Comments (0)

By Keith, September 2, 2010 7:02 pm

This evening, as the outside air temperature was beginning to drop, I opened my bedroom window to let the breeze blow through and cool off my computers.  While re-watching season 1 of The Big Bang Theory, movement outside my window caught my attention.  To my dismay and mild discomfort, I saw two young men dressed in dress slacks, white short sleeve shirts, ties, and black backpacks.  They were just sort of loitering in my next door neighbor’s back yard.

As if the presence of what appeared to be two Mormon mental cases (offense intended) outside my window was not disturbing enough, I saw no sign of anyone else with them.  So they were just standing around observing things as if they were from another planet.  One of them picked up a fist sized stone that some higher power had piled around the base of a tree, looked at it very closely, no doubt trying to determine god’s purpose for it, before dropping it back on the pile.  Meanwhile, the other one was analyzing the bark on a nearby tree and apparently wondering why tree skin is rough to the touch, but human skin is not.

The whole time these two nut jobs were in the yard next door, I never saw anyone else with them, so why were they hanging out there?  Were they shirking their evangelical duties?  Didn’t they know that their omniscient god (who already knows who will and won’t have believed in her) can see them through leaves?

Whatever their reason for being there, they creeped me out a little.  Part of me feared that once they had their fill of god’s glorious creation, i.e. rocks and tree bark, they might ring my doorbell next.  Fortunately, they soon left to find more interesting inanimate objects to investigate elsewhere.  Weirdos!

Creepy Weirdos

Comments (0)

By Keith, August 30, 2010 11:46 pm

This morning after work, I popped into Menards to check whether they had lids for their recycling bins.  It had been almost a week to the day since the last time I had looked, so I thought there was a chance that their high tech inventory management system might have recognized that the number of recycling bins exceeded the number of lids for recycling bins by 2.  As of this morning, Menards still does not have lids for their smaller size recycling bins.  They do, however, have some rather large blue bins with lids, but that’s not what I want.

At Lowes, they have quite a selection of rubbish bins.  At the far end of the same isle, they have a massive selection of stackable plastic containers and lids, but none of them seem quite right for recycling.  I left Lowes a little depressed because I seem to live in a small city with very poor selection of anything, really.

To make a long story a bit shorter, I ended up ordering an 18 gallon plastic Rubbermaid recycling bin from Amazon.com.  Although I was dissatisfied with the description of the product, because it did not specify whether or not this “stackable” bin ships with or without a lid, I decided I would not reward the pathetically understocked Menards or Lowes.

It’s a catch-22 for local stores.  People don’t shop there, because they lack selection, and they have a poor selection of stock, because nobody shops there.  I know this is an over-simplification, but I think you get my meaning.  The funny thing about this purchase is that I’ll be recycling the box in which my recycle bin arrives by breaking it down and putting it inside my new recycle bin.

Comments (0)

By Keith, August 28, 2010 7:02 pm

This week has been very typical.  I don’t think anything remarkable has happened.  Nothing of note has befallen me, except my digital camera has started taking very blurry pictures in manual mode.  I can work around that.  My commute got a few minutes shorter with the opening of an overpass over US Route 24.  That should help me be a little earlier to work, but it’s not really newsworthy.

Sleep Cycle
This week I’ve been struggling a little with a slightly messed up sleep cycle.  Sleeping from 10:00am to 4:00 or 4:30pm is not optimal when you work third shift.  Better to get 6 hours of sleep than none at all, I suppose.  I have a theory that I need more exercise to make me sleep longer.

Fighting KDE (Linux)
I made the mistake of upgrading KDE Destkop to 4.5 SC on both my notebook (Lucifer) and desktop (Godzilla) PC’s.  My notebook has not had a single problem.  Unfortunately I cannot say the same for my desktop machine.  Since upgrading Godzilla, KTorrent and Dolphin have begun frequently and randomly crashing.  I have not looked too deeply into the cause of the problem, but I’m looking forward to some updates that might fix this issue since downgrading to 4.4 does not seem to be an option.  Please KDE, fix this.

Tech News
In more geeky news, Google added support for calling phones (free) inside Gmail.  I have not used this feature yet, but at some point, I know it will come in  handy if ever I feel like calling people.   Actually, I don’t have very many phone numbers entered for people on my Gmail contact list.  I’ve been too lazy to add them there.

In other tech news, Diaspora, the “privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network” has announced a launch date of September 15.  You can bet I will be joining on day 1.  If you go to their website now now, you can sign up for their newsletter which will send out a notification once registration opens.

Posting Daily
They say that it takes 21 days of repetition to develop a habit.  My blogging habit (addiction) has never lasted for 21 consecutive days.  So from this post forward, I will attempt to make blogging on Think Obvious a daily thing instead of randomly sporadic.  If for some reason I cannot complete a post on a given day, I will post a post about why I cannot post, and thus having posted, I will have posted and negated my post about not posting.