Category: Random Nonsense

Sometimes I just feel compelled to share nonsense, random thoughts, and sometimes just stuff I want to save

Hello Coffee my old friend

In an effort to get out the door for work on time yesterday and then to a meeting a little later I skipped out on getting coffee, which left me caffeine deficient until about 30 minutes ago.

Why this sometimes seems like a good idea is totally beyond me.  I’m addicted and I should really just come to terms with that.  I’m just a nicer, better person when properly caffeinated. 1 2 3

At the local coffee spot I stood in a line of zero people while waiting my turn, still with my sunglasses on from being exposed to the harsh bright light of a Bay Area sunny morning.  The barrista beckoned me forward and I handed him my empty travel mug and credit card.  “A lot of coffee please.”  He filled the mug, charged my card, and asked if I needed the receipt, which I declined.  At least, that’s how it was supposed to go down.

Small coffee?

Huh?  What?  Um, n…

Well, I’ll fill it up, and charge you for a small coffee.

Oh, okay… thank you.

Do you want me to rinse it out?

Uh, wha… no…

Room for cream?

Um, yeah, thanks.

Okay, great!  Credit card?  Do you want the receipt?

No, thanks.

The above is actually a very normal transaction, but in my drug dependent state it was terribly confusing and disorienting.  I felt like a kid left a train station as an engineer asks me questions about where my mommy and daddy were as I try to answer with my mind trying to work out the discrepancies between my current dilemma and the directive to not speak to strangers.45

  1. And a grumpier, surlier person when under-caffeinated. [↩]
  2. And a frenzied frantic inspired person when over-caffeinated. [↩]
  3. It’s a fine line. [↩]
  4. Mom, dad, if you read this…   please come back!  I promise to eat my veggies.  I miss you! [↩]
  5. The train station wifi is terrible! [↩]

Son, I am disappoint

Tron: Legacy.

Really?  I must be missing something.  They really could have had a decent movie without a bunch of “meaning of life” BS.  Why couldn’t it just have been a movie about a kid rescuing his dad?  The mystical junk just got in the way and made it confusing.  The effects were pretty good and there were only a few uncanny valley moments, but’s not going to save a movie.

Oh Adobe, you so silly

I just updated my Adobe Reader.  The only reason I do it is to patch vulnerabilities in their crappy ubiquitous system.

And, with the update it installs a shortcut to Adobe Reader on my desktop.

Seriously, now, why the hell would I want that?  How could this possibly be useful to anyone?  If I click on a PDF, it opens with Adobe.  If I click on the Adobe link, I still have to go find the PDF that I need to open.  Has anyone, ever, found a use for opening Adobe Reader directly and often enough to justify a shortcut on the desktop?!

It’s the little things in life

I’ve got a funny day job.  Some days I’m out and about at meetings.  That’s where I was for the last three days.  Some days I sit at a desk.  Today was one of those days.

I spent basically the entire day wrestling with a HUGE spreadsheet made by someone else who just doesn’t understand the concept of elegance.  Seriously?  A spreadsheet of 400,000 rows to perform one calculation?  That’s just insane.  In the time it took for me to understand what they had done, I am pretty sure I could have mocked up about 85% of a PHP script to knock the answer right out of the park.

I don’t do these kinds of calculations often.  I’d say that on average most people in my industry never do a single calculation like this – leaving to others who are more interested in doing so. 1  There were several false starts with me basically finishing the calculations, doing a write up… and then realizing that I had forgotten something.  It’s taken me about two days worth of work to iron this thing out.  And, quite frankly, I loved every minute of it.  Of the very few people in my industry who actually bother to run these numbers, most just shoot for an approximation. 2  And of those very few people, no one really runs these calculations all that often.

Having just experienced the WORST way to run these calculations, I’m ready to build the best way to run these calculations.

  1. Such as, yours truly [↩]
  2. Approximately???  What do you mean “Approximately”? [↩]

This is #650

This is the 650th post on this blog in the 18 or so months since its launch.  As of this moment, very early on Monday morning, there’s 283 posts over at the MakerBot blog authored by yours truly.  That’s 933 posts in the 497 days since I started blogging here on 11/23/2009.  That’s about 1.88 posts a day, every day, on average.  Some of it is even about 3D printing stuff.  ;)

I wonder what a pie chart of this website’s content would look like?  Probably something like:

[pdrpiechart data=”Random nonsense=68|Doctor Who, sonic screwdrivers, and daleks =18|DIY 3D Printing=27″]