Month: October 2005

This weekend, in Chattanooga Tennessee, I visited Chucky Cheese’s as an adult. A young Corey had always said to himself “man, when I grow up, I’m coming back here with $40 playing everything here as much as I want”. I’m happy to report that, now, a couple of months before my thirtieth birthday, I am mostly grown up and I was able to play everything I wanted and for only $10.

I don’t remember this being the case as a kid, but they didn’t have any video games with any kind of shooting or fighting, which leaves surprisingly few options left. You could be a mock firefighter and put out pretend fires, but not rescue a princess anywhere.

I played lots of Skee-ball, but I quickly moved on to ascertain which games had the highest ticket / token ratios.

We amassed 172 tickets which were counted by this new, really well designed ticket-counting machine. It prints out a receipt and you take that to redeem your tootsie-roll bank or clock radio, or plastic slinkee as in my case.

Northern State did a 15 show tour with Tegan and Sara (I went to the one in New Haven). When the tour was all over I got this super all-access pass kinda thing brought back for me signed as a gift!

bsw96 posted a photo:

[via Flickr: f1 – Everyone’s Tagged Photos]

Neat. Must be a strange feeling to travel so fast in that pose.

Following up my previous engrish post “I owned you once”

This comes via Amanda, who is in Hong Kong at the vendor’s office:

<name withheld>, one of the support guys, wore a dark pink ringer tee to work today.  It is by Reebok and displays the message prominently across the chest: “Mall walkers do it slowly.”

I come into work this Monday morning and my computer has forgotten every single password I have ever stored in it. I have no idea why. Amazing how many there are; I’m finding new ones constantly. Of course it is extra difficult since my machine is not a domain member. It means that any server I want to connect to, I have to store my domain account in the manage my network passwords section of the user accounts control panel for that server. Rationale: I’m so particular about my computer I don’t want anything happening without my knowledge and I get a panic attack whenever those overly long login scripts run. It does mean that I have to be my own desktop support help desk. I have a separate PC that sits on my desk that I use as a reference for 100% company standard machine, so if I have a genuine problem I have to reproduce it there before asking for anything.

I just finished helping Emily out with a new version of her professional site (as opposed to the informal Experience photo blog site).

The site is done in Flash and every time we add something to it, we have to re-learn how to use Flash. I’m pretty surprised Flash has been as successful as it is with such a difficult to use tool. Even after I’ve remembered how it works and all I’m doing is following the same pattern to add images, it seems to take a really long time. I wonder what the cutoff point would be for taking the time to move the page to DHTML.  

I also messed up when I posted the files because the web host uses case sensitive file names and non IE browsers don’t like spaces in the file names for the embedded Flash links. I’ve been doing internal corporate development for too long; reminder to self: always test what you are publishing online with a variety of browsers and platforms.

This Rally Could Be Huge; It’s Up to You:

You can also now download an attractive rally announcement at:   http://centralpark.c.topica.com/maad64EablhWKa7ANZ5baeQA8g/
Print it out and hand it out or post it!

Please visit http://centralpark.c.topica.com/maad64EablhWMa7ANZ5baeQA8g/ to learn more about this campaign.

I’ve been following this for a long time now. I’m going to be there, next Monday, offering my support.

My good friend Val is traveling to Pakistan. He has started a blog to document the adventure.

Hi everyone,

 

i’ve started a blog on my trip to pakistan. you can find it at http://triptopakistan.blogspot.com.

 

it’s pretty basic right now–these first couple posts just provide some background about why i’m going and serve as a test-run as this is my first blog.

 

i’m going to try to post about once a week and will hopefully have some pictures up soon. hope you enjoy reading about it.

 

take care,

val

RSS (atom) feed here: http://triptopakistan.blogspot.com/atom.xml 

I zipped up and sent some IIS logs to our vendor in Hong Kong and got this priceless reply:

Thanks mate, I owned you once

I just watched one of the mail room guys retrieve his (late) lunch from the machine in the office kitchen.

Soup, Nissin, Cup O’ Noodles, Ramen Noodle, chicken flavor
One package Hostess brand Twinkies
1 can Pepsi

746 Calories, 127.5 grams of carbohydrates, 24.1 grams of fat, ~80 grams of sugar, 7.6 grams of protein and enough sodium for the day and then some.

The glucose spikes from these kinds of meal are the fast track to diabetes. I had several reactions including horror and sympathy. It can’t be a question purely of economics because there were at least a couple of alternatives in the horrid machine that would have been worlds better. Do people still not know these are poor choices for lunch? I can appreciate throwing caution to the wind and indulging, but I sensed zero enthusiasm on his part. If it is just fuel for getting through the rest of the day, why not treat it that way?