Pink Asparagus

Just a quick note that I've happily contributed to my friend Catherine's blog over at http://www.pinkasparag.us. Catherine is a longtime and dear friend from my Boulder days. She and her husband Peter are not only fellow full time geeks but also sassy! And who doesn't like SASSY?!

Anyway, head on over there and check out my interview. You might even learn a few things about me that you didn't know and probably don't want to:
http://pinkasparag.us/2008/08/21/interview-with-gp/

And thanks to Catherine for being the best blogger around. She's dedicated, witty, timely, geeky and downright family friendly to boot. You go girl.

Why Apple's stock chart is going UP

Once upon a time I worked on a Windows PC at work. Then I joined a liberal forward-thinking company. Now I use the computer of my choice. Why? Because when I'm on a conference call my computer works, I don't tell the other callers to wait for my computer to reboot. I can get to the documents I require. So I use a Mac. I attribute about 1% of my success at work simply to the quality of the computer I use. Lest you think 1% is low, that's a HUGE number. The other 99% is intention.

Once upon a time I used a Palm Treo for my telephone. I used it exclusively as I had/have no land-line at home and no interest in paying AT&T for one. Then they had a firmware upgrade that allowed me to get my email pushed to me like a BlackBerry. It's called ActiveSync. It worked... for a while. Then it didn't. Then other things started failing. And the calls started dropping. So I got an iPhone. Those things aren't broken anymore. They work. I attribute 1% of my productivity simply to having a phone that works. You know the rest.

Once upon a time I had a MP3 player that was among the first ones on the market. Before people knew what the hell an MP3 was. An MP-What? It worked... somewhat. It was highly portable but not highly usable. It had maybe 50 minutes of music. The company went bankrupt. So I got an iPod. I have lots of storage the UI is simple and it runs forever. It works. I attribute 1% of my on-the-go music enjoyment simply to having a music player that works. You know the rest.

Scrooge

I believe I may have hit a near-record in stinginess having made it until August 7th at 10:30pm to turn on the air conditioning this year. In the meantime I have saved:

1) Money
2) The environment
3) Wear and tear on my on-its-last-legs unit (my neighbors just had to replace and identical model; mine was built in 1985 and still going strong!)

I have created:
1) Sweat
2) Complaints from girlfriend and guests
3) Hot kitties

Amazingly, my house is normally super-cool during the day due to the tile flooring. Even being at the bottom of a valley we normally cool off at night due to our proximity to that giant pond called the Pacific Ocean. But last night was toasty. I swear it was hotter at night than it was during the day (though I work at the beach so I have a false sense of daytime temperatures).

No, that's not strong enough wording. Basically the devil himself came and visited my bedroom last night and complained about the heat. He said something about moving back to Washington, DC where the 99% humidity seemed much cooler than the ambient temperature on Eastview Rd.

So not wanting to disappoint the devil, with whom I have a life-time pact which I shall not disclose lest he double-cross me, I turned on the A/C. The unit is working OK for now . And all it took to cool the house down was to set the temp to 77 from 79.

Lesson Learned: Cat fur does not melt at 3984 Kelvin.

English 101 1/2

Picked this up from my Dad via email. Fun to look over:

We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes..
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.

If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?
If I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?

Then one may be that, and three would be those,
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
And the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim!

Let's face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple.

English muffins weren't invented in England.

We take English for granted, but if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square, and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend. If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it, and odd or an end?

If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.

In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? We ship by truck but send cargo by ship. We have noses that run and feet that smell. We park in a driveway and drive in a parkway. And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out, and in which an alarm goes off by going on.

And in closing, if Father is Pop, how come Mother's not Mop?