Safety first, Robin
The lever-operated aluminum can crusher over the recycling bin in our break room is solemnly marked:
“Do not place small woodland creatures in can crusher.”
Good advice, I’m sure.
For a Foggy Morning
This morning, I discovered that the video drivers for my eyeballs must have gone bad. My view distance was cut to around 30 yards, with everything farther cloaked in thick white fog. Perhaps I needed a patch – Sunlight 3.4?
Seriously, the fog this morning gave my commute a truly surreal ambience. Once I’d travelled a third of the way onto the Monitor-Merrimac Bridge-Tunnel, all I could see was a short stretch of driving surface before and aft, with nothing but unfinished whiteness all around. I was driving from nothing into nothing – it might have been a visual metaphor to describe some kind of magical or high-tech transit. Perhaps this morning I was dropped into a parallel universe with all my memories instantly edited to make me believe that I’d always lived in a world where the Allies won World War II, and Earth had a single moon.
Perhaps it takes me a really long time to wake up in the morning.
Thunderous quiet
NASA Langley is actually rather pretty in many spots… away from the streets of the base, you get tree-lined walks punctuated with sculpture, providing lotsa good places to sit and eat lunch when the weather’s good.
One of those areas was colored purple and orange for an hour today as the base held a small ceremony for the Tech victims. I’m no good at counting crowds, but easily a hundred of the people here came out for the memorial. I exchanged small talk with Lloyd Eldred, and saw many of my Desktop Support co-workers as well. Some disturbance floated over from the Air Force base, where Joint Strike Fighters were practicing for next week’s air show, but we forged ahead.
Forging ahead – that was my epiphany during the ceremony. To hell with Cho Seung-hui. If the best legacy he can leave the world is the death of some innocent bystanders – if all he ever wanted was to remembered as a homicidal cretin – then he’s got it. The rest of us will mourn, and hurt, and then get on with our lives despite him.
There are folks out there who are already turning his sickness into works of art; turning his ugliness into beauty, and togetherness, and hope. We can always defeat these random acts of destructiveness as long as we’re willing to take a deep breath, straighten our shoulders, and forge ahead.
Trick or Treat!
I was working on a journal post this morning, but my USB 2 expansion card freaked in the middle of that, ruining an iPod update and crashing the computer. So no post.
That’s kinda the tone for the whole month of October. Good things certainly happened, but it’s been pretty rough. My workload’s been amazing – I netted almost 120 hours in one 2-week period. As well, a carefully-arranged Halloween costume failed to materialize; then sickness killed a carefully-planned Halloween party trip.
On the other hand, I was too lazy to put together an interesting outfit for a later party, and wound up just attending in my Enterprise uniform… winning First Place (Men’s), to my surprise!
I’m really bummed about missing Rising Star this year. It sounds like they’re gonna have some fun! But we’ve dropped $700 on car repairs this month, and holiday gift-giving’s on the way, so we have to watch the budget like a hawk. (Here’s hoping I don’t have to replace that PCI card.)
Questionable Content – one of my favorite webcomics, and worth reading through from the beginning – is selling a t-shirt which proclaims, “She Blinded Me With Library Science!” which keeps bringing to mind a certain Yeager crew member.
I did in fact begin NaNoWriMo this week. I have no expectation of finishing in time – the demands on my time are manifest right now – but I’m starting it anyway. This is the closest my head has been in years to having a complete plot and interesting characters lined up, and I’m not giving up now. I may even get around to reposting my WARS stories to elfie, just for my own inspiration.
Taverncast – a WoW podcast – did a Halloween episode called “War of the Murlocs” this year. Despite the fact that I listened to it during the day at work, am closely familiar with the old Orson Welles broadcast, and caught many of the in-jokes, they still managed to creep me out a tiny bit. Maybe it’s my overactive imagination: judge for yourself at war-of-the-murlocs.mp3 if you like. I’ll be having fish for dinner tonight as my own strike back against the slimy rampagers.
Eat at Gamera’s
There is a restaurant only a few blocks away from us named “Megallon’s Gourmet Barbecue”. Naturally, when I pass by and am in appreciative company, it’s difficult to avoid making Godzilla vs. Megalon references. “Straight from the underwater farms of Seatopia!”
Last week I composed a business card for them. Imagine my delight to discover that the owner’s partner was nicknamed “Jet Jaguar” and the place is full of kaiju memorabilia. I may have to eat there sometime soon, just on general principle.
Today, a weblog link took me to a site comparing shots of the 1977 LD release of Star Wars and the 2004 Special-Special Edition DVD release. It got me to thinking what a difference a little time can make in a story; if we agree that Luke is approximately 25 by the end of Return of the Jedi, then Darth Sidious’ great Galactic Empire only lasted 25 years. The Old Repulic had lasted for at least 1000 according to Lucas. Not really a proud entry in Sith history, hmm?
Ben Kenobi certainly didn’t act like he’d been jumping lava rivers only two decades ago. Yoda absolutely suffered a decline in health and strength from age 875 to age 900. And Han Solo talked as if no one had seen public use of the Force, or a Jedi for that matter, in a century or so. How quickly the Galaxy forgets…
Bringing new meaning to the term “press gang”
Friday at work, we had “Dress Like a Pirate Day” in an attempt to do “Talk Like a Pirate Day” one better.
The whole gallery of pictures is behind the link. It was a lot of fun… we certainly flummoxed the shop owner for a few moments.
My co-workers were amazed to learn that I can throw together a passable pirate outfit from my closets with 30-minutes notice. Thank you SF and fantasy fandom 🙂
(Oh, and I did finally find some Harlock desktops to throw onto the screens of the two stations I use.)
Arr.
Tomorrow is Dress Like A Pirate Day at work, in late celebration of the new Disney movie.
I was intending to let my computer be part of the theme, until I found out what an incredible scarcity of Captain Harlock wallpaper / desktops exists on the web.
Bleh.
