Month: July 2006

When I get up in the morning, one of my first thoughts is usually along the lines of how good that alarm clock would look when smashed into a million pieces. Given this is the case, I tend to sleep as late as I can and still get to work on time. Doing this does not give me a lot of time in the morning for breakfast. I try to make up for this by eating a cup of yogurt as my first breakfast and then later in the morning I get a granola bar as second breakfast.

Additionally, I don’t like to waste money1 so I tend to buy whatever yogurt is on sale. When I did this Tuesday, the grocery store had Dannon yogurt on sale at 20 cups for $10 or 50¢ a cup. This makes them just barely cheaper than the store brand yogurt. I thought I’d give them a try and picked up 10 cups in a variety of flavors.

Yesterday, I cracked open my first cup of the Dannon yogurt and had selected 7 Benefits All Natural Coffee Yogurt. Once I had the foil cover off the cup of yogurt I knew this was not going to be good. The color of the yogurt reminded me of things I’d blown out of my nose, last time I had a bad sinus infection. For extra unpleasantness, there was a thing layer of oil or maybe water on top. I mixed the yogurt up with my spoon, starting by smashing it straight down into the yogurt. To my mind some of the yogurt should have stuck to the spoon when I lifted it out of the cup. Also, the yogurt should have moved together to fill in the holes where I’d stabbed down into it with my spoon. Alas, neither of these events transpired. Then I did a more traditional mixing2 and prepared to take my first bite.

*horrified shudder*

Imagine if you will the worst office coffee you’ve ever had. With extra creamer. Gone all cold and solidified. Now add in an unhealthy dollop of chalkiness and you’ll almost understand what it tasted like. Of course, that’s not the worst part of this story. The worst part is I have another cup of it in my fridge and I’ll be eating it in the next week or so. Yes I know I will hate it, but if I just throw it away then it’s wasting money. *sigh*

1 Some people would say I’m cheap.
2 Swirling the yogurt around in a circular fashion using my spoon.

It was another long, dull morning at the office. Fortunately, the afternoon proved to be quite a bit more interesting. While I was examining an issue reported by one of our beta users; I heard some shouting about a fire from one end of the building. Popping my head up like a good, office gopher; I saw some people rushing about, the overhead lights that was were off and the safety lights were on. Shortly after that I was told a fan in one of the bathrooms had caught on fire, burning/melting some of the plastic of the fan. There was only a little bit of smoke right then and the fire had been put out so I went back to work. Then the smoke got worse and I stood with some co-workers near an exit with the door open to the outside for fresh air. We stayed inside as it had also just started to rain. A few minutes later, we heard sirens and were told to either go to the top floor of the building or outside. I opted to stand outside. After we were out there for something like 20 minutes; we were told to go home for the day. Which was a sweet 90 minutes early, but I had a fearsome headache presumably from the chemical fumes off the burning plastic. What a day.

I used to love playing video games and would waste entire days doing nothing else, but over the last couple of years I’ve started slipping away from that hobby. The expense of keeping my computer updated to handle the latest games combined with the pain I’d get in my wrists just kind of killed the fun. Particularly since I wasn’t seeing a lot of new games to keep up my interest. Well, if the game behind this trailer plays anywhere close to as good as it looks; then I’ll be back to burning the midnight oil to lay waste to the enemy. *grin*

You see, one of my all-time favorite video games was the original Team Fortress mod for Half-Life. The class choices, mayhem and fun were an unbeatable combination1. Then as other mods were developed further; Valve announced they were going to go all out on making TF2. This was 5 years ago and was the last we heard from Valve about it. At least the last we heard until this month when they released the official trailer for TF2. The new character models are wicked cool and oddly enough something about the trailer reminds me of No One Lives Forever (another great video game).

Just wow! I cannot think of any better description of how cool this trailer looks. Go on, hit the link and watch it yourself!

1 At least I’ve always thought so, but others have preferred that POS called Counter-Strike.

Lately, I’ve been watching this some what silly (but still addictive) reality show on NBC called Treasure Hunters. Part of what I like about it is they let you play along with the contestants. Well, sort of… They have a trivia question given out during every show which if answered correctly gives you a shot at $10,0001. Additionally, you can play various puzzles, one released each week, for a shot at $200,000 and an appearance on T.V. Personally, I have no interest in ever being on T.V. but that $200,000 would buy a nice house and pay off all our bills2. And there would still be enough left over to give some to various charities I like, e.g. American Cancer Society, American Red Cross or Toys for Tots.

Anyway, I’ve been following the show for a couple of weeks and I’ve gotten help from the NBC.com forums on solving the weekly puzzles. Since I appear to be slightly ahead of the curve at the moment, below the cut are is my solution to this week’s puzzle. You should only read past the cut if you don’t mind spoiling the puzzle for yourself.
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