Too Much Computer Time

Posted by | Filed under Humor, Life

Why can’t mov­ing be as sim­ple as.…
mv /home/old/ /home/new

*sigh*

Dear Liption, Your Tea Sucks

Posted by | Filed under Food, Reviews

Dear Lip­ton Tea/Pepsi Partnership/Unilever1,

Recently, my wife asked me to swing by the pet store and pick up some cat food. I did so after work and then stopped at a nearby con­vienence store to both fill up my gas tank and get some­thing to drink. Desir­ing some­thing that was not loaded down with sugar or the Amer­i­can favorite “high fruc­tose corn syrup”, I checked out the cold cases and found I had 2 options: plain water or Lip­ton Unsweet­ened Iced Tea. See­ing how it was late in the day and I have feel­ing tired, I picked the caf­fi­nated option. Dear god, I wish now I had choosen to stick with water.

The mar­ket­ing blurb on the side of the bot­tle claims you brew tea straight from hand-selected tea leaves. If that blurb is accu­rate then the peo­ple you have hand select­ing the leaves must be sadis­tic, tea-hating bas­tards who desire to inflict max­i­mum pain and suf­fer­ing on their fel­low man. But then if one con­tin­ues read­ing the infor­ma­tion printed on the bottle’s label; one will find you feel the need to add cit­ric acid (for tart­ness) and caramel color. That kind of blows away the the­ory that they’re really hand select­ing the tea leaves for their customer’s plea­sure. I mean if you were hand select­ing good leaves to make tea for the con­sumer then why do you feel the need to put addi­tives in the tea? After all Ito En is capa­ble of mak­ing an entire line of bot­tled teas con­tain­ing noth­ing but water and tea2 with­out coloring?

I’ll grant that Ito En is brew­ing green teas, not black. How­ever since you do not appear to pro­duce an unsweated green iced tea; I can­not make a direct com­par­i­son. Still this bot­tle of your tea was eas­ily the worst tea I have ever had3. Hell, even Nestea was bet­ter than this! Until you learn how to brew some proper tea, per­haps you should take this crap off the market.

Sin­cerely,
Mark

1 If you care­fully read all the text on one of their bot­tles, you’ll see Lip­ton Tea pro­duces their Iced Teas in coop­er­a­tion with Pepsi and that they are a Unilever brand.
2 I had to change my argu­ment slightly as after check­ing a bot­tle I’d not thrown out yet, I found Ito En adds Vit­a­min C to their tea.
3 Yeah, I drank it all. I was hot, thirsty and had to drive home yet.

Thinking ahead 15, 20, and 25 years

Posted by | Filed under Life

A friend recently posted on her LJ where she thinks she’ll be in the next 15, 20, 25 yeas. Since I rarely if ever think about I’ll be in the next 5 years much less far­ther out; I decided to take a moment to pon­der the same ques­tion. Here is what I came up with:

2021

  • Age: 46
  • Employ­ment: Still work­ing and prob­a­bly shoved into some sort of man­age­r­ial posi­tion. Read­ing the techie news sites so I can fol­low the con­ver­sa­tions being held by the peo­ple I’ve got report­ing to me. Won­der­ing if we’re ever going to get those fly­ing cars that they’ve been talk­ing about since I was a child.
  • Van­ity: Rather enjoy­ing how my beard & hair are inter­mixed with grey.
  • Health: Still work­ing to get rid of my cookie gut1 and prob­a­bly start­ing to take a vari­ety of med­ica­tions for arthritis.
  • Hob­bies: Still read­ing plenty of sci-fi, fan­tasy and mys­tery nov­els. Actu­ally, I’m prob­a­bly read­ing more of the mys­tery nov­els as I either don’t under­stand what they’re talk­ing about in sci-fi/fantasy these days or I just don’t care any­more. Addi­tion­ally, I’ll be doing odd jobs around the house renovation/restoring bits & pieces of my cas­tle2. Lastly, I’d like to be work­ing more on my pho­tog­ra­phy skills and pos­si­bly learn­ing to build fur­ni­ture3.

2026

  • Age: 51
  • Employ­ment: Start­ing to think a lot more seri­ously about retire­ment and giv­ing this work crap over to these younger guys with all the energy. Prob­a­bly shift­ing my retire­ment invest­ments to being more con­ser­v­a­tive. Also, tak­ing advan­tage of my senior­ity to get myself sent to all the inter­est­ing con­ven­tions, train­ing sem­i­nars and events. Or at the very least all the ones tak­ing place in inter­est­ing places.
  • Van­ity: Not so sure I like the all grey hair any­more. Par­tic­u­larly when the lit­tle whip­per­snap­pers run­ning around call me gramps.
  • Health: Finally got rid of my cookie gut, but get­ting awfully cranky about all the meds I have to take.
  • Hob­bies:

2031

  • Age: 55
  • Employ­ment: Some sort of senior design posi­tion, as man­age­ment jobs might get bet­ter pay but they all suck.
  • Van­ity: Seri­ously, I’m 55 and not dead. That’s prob­a­bly all I need to be vain about at this point.
  • Health: Seri­ously hop­ing the cur­rent research into cyber­net­ics will be com­pleted in time for me to dump my meat­bag for some shiny steel & silicon.
  • Hob­bies: Going to pub­lic places and pre­tend­ing to be older and meaner than I actu­ally am to annoy all lit­tle whip­per­snap­pers run­ning around. :D

Side note: I started writ­ing this post up a cou­ple of weeks ago when the friend’s post first appeared, but as hap­pens a lot set it aside to work on later. Now that I’m going back to work on it again, I noticed a few dif­fer­ences in how I’m orga­niz­ing the infor­ma­tion. Whereas my friend wrote her post in a more nar­a­tive form; I’ve got bul­let points. I can think of two imme­di­ate rea­sons for this difference.

  1. I’m lazier than my friend
  2. My friend stud­ied Eng­lish and writ­ing; while I stud­ied busi­ness & com­put­ers. All my train­ing tells me that nobody really wants to sit there and read the crap I’ve writ­ten so I’d bet­ter con­vey my point as quickly & clearly as I can. Her train­ing is all about try­ing to engage the reader in what she’s say­ing. I think I like her way bet­ter. Ah well.

1 I don’t really care for beer, while I do love munch­ing on freshly, baked home-made cook­ies. Yum­m­m­mmm!
2 “Cas­tle” is used here in the sense that every man’s home is his cas­tle. Rather than in the more lit­eral sense, though if that did some­how hap­pen I think it would be pretty dang rockin’.
3 I like wood­work­ing, but opporuni­ties for doing it while liv­ing in an apart­ment have been extremely lim­ited. Since I’m buy­ing a house, I expect I’ll get to do more of this. If only in home repairs and it might lead to more inter­est­ing things.

You are feeling very, very sleepy…

Posted by | Filed under Life

Well, maybe you aren’t but I am today. It prob­a­bly has some­thing to do with me wak­ing bolt upright at 1:30 this morn­ing think­ing my alarm clock had gone off and it tak­ing me 10–15 min­utes for the fol­low­ing real­iza­tions to dawn on me:

  1. It’s awfully dark out, even for 6AM.
  2. I didn’t turn my alarm clock off or hit the snooze but­ton, but I don’t hear the radio play­ing1.
  3. The clock on the microwave says 1:30 AM.
  4. The clock on my com­puter says 1:35 AM.

*sigh* I sup­pose I should be thank­ful I only lost that 10–15 miunutes of sleep but it sure is mak­ing the day drag along today.

1 I use a clock/radio for my alarm clock and will shoot any­one dumb enough to switch it to that god-awful beep from the radio.

NBC’s Treasure Hunters: Finale

Posted by | Filed under Life

Dang nab­bit! I was not picked for the final 10 and I didn’t win bump­kiss in the game. Ah well, maybe they’ll have another sea­son of the game and I’ll do bet­ter then. Since my last entry about TH I received a cou­ple more ques­tions. Addi­tion­ally as the game is over now, I don’t mind shar­ing my totally lame and incor­rect guesses as to the final loca­tion of the trea­sure1.

@Stephen Y.: As you already found out, the cor­rect answer to last week’s ques­tion was the Guten­berg Bible. I have to say I felt really proud of myself with that week’s ques­tion as it was the first time since watch­ing the show where I was com­fort­able enough in my knowl­edge of the sub­ject that I did not have to research the ques­tion before sub­mit­ting the answer2.

@Jorge: Mind you it’s been many weeks since I did chal­lenge #3, but as I recall it’s a mat­ter of which way the wind is blow­ing (watch the clouds to deter­mine this) and then of tim­ing. For me, I had to wait for the ship to touch the raised chain and start it’s turn. While it was turn­ing, I aimed for the right-hand side of the screen and fired. That allowed me to hit the ship by basi­cally hav­ing them sail right into my canonball.

@Everybody else: Keep in mind that I only started watch­ing TH/playing the online game with week 6. My guesses for the final loca­tion of the trea­sure were:

  1. Wash­ing­ton, D.C.
  2. Wash­ing­ton, D.C.
  3. Library of Congress
  4. Lin­coln Memorial

As you were warned, my guess were all lame & inac­cu­rate. I guess it is just as well that I didn’t get picked as one of the final 10 con­tests as the odds would have been against me win­ning. *shrug* Oh well, you can’t win ‘em all.

1 Accord­ing to this post on the NBC mes­sage boards for Trea­sure Hunters, the cor­rect final answer was Smith­son­ian National Museum of Amer­i­can His­tory.
2 It didn’t hurt my ego that I also answered that ques­tion before my wife did either (also a first since I started watch­ing the show).

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