I’ve been here only twice before: first for my written boards, then for my orals. Yeah, they couldn’t manage to hold them both in a two-day interval. If they had, how could they have justified charging separately for the two tests? (Solution: charge double for the two. We still would have saved a bundle on plane fares and hotel costs.)
My impressions from before: not much. When you’re taking your boards, you’re in high stress mode. Forever after, you tell yourself, hospitals and potential employers will want to know if you passed the first time through. (In reality? Not so much.) So all I remember is that Chicago and That Big Lake Out There are remarkably beautiful, and that I wouldn’t mind coming back under less stressful circumstances.
And here I am, twelve years later.
September 19 . . . it be more than just the prelude to yer humble narrator’s impending birthday . . . it be TALK LIKE A PIRATE DAY!
But this pirate’s flying to Chicago today (on the back of a roc — ain’t that how real pirates fly?) so ye’ll be gettin’ me reruns from OMFG FOUR YEARS AGO. Have I really been blogging that long?
Follow below the fold, maties. Back when I had me some creative spark . . .
I feel crappy. What did I eat today that had beef in it? And what have I done with my life? Where am I going, and who will I be when I get there?
Ah, forget it. Check out Wikipedia’s page on Common Misconceptions (hat tip to my son. How does he find these things?) Should I add one in the health category: ear wax isn’t really wax?
This one was interesting:
The Coriolis effect does not determine the direction that water rotates in a bathtub drain or a flushing toilet. The Coriolis force is relatively small; it appears over large scales (like weather systems) or in systems such as the Foucault pendulum in which the small influence is allowed to accumulate over time. In a bathtub or toilet, the flow of the water over the basin itself produces forces that dwarf the Coriolis force. In addition, most toilets inject water into the bowl at an angle, causing a spin too fast to be affected by the Coriolis effect.
Need a fact which will win you drinks at the bar? Here:
The Earth’s North Magnetic Pole is not a north magnetic pole, but rather a south magnetic pole. Since a compass needle is a magnet whose “North” end has standard north polarity, and since magnetic poles are attracted to their opposites, the compass needle points to the magnetic south pole of the Earth’s magnetic field. Therefore, the Arctic pole is a south-type pole, while the Antarctic pole is a north-type pole.
You’re welcome.
D.
Sara Benincasa, she of the Sarah Palin Vlog fame, has a blog.
heart heart heart heart heart
D.
Have you seen this one?
Jeez, get over it already! It’s just poop!
An entirely different personality.
I love the way her head maintains the same position from one shot to the next, don’t you?
There ya go, your Cuteness Overload for the evening.
D.
PS What is it about the kitten that reminds me of this? When you can snatch the mouse from the palm of my hand, you will be ready for the catnip.
Yup, that’s my name, don’t wear it out. Or at least that’s what my name would be if Sarah Palin were my mom.
Sarah Palin has picked out an All-American set of names for her children. There’s Track, Trig, Bristol, Willow, and Piper.
Ever wonder, What would your name would be if Sarah Palin was your mother? Well now you can find out!
You can discover your Palin-name, too, at the Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator. Karen is Khaki Salmon Palin, and Jake is Timber Challenger Palin.
Guess you know what I’m going to be doing the rest of this evening!
Hat tip to Daily Kos.
D.
Wasn’t I just saying something about how royally effed I’d be if my old computer died? It died. Not sure what died, but something died. Karen pulled the hard drive out of it and plunked it into the disk drive slot of one of our Crescent City office computers (we’re up to our umbos in computers, I’ll have you know), and the office computer can access the data on my old computer’s disk drive, so we’re not too royally effed. I can, for example, recover my half million unpublishable words.
ANYWAY here’s the question. I can access the data files, I can back stuff up . . . but I can’t seem to figure out where my old emails are stored. We use Thunderbird. We’ve found the Thunderbird program file, but it’s not obvious at all where those old emails are hiding. Does anyone have any ideas about this?
Thanks 🙂
D.
PS: I’ll be incommunicado (email-wise) until I get that azureus account up and running again.
I worry about making a living — maybe not two months from now or six months from now, but two or three years from now? Anything can happen.
I worry about hostile competition, and all the grief they can cause.
I worry about the fact that outside of my own family, I never know who to trust. (I can’t help it. Paranoia runs deep in my blood.)
I worry about the fact that I’m having a harder time remembering whether it’s “who to trust” or “whom to trust.” All I remember is that sometimes, the answer is counterintuitive, and that it depends largely on the structure of the clause.
I worry about my son’s future.
I worry about OUR future.
I worry about my blood pressure. Yes, this is counterproductive.
But most of all, I worry about President Sarah Palin.
What are you worried about?
***
Anyone up for live-blogging tonight?
D.
I’ve been writing for catharsis. Thought about sharing, but nah, this is for me. And that’s what a lot of catharsis-writers fail to realize. Have I ever told the story of my high school friend who, when I was home visiting from college, felt it necessary to read aloud from his novel-in-the-making? He had just finished reading The World According to Garp and it showed. His writing was one part faux-Irving, three parts teenage angst. I can still remember my gratitude that we didn’t have a loaded gun in the room.
We finished the computer room today. Our gaming computer had a fried hard drive, so we popped for one that was Newer! Bigger! Better! The repair dude said, “Man, I am SO glad you didn’t trash it, because that is a sweet box.” When a computer geek says “sweet box,” everyone knows he’s talking hardware, and the geek doesn’t even realize he could be talking about something else.
But don’t get me wrong. Geeks rule. We got this box a year or two ago, mostly because Jake and I wanted to be able to work on World of Warcraft quests together. Of course, now we’re bored with WoW (only took us three years!) so the impetus to have two good gaming computers is no longer there. Still, Jake’s “good computer” is getting up there, and the computer I’m using right now is older still — maybe six years old? Karen would know. Old. About 100 in computer years. It boots up like a 286. So old that when you put a CD in, out comes a poof! of dust.
And yet it’s MY computer and it has tons of MY stuff on it, including stuff I can’t back up. Paint Shop Pro, for example. It was shareware, once upon a time, and then I began buying the upgrades. You can forget about original disks. They don’t exist. And now I’m stuck. If I switch to another computer, I’ll have to buy all new software.
There really ought to be a thing where you stick one end of a cable into one computer and the other end of the cable into the other computer, and you hit a button that says “Clone A to B” and it turns Computer B into a carbon copy of Computer A. And then everyone would whine about how they screwed up and meant to turn A into B, not B into A, and now they’re ruined! And everyone else would snicker knowingly and say, sotto voce, “Noob.”
Not that I would ever make an error like that. You know why?
I’d make Karen do it.
D.