I’m eating my oatmeal with a fork today.  As was said in The Matrix, “there is no spoon.” At least, not in the break room at work. I was too lazy to go to another floor in search of one.
Reminds me of an outdated joke, that used to be told before 1998:
Why does [...]

I work at a fairly large company, and the cafeterias will let employee put money on their badges to be used for later purchases. I don’t usually do that, but I suppose it’s convenient for people that don’t want to carry cash, since the cafeteria doesn’t accept debit cards. (I think accepting debit [...]

I need a 3/16″ thin-wall nut driver, and found that Wiha appears to make what I need. I’ve been happy with other tools from Wiha, so I ordered one from Chad’s Toolbox on January 2, with normal ground shipping. They notified me that they shipped it on January 4, and I’ve been waiting [...]

On Tuesday I filled a form for a vehicle registration issue, went to the California DMV, got a number (B-something), and waited an hour.  It turned out that I didn’t have everything I needed, so I had to go back this morning.
I get a number, this time G038, and waited.  After about half an hour [...]

On Friday, I needed to add disk space to the RAID 5 array on my server. I’m using a 3ware 9550SX-8LP RAID controller, which I’ve generally been very happy with. It has support for online capacity expansion, so I decided to reconfigure it to drop the hot spare drive, then add that drive [...]

I’m about halfway through reading Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education by David F. Noble, a book recommended to me by a fellow student. It is a scathing critique of the trend of universities viewing education as a commodity product rather than a service.
I went out to a fast food joint for [...]

The needle was on E again, so I stopped at my usual gas station, around 9:30 PM. My only means of payment was a hundred dollar bill, but I was going to buy over 24 gallons of regular (87 octane) at $3.419 per gallon, so I didn’t expect that would be a problem.  The [...]

The little red needle is pointing to “E”, and while that always stood for “Excellent” in my book, I think it means we’re out of gas!
— Firesign Theatre: Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers
I stopped at a gas station. Since it was after 9 PM, the attendant had locked the door [...]

I’ve been practicing sleeping for over forty years now, and I thought I’d gotten fairly proficient at it, but last night suggested otherwise.  Here’s the suboptimal way to get a good night’s sleep:

get exhausted during the day
drink way too much water with dinner (but not to this extreme)
go to bed two hours earlier than usual
fall [...]

When a few people started calling for the death penalty for spammers, my intial reaction was that it seemed extreme. But the more I’ve had to deal with spam, the more I’ve come around to that point of view. Spammers may not kill any one person, but considering the lost time they cost [...]