There’s something to be said for “stage zero” of defensive driving. that being the set of actions done to avoid a dangerous situation before any actual defensive driving is neccecary.
Even though I’m only moderately satisfied with my job and not at all happy with my prospective career path, there’s something undeniably satisfying about signing my own cover letters on the technical reports I write. Anyone who’s ever had to be a lab tech/peon and has gotten to a rank where they can sign cover letters knows this feeling. It’s something I’ll miss if/when I leave the field.
I rolled a natural 20 against my lockpick skill this morning. I’d locked my keys in my office last night. don’t ask how, I just did. So I had no way to get in and finish up the work I told my boss that I did yesterday =D. she’s not in till tomorrow so I still have time to get it all done. Anyways… I got lucky, Dano had a set of lockpicks. I’d tried to pick the lock last night with some paperclips and a set of tweezers. seems the proper tools were all it took. It sprung open in under 30 seconds. That’s my story… Off to some frantic report writing.
So there was this cracked out guy hiding behind a dumpster last night…
Ryan (Unit 91) was in town from Cali to help set up the “hot import nights” thingy at the expo center in Boston. He’s staying with Pete (redobs) and Will (wagonmonster) in Boston. So Ed (sirkbac… last parenthesis, I swear) calls me up and says that everyone’s hanging out tonight at Pete’s before Ryan has to go back. We’re all hanging out on his back porch just generally chilling. where he lives is a row of triple deckers with small parking lots in back. Ed says “there’s this guy behind the dumpster next door, and he keeps peeking at us”. We all laugh until he insists we look. sure enough, there was a guy kneeling down peering around the dumpster. There’s no way he didn’t know we could see him. there were 6 of us total, and we were all looking right at him. we start calling out to him to stop lurking, and he kinda slinks around like an animal of some sort that still thinks it hasn’t been seen but wants to reposition itself to be sure. so he scurrys over to a Nissan X-Terra that’s in the little parking lot and lies down under it. yeah. the way the lights are in that lot, he was completely illuminated. a that point we called the cops (after posting about it on the club, of course). he’d ran off by the time they got there.
That’s my story.
Since everyone else is doing the LJ comments thing (and by “everyone” I mean “a few people”)…
I thought this was pretty cool:
http://y.20q.net:8095/
It’s supposedly an AI that guesses what you’re thinking of in 20 questions. by “AI” they mean “response table” I’m sure, but it’s pretty good. I was thinking “turbocharger” and it guessed “turbine” in 29 questions. not bad. brought a little smirk to my face when it actually got it.
I went karting again today. it was good and bad.
It was good in that I did a god deal better than the last time I went. Last time was the first time I ever did this, and I got decent lap times. 21.7 and 20.85 for my best lap, and 24.7 and 23.2 for my average lap time. Mid 19s is about as good as the “really good” guys get on their best lap, so I was pleased. This time I got 20.2 for my best lap and 21.8 for my average lap time. I was very pleased. I think I would have placed better, but there was a guy I couldn’t get around that was really slowing me down. I got a penalty for “contact on passing” so I didn’t feel like trying my luck with this guy.
The bad is that I got in too late to run the first of the two sessions my group was running. Also, my back is killing me now. those things really whip around the corners, and I was doing a lot more leaning out for extra grip this time. it was worth it though, so forget the stupid “sad face” on my current mood field. glad to have a new weekend addiction.
So the acoustic microscope at work b0rk’d onwednesday while I was working on it. we were having a problem with one of the operational modes, and they sent us a couple replacement parts to try and fix the problem. A big computer board and one sort of little scanner assembly. I go at it and replace the big board… no dice, still not working quite right. Next I replace that little assembly… score. it works perfectly now. So the boss asks me to put back in the old computer board since it wasn’t the problem. At that point I must have touched something jsut the wrong way, becuase the machine pretty much crashed when I turned it back on.
I have no training working on this thing. It’s far mroe exotic than anything computer based that I’ve worked on before. All the boards in it are hand built in-house at the main office in Chicago, so it’s not like I can call up Belkin and ask how to fix it. I hacked away at it all wedensday and thursday… getting very frustrated all the while. I had a good idea of what was wrong at that point. all the things that weren’t working could be traced to one of the boards in my opinion. so they decided to ship out a bunch of random boards for me to swap out to try and fix the problem. I say “hey, send me one of these boards too.. I think that’s the problem.” they tell em they really don’t think so but they’ll send it anyways.
the boards got here this morning, and I had the machine up in a matter of minutes. it was the one board I had suspected had failed. I win. me > them. normally I would have played this out all day to get in some quality slacking time, but I had to gloat as quickly as possible. Everyone’s allowed occasional gloating. I earned it with the week I’ve been having.
so that’s my story. Sorry there were no naked wimmen. I’ll work on that one.
Define pitiful: When even the internet doesn’t think you’re interesting. Did the interests meme, and here are the results:
Based on the lj interests lists of those who share my more unusual interests, the interests suggestion meme thinks I might be interested in
coded by ixwin
Find out more
ain’t that some shit?
there are some times when things are so convenient that it actually bothers me.
in a recent attempt to uninstall a program on one of my FreeBSD boxes, I typed the wrong flag on the end of the “pkg_delete” command and uninstalled… well, pretty much everything. by… um.. mistake. oops. ok, so that’s not very convenient, but that’s not what I’m talking about…
Now I’m reinstalling everything. I want to install “XFree86”, the GUI that comes as the sort of standard graphic interface for many flavors of UNIX. so I tell it to install and it goes along its merry way. in the mean time I want to look something up, but I realize I don;t have a web browser. so from the command like I type “pkg_add -r lynx” (lynx being a simple web browser I can use from the command line). it says “fetching lynx from such and such a server….Done”. and it’s, like, done. just the one command and it finds and installs the program. that’s just way too easy. I keep expecting it to ask me tons of stupid questions and click “next” an infinite number of times.
kinda reminds me of The Matrix when Neo learns Kung Fu or whatever. I bet that guy just plugged him in and typed “pkg_add -r kung_fu”. Neo was so impressed because he’d been plugged into a cumbersome draconian GUI based OS all his life. He was amazed at how easily and quickly he could learn martial arts now that he wasn’t bogged down by The Matrix XP Home Edition ™… not the actaul fact the he learned it.
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