Dark Tower mit Schlag

In Dark Tower 7, King dredges up a term he must have just recently discovered, which annoys the hell out of me. It's the phrase mit schlag which he claims is the way hot cocoa should be made - he says it means "with cream on top".

He's wrong on so many levels it's amazing.

First of all, "schlag" is German for "slam. wham, smack" and I'm guessing it's slang for whipped.

Second, it's mocha, not cocoa which is the drink which comes mit schlag. Cocoa gets marshmallows, as everyone on the northeast coast knows.

And "mit schlag" is not a common phrase in NYC, which is where King is using it as if it's from there.

And it just does not match the tone of the other non-standard verbiage in the series.

It's annoying.

Too Much on my Plate

There are two projects on my to-do list which will take most of a day, I think, and normally I would do them over the weekend but this weekend is Consonance, and a friend's birthday, and the Oscars and the South Bay Peace Corps alumni dinner/meeting.

One is the computer, which cannot be done until tomorrow when I am no longer on call. Okay, I have my laptop for backup, so maybe I could do that tonight. If I get home early enough and it goes right the first time.

( Read more about what-all this involves )

Next is re-shooting the sapphire collection. There are a few more stones en route from Thailand (several of the places I bought from in Chanthaburi are actually selling on eBay!). We're talking about 170 close-ups under exacting lighting conditions, at best 2 minutes per shot. It will take half an hour just to set up the first shot, but after that it's somewhat automatic.

I also want to scan a lot of my slides from Peace Corps, which will take about 5 minutes each with my single-slide scanner attachment at top resolution. I did six this morning and it took almost an hour. Ideally, I want to find a slide scanner which can take a stack of slides, since the real project is to scan all my slides, which include trips to Thailand, Fiji, Israel, Malaysia, Singapore, London, Paris, Germany, Canada and several places in the US. Probably 10,000 slides in all. If i was really serious, I would toss in the 20,000 or so frames of print negatives as well. Last time I looked (about 3 years ago) those machines cost more than I could afford. So would having the work done for me at a place which does have the equipment. It's labor-intensive.

Apple Squee

The other day my company gave me a Mac G3 blue & white just like the one I ran a Darwin video server on when I worked at Microsoft. It was part of a pre-moving give-away of old lab stuff. It was part of the QA lab, and QA was outsourced to India a while ago.

I was supposed to get it Friday, but the IT guy who was supposed to make sure the machines were handed out in an organized fashion went to lunch instead, and one of the development engineers grabbed it while we were out. It mysteriously re-appeared Monday, apparently it was either not the G5 he thought it was, or maybe it just didn't work.

The IT guy made up for the original mistake by finding me the right Blue & white keyboard and mouse for it.

Last night at home I plugged it in and fired it up. The internal speakers gave me a loud chord, the one which says POST passed, but nothing showed up on the display (It was plugged into my flat panel VGA connector). This is when I noticed there were two VGA connectors - one was a display-only card, the other looked like a video encoder/decoder card. So I tried the other connection. Still nothing. But there was a signal on both ports, because when I disconnected, the monitor's "no signal detected" message came on the screen. Connected I didn't get that.

So I popped open the box (it took me several nanoseconds to remember how to do that) and pulled out the fancy video card and left in the simple one.

Bingo!

The machine came up in OS 9.2 in about 30 seconds, maybe less.

So now I have a working Mac G3, sitting in the closet until I have time to figure out what to use it for.

Why is it

that there are no bearded super-heros?

http://www.castingaudition.com/display_casting4.php?casting_id=27396&s=

Evil thought

I'm in the car coming back from lunch, and the CD starts playing Dr. Hook's Cover of the Rolling Stone. And I think that I would love to hear this covered by the Rolling Stones. It would be way too funny.