Category Archives: Geek

Puff Datty

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What a windy day today has turned out to be! Took care of cleaning the CX-5, then going to the gym, and then with Scott’s help picking up around the house and running the vacuum. Next, laundry going apace. After that a trip to Menards for a fluorescent light bulb and a starter. It’s a F14T12CW. Yay for codes. And I’ll have the bummy starter on me, so that should be a simple thing to replace. Of course, now that I’m looking for anything, it’s all gone. The entire county. Sold out. Never heard of it. Never stocked it.

I know this game. It’s called “Might as well just fucking buy it on God Damned Amazon.”

But I love disappointment. So, that’ll keep my Sunday busy.

The Dark Side of USPS Informed Delivery

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Early this morning I got my daily alert from the USPS Informed Delivery site. Pictures of incoming mail.

This mornings haul included a letter from Hettinger & Hettinger Law Firm. Seeing this created instant dread. What could it be? It wasn’t a summons or a subpoena, it wasn’t even certified or return receipt requested. But what could it be?

Oh the dread. My mind worked overtime on this. Sure that someone who had a gauzy level of butthurt decided to take me to task for some unknown transgression and hired a lawyer firm to strongarm me into some sort of seedy compliance with some imagined transgression that was best executed in the most passive aggressive way possible. Because why else would lawyers be sending me mail?

What have I done! I couldn’t think of anything but I’m sure there are enemies galore just beyond the extent of the street lamp, angling for their pound of flesh. Something to make this Retrograde in Pisces really hurt. Something from TPTMNBN, I was almost certain of it. Come back from the darkness with one gnarly tentacle shooting out of the inky blackness of their malevolence.

Turns out it was simply an advertisement of the legal services they offer. That’s it.

Why! What do you know! How did you get my address! So, an entire day of worry and panic, expecting every Sherrif’s cruiser to stop, turn on its lights and pursue me. Because Retrograde is built from fuckery and shenanigans.

I can’t take these scares. Law firms sending me mail! It shaves years off my life expectancy just in stress hormones alone!

So the letter sits on my cutting board in the kitchen. I had to walk away from it. I’ve had a whole day to create exciting vistas of suffering and now all of that must be purged. This is going to take a while.

Corned Beef

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The search for our St. Patrick’s Day corned beef has run into a snag, then an epiphany, and now, a hairpin loop back to Walmart of all places. A long while ago we loved Sy Ginsburg’s Corned Beef. Can’t find it. Meijers isn’t carrying it. But we did notice Grobbel’s Corned Beef at Walmart. Didn’t realize that E.W. Grobbel bought out Sy two years ago.

So, back to Walmart we go.

Good Omens

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https://www.reddit.com/comments/axv3go/only_this_unlikely_duo_can_stop_doomsday_good/

Here is a link to a trailer for a Good Omens. It’s one of my all time favorite books by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. If you haven’t read it, YOU REALLY SHOULD. I can’t wait for this series to come out! It’s on Amazon Prime, so thankfully I can watch it on a borrowed Prime account.

David Tennant as Crowley. I love it!

AT&T Is A Pox

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AT&T Sales Associates are a ripe bunch. They reach out at random and contact people who have nothing at all to do with telecom around here. I tell them that we aren’t interested and they keep on going. Keep on flogging their products to people who don’t understand what they do nor can they approve anything about it. So I told them all to just stop it. To take all their sales pitches and go to our Telecom MSP.

To which, their response was remarkably shady! Shocker!

If you no longer wish to receive email information from AT&T, please click here https://www.e-access.att.com/abgmas_n/imail/dispatcher?action=sm.unsub&ct_id=########### Or send notice to: AT&T Business, 55 Corporate Drive, Room 24C27, Bridgewater, NJ 08807.If you are an existing AT&T customer, you may still receive transactional e-mail messages concerning your current products or services.

My last message to them was:

Hello,

And this right here is why we only do business with AT&T through our Telecommunications Managed Service Provider.

No reply needed.

Goodbye.

No love lost. It was a rather surprising turn, you’d think that salespeople would treat the primary decision-maker with something less than shade. Perhaps something more like “Sorry for the trouble, we will update our records!”

Ah well, it’s AT&T. The lesson here is, the statement “it’s AT&T” pretty much explains all you need to know.

And with every waking breath I wish that Alexander Graham Bell continues to burn in hell for what he did, strapped right up there with Thomas Edison, jammed as clear up Satan’s anus as both can fit.

Ashes to Ashes

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Just re-watched Avengers Infinity War. Everyone’s dead! Yaaaay!

Obviously this is comic book universe. Don’t be upset. Everyone is dead. They do that all the time. Existence in comic books is a flippity-floppity timey-wimey ball of faff.

It sells comic books. But not nearly so many as what happens next.

And you thought the ending to Dallas was absurd. Oh honey. You should sit down. LOL.

Mercury Retrograde!

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If you work in IT, have anything at all to do with technology, you should be aware of these two dates and times:

Mercury goes Retrograde in Pisces (29o 39″) on March 5, 2019, at 6:19 pm Universal Time, 2:19 pm EDT and 11:19 am PDT.

The Direct Station occurs in Pisces  (16o 06″) on March 28, 2019, at 1:59 pm Universal Time, 10:59 am EDT and 7:59 am PDT.

It is coming up for us on the Eastern Time Zone, in just a few minutes. After that, everything will be impossible, bonkers, or unbearably loopy for about four weeks.

You have been warned!

Darn Tough Socks

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The start of this Winter season inspired me to organize my wardrobe and store my summer clothes and reveal my winter clothes. Living in Michigan as I do, Winter is something you do not fool around with and the best way to prepare yourself for anything that the outside may have to offer is to dress for the conditions. As I was pulling previously stored winter gear out of storage, I came across a pair of Darn Tough socks I had bought, or were a gift, years and years ago. They were woolen, featuring Merino Wool and quite long, definitely over-the-calf in length. Generally I cannot sleep well unless my feet are warm, and so I almost always sleep with some sort of socks on my feet, and since these were woolen and the warmest I had, they served that purpose quite well.

Then I noticed there was a hole that had been worn into the heel of these particular pair of socks. I have a pronated gait, so this sort of wear and tear is common for me. I noticed the label down by the toes and figured I would replace them with another pair, since they worked so well for so long. I went to the website and discovered more about the Darn Tough brand. They take incredible pride in their products, even to go so far as to offer a unconditional lifetime warranty on their socks. Send in the blasted out pair, and they’ll credit you for a new pair. I was blown away by this, you don’t see pride and pro-consumer qualities like this anywhere, at least never in my lifetimes memory, except for Darn Tough. This started me exploring and reading and discovering that Merino Wool is not scratchy, that it has a litany of really quite shockingly good features, warm in the Winter, cool in the Summer, naturally fire-retardant, and naturally anti-microbial. It also dries very quickly and transports sweat away from the skin and releases it better than a lot of other fabrics. Pretty much every review I read online flogged the daylights out of Darn Tough, claiming they were the best socks that they had ever owned. So I gave them a shot. I washed the blasted out pair, then shipped them to Darn Tough. A few weeks later I got a gift card for the cost of the original pair!

So I bought three pair to see what all the hubub was about. I prefer long socks, so practically knee-high are for me, which in the industry is called OTC for Over The Calf. I picked their Paul Bunyon socks, the pricetag was rather shocking for socks, but after a while of wearing these socks as my daily pairs I can say that they are the best socks I have ever owned, hands down! They are soft, they check off every expectation claimed by the manufacturer, and then some!

After that, and with the gift card in hand for my warranty claim, I bought a few more, some for sleeping, some for work and daily use. If you are tired of cotton or polyester-blend socks leaving you with sopping wet feet, smelly feet, or cold feet, find something you like at Darn Tough. You won’t be sorry you did.

Bundt Buddy

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I’ve noticed for a long while that no matter how long you microwave a dish, the center of the thing you are reheating is always colder than the ring around whatever you are cooking. Even if you use a flat plate and put it off-center on a rotating micowave tray inside the device.

I have taken to putting whatever I want to cook on a plate and then move it around so there is an empty spot in the middle, and that maneuver started me thinking about the general shape of what I was doing. I’m making a form similar to a bundt pan.

This started me to think about a microwave accessory, a ceramic shaped dish that could you could put your food into, it is shaped to avoid this center dead-spot, so your food cooks faster and more evenly. I call it a Bundt Buddy. LOL.

Anyhow it would be silly as it just is one more thing to clean, but if you want to avoid a cold spot in your microwaved food, make it a ring with nothing in the center, like a food doughnut. Smooth it out afterwards.