Gestern Abend habe ich auf Deutsch geträumt. Im Traum, ich war, warscheinlich, ein deutscher Panzerspäher im russischen Hinterland. (Ja, ich weiß, daß ich ein großer Kriegsstreber bin.) Ich hielte in ein reisendes, grasbedecktes Dorf, wo ich ein Volksdeutscher getroffen habe. Ich habe mit ihm gesprochen, und ich wollte ihm sagen, daß er ein richtiges schön Bauernhof hat, aber an das Wort “Bauernhof” könnte ich nicht um alles in der Welt erinnern. Ich könnte nur im Traum “entschuldigung, ich habe das Wort für ‘Farm’ vergessen” stammeln.

Ich hasse es, wenn ich etwas einfach nicht erinnern kann. Ich bin in eine brummige Stimme heute aufgewacht.

This morning I saw a car on the road with a vanity license plate that read “DE PNGA”. Now, I understand that “de Pinga” can mean “amazing” or “wow”, but I originally learned the word “pinga” with the salty* meaning (if you’ll pardon the blue imagery, gentle reader) of “a gentleman’s phallus”; so it was pretty amusing to see a plate reading “[of/from] the dick”.

*Pun intended

I finally downloaded—and finished—Portal a couple of weeks ago. As many, many people have already opined, it’s a marvelously clever HL2 mod, and I had a lot of fun playing it.

But it’s been two freaking weeks and I still can’t get the song (that plays during the end credits) out of my head. Still alive, indeed.

The group I work in doesn’t always have a lot of say in the decision-making process, but we’re almost always impacted by those decisions. Server changes in other departments, software licensing agreements, firewall changes, whatever it is, it’s going to end up affecting our daily work to some degree.

To that end, we get a lot of “heads up” sort of mail, where some thoughtful soul realizes that we should at least know about what’s going on, and forwards us a copy of a thread wherein Great Things have been discussed, and are now being handed down from on high, usually prefacing it with the familiar abbreviation FYI. Not all of these decisions are popular in my group, but we just have to suck it up. Such is life.

It was during a recent deluge of FYIs from our boss that one of my colleagues noted that FYI could also stand for “Fuck You, Idiot(s)”. It certainly fits sometimes, and makes reading these forwarded threads much more amusing, albeit in an admittedly sophomoric manner.

The fact that this interpretation also makes many of the messages in my inbox a little more honest is something I try not to think too much about.

Tim is moving on
only one explanation
must be the sunspots

Its progress is insidious. It takes hold from within. Often viewed initially as a benign thing, it can quickly metastasize, growing alarmingly strong and fast, until its host has been subsumed, converted into a ruthlessly efficient vector for spreading it further into other, unsuspecting individuals.

I’m talking, of course, about Mac ownership.

Our department is now pretty much Mac-centric, but most of the other units in our division are still Windows-only shops (to say nothing of Linux). Yet just the other day one of the desktop techs, a staunch Windows user, declared that he’s in need of a new laptop. Since being able to run both OSes on a single machine would be a benefit in his work, he came over and asked about our group’s experience with Boot Camp and virtual machines. Now, since you can’t run OS X as a virtual machine in a Windows environment without hacking the OS, the only reliable single-machine solution is really to get a Mac laptop, and that’s the conclusion he seemed to have arrived at, too.

Now, it’s a given that he’ll be running Windows as his primary OS. But OS X will be there for the times he needs to roll out to help a Mac user. As a long-time Windows user who is (justifiably) deeply skeptical of the usual Mac fanboy faggotry , he’s certainly not going to just start guzzling the Kool-Aid.

But now he’ll have the cup right there on his desk. It might be empty, at first, but it’ll be there, waiting.

Sooner or later, he’ll take that first little sip.