan­ning our items and deduct­ing the coupons, I swiped the debit card. At this point, know­ing my wal­let is empty, Donna says, “Take out a cou­ple extra bucks.” This is unnerv­ing because I am used to requests for spe­cific amounts. I ask Donna what she means by a cou­ple. Her answer was even more unset­tling, “Just round up the total.” Our bill was at that point ninety-four dol­lars and four­teen cents. Crap! She expected me to do math under pres­sure, the cashier was wait­ing, the woman behind me had her stuff on the con­veyor belt…I couldn’t do it, I just knew I’d sub­tract wrong, for­get­ting to carry the one or some­thing, and the bill would come to $101 or $99.

I punted, fig­ured I would just take out ten bucks, that should be easy. I push the other key, hit the 1 and the 0 and hit OK. Your total is $94.24. Damn that’s ten cents! Can­cel. Back. Can­cel. Panic.

I just know every­one around is star­ing at the doo­fus who can’t oper­ate the card con­sole. In my head I imag­ine the kid at the ser­vice desk is mak­ing an announce­ment, “Atten­tion Kroger shop­pers. Gather around Reg­is­ter #5 and watch an old guy try to oper­ate the credit card reader. Grab a latte at the Star­bucks counter and come on up front because next he’ll be try­ing to pay using the change from one of those lit­tle rub­ber things with a split in it that even your grand­fa­ther is too cool to use anymore.”

Mirac­u­lously all my but­ton push­ing has brought me back to the “Would you like cash back?” screen with­out hav­ing to swipe the card again. Alright, I want ten bucks, not ten cents. I push the key oppo­site other and push the one and the zero keys, then the big green Yes but­ton. There. That wasn’t so hard was it?

Appar­ently it was hard, because the cashier hands me my receipt and my dime change.

And while I’m sure she was try­ing to be help­ful by point­ing me to the ATM machine near the ser­vice desk, I wasn’t lis­ten­ing to the cashier, I mum­bled rudely, “No thanks. I don’t really need it.” I just wanted out of the store.

My very sup­port­ive wife waited until we got out­side in the park­ing lot before she started laugh­ing at me…

July

Goo Goo Eyes

Wednes­day the 16th

Today we rode the tan­dem into work and our arrival time was around 15 min­utes before the open­ing bell, so to speak, for most of the hourly employ­ees, so quite a few of them were sit­ting under the break area awning get­ting in one last smoke before going to work. Unfor­tu­nately the bike rack where we are sup­posed to park is like 15 feet from the awning, so Donna and I have to unload our lunches and change of clothes right in front of the crowd.

Now a per­son on a bicy­cle is a rare enough sight as it is, but put two peo­ple on a long ass bike and we are talk­ing parade level atten­tion. One of the engi­neers was arriv­ing at the same time and as he walked up to the build­ing he noticed us unload­ing, but what he found most eye-catching was not us, but the looks of all the other employ­ees openly gawk­ing at Donna and I. He said nearly every­one was look­ing in our direc­tion with sort of an incred­u­lous look, as if they were think­ing to them­selves that no sane per­son would ride that thing.

Yes­ter­day we had a very busy day, so instead of com­ing home and cook­ing some­thing we dined out at what used to be one of our favorite south­side eater­ies, Wing Place (why it “used to be” is the sub­ject of another post.) When we were fin­ished eat­ing and head­ing for the door there was also a mom leav­ing with her daugh­ter just in front of us. The girl was some­where between to ages of seven and ten, very cute, with long curly light col­ored hair, a big ol’ smile and the largeest eyes you ever saw. I really noticed the eyes because they were aimed directly at me. This girl was star­ing at me like I was a movie star or a pony.

As it turned out, mom and daugh­ter were parked next to us in the park­ing lot, so we were more or less fol­low­ing them. About half way towards the cars I got another look from the lit­tle girl. Donna won­dered if I dripped a bunch of ranch dip­ping sauce down the front of my shirt and she hadn’t noticed. Mom loaded the lit­tle girl in the back of their Jeep Wran­gler as we got into the Miata. The girl was look­ing over at me, with an almost wist­ful expres­sion, like maybe she was wish­ing it was her get­ting into the Miata instead of Donna. As the mom was going around to the driver’s side of their vehi­cle we put the top down. The girl was still look­ing our way with her big eyes and her chin in her hands with her elbows on the side of the Jeep and I could swear she let out a sigh of regret, it was almost creepy.

August

What Is Love?

Mon­day the 10th

Sun­day nights from 6 PM until when­ever, Bravo runs a Law & Order: Crim­i­nal Intent mini-marathon and I like to watch the repeats of older shows until 9 PM when USA runs a new episode. The orig­i­nal L & O is still the best (although some­times their twists at the end stretch cred­i­bil­ity), occa­sion­ally L & O:SVU leaves me feel­ing like a voyeuris­tic per­vert, but L & O:CI is a guilty plea­sure with Goren, it’s quirky lead detec­tive and Eames his sneaky hot part­ner pok­ing and pry­ing until they get to the bot­tom of the crime.

I’m sure because of con­trac­tual oblig­a­tions Bravo only gets to show cer­tain sea­sons of the show, so nearly all the time I will rec­og­nize the episode as one I’ve seen and watch it again any­way. Some­times I get real lucky and I won’t have seen it for a while, mean­ing I have for­got­ten who the killer is, so the show is a real treat. Rarely, I will stum­ble on an episode I haven’t ever seen at all before. Tonight at 7 o’clock that hap­pened and it was exciting.

At ten min­utes after seven my wife came into the liv­ing room and asked if she could have the TV, the Olympics were on and there was going to be swim­ming, div­ing and gym­nas­tics tonight. I said, “Sure, go ahead.” That my friends is love.

When it turns out they were show­ing syn­chro­nized div­ing right then I didn’t make her turn it back to L & O:CI. That my friends is true love.

Sep­tem­ber

Wild Life

Sun­day the 7th

Sung to the tune of Scott McKenzie’s San Fran­cisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flow­ers in Your Hair):
“If you’re going to walk Hitch­cock Woods
You’ll be sure to get spi­ders in your hair
If you’re going hik­ing in the woods
You’re gonna see lots of ani­mals in there”

On our walk in the woods this morn­ing we saw sev­eral humans, some with dogs, some on horses and a cou­ple on foot. We saw a fox squir­rel and lots of spi­der webs, even some with spi­ders still in them. We heard sev­eral dif­fer­ent species of birds. We saw a toad, a sala­man­der and a snake. A SNAKE!?!

He was a decent size one too. just lying there across the trail, prob­a­bly 4 foot long. When I first noticed him he looked like a lit­tle krin­kle french fry, all wavy like. Must have been asleep because when I poked him lightly with the end of my walk­ing stick he smoothed right out and kind of looked up at me. Flicked his lit­tle red tongue at me sev­eral times and just stayed where he was. I’m think­ing he was kinda pissed at me for wak­ing him up because he pulled his head back like he was going to strike. I was still stand­ing back away, just close enough to poke him again with my 4′ walk­ing stick.

He didn’t like me pok­ing him, but he still didn’t move off the trail until I kicked sand at him for the sec­ond time. He looked up at me once more, as if to remem­ber my face, and slith­ered away slowly bid­ing his time, prob­a­bly plan­ning when he could catch me unawares at another time.

Just after he left the trail Donna said, “Take it’s pic­ture.” Good idea I thought, if I only had a cam­era. I did, like I always do, it was right there one the end of my walk­ing stick. I just didn’t think to use that end of the stick, I was too busy pok­ing with the other end.

Octo­ber

Cash Back II

Thurs­day the 9th

On our way to get our monthly hair­cut Donna wanted to stop at Walgreen’s, she had a cou­ple coupons that were burn­ing a hole in her pocket. Of the three, there was only one we ended up using, eight Hal­loween themed pen­cils for a buck With tax, $1.07. Donna asked for five or ten dol­lars cash back because she would need a few bucks in a cou­ple days when she went out to lunch with her depart­ment. I fig­ured if I just rounded up the bill to $10 that would do it. Donna agreed because that would give her some sin­gles for a tip. I skill­fully guided myself to the other amount screen for cash back while sub­tract­ing a dol­lar seven from ten. I typed in the amount I wanted back, hit OK and OK again. The cashier handed me my receipt and change and we headed for the door. When I looked down at the receipt total it was then that I real­ized the math tutor­ing from Jethro Bod­ine might have been a mistake.

I had asked for $8.83 back mak­ing my total debit pur­chase $9.90!

Oh, so close.

Novem­ber

Oh Goody

Thurs­day the 13th

At work a big chunk of the pro­duc­tive part of today was spent star­ing at nearly worth­less PC. Half of every­thing that most peo­ple need to do their jobs and one major item, email, are con­trolled through servers in New Jer­sey and it seemed like maybe some­body parked their truck on the net­work hose and didn’t real­ize it. Started some­time mid morn­ing and after lunch we got par­tial con­nec­tiv­ity back and received this email:

From: Xxxxxx, Xxxxxxx [INDAUTO/ASCONUM/FP]
Sent: Thurs­day, Novem­ber 13, 2008 1:08 PM
Sub­ject: NETWORK OUTAGE

All Employ­ees:

Our Dat­a­cen­ter is still expe­ri­enc­ing net­work prob­lems as a result of sev­eral out­ages by our local tele­com car­rier. We have failed-over to a backup link and will con­tinue to work on restor­ing the pri­mary link. We are severely lim­ited in band­width so please sus­pend all non-work related web/internet activ­i­ties until our pri­mary link is restored. We apol­o­gize for any incon­ve­nience this may cause and thank you for your patience and under­stand­ing. If you have any ques­tions, please call me at the num­bers listed below.

Xxxxxx Xxxxxxx
Man­ager, Net­work Systems

The high­light­ing is just as it came from the sender. My favorite part is the red let­ter words, “please sus­pend all non-work related web/internet activ­i­ties” because I could swear that every employee has to sign off on a com­puter usage pol­icy that expressly for­bids using the net for any­thing non-business. I’m think­ing that because this man­ager has to remind us not to use it for non-work, that per­haps he must think it is OK in other times to use it that way.

Decem­ber

Iden­tity Crisis

Tues­day the 16th

On our trip down I-95 in Florida on last Thurs­day I saw a most inter­est­ing car. I was in the cen­ter of the three lanes when I noticed a small black sedan with dark tinted win­dows approach­ing fast. In the cen­ter of the grill was a shiny oval badge with a large L in the cen­ter. The car was a Lexus. It looked smaller than their small­est cars the IS and as it passed by I didn’t rec­og­nize it. Now I’m a car guy, I read prac­ti­cally every major car mag­a­zine and check Auto­Blog every day, so if Lexus has a car below the IS I would known about it. Once the car was past me I could see the back of the car and right there on the left of the trunk was a chrome Lexus badge, in the cen­ter of the rear panel was another oval Lexus logo where they were sup­posed to be. On the right side of the trunk was the clincher, a chrome IS250. A neigh­bor used to have an IS250 and this was def­i­nitely not one.

I wasn’t real sure what it was, but I had an idea and it was con­firmed after I had inter­net access, it was a Toy­ota Yaris sedan. Props to the owner for a nearly thor­oughly con­vinc­ing job, he even stayed in the fam­ily so to speak. If he had just com­bined two badges on the back to give the car two let­ters that weren’t on a known model, like say IC250, I might have actu­ally though I spot­ted a prototype.