Free Love Seat
August 14th, 2008 by joby
I know Rainwytch doesn’t like her current living room set — so I found her a “new” love seat:
It’s waiting for you at 62nd and 15th Ave NE!
Archive for the 'Friends' Category
Geek Social Fallacies
April 24th, 2008 by joby
I came across this several months ago — and being a geek that socializes with geeks, I recognize all five of the Five Geek Social Fallacies:
#1: Ostracizers Are Evil
#2: Friends Accept Me As I Am
#3: Friendship Before All
#4: Friendship Is Transitive
#5: Friends Do Everything Together
These fallacies don’t start off as something that is necessarily bad or wrong, but when made into an absolute bad things can happen.
I am not very social. I have friends and I’m happy so I won’t rock the boat. So I am a carrier of a corollary of #1 — avoid conflict that might lose you friends. I hate personal conflict, and will most likely just ignore it or maintain blissful ignorance of the issue. And my lack of social interest turns me into the curmudgeon at the parties where someone with #4 is trying to get me to be friends with their better friends(*) — which causes tension that I don’t want to deal with. I have gotten a bit better … but that isn’t saying much.
* better friends: another person’s friends or family that aren’t part of my core group of friends.
I guess I’ll be a pirate for Halloween
October 28th, 2007 by joby
So this weekend we’re making the final push to finish the electrical work on the garage. It was slow going in the early afternoon we finished with one exception. It was very satisfying when we were testing the circuits and everything worked. That one final bit is the exterior lights, which have been a pain in the ass. At about 4PM we got back from our 2nd trip to buy parts (the third this weekend), with a possible solution. Of course with our work nearly complete something had to intervene.
To complete a bit of work I went down into my basement — It was then that the hippies attacked. I’m not sure what they were planning to do in the basement — drug induced orgy, drum circle, or just looking for something to sate their munchies. The fight was fast and furious, they were armed with with a wide assortment of musical instruments and drug paraphernalia while I was armed only with my tool belt of electrical equipment and a keen understanding of physics. The first went down quickly with a handful of yellow wire nuts he ran away screaming about bees; and the second a handful of staples. I then pulled my 25′ measuring tape to use like a weighted string and was able to take out two more (one armed with a bong, the other a before a hippie armed with a guitar was able to strip it from me, but when I smashed a hole in the guitar with my hammer he fell to the ground crying.
All that remained were the two female hippies: the first wielded a tambourine; and the second a bad acid trip made her freak-out. The tripping hippie went berserk slashing at me with filthy raged finger nails. I was just barely able to deflect her first frantic attacks with my needle-nose and thick pliers, but she was able to knock both from my grip. I then flung a pair of screwdrivers at her, but she was able to dodge the missiles. Running low on tools, I was getting desperate and sent my new circuit tester at her head. The black and red body with flopping probes hit her in between the eyes and sent her into
Unfortunately, I was distracted with the first female hippie, the second chucked her tambourine at me. The projectile hit me directly in the right eye. My glasses prevented the tambourine from damaging my eye, but the glasses where forced back violently and cutting me just under the eye brow. The flowing blood and sudden blow blinded my right eye. I staggered back in shock and pain trying to protect my eye and determine the damage. They took the opportunity to make their escape.
Jim (our neighbor) drove me to (and later picked me up from) Group Health’s Urgent Care where after 2.25, I was discharged with three stitches and a slightly blurry right eye. I would take a picture to document the injury but Aly took the camera with her to Orlando (work thing). So Adam, I’m sorry I didn’t make it to tonight’s Ritual Pumpkin Sacrifice. But at least I’ll have cool scar over my eye from a hippie’s tambourine — and not from a chuck of wood flung from my chop saw that ricocheted into my eye — it was hippies.
Free Videos
October 1st, 2007 by joby
As part of the clean up I sorted through our old video tapes into:
1) Keepers
2) Keep until replaced
3) Someone might want but get rid of
4) Trash.
In #3 we have some “nice” stuff that people might want:
1) A complete video collection of Babylon 5 that aired on TV (except the last TV movie that was on SciFi but we won’t count that) — 28 tapes in all.
2) A mostly complete collection of Black Adder: All of Seasons I-IV (except the season III episode that Channel 9 lost) and the Christmas Special — 4 tapes.
3) Six tapes of Season 1 of Star Blazers.
4) Some movies: Battlestar Galactica, Armageddon, Godzilla (the Mathew Broderick one), Gettysburg, Girls Just Want to Have Fun (not to be confused with Girls Gone Wild), Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Saint, Star Wars.
5) Three episodes of STNG (though Aly might reconsider giving up them).
6) Some workout videos.
7) And not much more…
Just imagine you could own a collection of videos carefully collected by an obsessive compulsive that had to have them all. Anything that doesn’t get claimed will go to the dump or be donated.
Too much to do
September 6th, 2007 by joby
Ug… I’ve been busy before, but I’m in a huge time crunch right now — and losing time this evening to diagnose and restore Vesta didn’t help. I was hoping to finally get a chance to perform a motherboard switch for Adam on a pair of macbooks tonight — I had hoped to do this earlier but some other priority has come up (such as working on the garage on Monday). Hopefully, I’ll be able to complete the switch tomorrow so I can return the computers to him Friday (or whenever we play D&D this weekend).
My weekends have been taken up with building the garage, which isn’t going to stop anytime soon. I have several improvement projects that have languished, and several that I need to work on soon. For example, I need to upgrade my myth boxes to 0.20.2 so I can use Schedules Direct since Zap2It no longer provides scheduling data for free. I have scheduling data until September 15th — and I won’t get more until I upgrade and start using Schedules Direct.
It isn’t helping that I am trying to get a reasonable amount of sleep too.
Thanks Jeannie!
August 28th, 2007 by joby
Last week the University Bookstore had an author signing event with Mark Ferrari for The Book of Joby. It isn’t too often that my name is in a book, let alone the title. Latter I found out that the author is a friend of a friend of one of my friends: Jeannie. The author, of course, had no idea about my existence when writing the book, but it is still an interesting coincidence (or perhaps the Force at work…). I didn’t attend the signing event because of our Friday D&D game, but Jeannie did.
Last night when Aly came home from Jeannie’s birthday event, she handed me a gift from Jeannie. She had purchased a copy of The Book of Joby, and the author signed it with:
To Joby…
(Wow! It’s so weird to be writing to you!)
Enjoy!
Mark Ferrari
8/24/2007
Thanks Jeannie, that was very nice. I’ll write a full review when I finish it, but I did enjoy the first chapter (PDF).