Black Mirror Coach

Ut oh.  My wife and I are in trouble.  I should be hanging with her instead of blogging.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/black-mirror-just-ruined-my-marriage-1822998245 

Asymmetrical Military Forces

I was Googling for information on asymmetrical military forces.  What I was really after was asymmetric warfare.

But this is what came up when I did my search...  I think there's a gap in understanding.  That, or Google is telling me to quit worrying about war and find a nice outfit instead.

My Historical Joke

Inspired after watching Frankenstein's monster point out different kinds of ships on the Thames during the third episode of Penny Dreadful.

Did you hear about the naval battle between the Dutch and the British?
The barque was worse than the fluyt.

Thank you, I'll be here all week.

Merit Badges

I had a lot of merit badges as an Eagle Scout, so I always find them amusing, because they were so different in difficulty and attractiveness.  Dangerous Minds has a great post up about Luke Drozd's alternate badge selections.  Very funny, and they reminded me of an old Jezebel post which, in turn, reminded me that most of those badges were courtesy of a contest on Worth 1000.

I noted on Facebook that I'm very surprised Mean Mr. Mustard wasn't responsible for the RTFM N00b merit badge, given his history of making co-workers cry using that language.

Useful Documentation

I had a suspicion this would be the answer to the Selenium error message in my logs, but I felt I needed to validate it anyway.  I think under Common Solutions it should say, "Make sure the element is present.  Idiot."  That would help a lot.

Interviewing, The Bobs Style

Drew and I went interviewing on the 20th at the Maverick offices at the U of MN to talk to the students about internships at work. Yes, that is a Swingline stapler. A red one. And yes, we are being photobombed by Mr. Worf, Michael Dorn. Which means I could have done a meme to the effect of, "TO BE HONEST WITH YOU, I LOVE HIS ACTING. I DO. I AM A MICHAEL DORN FAN. FOR MY MONEY, I DON'T THINK IT GETS ANY BETTER THAN WHEN HE SINGS KLINGON OPERA." But I'm pleased with my choice of quotes.

Rocky Mountain Mist

Well, that was easier than I thought it would be.  I showed it to Eryn, she doesn't remember it being quite like this.

Chalk

At the MIA, there was a chalkboard in the store.  I was very amused to see someone was making sure to greet Bad Wolf, ala Doctor Who.

47 Ronin and Bored Game

My dad, daughter, and I (three generations) just got back from 47 Ronin at the local theater.  Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 12%.  I'm not sure it deserved a 12%, as in it probably deserved something better.  It was a pretty run of the mill adventure movie.  The critiques seem to point out that it was slow paced for its length.  I'm surprised.  I thought the bad reviews would be more around the fact that all 47 of them kill themselves at the end.  That's not a spoiler.  At least not if you're not so Western you've never read anything about them.  What it didn't do, in my opinion, is really showcase more of the Ronin - particularly given all the famous Japanese actors in the movie.  That would seem to warrant a bit more personality and interaction between the ronin rather than so much of the chatter being between the bad guy and his witchy girlfriend and between Keanu and Oishi (Hiroyuki Sanada).

I recommend this article from Laughing Squid about the 80's style Bored Game and accompanying video.  Very amusing.


BORED GAME™ from Dark Igloo on Vimeo.

Fire Door

Today Erik ripped the handle off the fire door in the swing area, where his team is temporarily hiding in a basement at the end of a very long wing.  One of the other developers, concerned they might burn to death, put a temporary fix in place until facilities can resolve the issue.

Close Call

While I was walking into the shower/bathroom area downstairs at work, I noticed a Dickey's BBQ cup on the drinking fountain outside the doors.  Once inside, I noticed someone was taking an early morning dump.  It occurred to me that I should send a humorous (in my opinion) email to a coworker telling him that if he was going to take a big dump in a quiet area downstairs where no one could find him, he shouldn't advertise he was down there by leaving his cup nearby.

I went back to get out of my bike clothes and into my work clothes by the showers and a few minutes later I hear, "Hey Scott!"  From exactly the same person I intended to email.  It really was his cup.

Free Stuff

I noticed these things for free on Craiglist in the area.  They made me laugh.  Is this a playhouse, or just a windowless place to lock up the kids?  It seems like a fine line in this case.

I'm glad they put the woman's legs in the picture or I'd be more carefully looking for bones sticking out of the free fill dirt from someone's basement.  A particularly clever way to get rid of the bodies.

My favorite.  Free Large Kids Playhouse - $10.

Randomness

I enjoyed these two items from The Chive.  My save to images option is gone on my iPad, but it's easy enough to do a screen scrape by touching the screen to eliminate the ad bar and simultaneously pushing the two buttons to take a scrape.  So maybe not so easy as 1 in 4 I get the ad bar in the picture and have to try again, and it tends to include the letterbox bar.  But sufficient.

Usually I'm not much into quotes that might describe my life, but I liked, "Never be ashamed of a scar. It simply means you were strong than whatever tried to hurt you."  I have a lot of scars.  Birthmark.  Roster + chicken pen.  Roof flashing.  Three thumb scars from knives: Katie's pear and two related to carving in Boy Scouts.  A scarred toe from the broken jar my brother left in the running path in St. Michael.  Stomach, where I almost died as a baby.  Knee where I removed a pinky nail cube of flesh falling between the boards at my grandparents' swimming pool/oil pit.  I probably have one in a place I wouldn't want anyone to have to look at.  Hip!  I have the car-related scar that's longer than my abdomen scar is wide.  And the knee dent from where they put the post.  That's on both sides of the knee.  For a long time I had a scar related to pouring a whole pan of bacon grease down the front of my leg at National Scout Jamboree in Virginia.  That seems to be gone unless you really look for it.  I've got another knee scar (so both knees) that I don't even remember where it came from. A scar on my wrist from a deep burn from solder at the duplex trying to fix a water pipe. That should be all of them.  A healthy collection of a life that was more exciting than I intended, although not so exciting that I can point to scars from mountains or sharks.

And not uplifting like a quote, but Pretty Spock setting his phaser to stunning is just funny.

Bad way to start the day

I started out my day realizing I'd put my underwear on inside out.  Something you don't want to fix after you've been wearing them for a few hours. If for no other reason that it just seems wrong, despite being a clean individual. And then I got on the elevator while starting up my iPhone and tried to key my PIN into the elevator buttons before I realized it a.) wasn't allowing me into my phone and b.) was going to take me to floors I didn't want to visit.

Normally at that point, I'd be very careful about any email I crafted, assuming the chance of a sexual typo was just a matter of time.  But despite that confusion and way too much work because of differing time zones, I don't think I was a problem today and managed to get a good backlog of work done prior to queuing up a new backlog during my upcoming ooo.

Crafty Burglar

I like the first headline from The Patch, not because it's Crafty Burglar Strikes Toilets of Eagan McDonalds', but because the follow up line is "Prosecutors claim crap metal, not lost rings or pet fish, was the motive."  I suppose that's accurate. And then to top it off, the next headline, "Burnsville Man Spends Six Days in Jail for Molesting Eagan..." is almost as funny, albeit sad.  A poor choice of where to put the ... on the part of The Patch.

Where to find job training at Supervalu

I seem to remember that Supervalu was offshoring a significant portion of its computer programming staff.  Perhaps that explains why their website doesn't even support some basic clicks.  Unfortunately, it looks like they can't train themselves to fix it, because the training resources are 404.

Fortunately, the benefits are commensurate with the necessary web skillz.

Unsubscribe II

Think Progress has a different trick to keep me from unsubscribing.  They forget the // and create a malformed href so I can't click it.

And if you grab the URL, stuff in your own //, and drop it in the URL bar, you go here:

Unsubscribe

I've been on a kick to unsubscribe myself from a lot of email lately.  One less thing to declutter and I only worry about the ones that make it into my inbox, not the spam box garbage.  This unsubscribe form was particularly enjoyable because, after clicking the submit button once, it disabled the required field for unsubscribing myself.  So either Apsalar is very clever, and they're actively working to stop me from unsubscribing while appearing compliant, or they've got an incredibly obvious bug that should have never slipped past testing.  Leading to the question, "Why would I trust any other software I might be interested in purchasing from them given such an obvious bug in such a simple web form?"  Perhaps they've rightly intuited that my unsubscribe is a tacit statement on my part that I don't intend to buy in the foreseeable future and I may be fucked with at will.

Multi-layered Safety

I'm glad they chose to use both the bag and the sign, or I might not have understood what to do and made a real mess.

Dark Bread

My sister sent me this a while ago.  Originally, I was worried about what he was up to, trying to cook bread with a flashlight.  That's just not enough heat.  Then, after I'd looked at it for a while, I was much more disturbed that he's trying to cook a yeast-based product in a room with that much junk on the table and a washer (and presumably dryer) in the room.  I'd be worried about my loaf tasting like old socks.

If you're up for it, please leave your submission for a caption contest in the comments commemorating my father and his strange behavior.  Something like, "I've been standing here for a week, and the loaf still isn't browning."  Or, "If I stand here long enough, I'll catch those bread gnomes in action. They have to get done making cookies at some point."  Or, "I prefer light bread."Jesus? If you're in there, would you turn it into a bunch of loaves?" Or, "This should help fortify it with Vitamin D."