Tapirtype Blog

I saw naked people today.

We had a lab outing, renting kayaks from Agua Verde. The initial plan was to go out by the Arboretum, but Faith’s significant other’s son, was with us and we decided that the cut would be a little dangerous for him, so we decided to paddle down toward Fremont instead.

It was also the Solstice which meant that the Annual Fremont Solstice Parade was going on. Paddling past Gas Works Park, we looked up and, yup, sure enough, there they were, naked as the day they were born. Assuming, of course, that they were born wearing shoes and body paint. Which upon reflection most of them probably weren’t.

Today I was walking down Beacon Street, and something was amiss. I looked up as I passed a storefront, and lo and behold, the Kosher Dunkin Donuts was gone. A sign said it had closed permanently. Patrons were advised to visit their other location on Boylston Street, but where will the neighborhood turkeys go for their morning pastry? It is a sad day for the town of Brookline.

Addendum: This void now creates the longest distance between Dunkin Donuts franchise locations in entire Greater Boston area: a full 1.7 miles. How will Brookline survive? Only time will tell.

This morning, as I was waiting for the T, I saw a turkey. It was scrounging around the plants in the islands that run down the center of Beacon Street, right next to the trolley stop like it was waiting for a train to arrive.

At first, I thought I was hallucinating, but it was right there, about three feet away from me.

A Russian guy started throwing it bread crumbs. I asked, “Is that your turkey?” He said, “No, it is just hun-ga-ry!” I really, really wanted to reply, “No, it’s not Hungary, it’s Turkey!”

Things I don’t like:

Fiddling around with my speaker wire to see if I can fix the (real or imagined) crackle in my speaker only to find I’ve poked my finger into an old spider nest.

Further finding the nest wasn’t as old as I’d thought when I see a tiny baby spider skitter by on the floor.

Further looking down and finding the very large momma spider rushing towards me out of nowhere doing a very good impression of a momma bear who’s found me messing with her cubs.

At least I didn’t accidentally summon a fear demon.

Hey, I just noticed that I missed this blog’s birthday.

Sad blog. I’ll have to send it flowers.

While we’re on the topic of substance consumption, I’ve got a new little problem. You see, to get the mix of coffee to milk right in my lattes, I order either a double short or a triple tall. Things is, most espresso machines are set up to make two shots at once, so occasionally they’ll offer you four shots to make it even.

Three times in a row now this has happened.

Why isn’t this a good thing? I can’t say no, but really I’m addicted to caffein enough as it is. If quads stop doing it for me, I’m sunk!

Ah, the inexorable march of caffeine addiction.

Subtitled: Brand name hard drive enclosures should last longer than a year.

This is just a short little rant today. The next thing that failed me was my hard drive. I have a little external hard drive. It’s the result of the death of my old computer. Shortly before it died I’d sunk some money into it (I mean of course, I did, when else does your old computer die but when you’ve just put money in to make it last another year). So I took my brand new hard drive and bought an external enclosure for it both to ease the transfer process and so that my investment wouldn’t have been entirely wasted.

After a cascade of events, I ended up buying a nice sturdy aluminum MacAlly enclosure for almost $40 at retail because I needed it right then. It worked perfectly for a year and lately I’ve taken to using the drive to offload things that I want to be able to access on the road but don’t need all the time so I can off load in order to free up space on my already full internal drive. Mostly movies, older pictures in my Aperture library (Can I say how much I love that I can now offload the originals of some pictures while keeping low resolution stand-ins for offline viewing in the library? Pop my drive back in and they’re all there just as if I hadn’t off loaded them.), and a game that I’ve taken to playing.

While Sasha was here I took some time to offload some more pictures and when she left I decided that to console myself I’d have a nice long game playing session. So I plugged my drive back in and… Absolutely nothing happened. The drive seemed to power on as normal, but nothing I could do could make Mallory (my new computer) give any evidence that she had any idea that a hard drive had been plugged in. No drive utilities could recognize that there was a drive attached to scan.

So I figured either the drive was damaged beyond my ability to repair with the utilities I had or the enclosure had died. So I bought a brand new, cheap, Bytecc enclosure for about $19. It’s not quite as pretty, but it’s aluminum. It’s compact. And it even comes with a very nice carrying case that I didn’t expect. Worked perfect right away. No problems with the filesystem or anything. Hopefully this will be the end of my worries, but I still see a second LaCie hard drive in my future.

I’ll say it again: A retail enclosure should last longer than a year. It’s as simple as that.

Subtitled: The military coffee cake complex.

On my way home today I stopped by the U-Store to get a book and was tempted by some coffee cake at Bulldog News on the way back down the Ave.

Just as I was starting to order I heard a man coming up the Ave toward me shouting loudly “One, Two, Three, Four! Who’s against this god damn war?!?” repeatedly. He made it up level with me just as I had ordered my coffee and was starting to inquire about the cake when he paused, looked at me, and repeated his slogan. I stopped mid pointing and proceeded to adopt my full on city mode and loudly ignore him, but he wouldn’t have it. “Are you against this war?”

“…” I started to try to recover myself and begin to point at the coffee cake I’d like as the Barista and I kind of look around wondering what we are supposed to do, frozen in the middle of the transaction.

“Don’t buy that! Before you buy that, think! … Are you against this war???”

“…Um… Yes, actually…”

He held his hand out and, not knowing what else to do, I shook it simultaneously looking at him for the first time and realizing that he smelled like lots and lots of really old beer. As I shook his hand he said “High five! Now… ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, Who’s Against This God Damn War!” clearly expecting me to join in and then he walked away.

After a stunned moment the Barista and I laughed, decided that it was ok for me to order now as long as I promised not to tell him so she wouldn’t get in trouble for selling something to me, and went back to the beginning of the whole ordering process. Of course now I realized that I’d shaken this not so clean guy’s hand just before ordering coffee cake that I really wanted to eat right now, but I tried not to think about that too hard.

The strangest thing about the whole episode was where it was happening. I mean, running into a young guy in jeans with a messenger bag on the Ave in Seattle you aren’t very likely to find out that he’s for the war. Of course, drunk and crazy as the guy seemed, I’m not entirely sure he knew where he was much less what war he was talking about. Maybe he was trying to recruit people to his side against the war on poverty or something.

So I’m back from the fly meeting and ready to dish out a fresh set of bile to the things that have failed me over the last bit. In this first installment we visit how complicated UPS can make delivering a simple little envelope.

My watch broke a while back. The crystal cracked seemingly spontaneously with a loud ping that was heard from four meters away. I really could put Skagen on the list for that, but it’s balanced by the fact that I really, really like my watch, so I’ll spare them my wrath for now unless it breaks again. (It did mysteriously loose half an hour a couple of days ago…) It was marginally cheaper—if only marginally—to get a cheap temporary replacement and send it in to be fixed than to get a new one, so I dutifully sent in my little box insured with return receipt and waited.

Next thing, I come home to find a UPS 2nd delivery attempt slip on my mailbox. Strange, I never got a first delivery slip. And no information was filled out, so I could only assume that it was my watch coming back. Oh, and it was dated from the day before… So sure enough I go upstairs and give UPS a call and they claim to already have made a third attempt making it too late for me to do anything about it other than spend money renting a flexcar to drive all the way down to the UPS facility in Sodo. So I talk to a representative, and to his credit, he assures me that he can have it sent to my work now, but it’s the last chance and they won’t even hold it for me if anything goes wrong. One more problem and it’s going back to the sender and who knows what I’ll have to go through to get my watch back.

So I carefully ask him exactly what information he needs to make sure it gets through the byzantine addressing of the UW to our new building, giving him building name, floor, room number, lab name, department, street address, and zip plus 4, which should have been redundant about five times over to get it to me. He tells me that unfortunately it’s after 6:00, so it won’t get to me until day after tomorrow. No problem, I think, just so it gets to me and I don’t have to shell out any more money or time. Oh, if only…

So two days roll by and nothing comes, so I track the package and there are about a million notices up repeating that “this delay was caused by an error in routing, we’re sorry for the inconvenience…” Or something like that. Finally the next Monday, I have a free moment to think about it and track it again and it says that it was delivered to someone with a name I don’t recognize (first name only making directory lookup almost impossible) to the “office.” Nievely I run down to the departmental office and ask for my package, but no one has seen it or heard of the person who supposedly signed for it. We spend some time looking around the building for someone who might have signed for it, wasting almost an hour with no luck. Finally we decide that it could have ended up just about anywhere in the University. The problem is, I’m leaving at 3:30 AM the next day for the fly meeting, so I’m afraid that I won’t be around when whoever received it tries to find me and I’ll never see my watch again.

So on the suggestion of an administrator I gave UPS a call again to see if they had any more detailed information and the recording tells me everything that I already knew plus something indecipherable in a non-artificial prerecorded voice. After asking for an operator, I’m able to gather that I’m being told a room number where it ended up in the I wing of health sciences. You know, the kind of information that would have been actually been useful had it been on the tracking information page.

Unfortunately it is a couple minutes past five now, so I run off to see if I can get in to where my package is and I track it down to a relatively high security locked door with a sign saying not to knock but to use the phone, which I do and get the voice mail of the person who signed for my package. Finally luck struck because as I was about to leave someone came by and used her card to get into the door. She was nice enough to let me in and look for the package which, after some searching, we found stuck behind another envelope. So at least the story has a happy ending.

You see, what happened is that apparently UPS decided to leave out half of the information that I gave them from the new shipping label. So even though it still had the street address and room number which should have been enough to get it to me, they became confused and tried to do a directory lookup on me. The problem is that we just moved and it seems that when I changed my address in the directory when I registered for the quarter, that didn’t change my faculty/staff listing (which I should have thought of), so they gave it my expired address. How it then got two floors down from my old address instead of someone in the old space telling them that it was probably something for the who used to be there, is anybody’s guess as is why they decided to deliver it to a high security area.

I fixed my address listing and I’d like to think that this won’t happen again, but then that would be pretty naive wouldn’t it?

There are many obvious reasons why it sucks to be back in Seattle: Separation from Sasha, facing work after a long absence, etc. But one thing sure doesn’t suck.

Praise be for decent coffee! I really tried to find an independent coffee place in Boston that had good coffee. I tried to think of it as just being different. But no, it’s not. It just sucks. And that no one there seems to realize it is the strangest thing.

But my first cup of coffee back here was absolutely perfect.