Lonely? Not Moi

I do my best to ignore this time of year. I'll be working through the week, and the only glitch there is I'll need to bring my own lunch tomorrow and Friday. No worries, I have frozen meals and there are microwaves at work. And unlimited free soda, coffee, milk, string cheese and if I want to get brave, yogurt.

My nearest relatives I have not seen in ages, one lives in the same town as me but works nights, his parents are in Capitola, which is a nasty drive which I am not keen on making in the winter. They are not close relatives, his mother is a second cousin of my Dad. They left NYC when I was a year old, and we didn't reconnect until about 1990, a story I have told previously. They're Jewish, Chanukah was a  month ago, they wouldn't be doing anything for this weekend. And not for New Year's, I don't think, because that's the anniversary of local cousin's wedding, which is long over with. 

Anyhow, Netflix  and TiVo are my friends, I will avoid the idiotic Xmas commercials that way.

One thing I have noticed this year is far fewer Jesus songs in commercials, and those which are there are often given a Jesus-ectomy. Nat King Cole singing about chestnuts and open fire for (I think) a cell phone company is faded out before he gets to the punchline. Most of the car ads are either using their own jingly sound loops, or Winter Wonderland or, more often, Jingle Bells, which is, after all, a song about transportation.

Target is one of the exceptions, with several commercials which are all Christmas soaked with Christmas sauce, wrapped in Christmas and rolled down Christmas Tree Hill. Disgusting.

TJ Maxx has one which is especially infuriating because the singers are so damned excellent and it is so blatantly commercial. It starts off with a single blonde woman holding a TJ Maxx shopping bag, confidently striding forth as if she is the world's greatest soprano, singing "In the mall, when you're shopping; budgets burst they're a popping". Okay, it's Jingle bells, but it's just so wrong. As she briskly walks through some mall, she is joined one or two at a time by other singers, all also excellent, with way too much confidence. I don't like when something I loathe is done well.  

And of course there are the 12 days of Xmas in various commercial flavors, but I'm not hearing as many this year.  More on the radio than on TV.

Really glad I have the car audio unit which I can plug my iPhone into and it plays my iPod playlists.

Coffee, Lunch and Blue Cross

This morning for no apparent reason I was thinking about the universal offering (usually free) of coffee at Silicon Valley workplaces. I have never been a coffee drinker, my caffeinate of choice when I had one was cola. It's been decades, though. The closest I come to coffee appreciation is it mitigates the  overly sweet taste of chocolate in mocha, and my dad introduced me to the joy of coffee ice cream, for when mint chocolate chip has started to lose its zing.

So I don't understand the hackneyed cliché which is over-used in detective and sci-fi novels about the rarity of a great cup of coffee. Seems to me unless it has been burned or composted, one cup of coffee ought to be +/- 10% as good as any other. YMMV.

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The first test I ran at work resulted in a show-stopper bug. It is so obvious and annoying it should never have made it out of the manufacturer's plant. All three of us testing found it on our machines, and I voted to fail the device right then, but was overruled because as bad as it was, it did not prevent us from running any of the other 600 tests.  Ironically, as I was demonstrating it for my lead, instead of that bug showing up, another major bug occurred. That one will take a couple of movie playbacks to confirm.

Got to watch a whole movie today, Dragon Wars D-War, a Korean-American venture which rips off so many sci-fi movies it is amazing. Starts with a scene right out of Gremlins, pulls from the Superman series, any number of dragon-themed movies, Star Wars, Godzilla, and even King Kong. The acting ranges from acceptable to not-so-much. Some of the special effects are superb, costuming for the bad guys is impressive in a Darth Vader Shops At LeatherMasters kind of way. They do some pretty good CG changeling stuff with the hero's mentor (who is seriously mis-cast - I'm sure they wanted David Carradine, but he was busy making 10 other movies at the time). The story centers on a young Korean couple from 500 years ago, and they are well cast (he is heroically handsome, she is heroine-ically beautiful) who are reincarnated in America as a homely reporter and a plain Jane woman whose occupation we don't know. There are no clever lines, the dialog is strictly functional. There is a lot of helicopter warfare, and it was required that any chopper which goes down has to immediately burst into a ball of flames. There are not a lot of plot holes because there is not a lot of plot. The ending, however, takes a couple of minor twists which saves it from being telegraphed too terribly much. Worth 90 minutes of mindless video streaming.

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Home, two copies of the Blue Cross membership card arrived, which I have been waiting for since a month ago. Well, not quite, they both had my start date as this January, but they had my member ID, which got me into the "find a doctor" web site, and I've found a clinic, and narrowed it down to two doctors to go to. Will do that early next week, as I am about to run out of my prescription-only insulin. I have a fax from Blue Cross which says I am already covered, so there shouldn't be a problem.

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I was supposed to help a friend set up her TV Saturday, but the TV table she had bought online arrived missing the assembly instructions and several pieces. Considering what time of year it is, I doubt they will arrive in time.

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Have made my first round of calendar photo selections. This weekend I'll pare it down to the lucky 13. Printing takes a couple of weeks, though.

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Spent some time online looking for a decent telescope for taking pix of the moon & nearer/bigger planets, and the camera adapter hardware. Need to do more reasearch as some prices to my untrained eye appear to be way out of line with the specs of the product. For example, there was one which was $119 which was very close in specs to a $400 one from the same company.

I am still kicking myself for the newbie mistakes I made with the eclipse pix. The main one being I did not use a remote trigger, or a delayed shutter. I remembered to do that for my last moon shoot, why not this one? I also discovered that in the dark I had accidentally switched off the vibration reduction feature of my lens.

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Plans for tomorrow:
work
home

Senior Lunch, and another Deep Thought

Put in the subject of the last post but forgot to write about it. Where I work they provide a free box lunch every day. There are usually 5 choices, one of them is always veggie, another is a salad with and without meat, and a sandwich. Lately soup has been a choice. Or tacos. Thurs-Fri of Thanksgiving there was no lunch provided (my boss reimbursed us though) but today and tomorrow they are offering a soup, sandwich & salad buffet.  Not sure what the plan is for next week. Boss is hinting that we should all take off the 31st.

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And now a slightly boring story about how I came to be introduced to the music of Jimmy Buffet. ( Read more... )