Red Wing scores again, sort of

Well, first they took almost three weeks to resole my steel­toed fire boots. I was promised they’d be back in just over a week. Appar­ent­ly they got backed up. I got a phone call today telling me that the boots had come back with new soles, but that they’d put the wrong soles. Instead of the soles I’d request­ed, they’d put on a sim­i­lar but thick­er and heav­ier lugged sole. That’s two strikes.

The upshot of this is that I … Read the rest

This is like working for a dotcom

My back has been killing me this past week­end and con­tin­ues to hurt today. So my man­ag­er sug­gest­ed that I go take some time on the mas­sage chair. Turns out we have a small room with one of these:

http://www.sharperimage.com/us/en/catalog/productview.jhtml?sku=HW551BLK

Now, I’ll admit that I was skep­ti­cal. And I’ll admit also that a robot­ic mas­sage is no sub­sti­tute for a human mas­sage. How­ev­er, it was damn nice to spend 20 min­utes reclin­ing while this thing worked out the kinks … Read the rest

OMFG brain short-circuiting

Sec­ond by sec­ond, the Qeng Ho count­ed from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth­’s moon. But if you looked at it still more close­ly… the start­ing instant was actu­al­ly some hun­dred mil­lion sec­onds lat­er, the 0‑second of one of Humankind’s first com­put­er oper­at­ing systems.
[A Deep­ness in the Sky]

Damn that’s cool.… Read the rest

Excessive speed for the freeway

Since I start­ed my new job in Palo Alto, I’ve been rid­ing back, rather than by 280 or the hat­ed 101, by Page Mill Road up to Sky­line. It’s a great, fun ride. Page Mill is chal­leng­ing­ly twisty and not a very smooth road so I have to be a lit­tle cau­tious. Sky­line is smooth and even and about as nice as a two-lane road can be for a fast, relaxed pace. Well, right about the time I got … Read the rest