Posts from — April 2006

So today I was on-and-off following an IRC channel for Wikipedia’s helpdesk (yes, while at work - ssh!), and I kept thinking to myself that a particular user’s nick looked familiar.

and then i realized that he’s on my blogroll. and has been for a while. and uses that nick as both his domain and his blog title.

#facepalm#

Go read Bastique.

because my mind is too fragmented at the moment for a single, coherent blog post. Sorry.

• The other day I found a brown recluse in the bathtub, about halfway between the drain and the spigot, as I was about to step in and take a shower. I know it was a brown recluse because of the black violin-shaped mark on the thorax.
• If any athletic person with a natural mocha or caramel complexion is interested in becoming a professional wrestler, then I have a schtick for you based on my above experiences: you can be The Brown Recluse. You’ll need to get a violin-shaped tattoo on your back, with the tailpiece at the base of your neck and the pegbox at the base of your spine. You’ll also need to develop a signature move, the “Spider Bite”, which will “debilitate” your opponents. Beyond those two minor details, though, you should have a long and prosperous career ahead of you.
• I’ve had “Bist du bei mir” in my head all week. Not sure why.
• Performing at the Sheldon again! It’s a Wednesday evening this time (May 17) and will be a BRIEF program instead of the ponderously-long marathon o’music to which we contributed in February. I have to get cracking and learn something like ten songs in the next month, though.
• And while I’m thinking about it, STL-area folks should head for the Tivoli on April 23 for a special matinee screening of The Power of Harmony, a documentary about the Turtle Creek Chorale (a gay men’s chorus in Dallas). $5 a pop.
• No more plugs. I promise.
• My contract with a certain mobile phone service provider (who shall remain nameless, but whose logo is bright orange hinthint) expires next Monday, w00t. Already checking out my options, I am.
• Eating lots of Rachel Ray recipes lately, thanks in part to time constraints for both Fred and I but mostly to the fact that we picked up her newest cookbook a few weeks back. Most of these recipes leave Fred cursing Rachel, though: “DAMMIT! IT’S TOO EASY!”
• Work? Yeah. Sucks. People don’t seem to realize that they could save themselves time by reading the freakin’ documentation instead of playing Twenty Questions (or the less-fun alternative, Forty Questions) with me. (”My $PROGRAM doesn’t work.” “How does it not work?” “When I try to get it to work, it doesn’t.”)
• Do have a new toy at work, though; we installed a new spam firewall just about three weeks ago but haven’t really told anybody about it yet. So far, of the hundreds of thousands of e-mails we’ve received, 75% have been blocked as spam. Over time, though, that ratio is bound to increase as some of the intelligent filters learn. Day um.
• Going to the ballgame tomorrow at the new ballpark. It’s a day game in April in St. Louis; is there anything better? Oh, right, not having to go to work the next day.
• No, I don’t have to go to work on Friday. I get to sleep in for once.
• I so need to find an excuse to go outside today. It’s currently 79 degrees F (26C) and sunny, and the dogwoods, magnolias, and cherries are blooming. Maybe I can fake severe allergies or something and hope nobody sees me frolicking outside.
• About to start a major overhaul on my home laptop, and I’m enough of a masochist to run Gentoo on that thing, so posts over the weekend may be a bit limited. (Like any of you are surprised.)
• Thinking about changing the image at the top of the screen here, so I’m browsing the interesting Creative Commons-licensed medical images on Flickr.
• Got Fred hooked on the Electric Sheep screensaver… come to think of it, got a few people at work hooked on it too. It’s preeeeeetty.

OK, that’s all that comes to mind right now. More later.

Very well-executed, yes, but still WRONG.

(Here is a permalink if you need one.)

Seriously, though, the choice of agents is inspired. We just don’t see enough of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew or Beaker.

ack, blogslack. Well, maybe not so much “blogslack” as “too much on my plate”.

This past weekend was the Gateway Men’s Chorus spring concert, entitled ‘MoTown. (Yes, we sang hits of a certain Detroit-based studio, but we’re also in the state of Missouri, and duh, bunch of ‘mos.) It went a lot better than I was expecting, especially given that the chorus is 90-95% white, that the venue was in a somewhat shady part of town, and that there were a few semi-major ticketing snafus. Still, there is something to be said for singing songs that all the singers know already, and having an open bar throughout the show.

The concert took up quite a bit of my time, though, so I’m glad it’s OVER.

Not much else comes to mind, except that friend Dan has started a classical music blog (CSOTD), that Fred and I seem to know half the guys listed as friends on Josh Weast’s MySpace profile, that Fred and I have succumbed to TiVo (Kristie will be proud of us), and that my April Fool’s RFC was not published .

More as I think of it.