I Dare You To Watch This Entire Video

I wasn't sure if I should tag this as humor or not. It's one of those "comedy lets one express painful truths" things, I think.

Although I still read an entire book all at once.

Posted by: Boviate at 04:35 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 43 words, total size 1 kb.

Pale Blue Dot

Posted by: Boviate at 11:57 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 3 words, total size 1 kb.

Cake Day

Well, it's over. Future references to "my fiancée" will henceforth be "my wife". I was wracked with nervousness starting the night before the wedding, and I am eternally grateful to my best man and the rest of the groomsmen for keeping me on schedule and on track. My bride was a vision in white, and the minister did his part admirably. (A friend joked that he should go to more Methodist weddings, because we started exactly on time and it didn't last forever.) Lovely music was provided by relatives on both sides of the family.

The reception also went quite well. I'm quite glad we decided to hold it at a banqueting hall, because that meant the staff have done about a zillion wedding receptions before and they had it down to a science. My fiancée's wife's family loves to dance, which nicely made up for the fact that my family… doesn't.

The weather was sunny and hot, but not humid, so while I would have preferred it to be ten degrees cooler, it still was preferable to the thunderstorms that came the next day.

The cat seemed glad to see us when we came home, but I suspect she will be plunged into a deep depression when we go on our honeymoon in a few days. We have people coming over to check on her, but still.

Finally, we've got an enormous pile of presents to unwrap and a disturbing number of notes to write.

But I'm glad that so many people traveled so far to support us.

And now, life goes on.

Posted by: Boviate at 11:26 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 266 words, total size 2 kb.

June 7th

Big day today. Lots to do.

Edit:
 

Posted by: Boviate at 08:46 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 9 words, total size 46 kb.

June Is Here

I'm sorry I haven't been posting much. The whole getting married thing takes up a lot of mental energy.

Posted by: Boviate at 12:21 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 22 words, total size 1 kb.

Noah

I wasn't planning on seeing the Russell Crowe Noah, but I must say, this clip has impressed me.

Posted by: Boviate at 11:42 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 19 words, total size 1 kb.

Shipping Containers

The standardized shipping container is the biggest revolution in logistics since the internal combustion engine. Presented for your education is this video showing how a Chinese factory makes standard containers. It had less automation than I expected.

Posted by: Boviate at 07:28 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 39 words, total size 1 kb.

Septimana Horribilus

It's been quite a week. In roughly ascending order:

• There's yet more wedding prep work to be done.
  
• Allergy season has started.
  
• My car needs to go to the shop, but I've been working every day so I can't make time. (The same time crunch is effecting the above entry.)
  
• My (future) in-laws are putting down their 15-year old border collie tomorrow. Honey's always been a very sweet dog, but apparently it's time. This is a harsher blow to my fiancee, who lived with that dog for most of Honey's life.
• A relative is not going to make the wedding due to medical treatments.
  
• A Marine I served with died yesterday, in a motorcycle crash. We weren't exactly friends, but we were comrades, which is something both less and more. He had a family, too. I'm going to chip into a memorial fund for his family, which is the least I can do, in a non-metaphorical sense.

And instead of a nice relaxing weekend, I'll be working overnights, and working twice as hard as usual because the colleague that knows what's going on is on vacation and is being covered by someone useless.

So if you'll excuse me, I think it's time to play with the cat and contemplate stoic philosophy.

Posted by: Boviate at 02:50 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 213 words, total size 1 kb.

Work TV

Last December, the departmental manager had a TV installed in the office where I work. The stated purpose was that we would leave it tuned to news channels, but everyone assumed that the real purpose was to use up some of the budget at the end of the year.

The oldest guy in the office likes it tuned to CNN. The youngest guy prefers Al Jazeera America. There's one guy that likes Fox News, and another that tunes to the MSNBC. He told me doesn't think that's the best news source, but he enjoys irritating the Fox News guy.

For most of us the TV is basically useless as a new source. We work at real-time terminals, and have lots of Google News alerts to let us know about anything that's actually relevant to our jobs. But the TV is nice for me, because when I'm working overnights and the manager is at home sleeping the sleep of the just, I can change the channel to something more entertaining.

We get a special corporate channel package, with basically every news channel that Time Warner offers. But there are a strange collection of other channels too. We get the NFL Network. (Apparently because one of the guys called in a favor.) We get the Military Channel. We get H2 but not the original History Channel. We get the Cooking Network but not Food TV. Country Music Television, but no other music channels. It's all very strange.

My favorite random channel has been El Ray Network, which doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry last I looked. It's basically the Quentin Terantino and Robert Rodriguez channel, if you know who they are. I watch it because Saturday nights they show six hours worth of classic kung fu movies.

Sadly, last week we had to add some more equipment to the office, and it went where the TV was. So some technicians came in and installed a wall mount for the TV on the wall behind everyone's backs. It's nice that it's out of the way, but now the original purpose is completely obviated, since you can only watch the TV by turning away from the computer where you are expected to do your actual job. Originally it was in one's peripheral vision. I figure in another six months it'll be gone.

Or maybe there'll be more money left over in the budget, and we'll get a second TV.

Posted by: Boviate at 08:19 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 407 words, total size 2 kb.

Rrrrar

It turns out there's a little bridezilla in every bride.

Specifically, my fiancee objected to one of the menu options, because the same side dish had been offered at her sister's wedding.

Which was eight years ago.

Posted by: Boviate at 09:58 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 38 words, total size 1 kb.