Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Two Trips


You probably know this for yourself,  but if you didn't, it's a halogen bulb shown a mm less than actual size for my desk lamp. Need I mention a halogen bulb that burnt out. The problem with getting a replacement bulb is that they you have to bring the old bulb in with you to the store otherwise the bulbs all appear the same size on the rack by memory. Then you see the "pin gauge" printed on the package. Different wattage, and I don't mean 60-watts versus 20-watts, but between a 25-watts and a 20-watts have different pin widths.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Ready Mix



I'm glad that I wasn't following behind when this concrete truck tipped over on the freeway today dumping its load of ready mix. The sight of fresh concrete is always nostalgic to me from working in the construction trade. The sight, I say. Troweling the concrete is a totally different fun thing altogether. I sincerely feel for the firefighters shoveling the concrete off the freeway. After a few shovelfuls things tend to get heavier and that's no matter whether the slump is liquidy or on the dry side. Plus, they have to do it before the the concrete starts to set up while the asphalt temperature hovers near 100 degrees. Obviously, this is not the kind of work the firefighters originally signed up for. Asides from concrete spills, I'm seeing a few paint spills left on the roadways around town from contractors that neglected to clean up their masterpieces.

Excerpts

I've never issued an apology for not posting for a while, and well, this won't mark the inaugural day for it either mainly because every time that I've read an apology on another blog myself, I thought the act of posting it was ridiculous. If you want to apology, then impale yourself by sitting on a sharp stick. Now that's an apology in my book. Anything less misses the bullseye. Anyways, I haven't been overly busy in the real world, but in the digital world, I've been my usual participating in a number of forums that I'm a member of. By "member," that ranges from lurkers to multi-daily posters. I'm more of the later. After you multiply numerous posts on the various forums, it's midnight. That's largely due to proof reading and fact checking to pass the scrutiny of peer review as well as the peanut gallery. There's no equivalent to a spell check for the proper nuts and bolts with technical and mechanical topics. You might start off with two forums than overnight the subscriptions multiply in number. Over population.

There's a forum for every type of subject and its subcategories to satisfy the needs of all stripes of aficionados and enthusiasts. Dyson® vacuum cleaners as a random example. Car stereos aka boom boxes. How to sit on sharp sticks. Just checking if you were paying attention. If you have an interest, perhaps you should share your knowledge and experience with the forum members. More often than not they'll walk you through things and nuances that you weren't even aware existed on the particular topic. What this has to do with the price of tea is that if I compiled all the text I've written on my itinerary of forums per week it would amount to five times the things I wrote here on a good week.

Was it on another blog or on mines? I forget already, but we were discussing the rightful frequency of posting. Weekly? Five days a week? Every day for the next 20-years. Now, that's a worthy goal. I've been blogging daily for the past 19-years and 10-months, just 2-months left to go. Just talking to myself. Moving on, directly below is a photo I plagiarized from a blog that I use to follow which started in 1998. All text those days. I think I started reading it in 2000. I don't visit the blog much anymore because the author has written several science fiction books, successful at that, and all he talks about is the world of science fiction, which is not my cup of tea. Oh, the author won't miss me very much, since he receives 70,000 unique readers per day. In any event, I think his writing is easy to read, excerpt below, even for a seemingly mundane subject matter.



In case you ever wondered what a walnut fruit looks like before it’s husked, shelled and turned into pies and such, here you go. This picture is from a young tree in our backyard that is producing fruit for the first time and as such I was deeply confused as to what sort of thing it might be, but as it turns out the Internets had the answer. Oh, Internets. You always have everything.


And lest you think that having thousands of visitors and a hundred comments per day is all there is to a popular blog ....

The site has also been around long enough that it has its own community of people, evident in the comments section, where there is (as Mad magazine would put it) “the usual gang of idiots” who talk amongst each other on a usual basis. The composition of that gang changes slowly over the years — people come and go, depending on their own interests, time commitments and whether I’ve pissed them off sufficiently that they decide to stop talking to me and others — but overall there’s a day-to-day consistency which for me as the proprietor is both nice and useful.

As I’ve also noted before, maintaining the site turns out to be a lot of work, and there are days when.... Running a site that gets as many visitors as this site does turns out to be an actual job, whether it was originally meant to be or not. But what I get in return is usually worth it. So this remains the place I am most online, and will likely continue to be for the foreseeable future.



Then there is a former chef living in Paris. I don't even delve in the finer points of gastronomy. However, I like his insightful quips on french WTF's, er, "Why The French...." do this, "Why The French...." do that. There are better examples, but these were from recent posts.

When I moved to France, one of the first things a friend said to me was “David, you need to get a good tire-bouchon.” Seeing as an unusually large number of wine bottles were being opened on a regular basis all around me, and seeing the recycling bin on my street was constantly overflowing, it seemed he was right: one does need a decent tire-bouchon (cork-puller) if one is going to live in France.


I was recently conversing with someone about what stuns French people when they come to the United States. Supermarkets are always interesting places to go; last time I took Romain to one in Florida, he came out and said “Pas de stress!” (no stress) because shopping in a French supermarket can be an exercise in frustration. (Which is putting it mildly.)