When does ice melt fast?

When it's fucking hot, that's when.

Car-ma!

So the universe evens up on me with the ticket vs. warning scale. Just recently I let a cop off with a warning. Yes, for those counting along at home that's just two posts ago.

I blew through a yellow and pulled into a parking lot thinking, "Sweet they don't have photo enforcement on that light."

Um what they did have was an office who didn't exactly pull me over but pull up to me as I got out of the car and surprise the shit out of me. I almost wish I could have seen my own face and it amazes me that the guy kept a straight face and didn't laugh at me.

In my head, "I dodged that one no cameras on that intersection yet. Whoo hoo. Why is that car there. What kind of car is it? Why is that guy with the patch looking at me..." I bet I tipped my head to the side like my dog does when he hears his name as if trying to understand the meaning of the full sentence. "It's an officer. That's odd he has my car blocked in. He's talking to me. What is he saying? Red light? Right that red light."

I seriously wondered what I looked like. He wasn't getting out of the car and I felt so busted I was just all nods. I'm not sure I said anything until he said "warning." Then I laughed a little. Not a ha ha fucker you fool for not giving me a ticket laugh more of a nervous laugh. I was laughing because I was just bitching about how I never got a warning and here this guy was doing just that.

Now some of you may cringe when when you read that I told him (a really really abridged version) of my last tail light cop warning incident (also I think I used the word cop which wasn't good). Halfway through the very abridged version I started trying to asses just how dumb I am. I mean you take the warning and walk, idiot. He got a kick out of it actually and told me to "pay this warning forward."

I don't really know what that means, but here goes: "Do not run red lights. Especially if there is a cop right in front of you when you do it." You're warned. Pay it forward.

I took photos

So at Deonn's wedding I got a chance to take some pictures of the reception.

You can check them out here. I'm glad we had the camera and shouts out to Mr. Bander for running around and helping me.

I learned a few things that I need to fix, but I think the results came out well. Except for my results in the skipping race, but seriously I'm fucking OLD. K?

Can I see your license and registration?

So as I'm driving out of my neighborhood a small green car turns in front of me with plenty of room. Fine whatever they do it there all the time. A cop follows closely behind. I'm like well I guess he knows I'm not going to hit him. So all right. Let me get my coke open for my drive. Cop rolls through stop sign one. I laugh. Like you do. I also notice about now as he's rolling through stop sign number two that he's missing 1/2 of one his tail lights. You know that 3rd one in the middle that mulletmen(tm) replace with red flashing skull LED's? Yeah that one. Half of his is out. I laugh again 'cause... well mostly 'cause I haven't had my soda yet and the dog puked and so you gotta laugh at something, right?

They both drive away from well over the speed limit of twenty five miles per hour. (I have read recently of people getting caught breaking laws by confessions right on their blog so...) I, of course, observe all traffic laws. I come to complete and full stops at each stop sign and I proceed at the posted limit of Twenty-five miles per hour along our residential streets. I figure the cop is gonna bust lil' green car and better him than me, right?

So they go around the curve and I think, "Man I should tell that guy about his tail light being out." He's gone right so it's "safe" for me to think this because I won't actually have an opportunity to shove my foot into my mouth as I tell the officer (they don't really like the word "cop" I'm told). So the cop is at the fucking light and the green car is not around. I think, "You let that little piece of shit escort get away? Looooser." no not really. So I come up to him and I think, "Well now you have to tell him the light is out." I carefully weigh the risk and roll down my window and I actually signal the cop to roll down his. Yes I did.

He rolls it down (he's like 14 years old, but I'm guessing from what I've seen on TV that he has a gun. So I keep my foot the fuck away from my mouth.) He looks on his face like "aw crap this guy is gonna make me do some work or something. I'm gonna have to turn around and go look at something or save someone's life or some shit like that." You know the look. It's the look the check out lady at Fred Meyer gives you when she's carefully washing her conveyor belt with Windex and you show up to pay for your hot pockets. Hot pockets.

I go all polite, "You have a tail light out. It's the middle brake light. Half of it."

He nods and says, "The high one?"

I'm all, "Yeah the right half as you're looking at the back of the car."

He goes, "Thanks." I just nod and roll it back up.

He turns left and I go straight. I laugh. I don't know if he laughs or not, but I do. Then I twittered it. Because yeah. Then I think maybe I should have cited him. I mean you know that fucker would have written me a ticket. I've never gotten a warning. Ever. So I'm hoping this karmic moment where I told the cop his tail light was out will lead me to a karmic moment of a warning the next time I'm driving in Lynnwood. Probably not.

Schools out for the summer!

It's weird not to have to be on the homework patrol. The kids are getting set to go on vacation with their mom, then it's braces and summer routine after that...

Man.

Field day!

Yesterday we did field day at Sam's school. That's a bunch of elementary kids running around from station to station doing activities for the end of the year.

My station this year was base running. All I had to do was let the kids run the bases of a baseball diamond and I timed them. I yelled a bunch, too. It was all encouraging like, "yeah tag it!" or "run run run!" or "Well you'd be out at 2nd, but keep going" or the ever popular, "um are you OK?" That last one was usually followed up with, "Do you want another turn?"

3 kids total bit it. No blood so I call that a win.

Of course I was nice to all of them (You have to be. They make you be nice.) but man were there some kids who run... well ... to say the... just like me. I felt so bad for some of them that I cut their time a little.

Well seriously dude that's a good time for a 4th grader and hey you managed to include the pitcher's mound as well as 2 of the bases so you go!

Then they gave me a Popsicle. I mean seriously don't you miss grade school, too?

Email Confessions

So NPR is running a series on email tips designed to reduce email in the workplace. There was cost estimates for email services in the billions of dollars. I of all people felt bad. Why? Well they mentioned Microsoft Outlook (a product I worked on a long time ago) by name. This leads me to a little story of fixing bugs. I remember very clearly working late after having eaten Indian food brought in by work (I wonder if that particular meal was the one my boss made fun of us for not knowing how to eat Indian food. Whatever, I still dip my naan.) and late that evening I had an easy bug to fix. The header string for replies and forwards that says, "-----[Original Message]-----" wasn't right. The correct string wasn't listed in the bug record so I had to make it up and yes I'm the guy who typed that. The bug said to reformat the string and add the square brackets, but it didn't say how many dashes to have. So being a human being who hasn't had the unfortunate happenstance (I love that word) to lose any digits in a farming accident, I pretty much decided to go with 5. In my defense there were no Program Managers around having done the standard PM "Eat and Leave" move that they were so famous for during what we started calling, "Dev Dinners." Thus I take full responsibility for my actions.

10 Dashes. What if I had used 4 on each side for a total of 8? Now multiply that 10 by all the times you yourself hit reply or forward in a day. Now take that number and multiply it by the number of users using Microsoft Outlook to reply and forward plain text or rtf email messages. (Sorry to be so precise but the string isn't used when you're forwarding rich HTML messages anymore. We're doing math here, OK?) That's a fuck ton of dashes. (A new unit of measure!)

Fuck Ton. Now let's realize that every character that is stored and transmitted by your email server costs some amount money. Not zero money. Not like big money, but some money. Now take that small yet positive number and multiply by our Fuck Ton (FT from now on) FT of dashes. Holy shit batman. I feel responsible for all that money. All that loss of GNP. (That's Gross National Product for those following along at home.) I could be responsible for the whole housing crisis because I chose 5 dashes instead of 4. How do I get up in the morning? How can I look in the mirror? How can I look my children in the eye?

One down...

We went to Alex & Barrie's wedding on Saturday and it was beautiful. The venue was in Port Townsend and just awesome. It's a little stressful having something with such a hard deadline as a wedding and throwing the ferry system into the mix. I was pretty cranky in the morning wanting to be on time, but really we buffered correctly and we were very early. We drove around the cool little town and we have to go back and just hang out. We drove down to the beach and could see the fort part of the Ft. Warden, but didn't have time to explore so we'll go back. Lots of bed and breakfasts (Is that right? Can I have two breakfasts?) around to choose from. Awesome weather and there wasn't a dry eye in the house.

Next wedding we will have tissue on hand.

Top Chef Investments (Spoilers)

I don't like to get too invested in a show, but tonight with top chef. I was overly invested. Just liking someone doesn't do it. Thinking you know better than the judges? Nope.



Hate.



Pure hate for a contestant does it. Here's the spoiler part. I hated Lisa this season like there was no tomorrow. She was just mean, demanding and arrogant. Hey Lisa, if you're out there googling top chef and Lisa and you get this blog: I'll say it to your face so feel free to email me and I'll give you my number and I'll help you through locating where you went wrong. Seriously just get my profile and click the email and I will tell you straight up. You can even call collect.



Mostly it'll be me saying, "You really said that? Do you not have a rude filter in that brain of yours?" and honey, let me give you a clue they only kept you because I hated you. They only kept you because that's what got me interested in the show. Hate.



So glad you lost, Lisa of top chef. Lisa Top Chef (google likes it when you run the keywords together) Lisa of top chef... loser.

Finished!

I finished all the things I set out to finish today. I would tell you all three but that would be seriously boring for me to write and therefore for you to read. QED. (I didn't really prove anything, but my theorem is when anybody says QED no matter how many nobel-fucking-peace prizes they've won then that is the time to suspect that they have not in fact just proven their point. It's a set of letters just to confuse the people who are almost understanding them. They drag not only Latin, but a Latin acronym into the mix. That'll fool 'em for sure!)

I will mention that I really enjoyed the book The Bloodbaths by Steve Libbey. Steve and I went to high school together. That makes it sound like we walked or travelled in some way to school together, but we didn't. I don't even know where he lived back then. I'm pretty sure he took the bus in the early years and likely drove at least some in the later years much like I did when I would drive my mother to work so I could borrow her car and drive my own sorry ass to school. Where I would then entice John Hibberd to ditch the rest of school after lunch by using the clever Spanish phrase, "Tengo un coche," which to me, academically, meant nothing, but apparently was dreadfully bad for Mr. Hibbard who flunked out because of it. (Consider this meager blog post an apology, John.)

I have, as usual, digressed. Steve's book is a great piece of fiction. Much fighting and hot chicks. What else could you ask for? Lions? Rented Goats? and had a very large "I don't want to put it down" rating. I believe the PDR (Put it Down Rating) was at least 50% maybe a 55%. You can calculate this by taking the page you are on when you say to yourself (or a close family member), "fuck I don't want to put this down" and subtract that number from the total number of pages in the book. This is, of course, the number of pages you have left. Divide that number by the total number of pages in the book and multiply by 100% (thus giving you a percentage of how much book you have left). If you've rated a book around 3% then it's likely a lemmejustfinishthisbeforeweturnthelightout while reading. Not so good.

If you drop everything and just keep reading from 54% or so then the book rocks. This is how I measure a books worth. Therefore this book is good. QED. But don't take my word for it. Read it yourself.

Fourth Twenty Funny Fest

Oh man last night JenM (the other Jen) and I went to the The Mountain's :20 funny fest. I can't do it justice by describing so I won't. It was so great. It was my 4th and I've been to all of them.

They did a fine job of returning to straight up comedy after going last year with (also very funny) musical selections.

They had the order just right. All 4 comics killed from Megan to Gary to Greg to Greg. Different styles different philosophies very complementary and all very very funny.

This year the show sold out in 35 minutes. Next year I'm betting it will be sooner. You can count on me getting my tickets right on time again next year. I'm not breaking this streak.

Design kindergarten

Today I took design kindergarten. It was a 1/2 day class where we played with paper, glue, foam core, sharp knives and yes a glue gun. Mostly it was hands on from stuff I had already seen by Bill Buxton. He's a human interface designer that goes all the way back to Xerox Parc. I took the class with one of my employees and we had a good time messing with sketching on post its to trying to make a cube out of foam core.

The funniest part was when they were showing us how to use Ken Dolls to do animatics of interactions like in a store. I couldn't get Team America out of my head and it was hard not to laugh.

Best news? I only burned myself once on the glue gun. I was, of course, checking to see if it was still hot after I unplugged it. It was.

The cheese moved

Yes there was upheaval at work and now I have a new boss. I don't blog much about work as nothing really good ever comes of it. I mean to say the blogging not the work. OK well they do call it work for a reason, but still blogging abut work generally doesn't lead to sunshine and happiness of butterflys. Just doesn't.

I can blog about my old boss though, right? I mean he's not my boss anymore. He gave me the who moved my cheese book today to read tonight. I don't really feel like I lost my cheese. I mean nobody moves *my* cheese. Why? cause fuck you I'm not a mouse and I'll take my mutherfuckin' cheese back you cheese moving a-hole. OK that was a bit strong, but basically what I'm trying to say is that there is cheese. You know I'm hungry. Were we talking about work? I want some cheese. Not meta-fucking-phoric cheese. I want some really very seriously flavored cheese. That sounds good.

What were talking about? I'm going to go get some cheese. Maybe a little laughing cow. I'll read this book because I said I would and hey there might be something to it. But really I just want some cheese. Or some Korean spare ribs. Those fucking things are yummy. My god I have to learn to cook those! Am I hungry? Who's hungry?