It seems Uncle Steve has suffered another fit of generosity, doling out free iPhones to all employees, a little over a year after Apple kicked my PowerSchool colleagues and I to the curb.

I was initially going to dismiss the report when I saw a former colleague’s postscript to one of his recent blog posts corroborating the story, and quickly found that other sites like Engadget had also picked up the story..

I would just like to take this opportunity, as a former Apple employee, to state for the record that while this is awesome, and that I had not been particularly interested in owning an iPhone, you current Apple employees are all fuckers.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go finish my bowl of sour grapes.

Lunchtime. Lunch, however, was left at home on the kitchen counter. Wallet is hopefully sitting on the dresser, as its current absence from my pocket is acutely noted. Blood sugar dropping. Attention span shortening.

I could really go for a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich with a side of slaw. No, wait, make that a Reuben with fries and a glass of lemonade. Or some kung pao chicken. Or a big bag of chips and a bowl of guacamole. Oh, wow, meatloaf sounds good, too. But then, I haven’t had sushi for ages. Or a cheesesteak with extra onions and onion rings on the side-not the battered ones, the ones with panko crumbs, and a bottle of root beer. Teriyaki shrimp sounds awesome right about now, though lasagna would hit the spot nicely, too…

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh

I knew that Theodore Giesel didn’t always write children’s books, and that he penned a few late in his career that were intended for more mature readers, and that he started writing in the late 1920s, but I never really thought about what he was up to during the war. As it turns out, Dr. Seuss used his pen to fight the good fight.

The Doctor drew? In World War Two? Who knew? Did you?

UCSD has a pretty extensive archive of Seuss’ works, and a number of his wartime works are available online for your perusal. Looking for a Seussian take on the Maginot Line? How about Stalin? Or maybe everybody’s favorite hot-button topic, the Neutrality Act? It’s both weird and wonderful to see the same Cat In The Hat-style art used to illustrate Benito Mussolini.

After many, many bouts of severe frustration playing Civilization III I swore off the franchise. I was through, I told myself, with suffering through blantantly cheating AI and non-existent or simply horrendous multiplayer functionality. Though I dearly love turn-based 4X games, of which precious few exist, I turned my back on Civilization, though it pained me no end.

Until, of course, the siren song of Civilization IV was sung. But not too long after purchasing both Civ IV and its expansion pack Warlords I found that both were well-designed, highly entertaining games, but sadly lacking in the development department. Civ IV suffers from constant video memory-related crashes (with an error dialog advising me to “allocate more video memory”. Hello? this is the year two-thousand-fucking-seven; users should never even be suggested to manually juggle memory for any reason. Warlords will occasionally just freeze my system and cut to a black screen during leader trade dialogs.

Both the base game and Warlords are patched up (to 1.61 and 2.08, respectively, the highest patch versions available). It’s both interesting and exasperating to note that the last Civ IV patch was released in April 2006, and Warlords’ last patch was published in October the same year. Searching in vain for an answer to my problems, I thought I’d found the solution in the Mehmet II patch (written by a Firaxis developer to solve a problem with a particular leader dialog, but never released through official support channels), but, alas, no love. And the Firaxis’ (the developer) and 2K Games’ (the publisher) sites offer only the lame suggestions of updating Windows (no problem) my video drivers (done) or playing the game in 800×600 resolution with 16-bit color.

I’m sorry, but fuck that. 800×600? 16-bit color? Are you fucking kidding me? Those are crap answers from people either unwilling or unable to fix bad code. The QA team and the engineers behind them should hang their heads in shame.

And meanwhile, I’m out $70. And heartbroken. Again.

On the way home, after a round of unparalleled fun in the dentist’s chair, I remembered I needed to get some milk. And mouthwash. And a floss holder. Hey! A box of stuffing mix to go with the chicken I cooked the other day, too. Oh, and some peanut butter. Hmm, the tomatoes look good, maybe I’ll—you get the idea. I always go to the store for one or two things and end up with a full shopping cart.

But this tale is not actually about my poor impulse control. This is about unbelievable human sloth, indifference and torpor.

This is about what I found when I left the store.
Read the rest of this entry »

This weekend I resolved to tackle a household repair that has been nagging me for weeks. One of the spigots in the backyard has been leaking for a month or seven, a steady drip-drip-dripping that over the course of its life must surely have established a subterranean slime pool deep under the house, spawning who knows what kind of Lovecraftian horrors in the crawlspace.

“Easy money”, I told myself. It seemed likely the washer was failing after 22 long years of service. All I’d need to do is haul myself down to the Ace store and score a “standard washer”, take it home, and swap it out with the old one. Easy money. Except for the part there is no such thing as a “standard washer”. “Did you bring the valve stem with you?” asked the helpful clerk at the store. “Well, no”, I admitted. “I figured there would be a standard size”. “Oh, there’s a standard size, all right”, he replied, “only thing is, there’s more than one standard size”. He proceeded to show me three cabinets full of “standard” washers of every shape and description.

Pwned.

Read the rest of this entry »