Geek Drivel

Ah, the infamous duct tape.

How is duct tape like The Force from Star Wars? They both have a light side and a dark side, and they bind the universe together.

A roll of duct tape and a can of WD-40 is all you really need for most household repairs. If it moves and it shouldn’t, use the duct tape. If it doesn’t move and should, use the WD-40.

I could probably find a dozen other humorous (and true!) statements about this wonderful product, but the people at Lifehacker have done one better — they’ve got an entire list of the uses that people successfully put duct tape to, including a number of them that I’d never have thought of — honestly, healing warts?!

(I saw my first roll of actual “duck tape” — duct tape’s ancestor — in a hardware store last week. Neat.)

Without even noticing, I made Geek Drivel’s one-thousandth post yesterday.

My only stated goal in starting Geek Drivel was to give interested friends and family, and anyone who stumbled onto it, the questionable benefit of my experience. My unstated goal was to give myself an outlet for expression. I think I’ve achieved both, and I know I’ve reached a few other people during that time… or at least, I hope that a few of those page-hits I’ve been getting all these years weren’t just automated spambots.

I considered shutting it down, as a successfully completed project, but I think there’s still more that I can contribute on occasion. And of course, I like to store interesting data on it for my own future reference. So I’ll keep it going, for now. Maybe I’ll revisit that decision after the next thousand posts.

Doom, despair, and agony on me!
Deep dark depression, excessive misery!
If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.
Doom, despair, and agony on me!
— Recurring skit from the TV show Hee Haw

This sounds like a great idea. But I have to wonder about it.

I know a woman, a friend of ours, with totally abysmal luck. She suffers minor — and very odd — disasters on a regular basis. And it’s not from anything she does — they’re just random events that could happen to anyone, but that happen to her with far more regularity than mere chance would allow for. On a related note, she loves to complain about her life, and these little visits from the misery fairy seem to give her plenty of fodder. It’s an open question whether the complaints come from the bad luck, or the bad luck comes from the complaints.

On the other hand, I know one person who could fall into a sewer truck and discover a gold nugget, and I can’t attribute that to any particular perspective on his part.

I also know people who technology hates — they get near a watch and it starts gaining time, and woe betide them if they try to use a computer. And others (like myself) who technology adores, and whose mere presence often fixes wonky machines.

It’s enough to make you seriously consider that there might be an element of truth to The Matrix, that the entire universe is nothing but a simulation that we’re all in. Which gives rise to some interesting philosophy, and might explain quite a bit, when you think about it.

This is from yesterday’s Dilbert Blog entry:

A Muslim, a Christian, and a crazy guy walk into a room. The one thing you can know for sure is that at least two out of three of them organize their lives around things that aren’t real. And that’s the best case scenario. Atheists would say all three have some explaining to do. And atheists are the minority, which is the very definition of abnormal.

Hm… is computer software “real”?

I never needed to be convinced of this, but it’s nice to know nonetheless.

(The “him” is our cat Winston, who went missing on Monday, as we were moving out.)

The cats hadn’t been allowed in the basement for the last couple years, but we let them roam freely down there on moving day, and Oliver immediately rediscovered — and christened — the unused litter box there, multiple times. We thought nothing of it. But over the past few days, as we went over to clean up the place, GoddessJ mentioned that the box looked like it had been disturbed.

When we went back yesterday, it had definitely been disturbed — there was a patch of waste that had definitely not been there the day before.

There wasn’t much left in the house, but we tore apart what there was, looking for Winston. We’d already checked everywhere we could think of, multiple times, but he had to be there, so we started digging into places that we didn’t think he could have gotten.

Sure enough, that’s where we found him. He’d wedged himself under the bottom-most step of the basement stairs, behind some junk left behind by the previous owner of the house. We still have no clue how he got in there, but after five days, he was hungry enough that we had no problem tempting him out with some cat-treats that I’d been carrying around while trying to find him.

(GoddessJ says it’s the best diet he’s tried yet. He does look noticeably slimmer, but he had plenty of fat to carry him through the ordeal, and still has a goodly amount left over.)

When we took him to the new place, he immediately found a new hidey-hole. We’re not sure where yet, but he comes out every now and then. So long as we know he’s safely in the house, we’re not complaining.

Thanks again to everyone who shared our concern while he was missing.

We’re safely ensconced in the new place now… well, most of us. Our cat Winston ran out the door while the movers were there. I followed his tracks down the street (it’s the only time you’ll hear me say it, but thank God for fresh snow), but eventually lost them.

He may still show up at the old house, once he’s gotten over his terror. Or someone may find him, he’s wearing a tag with his name and our address and phone number on it. We haven’t given up hope, but we’re worried sick about him.

My Internet connection (and phone line) will be down this morning. If all goes well, it’ll be back before noon, at the new place; if it doesn’t, I’ll be back as soon as I’m able.

I’d like to officially thank our friends c-square, W, and B for helping us with the main part of the move yesterday, and everyone else for the well-wishes. See y’all on the flip side!

As some of you already know, GoddessJ and I are moving. Yes, I swore when we moved into this one that I’d never move again… well, I was wrong.

This was a spur of the moment decision. We bought the new place here in town last month, hoping to rent it out to reduce our dependence on our savings each month. Well, I screwed up there… the area we bought in is way oversaturated with rental properties, something I didn’t realize at the time. But as it turns out, the place we’re currently living is in a prime rental location. We really like the new place ourselves, and we needed to get the furniture out of the old place anyway so that we could renovate it, so last weekend we decided to move into it.

I come from a military family, and as a kid I had to move every two years, like clockwork (which did nothing good for my social development, believe me). And after I moved out, I was in Washington DC, where the rents went up $50/month every year that you stayed in one place. But my moves have gotten less frequent of late, and I’d forgotten just how unpleasant moving can be.

The last few days have been irritatingly full of preparations. We’ve been here for eight years, and as GoddessJ puts it, we’re like goldfish: we expand to fill whatever container we’re in. Sorting out eight years of collected detritus, packing it, and transporting it to its new locations has been… interesting, to say the least. GoddessJ has been a tsunami, powering through rooms and leaving nothing but little swirling dust devils in her wake. I’ve been reduced to acting as a pack-horse, and occasionally taking apart the things that are more easily transported in that state, and making arrangements both for the move and for the renovations afterward. My programming productivity, as you might expect, has dropped to nearly zero.

And the worst thing is, we know for a fact that this won’t be our last move.

Oh well. I’m trying to treat it as an adventure. I figure I’ll be back on my usual programming schedule some time next week, or the week after that at the latest.

Wish us luck!

ADDENDUM: Did I mention that I’ve had to shovel snow three times already this week, at both places? Yeah, I’m as tickled about it as you might expect.