The Empty Soda Can

We all know the running gag: Christmas keeps coming earlier every year. Back when we were kids, the Christmas stuff would hit the aisles, the second Thanksgiving was over. As time went on, it started predating Thanksgiving—first a little bit, then significantly. Now by mid-October, we regularly see Hallowe’en and Christmas items being sold side by side. So with all this jumping the gun, I guess what I’m about to say shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me—nor, I suppose, will it to you. This evening, I stopped by the store after work to grab some last-minute items for our New Year’s Eve party. We already had most everything we needed, but I’d forgotten the marshmallows for the Rice Krispie Treats. In addition to grabbing what I came for and the requisite few other items, I found myself in for quite the surprise. There they were, right in the front of the store, between two cash-register lanes: Cadbury Creme Eggs. In December. Happy New Year, everybody, and remember: bawk, baw...

I was recently reading my brother-in-law Ed’s blog entry regarding his eighth wedding anniversary, and I couldn’t help but get to thinking, regarding the wedding photos he posted therewith. It got me to thinking about one of the most obvious differences between men and women. The photo at right was gleaned from a random web site using Google Image Search . It’s certainly no one I know, which is exactly why I used it: I don’t want anyone to think I’m singling them out specifically. The question I’m getting at, though, is this: what do you see here? On the right, we have a bride, dressed in a beautiful white gown and veil. Her hair is perfect; her face, perfect; if we could zoom in on her nails, I expect they’d be perfect too. Add to this her long, blonde hair, and this bride is the epitome of worldly perfection in every conceivable way. On the left, we have a guy in a suit. Is it just me, or is this pretty typical? I know a lot of guys rent tuxes for their weddings, but even that seem...

Just thought my readers here would be interested in my latest Drakelings post: Facial Recognition :-)

Many years ago, Chevrolet released a car called the “Nova.” My wife, Anna, was one of the many individuals to own such a car: a car that was great for a while, but made us very sad when I had to drive my then-fiancée to work for several weeks—and very happy to have AAA Plus when we had to tow it just over 100 miles from her old apartment in Bloomington to our first home in Lafayette. She would eventually get the car fixed and sell it to her younger sister, who has herself long since moved on to a newer (and thus, more reliable) vehicle. Despite all this, however, my wife generally enjoyed her Chevy Nova for the time that she had it. Until that fateful day that it had a major problem (I think it was the alternator), it had been a pretty good little car. Unfortunately, this wonderful little hatchback’s success was—shall we say— limited outside the United States. It’s not that it wasn’t dependable; it was. It’s just that when they tried to export it to Latin America, they wasted a lot of ...

First of all, hats off to my beloved brother-in-law Ed, who started me down this thought process with  this post . If you’d like to read it before continuing here, that’s fine; I’m not going anywhere. Now for my thoughts: first of all, it’s definitely easy to go to one extreme or the other. I am reminded of the conscious decision I made, somewhere along the line, that I didn’t give a *$#@ what other people think about me as long as I’m happy with myself. I’m still not sure my unconscious mind is completely on board with this decision, but it does manifest itself in things like: When I go to the beach, I generally let my gigantic belly hang out all over the place, despite the fact that most guys my size would be hiding under a T-shirt. When I was 13 years old, I really liked Debbie Gibson (mostly because I was a teenage boy with hormones, but I digress) and actually saw her in concert twice. The day after each concert, I wore the T-shirt I’d purchased there, knowing full well...

Okay, so this is old news, but I just thought I’d share it with anyone that hadn’t seen it yet: Microsoft and Burger King decided to get together and promote last month’s release of Microsoft Windows 7. The promotion? Well, you’ve heard of a Double Whopper ® ; you’ve probably even heard of a Triple Whopper. So what better way to promote Windows 7 than with a Septuple Whopper? Japanese mafia hit: ¥50.000.000 Windows 7 Burger: ¥777 Knowing a deal when you see one: priceless.

You may have noticed that I’ve removed the overtly spiritual posts from my blog. This is intentional. From here on out, I’ve decided to make my own “Small Plates,” as it were—virtual though they may be. These “Small Plates” are to be known as The Gospel According to Jeffrey, and are available to subscribers at bookofjeffrey.blogspot.com . If you’re interested in reading them, just let me know in the comments and I’ll send you an invite. Until then, L8Rs!

Douglas Adams wrote: If one coincidence can occur… then another coincidence can occur. And if one coincidence happens to occur just after another coincidence, then that is just a coincidence. ( The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul , 172). As if to prove his point, I just randomly flipped through the pages of the just-quoted book, hoping to find the right page so that I could properly cite it. My random flip stopped on page 172 exactly, where my eyes immediately fell upon the word “coincidence” about two thirds down the page. Is this too a coincidence? Regardless, the reason I got to thinking about this is because about ten minutes ago, as I was reading Berke Breathed’s Bloom County Babylon , I came across this panel in a comic from 1985: Given current events, I must ask again: is this just another coincidence? I can only assume so, since it was probably also just a coincidence that some guy tried to sell Dave a screenplay about a late-night talk-show host that was sleeping ar...

For the last two days, I’ve been bombarded with RSS feeds about a recent study from the NPD Group. According to the NPD Group’s report (and about a thousand blogs regurgitating the information), “Nearly 85 Percent of All Apple Households Also Own a Windows PC.” While this could certainly be possible, nobody seems to have seen the original report; they’ve just seen NPD’s resulting press release . it really makes me wonder how well the release reflects reality. Let’s take my household, for example: I don’t think myself a Mac bigot, but at present, all of our functional computers happen to be Macs. Specifically, we currently own 11 computers: 10 Apple Macintoshes (ages 2-18), plus one partially assembled “white box” (read: generic) PC. The “white box” is one of my eternal projects and just sits in the closet; it doesn’t even have a motherboard or a hard drive at the moment, let alone an operating system. So that leaves us with the ten Macs. Here’s the OS breakdown, in numbers of instal...

I guess it’s probably just as well that I neglected to post this yesterday, since my customer support manifesto was long enough as it was. However, the subject of iTunes reminded me of a rather humorous scenario I ran into, a while back. Perhaps two, maybe three years ago, I received my weekly e-mail from iTunes informing me of some of the new releases to hit the store that week. One of the new items was a five-track compilation of some of Paula Abdul’s greatest hits. Curious, I clicked the link to see which five they considered to be her “greatest.” What I didn’t expect was the hilarity of the comments. While a few people that rated the compilation had some decent things to say—whether positive or negative—the great majority were along the lines of, “Paula Abdul is such a loser. She thinks that just because she’s a judge on American Idol , all she has to do is record her own material and she’ll become a pop star, too!” I could not stop laughing—as evidenced by the fact that even years...

A few months ago, I was horrified to discover that the RAID I use to store our family’s iLife—photos, movies, web sites, and music—had suffered severe header corruption. For those of you that don’t know what this means, the header is sort of like the index to the drive. Imagine a 10,000-page reference book that you use every single day. This book includes a 500-page index, so you can easily find what you need. Then one day, you notice that some of the page numbers are suddenly wrong: about 10% of the time, if you look up term A, it gives you the page number for term L, or Z, or W. That’s a pretty good description of header corruption, except that at least with a book, you can flip through until you find the right page. Without an accurate disk header, the computer can’t find the right data at all . Now, all this shouldn’t be so bad, since I’m extremely conscientious about backing things up. Unfortunately, the backup software I was using at the time was so good that it dutifully backed ...

Once again, I love today’s  Urban Dictionary  term (@2008 Aaron Peckham) and just  had  to share: adorkable Both dorky and adorable. A higher state of being all dorks strive toward. That dork is so adorkable I could just hug him till I die.

Remember those old Apple ads, back in the ’90s, that encouraged us to “Think Different”? I certainly don’t mean to put the cart before the horse, but I’m wondering if I took that counsel a bit too much to heart, because advertising just doesn’t seem to work on me these days. Consider the following, all three of which happened in the last hour. As I was driving down the road with my family, I saw an ad for a car. I don’t have the slightest clue what kind of car it was (which says something about the overall effectiveness of the ad), but the tag line was: “Hate Sitting In Traffic Even More.” I was like, “Okay… so you’re saying that if I buy this car, the unenjoyable parts of my life will become even less enjoyable? Why wouldn’t I just save a couple Chases and use the car I already have?” Anna, it must be said, understood the ad as I can only assume it was intended: “This car is such a pleasure to drive, sitting in traffic will be horrible by comparison.” More power to her, but do you rea...

For those that don’t know (or just don’t remember), I have a page-a-day Urban Dictionary calendar. I thought today’s term was wonderful and just had to share: applejacked The process of having your Apple iPod stolen, usually as a result of wearing the telltale white earbuds. Guy 1: Dude, I was on the train last night and someone came up to me and stole my iPod! Guy 2: Dude, you totally got applejacked. (Note: the preceding is @2008 Aaron Peckham. Please don’t sue me.) ;-)

…WHAT THE *#%! IS GOING ON? Today on What the *#%! Is Going On?, we have another entry from the book we spoke of, a few weeks ago. In this bleary, blurry photo, we see two boys doing… well, you decide. My personal take: a rare shot of Goofus actually doing something right for a change, although I’m not quite sure that rickety ladder will hold him much longer. Meanwhile, Gallant gets caught—on camera, no less!—stealing a sack of potatoes, ostensibly to pay the doctor’s bill for his sprained wrist. What’s your take?

For those that don’t know, my sister is permanently disabled. She has Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome , which basically means that untreated, she’d experience pain, 24/7, to the tune of 10% worse than natural childbirth. In fact, RSD patients—who are overwhelmingly female—often report that pregnancy decreases their pain level, so while most pregnant women are complaining that their back hurts, the RSD patients are rejoicing that their arms and legs don’t. Thankfully, my sister has been blessed with amazing health benefits. Until their retirement, a few months ago, my parents were both middle-school teachers in New Jersey, which basically means that their insurance is phenomenal compared to just about everyone else’s. (Case in point: growing up, my sister and I took prescription chewable vitamins because our $1 copay was cheaper than over-the-counter Flintstones vitamins. True story.) While many insurance companies won’t even admit that RSD exists , let alone cover it, I’m not a...

It was a couple of months ago that my wife, Anna, decided that we should start purchasing Dean’s ® brand milk over the store brand, because she heard somewhere that, unlike store brands, Dean’s contains no hormones. As luck would have it, about a week later, CVS started having sales on Dean’s milk, pretty much every week—sales so good that it’s now actually less expensive than the store brand—so we started taking advantage. This morning, I was sitting at the table, innocently eating my breakfast, when I noticed that Dean’s has actually begun advertising this rumored fact. You probably can’t read it in the photo, but that golden, rounded fourteen-point star contains the following words: Our Farmers Pledge Not to Use Artificial Growth Hormones* So I’m thinking, “Cool! Anna was right! There’s no artificial growth hormones! How consumer-conscious of them!” But then I notice the asterisk. “Hmmm…” I think, using those exact words. “What could that be for?” I look around the label—it re...

So I said I’d be back to talk about my next dream, and here it is. Unfortunately, since I’ve waited for yet another night to pass, the details are very sketchy until the climactic scene, which I will now attempt to describe. For much of the dream, I’d been driving around some city that I believe was supposed to be Philadelphia—not that I’ve been to Philadelphia, in the last decade, but that seems right. What sticks out in my mind is that after driving around for a long time, I finally came to a bridge. The bridge was extremely steep—probably about a 55˚ grade—but there was a long line of cars on it, slowly inching their way up. I decided to follow. As I, too, inched up the bridge, I noticed that the left lane was mostly empty and took the opportunity to pass a few people—still moving fairly slowly, because of the grade, but faster than the people in the right lane. As I passed, I couldn’t help but notice that all the drivers in the right lane were pretty old, the kind of drivers whose ...

First of all, an explanation of the title: when I arrived at my first area in Spain—Sevilla Third Ward—my trainer immediately took me across the street to Alcampo, a store kind of like Super Walmart but (in Sevilla, anyway) with multiple floors. As we walked through the store, I happened to notice the CD racks and came across what was then the Cranberries’ new album, No Need to Argue . What’s more, it was a special edition, containing a live E.P. in addition to the full-length CD, itself. (I assume Europeans do that because CDs are so freaking expensive, over there; it sweetens the deal, a little.) I wound up purchasing it and sending it home, so I’d have it when I got back. Fast forward a couple of years, when I was back in the States and no longer bound by mission rules. As I looked more closely at the liner notes, I noticed that parts of the track list were misspelled: specifically, the title track—which was spelled correctly, elsewhere—was accidentally listed as  No Nedd to Arg...

Now here’s a fascinating turn of events: we were having lunch at McDonald’s yesterday, and the TV was showing CNN’s live feed of Obama addressing a group of Pennsylvania union members. In the course of his remarks, Obama used the opportunity to once again drum up support for his health plan. As I listened to our illustrious president speak, he came to part about how’s he’s going to pay for all this, and I was flabbergasted. It was Romneycare! Now, don’t get me wrong: there are still plenty of differences between Obama’s plan and what Romney pushed through, in Massachusetts. However, the main sticking point—that the government stop paying doctors to treat the uninsured, then turn around and use that money to insure the same people they’re no longer paying for—was there. Frankly, I don’t know if this has always been a part of his plan (and don’t really care), but I do know a good idea when I hear it. It made sense when Romney suggested it, and it makes sense when Obama suggests it....

So last night, Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina spoke out in an unbecoming outburst, during the President’s speech before Congress (not that he was really addressing Congress, but that’s not Obama; that’s presidents in general). In case you’ve been in a cave this morning, Obama claimed that his health care plan—which he has now essentially vowed to push through, no matter what, and if the Republicans don’t like it, that’s just because they’re stupid whiners—would not apply to illegal immigrants. Representative Wilson yelled out, right then and there, “You lie!” (Nancy Pelosi was not amused.) So here’s the problem: Wilson’s outburst was inappropriate, but not necessarily inaccurate. And even if one does believe that Wilson is wrong, he spoke his beliefs, which last I checked, was still okay in this country. So the question now is: how does Wilson—a virtual unknown, until last night—turn this into a positive? Wilson has been apologizing (through his people, of course) almost since...

wuy So here are my thoughts: The most obvious option is what Eddie has already suggested: something that will last me another six years. Given the fact that desktops are, in my experience, more reliable than laptops, that would probably be a Mac Pro. It has all the power I could ever want (for the moment), but uses less electricity than my G5. It has room for four internal hard drives, which will make for easy RAID building; and plenty of room for expansion (Firewire 800, PCI Express 2.0, up to 32GB of RAM, etc.). The big down side is the price: a Mac Pro costs $2,499 or $3,299 with no upgrades, plus whatever else I’d like to spend on a new display (and no, my old display won’t work with its new-fangled ports, so I’ll need to upgrade that, too). It’s really not a bad deal, for what you’re getting, but do I really need that much? If I were constantly doing graphics or video, sure; but as a developer, I’d actually probably be better off with something simpler—if for no other reason...

For those that don’t know, my main computer is a Power Macintosh G5. It’s a great machine, the only downside being that it uses more electricity than your average computer, to power its gimongous processors (and in turn, gives off a bit more heat—although admittedly, that could be a lot worse). Anyway, this wonderful machine—on which I am typing, right now—has been my main workhorse for the last six years, and it’s still doing great! It’s been less than a week since it finally couldn’t run the current version of Mac OS ( Mac OS X v.10.6 Snow Leopard came out last Friday, in case you’ve been in a cave since, let’s say, July), and it still does pretty much everything I need it to, at a very acceptable speed—certainly much better than you’d expect, from a six-year-old computer. So here’s the problem: As tends to be the case (knock wood), I’m currently working on a database for a client. As part of this database, I decided to use a particular interface technique that I’ve seen ot...

So yesterday, I got this magazine in the mail. Let‘s take a step back—just for a moment—and look at the cover. What’s the name of the cover story? Yeah. That’s what I thought, too. I don’t doubt for a moment that this cover was developed by a professional graphics designer—the color composition and muted design tell me that—but seriously, dude (or dudette, as the case may be)… how many fonts do you have on your system? And you couldn’t find a single one that actually managed to convey what the heck it is you’re talking about? (I eventually had to look at the table of contents, to be sure.) So as a nickel’s worth of free advice, here’s a tip from one magazine designer to another: have someone check your work !  If your company can’t afford multiple designers, go to another department. In fact, that’s probably a good idea, anyway. They might (okay, they will ) have some pretty ridiculous feedback, but among all that, somebody might possibly mention that it sounds like your...

So here we are with my first post on a brand new blog. I figured that the Drakelings blog is all well and good, but I need someplace to post my own, non–child-related, miscellaneous ramblings. So let’s start with a picture I came across in an old Sunday School manual, the other day. I don’t know about you, but took me a long time to figure out exactly what’s going on. Maybe it’s because the page was smaller—and probably a bit darker—but I was sitting there thinking, “Is that the kid’s dad? Did he catch the kid shooting up? And what’s with the clown statue?” (I’m still not sure I entirely get it, but I think I’ve got a little better idea now.) So how about you, dear readers? What do you think the caption for this photo should be? Best answer gets bragging rights! :-)