Back at the UCI Artslab one of my co-workers opened a CD-ROM and the disc kept spinning and flew out at him (though it didn’t actually hit him). I was on the other side of the room and just missed seeing it.
Category: Strange World
Cybernetic counselors….
Typing the title “C.R.C.” after a counselor’s name today, I started out with my finger on D instead of C and nearly turned her into a Farscape maintenance droid.
Don’t think she’d have been happy about that.
They have customers who don’t?
For a long time Amazon.com has provided a short list of “Customers who bought this book also bought…”
Well, I saw a new one today:
Presumably nudists don’t buy puppy-footed one-pieces for newborns, even for their clothes-wearing friends.
Fallen Trees and Tumbleweeds
Despite what you might believe, tumbleweeds are actually quite common in suburban Southern California. They often grow by the side of the freeway, occasionally getting picked up by the wind and bouncing across cars.
Never is this more noticeable than during the Santa Ana winds, which seasonally sweep out from the desert to the coast, blowing over trees, knocking out power lines, and sending the smog out to sea. (Unfortunately, by the second or third day, all the dust from the desert has taken its place.) The two of us got some great shots from the most recent Santa Anas which hit during the week leading up to Thanksgiving.
A tumbleweed seeks relief at a fire hydrant.
Even a support stake couldn’t keep this tree up.
Hey! Get off the road! (Yes, tumbleweeds can get that big.)
Casa de Choo-Choo Bear
On our trip to Carmel last month we passed by Casa de Fruta, once a simple roadside fruit stand, now a huge complex of stores and restaurants, all with names like Casa de Coffee, Casa de Wine, even Casa de Motel. They even have a mini-railroad for kids, called, naturally, Casa de Choo-Choo.
Of course, we immediately thought of Choo-Choo Bear, the amorphous kitty from Something Positive
Creative Computer Names
I remember back in college we had interesting naming schemes for computers. The ICS labs had the Guilder and Florin Macintosh networks with servers Westley and Buttercup. There was also a Solaris network where each machine was named after a Roman emperor, with names like Aurelian, Caligula, Gothicus, Hadrian, Pacatian, Saloninus, Trajan, etc.
The lab I worked at over in the School of the Arts started naming their Windows NT servers after renaissance artists: Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Donatello… well, that’s what we told them the origin was, anyway! The first SGI box (for 3D modeling) we got we named Trippy, and then when we got several in we started naming them Happy, Sleepy, etc.
Then we got in a whole mess of computers, expanding our NT network from 3 machines to 14. We were trying to come up with a theme to name them, and started in with names like Pepsi, Mountain Dew, etc. I had to leave after we set up the first 3 or 4 of them, and the next morning I received a mass e-mail stating, “The Artslab liquor cabinet is stocked.” The message went on to list the new computers’ names: Absolut, Alize, Bacardi, Baileys, Bombay_Sapphire, Captain_morgan, CuervoGold, Glennfiddich, Jagermeister, Jimbeam, Midori, Remmy_Martin, Seagrams, and Wildturkey. Soon after, we got a pair of Mac G3s and named them BlackLabel and BlueLabel.
The names stayed at least as long as I did, and may be there still. It was funny, though, to get reactions from people – students who had actually used the machines, or faculty and staff opening up Network Neighborhood – as they realized they were all alcoholic drinks!
On the Borders of Reality
The two of us and our friend Daniel were wandering through Borders last night, looking at the Harry Potter display. Oddly, it was right next to the sections on Astrology, Speculative (I guess New Age is too passé), two whole shelves on Magical Studies, Christianity, Metaphysics, and finally Self-Help. (How’s that for an interesting combination?)
Among them we found some frightening titles, like Dreams for Dummies (they don’t already have them?), or The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Being Psychic, which made the claim that everyone is psychic, as opposed to the book we found down the shelf, which proclaimed merely that All Women are Psychic. Wiccan Feng Shui seemed like an interesting idea.
Daniel found the real kicker: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Enhancing Self-Esteem. Just think about it.