That which Rolls

Since I haven’t written here in quite sometime I thought, why not share my latest extremely weird dream.

I was taking a history class and I had a big assignment due the next day but I didn’t know what the requirements were and I couldn’t find the syllabus and I couldn’t get anyone in the class to let me look at their syllabus.

So somehow I ended up doing some kind of performance piece. I covered my right eye with a zipper and stuffed the space behind it with mashed banana so during class I would unzip it and dig out all the banana.

I’m not sure what that has to do with history, but I hope I got a good grade.

We had New Year’s eve dinner at Taste of India in Buffalo with a bunch of friends. They have a buffet + plus a free drink + a dessert buffet for the holiday. Last time we went we just stumbled on to it. This time we had reservations.

This time the whole experience was kind of surreal. Most everyone who worked there seemed like maybe this was their first night working in a restaurant. All I can imagine was that there was some kind Faulty Towers scenario happening in the kitchen.

I’m not writing this with the intention of giving them a hard time, though maybe it’ll come off that way.

When we walked in a woman asked us to follow her to our table but then she just disappeared before seating us so we just stood in the middle of the room for a while hoping she’d come back. Eventually she did come back and we got our table. She hadn’t brought any menus but told us if we ordered the buffet we would get a free drink and she wanted to know what we wanted to drink. After I asked what the options were she brought a menu. We all tried to order drinks. We all got drinks but some of them were better matches for what we ordered than others. We could already tell it would be better to just stick with whatever we had gotten.

A woman came over to let us know they were doing face painting if any of us were interested in being extra awesome on New Year’s Eve. After she left we joked about getting Mike Tyson tatoos. Then a waiter showed up to take some orders from the menu and he had a Mike Tyson tatoo face painting.

Two of our group decided to order off the menu so they got to watch us gorge on the buffet while they stared at the empty space on the table in front of them for a very very long time.

At some point they turned on music on the room we were in. It was pretty loud in our area but in the main dining area you couldn’t hear it at all. After a few minutes the CD started skipping. Then it was skipping worse. Then it was skipping about as bad as a cd could skip. The woman who had initially seated us noticed after it was going for 15 or 20 minutes. She went over to the CD player and turned it down a bit and left the room. Still skipping.

While our friend’s son went to get a zebra tatoo on his arm (he was hoping for a hippo but the painter was better a zebras), my other friend started to look like the skipping was starting to drive her really insane. It may have been driving me insane but more in the way that everything seemed more and more hysterically amusing ever second.

Then a guy who looked kind of like maybe he was the restaurant owner came in the room, noticed the skipping and turned off the CD player. Everyone applauded. He asked the room “Why didn’t you just turn it off?”

I don’t know the answer to that one.

They really do have good food. I tell this story because it’s funny, not because you should avoid the restaurant.

BioLite Camp Stove charges your phone while you cook

I can’t remember where I first heard about this even though it was just a week or two ago. It doesn’t matter though. Now I want one. I must have a BioLite Camp stove.

Basically you burn twigs and pinecones and little sticks and what-nots in the stove. The waste heat gets converted into electricity which runs a fan that makes the fire burn hotter and charges whatever you plug in to the USB slot.

It’s supposed to boil water fast and eliminate the need to carry fuel bottles.

They also make a home version that they’re hoping to send out into the world to eliminate some of the issues with emissions from wood cooking fires.

If you’re planning to survive the collapse of civilization, you’ll be wanting one for that too.

We bought Skyrim for Thanksgaming. I’ve been playing on and off whenever I have an opportunity and occasionally when I shoudn’t be too. Dang grownup responsibilities getting in the way of my gaming. I’m not sure what about Skyrim suddenly sparked my mom’s interest in trying to play Fallout 3 but it was sparked.

She managed to get out of the vault without any assistance which was pretty impressive but she was missing a few basic video game building blocks like the importance of looting corpses and the concept of a sandbox game where you can wander in any direction, there isn’t a linear progression that you’re expected to follow.

As she’s been working through the early parts of Fallout, I’ve been trying to share helpful tips and get her on the right track before she get’s frustrated. At dinner tonight she suggested I should write “A Gaming Guide for Old Farts.” I told her I’d need a different title because “Old Farts is an Old Fart thing to say.”

I think it’s a cool idea, though I’m not sure how many people would be interested in it. I always get a kick out of watching my parents play things because it makes me realize how much video game literacy is required to play most games. Maybe that’s why the Wii was so successful. It required a video game literacy level of Pat the Bunny. I don’t mean that in a pejorative way, it just didn’t assume you already knew all the tropes of video games past. It started you off at square one. Everyone was roughly at the same level, you just flailed around with the Wii-mote, stuff happened, everybody had fun.

My mom’s not starting from zero with Fallout 3. She started off with the Wii, then advanced to Super Mario Galaxy. I think Portal 2 really gave her the toolkit to start working through something like fallout. I think one major barrier to “Oldsters” playing the more complex games in the controller. So many @#$@% buttons. Portal is a great place to learn to walk and navigate the video game universe. Before Portal I was fairly limited with first person style games too.

I really do hope my mom sticks with it. It would be crazy fun to play TF2 with my mom… and it would be crazy fun to tell people I play TF2 with my mom. We’ve got a ways to go to get there though.

It’s time to dust off your bean bags and buy extra batteries for your controllers. Another thanksgaming approaches. I can’t wait to watch my favorite peanuts episode where Pig Pen goes to the Game Stop.

I thought I was just going to work on Monday of that week because I teach a beginning web design class on Monday nights, but it looks like the only week our IT folks have time to move a bunch of web content from one server to another is Thanksgiving week.

Lame.

Really I do understand but Thanksgaming is my most sacred of holidays.

I have been so busy and I was planning on spending at least 8 straight days in the wastes, possibly taking an occasional break for a bike ride. I don’t have any new games I’m looking at this year. I just want to spend a big chunk of time in Fallout New Vegas, maybe a bit of borderlands,some TF2, and maybe replay Portal 2 for the hell of it. We’ll see. There will still be time for gaming but it won’t be quite as indulgent.

I did get my bags back on Sunday after calling customer service again and just saying, I’m pretty sure my bags are in Rochester.

I’m not really sure what went down because they put me on hold and never came back.

I sat there waiting for 5 minutes or so and in the mean time baggage delivery was trying to call me to tell me they had my bag.

It’s all ok though. I have my stuff back. It’s not that there was anything of any particular value in there, but I really hate shopping and didn’t want to try to replace all my favorite clothes.

I decided to check a bag so I wouldn’t have to drag it with me everywhere in the airport. It seemed like a nice idea. The bags made it to Austin ok, but that was  a different airline and an uneventful flight.

On the way back from Austin, I was supposed to catch my connecting flight to Rochester in Newark, NJ. I got off the plane in Austin and was going to try to find some decent lunch because I had 2 hours until my next flight at 2pm. I decided I should check the board first. My flight to Rochester was cancelled.

I found someone to help me and they put me on a later flight at 5pm. I went and ate some lunch. I drank a margarita, thinking it would help keep me mellow. I’ve decided that alcohol or some other detachment strategy is key in air travel.

I found the gate for the 5pm flight to Rochester, sat down, and decided to actually pay for internet. After all, I had just spent $12 on a @#$% margarita I might as well spend $10 for a few hours of internet access. Now that I had internet I didn’t have to try to lug all my crap over to the big board to check on my flight status. I could just log in to the interwebs to see that the 5pm flight was now also cancelled.

I went to bug someone at one of the gates to figure out what I was supposed to do now. They sent me to customer service to talk to some exhausted customer service person who clearly hated their job.

I told her that both of my Rochester flights were cancelled. She said oh yeah, that one didn’t get cleared for landing. I don’t know enough about air travel so that was nearly meaningless to me and totally unhelpful. I asked what I was supposed to do and offered that I could fly to Syracuse. She then offered to fly me to Albany, which is four hours from my house, or maybe Ithaca. I said no, but I could fly to Rochester or Syracuse. She said there weren’t any more flights to Rochester. So I suggested Syracuse again. She put me on standby for a flight to Syracuse leaving at 4:30 with a guaranteed flight to Syracuse at 9:41.

I was pretty sure I was doomed to rot in the airport when I found the gate and saw the Syracuse flight was delayed by an hour, but the gate keeper (what are they really called?) said I shouldn’t worry.

So I wandered off to the bathroom and while I was there they started boarding the flight an hour early. I did make it on to the plane. I was so happy. We even made it to Syracuse early.

With all that, I wasn’t surprised that my bag didn’t make it to Syracuse. Last time I lost my bags they were found right away, and they were delivered to my house, so I wasn’t all that worried.

It’s been two days now and there’s still no sign of my bag. I just got off the phone with someone at Continental’s delayed baggage number.

Can you describe the bag?

It’s a brown duffle bag.

So it’s just brown?

Yes.

Without an extendable handle or wheels?

Right.

Just brown?

Yes.

Can you describe something in the bag to help us find it and identify it as yours?

I have two tshirts that say “obey gravity, it’s the law.”

Ok. Anything else?

I have a name badge from  a conference I was just at.

Does it have your photo on it?

No but it has my name on it.

What company is it for?

It’s not for a company it’s for a conference. It has my name on it. It says JODY and some other stuff.

Can you describe what else was in the bag? Any skirts or pants?

2 pairs of blue jeans. One pair of brown jeans… tshirts… you know… clothes.

Any feminine….

There are clothes in the bag.

(I was thinking… Are you asking me to describe my underwear to you? You can’t find my bag without a description of my underwear? My @#$% name on a name badge  and two identical “obey gravity, it’s the law” tshirts are not unique enough identifiers to determine that this particular soft sided brown duffel is my bag.)

Ok. I’m going to put you on hold ma’am and call Rochester.

I listened to the hold music for 4 minutes ( … I really love your peaches, wanna shake your tree ... )

I’m sorry ma’am they didn’t answer.

Ok, is someone going to call me back later? Or should I call again?

Yeah you should call later this afternoon.

Lessons learned:

• I will avoid Continental in the future.
•  I will avoid checking bags at all cost.
• I will try to find out which airports actually have free wifi and go out of my way to have connecting flights in those airports.
• I will always pack something extraordinarily ridiculous in my bag when I travel so whoever is rifling through them can figure out that it is indeed my bag they are rifling through.

Positioning your photo is much easier in Google Earth than in Map Maker. You can adjust transparency and determine the rotation and then save as a ground overlay kml file to use in the Map Maker overlays tool.

Important Notes

• Make sure to use an image hosted on the web & not a local file
• Google Earth allows rotation but mapmaker overlays doesn’t. If your file needs to be rotated you will need to do this in Photoshop (or other capable image editing tool) and upload the rotated image to the web

The Steps

1. Upload your satellite file to the web.* If you are going to need to rotate your overlay image at all you can start with a local file but you’ll need to upload it and get the web link before you get to step 12.
2. In Google Earth go to Add>Image Overlay
   
3. Paste the link to your uploaded image in the link field. Do not use a file on your local machine unless you are just trying to get the degrees of rotation you will need for your final file.
4. Reduce the opacity of the image overlay so you can see how well the satellite imagery is aligned with the google earth imagery underneath it.
5. Adjust the image to match the google earth imagery.
   • Scale by dragging the outside edges. Constrain proportions with shift.
   • rotate by dragging the diamond shape
   • move the image with the crosshairs in the middle.
6. If you did NOT use rotation to adjust your image overlay skip to step 12
7. Find the degree of rotation you are using in the image overlay properties, on the location tab in the rotation field.
8. Open your satellite image in photoshop go to Image > Image Rotation > Arbitrary
9. Rotate by the amount determined in step 7
10. Save as a transparent PNG.
11. Go back to step 1 and create at new overlay using the rotated image.
12. Right click on the image overlay in Google Earth and select “Save Place As” and save as a KML file.

    

13. Upload the KML file to the web* and add the url to the kml field in the Map Maker overlay tool.
    

(From a few days ago.) 

1. (of a person or their appearance or behavior) Lacking good manners, refinement, or grace: “he is unwashed, uncouth, and drunk most of the time”.

2. (esp. of art or language) Lacking sophistication or delicacy.

3. Jody

I was startled out of my thoughts by my mom shouting about something at dinner. I didn’t know what it might be. I finished wiping my hands off on the tablecloth and looked up to find out.

I guess it was that. The hand wiping.

The defense argued that the tablecloth was already dirty & the defendant didn’t have a napkin & the defendant’s pants already had enough stains on them from when accidentally being used for the same purpose at lunch time. The defense tried to bolster their case by accusing the prosecution of similar-but-different past crimes and then mocking the prosecution’s favored tv genre.

Of all the uncouth things I do on a daily basis that pass without note, I was surprised that this one caused such an uproar.