trickjarrett: Coco is coming to Atlanta
trickjarrett: And I have no money to buy tickets
trickjarrett: Sad panda
friend: I thought you meant Conan O’Brien
friend:
trickjarrett: I did
friend: oh
friend: not a panda?
trickjarrett: Coco was a gorilla
friend: whatever
A quick note that Koko the gorilla is alive and doing well, I incorrectly used the past tense in the above conversation.
Friend: Can I ask you a favor?
Me: Sure.
Friend: Can you explain Dungeons and Dragons to me in two paragraphs or less?
Me: Uh, yeah. You ever see a fantasy movie?
Friend: Yeah.
Me: It’s that, with you and friends as characters and someone as God/the director.
Friend: Oh that makes much more sense.
If there is one historical person I find fascinating, it is the brilliant Russian scientist Nikola Tesla. His life is surrounded in mystery as he was rumored to have invented amazing and magical devices solely through the power of electricity. Today his power reached even into the 21st century, as we discussed him and his history the power on my block went out as a transformer blew. If that is not an eery coincidence I don’t know what it is.
One part of keeping lots of balls in the air is that sometimes you drop one, and at times the dropped ball doesn’t just affect you but it affects someone else personally or professionally. And when you screw up, you need to apologize and try to make amends. Best is face to face so they can see you’re sincere and willing to make this contact and try to mend any damage done when you screwed up. If you can’t meet face to face, then do it over the phone. And if you can’t do it over the phone, do it by way of a well thought out and expressive email. More »
I got a good chuckle out of this comment in some code at work:
/** -------------------------------------- /** Indy! Bad Dates! /** --------------------------------------*/
I’m going through a php file that builds a schedule for one of our clients and this comment preceded the handling of bad dates or incorrect dates in the database. It took me a second to get it but I love it. I’ll be using this in any of my future date processing functions.
K just picked Mattie up from the groomers, she snapped this pic from her phone and sent it to me.
Can’t you just see Mattie saying “Awww mom, why do I have to sit still for a picture?”
Last week hailed a big news story here in Trickville. That is, the world became aware for the first time, that in my life I had never seen The Goonies. Ever.
I imagine most of you are rocked by this realization as my friends and family were. Thankfully we’ve been able to move past it and in an effort to make things right again I joined K and a group of our friends who went to the movie theatre and watched it on the big screen.
It is my hope that we can, as a community, move past this horrible event and continue on with our daily lives. I would just like to say that, yes I did enjoy the movie, and yes a lot more pop culture references make sense.
If it makes this act any more acceptable let me first say that I did enjoy the movie. Very much. And secondly I think I especially enjoyed it because of seeing it on the big screen and being with the group of friends who were all truly excited for me to see it.
I’d like to wrap this short blog post up with a few closing remarks: truffle shuffle, “thanks for saving me,” and Goonies never say DIE!
“Be nice to Bernice!”
That was written on a sticky note next to the phone when I worked at the college radio station, WREK. Her story changed depending on who was telling it to you, but the consensus was that she was an older woman who lived alone and spent her time in front of the tv. One day she misdialed a number and got the WREK call-in line, discovering a phone number which almost always had someone there to answer she saved the number and began calling it frequently.
I remember clearly the first time I had a call from Bernice. I was playing some beautiful classical music and the phone rang, the latter being quite unusual during my show because I did the morning shift, 6am to 9am. It was quiet and let me play classical music, low stress, nothing big. So when the phone rang, I answered it.
“WREK.”
“Can rats climb up your drain pipes?”
That’s how the conversation opened. She had an odd question and called WREK for some reason. I realized it was Bernice and so I let the conversation go on, I had another 10 minutes before the music ended.
“I think so… why?”
And off we went through her babbling story telling about finding a rat in her house and how it must of come through the drain pipes, the evils of rats and such. It was an unusual question and I genuinely tried to be helpful in answering it, I did think rats could climb up drain pipes. That story came back to me this morning after sleeping very deeply.
Yesterday K and I were in transit for approximately 13 hours, from Atlanta down I-75 to US-82, which crossed Georgia to drop grand mom off before getting on I-95 and taking it down to Titusville to pick up Mattie from K’s mom, then heading into town to try and pick up a CD for next week’s episode before finally heading home.
K and I had been getting ready for bed, both in the bathroom (which I had used previously when we first arrived home.) I lift the toilet lid to throw away a tissue, and both K and I jump back in surprise as a frog stares up at us from the bowl. I drop the toilet lid again and K and I just stare at each other in surprise.
I don’t know how he got into the toilet. There are a few possibilities:
In any case, the frog was quickly removed from the toilet via a plastic bag and a hand. To be released outside, leaving K and I to laugh about it as we finally called it a night and fell into a deep sleep.
I stand by my answer to Bernice: animals can come up drains.
Having played Dungeons and Dragons for a while now, a new character is refreshing especially when he’s not like anything you’ve played before. I find myself all too often falling into a mercenary fighter role, sometimes a valiant hero but that’s much less common. So when I knew I needed a character, Oaen (pronounced Owen) was about as different as I could get.
See, Oaen is 3′4″ tall and about as smart as a rutabaga. As a player, I go into every gaming session looking for stunts to pull which should, in all honesty, end up in the death of poor Oaen. The problem is that Oaen is built, in terms of the game, to be damn hard to kill. Let’s give you a rundown of the latest gaming session.
You know what? Screw that, here’s the story from Oaen himself.
***
As any good and humorous quote should be, let’s take this statement completely out of context:
But at least they have short periods.
Then layer in some context: we’re referring to midgets.
Further let’s settle back and lay a bit more onto it: The conversation had begun as one of our female co-workers made a comment about one of the developers’ “midol” which was in truth aspirin.
Ahhh programmer humor towards the end of the day when we’re all feeling a bit silly!
The Internet, as a whole, seems to lean to the left politically speaking. Yet, there is this huge following for Ron Paul, perhaps the most wide right of the Republican candidates… It’s just… curious.
I quote Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark:
Reporter: What do you think of being called the Da Vinci of our time?
Stark: Ridiculous, I don’t paint.
Reporter: How about your other nickname… Merchant of Death?
Stark: That’s not bad.
My favorite short online sitcom God Inc stopped production several months ago and I have kept close eye on Francis Stokes’s blog [the creator's blog] and today the new broke. He’s sold the idea to SciFi. Awesome!
Read more on his blog: http://francisstokes.blogspot.com/2007/07/god-inc-sold-to-sci-fi-channel.html
I’m so excited 
You should follow me on Twitter here!
