My family’s cat routinely sleeps in the middle of the staircase, sprawled out in some odd form or other. People are continually going up and down the stairs, and each time he’s woken up and opens his eyes halfway, looking groggy and glum. As anyone would be, woken up every few minutes. I don’t think he realizes that the middle of a thoroughfare is not a good place to nap. Stupid cat.
you hate d and b’s?? that’s the first time i heard anyone said that. i’m ok at that place maybe once in awhile otherwise i can’t afford it.
Well, I can’t hate the place as in, it’s a bad place or anything like that, because really it’s meant to be a fun place and how could I hate that? I mean, let’s say I liked roller coasters and I went to Disneyland and they barely have any roller coasters, but it’s still The Happiest Place On Earth, and how could anyone in their right mind have hatred towards The Happiest Place On Earth? (And I wonder, do they sell Snapple (The Greatest Stuff On Earth) at The Happiest Place On Earth? If they had a circus there, would it be The Greatest Show On Earth? Anyway, I digress (and often at that).) My point is that Dave and Buster’s, to someone such as myself who has an appreciation for video games, is like Disneyland when it comes to video games. They’re not real video games. They’re a small selection which are modified to give winners tickets which can be traded in, (and if you’re a decent player, have accumulated several hundred dollars’ worth of game play) for prizes such as rubber bouncy balls, colorful dish-rags, and tacky shotglasses. Essentially, items which would be an insult to the possessive tendencies of any regular video game player, avid or casual, and by that I don’t mean that game players have any particularly greater possessive tendencies than those of the average person, just that I’m speaking of the average tendencies, at whatever level they exist, for people to want to own things. The aspect, in other words. That said, one can certainly have fun at Dave and Buster’s, but the same type of fun can be had at a location with regular old pool tables, or over a friendly game of Taboo, or Twister (whilst clothed or not). Or at an arcade, but one with decent, up-to-date games (or even old, since what beats a good game of Pac-Man?) and which doesn’t attempt to insult my intelligence by throwing lame “prizes” into the mix. End of rant.
From “Rent”:
525,600 minutes, 525,000 moments so dear. 525,600 minutes– how do you measure, measure a year? In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee. In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife. In 525,600 minutes– how do you measure a year in the life?
That should be a blockquote. Design’s still in progress, you know.
I realized one of the relatievely steady ways I measure time’s passage is by how often I cut my fingernails.
To block caller ID for a specific call, you dial *67 beforehand. Was that intended to be a mnemonic? The only reasonable abbreviations I can come up with are *[N]on [P]ersonal, *[N]o [S]ender-info, *[M]ake [P]rivate, etc. Nothing that seems like it should be the “official” meaning behind the particular choice of the number 67.
On the other hand, to unblock caller ID for a specific call (if you have your line blocked by default), you dial *82 beforehand. That could just stand for *[V]iew *[C]aller-id.
On Verizon cell phones,
See, those make sense. Although it would be nice to have the phone check in the background, automatically and periodically, and update usage information internally.
The most time consuming element of folding laundry is turning everything (shirts, mainly) right-side-out. Therefore, this time around I’m just not going to bother, and if you see me wearing anything inside-out, you’ll know why. Hopefully after their next run through the laundry gauntlet they’ll have all turned themselves right-side-out in the same manner as they had turned themselves inside-out in the first place, in that inexplicable yet highly consistent laundry phenomenon which manifests itself, I believe, in the dryer.
No, today is just hot. Sweltering, rather. Broiling. Boiling (it’s the humidity that does it). Humidity is the complement of wind-chill factor for heat. If I were sitting on a vinyl chair I’d have stuck for a while and then come unstuck and slid right off. But I think this is only in my room, where comparatively the outside isn’t nearly as bad. I’m programming in a self-imposed coding sweatshop! But I can take the heat.
When I write code in PHP, the amount of time I waste deciding whether to use single quotes around something or double quotes around something, or in deciding that something I started with single quotes (thinking it would be a simple string) should be converted to double quotes so that I can embed a variable in the string and making the change, or vice versa, while maybe a second or two each time, adds up. Therefore, I’ve decided to just use double quotes all the time. I’m used to escaping the double-quote character when it needs to appear inside a string from C++, so that’s no trouble. Even though I’ll have to escape more characters on average, it’s nicer to have a consistent appearance in the code. Finally, whatever extra processor time it takes to parse double-quoted strings for embedded variables really should be negligible, and if it isn’t, I either shouldn’t be using a scripted language like PHP anyway, or should use one of several PHP compilers which should optimize away scanning within double quotes. So to sum it up, ignoring single-quoted strings saves decision and code-fixing time on my part, leads to more consistent code, and in my humble opinion looks better.
Wonder of wonders, this should be posted exactly at noon!
Time to get crackin’! On what, I don’t know. I’ve been working all day. Time to wind things down, actually.
This afternoon I was walking in my backyard and swallowed a fly. I don’t know why. Actually I do, and it was on purpose. I had been on the phone (for some reason Verizon has all of a sudden started giving me extremely choppy reception in the house, where it’s always worked perfectly before) so I went out to the backyard which helped things reception-wise for this call, but at some point in the middle of opening my mouth to utter an unspecific word, some kind of fly flew right in and lodged itself in my throat. It felt like it was stuck there; I couldn’t cough it out or swallow it down. I had been talking to my friend (who heard me coughing and trying to get the thing out) while commenting to the bug (and her, tangentially), “Make up your mind! Either get in or get out!” Eventually I had to go back inside and have a drink. “Extra protein, you know. My stomach acid’ll kill if it’s not already dead.”
I hate those stickers with a passion (well, that’s an exaggeration, they don’t really figure much in my life), so the idea of “etching data onto the skin of the fruit itself”:http://www.boingboing.net/2005/07/19/tattooed_fruit_en_ro.html with a laser is neat. I read about this in the NY Times this morning, and laughed out loud when the article mentioned, in passing, how advertising could be included because, after all, there _is_ plenty of spare space on the skin of any given fruit. I’m picturing a nectarine with abstract spiral designs around the outside, though… and my mouth is watering, probably because I’m picturing a juicy nectarine and for no other reason. In fact I’m going to have one right now. There’s an art to taking those stickers off, by the way.