I’m usually forgetting that I have a Jott account, so when I do actually think to remember to use it, I can’t recall how any of it works. I tried again (and failed horribly) to leave myself a message. I don’t know what it is about me, or the sytem, or maybe the two of us together, but we can’t seem to make this deal agreeable for the both of us. I think I eventually ended up writing something down on a napkin, which, while my handwriting is often unreadable, was much easier and much quicker than trying to figure out what this Jott thing wants me to do. It shouldn’t be this difficult. Don’t worry, I have yet to give up on the service. I want it to work at least once before I completely walk away from it. That’s assuming I don’t just up and forget about the whole thing.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
You Probably Can’t Tell
I have a bike-less seat and a seat-less bike. Yes, those both make sense, and the piece I’m missing measures 28.6. (I’m thinking diameter in mm.) Nevertheless, once I removed the rack and basket from my orange beast I was able to ride in the cool night air. That’s right, it was cold last night. But nothing that a little drink couldn’t protect. Ha! That and a pair of jeans and a jacket.
For some reason this seems like one of the longest weekends in a while. I think we’re on week 16 of the year. I think that.
I haven’t been to the market in 2 weeks, so as soon as I finish here I’m going there to buy food. The rest of you need to return my phone calls. I’m not interested in broken parts or dead batteries.
And there we have it.
April Fools’ Day
What is that, anyway? An April Fool? I don’t get it. Generally I can’t, for whatever reason, get interested in this holiday of non-holidays. A day of joke-playing and practical pranks. Elaborate hoaxes. Maybe it’s just that I’m upset at never having been the punchline for one of these laughable scenarios. I don’t believe that, but let’s leave it at that for the sake of not having to think about it any longer.
Even though I’m not a fan of the practical prank/joke, I do enjoy an unexpected outcome. While moving through the day with my boss, she received a call from her son where he told her that he’s engaged to be married to his girlfriend. His mom, my boss, is not immediately jumping for joy with excitement, the response I’m sure her son was seeking so he could then holler “April Fools!” Instead he was met with the sound of fear in his mother’s voice and the dreaded “Why?”
It was all I could do to keep from laughing, and I wasn’t on the call. Needless to say, my boss was much relieved (and jumping for joy) when she found out the engagement wasn’t real. At which point she directed her son to tell his girlfriend that “she was excited” when she heard the news and “let down” when she found out it was just an April Fools’ Day joke. Ha!
I’m not sure which of the three characters is the true butt of the joke, so we’ll have to wait and see how the story plays itself out. Until then.
The Day My Bike Seat Was Stolen
Those darn rascally kats are at it again, they’ve gone and hijacked the seat of my bicycle, which I loved very much for sitting upon while riding through town. I don’t know yet what it costs to get a new seat, but I think I’m going to hold off on making a purchase and see if maybe a ransom note shows itself.
I arrived at roughly 7:30 in the morning at the bike rack in front of a favorite pub of mine, to find the seat to my bicycle missing. A dastardly deed, indeed! (The stealing of my seat, not me finding my bike that way.) It made for a slow walk home, which was much different than the brisk walk I’d had to gather my bike, and much much slower than the ride I would have had home had my bike been functional. The problem being, that in stealing the seat they also stole the post, which I found out was a very necessary part to keeping the rear rack/basket set in place. Without the seat post, the rear rack/basket would swing backward and drag on the ground. So I had to hold these things in place while walking the bike home.
It definitely is not the end of my biking dreams, but kind of a bummer, to say the least. I’ll hoof it around the grid for a few days over the next couple weeks until I feel comfortable coming to terms with a new seat. Every dollar I spend on a new seat is one more dollar I won’t be spending to save the the lives of many starving children around the world. Think about that, you bike vandals, if you’re out there reading this!
How Twittering Sent Me Beer Drinking
All of a sudden, this week only, every blogger seems to be writing about Twitter, the cool new service for updating all your nearest followers as to what you’re doing right now by answering the simple question, “what are you doing?” What am I doing, that’s a reasonable question, but why would you, or anyone else want to know if you don’t already know me? Seems like a better question, but I’m not sure what the answer is. I suppose it has something to do with adding value to your world. Well not your world, but the worlds of anyone who decides to follow my Twitter feed.
Nevertheless, or needless to say, I started my twittering in late January of this year, and I couldn’t figure it out. I wasn’t really talking to anyone, and my account just kind of sat there looking back at me wondering when I would begin to understand what this service was for. Early March rolls around, and I’m still looking blankly at the space for 140 characters, not knowing what to do. I start twittering a bit more, and I begin to add the authors of blogs I follow. And here we have it, the space between blogging and emailing — Twitter.
Do you hear me? The space between blogging and emailing. Twitter.
Then the SXSW conference hit, and there was all sorts of Twitter activity taking place, from updates about the panels to flash mobs at the pubs. This was my biggest draw to making an active effort toward Twittering. The idea that you and your followers could meet up in real life and have a beer. And between meeting up and having beers, you stay in touch and spread ideas. Or nonsense. Whatever, whenever, just keep it to 140 characters.
Commercials as Social Objects
It almost never fails that someone, at some point in a conversation with me, if we talk long enough, will ask, “Have you seen that one commercial?” No. I haven’t. I don’t watch commercials. I don’t understand why anyone wants to talk about advertising if they don’t work in the world of marketing. Boggles my mind, and I have to make a real effort not to chastise someone when a commercial is brought up in conversation.
Okay, wait, I get that commercials can be short and entertaining, sometimes showing with a bit of humor, but none of that creates a want in me to purposefully watch one, and I truly do not want to talk about them while out in public because, ultimately, all commercials are really just trying to get me to buy something I already know I don’t want and I don’t want to push that sale on someone else. But that’s not what bothers me most about the situation when I find myself in it. What bothers me most is that these people find commercials interesting enough to talk about with strangers.
Hugh MacLeod has this thing he calls the Social Object. “The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else.” It drives me crazy that I appear to others as someone who views the commercial as a Social Object, the thing I would want to talk about with you rather than someone else. It’s a pretty safe bet that, if you’re talking about television commercials, I don’t want to talk with you at all. A Social Object can be anything we know about that would be easy to understand and interesting to talk about that is not seen on TV, like a park down the street where I play Frisbee from time to time. Maybe it’s been seen it in a commercial somewhere.
I’m usually not too picky when it comes to strangers talking about whatever, and I’m almost always willing to listen except when the topic turns to commercials on TV. Let’s, the next time we bump into each other, talk about the weather.
Umbrellas And French Toast
I keep my umbrella in the trunk of my car. Along with my golf clubs, jumper cables, a visor, a few old broken computer parts, two screwdrivers, and some other stuff I rarely use, like a squeegee for the front & rear windows.
I don’t use vanilla extract for my french toast. I don’t know why. actually, it’s been ages since I’ve even thought about making french toast. Nichole talked about it once not too long ago, but I wasn’t listening. Or I couldn’t hear.
I like the fruit punch Gatorade. it’s my favorite.
it finally ended…on Tuesday
I’ve been meaning to write about this all week, but for this or that reason, I’ve forgotten to address it. And that’s the ending of FCC auction 73, the bid for the beloved 700mhz spectrum. Apparently the only unsold portion is the D-block, which was the portion to be shared with the government for emergency broadcasting. Yesterday slashdot was running a forum about why this portion went unsold. But I say, "who cares." We care about the real winners, the winners who collectively bid some nineteen plus billion to forever change the way we use our mobile communicative technologies. Where the heck is my google android phone?
The top bidders have yet to be released. At least not as of the time of my writing this.
Do You Feel It, Too?
It’s in my lower back.
It’s hard for me to write about it without making fun of it, and, really, I have no business doing either. Right? As if that’s ever stopped me before. Oh, you’re probably right, it has. Or, it does. I say we wait and let the plot thicken. In the meanwhile, we’ll all just mind our own.
Let me introduce you to my new friend, Abuterol. Comes in a nifty little canister. I breathe it into my lungs. My lungs are filled with air.
Twitter twitter.
Every day with the this and the that, the that and the this. What’s the point? Enough already, I say. Leave me be in my sea of misery. (I don’t mean that, it just came out.) I’m not miserable. I’m bored. I guess one begets the other, but that’s not what I’m saying. A lot of time was misplaced, and that’s mostly my fault. Heck, we’ll say it’s all my fault. I’ll take blame for that. Misplaced time. What was I thinking, or rather, why wasn’t I thinking? Such nonsense. Can’t go back. The other one deserved better treatment. Neither an Irish Whiskey.
Pink and yellow elephanted polka-dots. (What do you think that means?)
I think it goes without saying that I’m in a mixed mood. But, there you have it, I’ve said it anyway. That’s part of the problem with sitting in the car for so long in the morning, there is much too much time left for planning skits. When one is home alone for long periods of time, one will perform skits.
St. Patrick’s Day
It’s the international American holiday of get drunk and crash your face while riding your bicycle drunkenly at two in the morning, which technically is the next day. It’s a glorious holiday, one I’ve been doomed to miss this year as the result of a terrible cold by-product. We’ll call it chest pain.
I’m sure with all the bicycle-riding pedal-pedants I know, at least one of them is also doomed — doomed to crash his face while riding drunkenly. It’s to be expected. They celebrate pretty hard, and are proud of that. I hope none of them is hurt badly. While it can provide for great entertainment, including side-bursting gut laughter, it’s kind of a drag if you have to take your pal to the emergency room at two in the morning. Undoubtedly, on this particular holiday, the emergency room will be filled with other drunken face-crashers, some more severe than others, and there will be no where to nap comfortably without getting a hollering from the nightly nurse who’s tired of drunk people all together. Good luck, she says.