Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Cat Update

The carcass has not moved. It begins to swell.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

I Lost 8 Pounds In 2 Days

Now you can, too.

This amazing weight loss secret is so proverbiant that my wingleton has told me to belare when I let you in on the snoglar.

But I'm going ahead anyway.

I lost 4 pounds between breakfast and lunch. Then I lost 4 more between lunch and dinner.

And that's all there is to it!

[These results are not typical. Your results may vary. Weight loss based on severe dehydration, bloodletting, amputation or firehose diarrhea may have undesirable long term effects.]

{True fact, this blog is an ad-manipulator. I'm watching to see if diet-ads show up.}

My World Goes Black Every 8 Seconds

You probably don't notice that your world goes black every time you blink. If your brain is anything like functional, it has learned to process out these moments of blindness. But not mine.

After a while, it learns to ignore the blacknesses again, but every time I urinate I notice that the lights are flickering. In fact, what I have noticed is that I am blinking. And afterward, the world keeps going black every few seconds for a couple minutes.

Believe it or not.

A Good Day For Scavengers

Not at all to my surprise, the kitten on the road has not been picked up. Now its head is smashed to naught. I wonder why in two days no scavengers have taken it apart. A city without a population of scavengers is doomed to smell hell.

Wonkered Redirect

Go to the Free Dictionary by Farlex

http://encyclopedia.farlex.com

Look up WHIPPLETREE (A synonym for whiffletree. Drovers will know whereof I speak.)

You get the article on dogwood.

Wonkered.

Monday, November 3, 2008

SCSI Mouse?

How well I still remember the first time I opened a mouse and looked behind the ball.

The rollers both had big gummy rings on them, right where the ball touched them. OBVIOUSLY the gummy ring was there to make the ball adhere better to the roller so that the mouse would track better. Only after I looked at another mouse and discovered much smaller gummy rings did I realize that it was skin oil combined with dust mites and ringworm that builds up as the mousepad sheds!

Now those rings gross me out. I am compelled to scrape them off whenever I feel the slightest irregularity in the rolling of the ball.

I don't know why it doesn't gross me out to TOUCH the goo-rings. It should. That stuff is NASTY!

Cause And Effect... NOT!

A Lesson Straight Out Of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Just because B follows A without any intervening activity, don't presume that A caused B.

The night of the Daylight Saving Time switch my computer shut down. That is, when I checked it in the morning, it had turned itself off. Mysterious. It has never turned itself off before. When I restarted it, the BIOS no longer detected my CD-ROM drive. It was OBVIOUS that something having to do with the Daylight Saving switch had caused the power-down and the loss of the CD-ROM. OBVIOUS.

So I don't check the basics. Whether it's all cabled up correctly. After all I didn't open the case overnight. What could have changed? Instead I try to reset the CMOS (i.e. BIOS). I download and install a NEW bios. I fiddle with it until I'm convinced the drive somehow blew up during the night, so I disable it in the BIOS and leave it at that.

For a while.

But I get to wondering. Maybe I should learn how to swap out the drive. I don't want it broken, because sometimes I want to boot from CD. So I open the case and examine the fixtures and the cabling. Nothing surprising, except that the CD cable is a transparent flat orange plastic ribbon cable instead of the usual multi-wire in gray ribbon cable of the type that is hooked up to the hard drive. Curious, I touch the orange ribbon and THE CONNECTOR POPS OFF OF THE CD-ROM DRIVE! How long it had been cocked to within a hair of coming off, I don't know, but overnight it must have vibrated just enough to become disconnected.

Plugged the connector back in and everything worked fine.

Lesson: Test those untested assumptions, bucko.

Scofflaws Risking Kids

I suppose I should have taken their license number and yodeled up the police.
Stopped at an intersection, I saw in the car ahead a couple with a small kid. Rather than have the kid ride in an approved car seat, they had taught her to ride on the floor under the passenger's legs. Every now and again she would pop her head up and look around and after a bit the mother would get her back on the safety of the floor.
Talk about a law having exactly the opposite of the affect intended. We legislate child seats to protect the kids; we enforce by ticketing when we "see" a child not in a seat; the adults learn to hide the child so as not to be "seen." Makes me wonder how many children are riding in trunks.

Vile as a Gas Station

So I go into the commode-room this morning and the stench is strong as onion aftershave. The urinal wasn't flushed all day Friday and it's been stewing all weekend. VILE. Men are such pigs.

Dead Kittens Aren't Much Fun

Saw a dead kitten in a school zone on the road today. Should it be there when I cross the road the other way on the way back at the end of the day I know that nobody cares about trauma to Bossier children.